Re: “On the Paradigm of Experience Appro priate for Semiotic”

* Comments on the Peirce List slow reading of Joseph Ransdell,
   "On the Paradigm of Experience Appropriate for Semiotic",
   http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/ransdell/paradigm.htm

Re: Comments by Auke van Breemen

By way of recalling our present engagement,
let's review Joe's statement of his thesis:

JR: The thesis of my paper is that it is doubtful that any distinction
     should be drawn between empirical and nonempirical semiotics or even
     between experimental and nonexperimental semiotics. Doing so tends to
     reproduce within the semiotics movement the present academic distinction
     between the sciences and the humanities which semiotics should aim at
     discouraging, rather than reinforcing. But to overcome this undesirable
     dichotomy, it is necessary to disentangle the conceptions of the
     experiential, the experimental and the empirical from certain other
     complexes of ideas with which they have become associated by accident
     rather than necessity.

The thoughts that occur to me on reading this statement are as follows.

On the one hand I am much in favor of seeking deeper-lying continuities
where only divisions appear to rule the superficial aspects of phenomena.
That is one of the things that attracts me to Peirce's theory of inquiry,
that succeeds in connecting our everyday problem-solving activities with
the more deliberate and disciplined methodologies of scientific research.

On the other hand I cannot help noticing the facts of usage. For example,
even though the words "experiential", "empirical", and "experimental" may
be near enough synonyms in some contexts, in other contexts a person will
tend to use "empirical" to emphasize a shade of distinction between casual
experience and the deliberate collection of data, perhaps even bearing the
motive of testing a specific array of hypotheses. In that empirical setting,
a person will tend to use "experimental" to suggest an even more deliberate
manipulation of events for the purpose of generating data that can serve to
sift the likely from the unlikely stories in the heap of hypotheses in view.

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