Interpreter and Interpretant • Selection 4
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2025/01/09/interpreter-and-interpretant-selection-4-a/

Interpretation and Inquiry —

To illustrate the role of sign relations in inquiry we begin with Dewey's elegant and simple example of reflective thinking in everyday life.

❝A man is walking on a warm day. The sky was clear the last time he observed it; but presently he notes, while occupied primarily with other things, that the air is cooler. It occurs to him that it is probably going to rain; looking up, he sees a dark cloud between him and the sun, and he then quickens his steps. What, if anything, in such a situation can be called thought? Neither the act of walking nor the noting of the cold is a thought. Walking is one direction of activity; looking and noting are other modes of activity. The likelihood that it will rain is, however, something suggested. The pedestrian feels the cold; he thinks of clouds and a coming shower.❞ (John Dewey, How We Think, 6–7).

#Peirce #Logic #Semiotics #Semiosis #SignRelations #TriadicRelations
#Cybersemiotics #Interpreter #Interpretant #Hermeneutics #Hermenaut
#JohnDewey #HowWeThink #Inquiry #Abduction #Deduction #Induction
#Abstraction #HypostaticAbstraction #Reflection #Interpretation

Interpreter and Interpretant • Selection 3
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2025/01/08/interpreter-and-interpretant-selection-3-a/

The following selection from Peirce's “Lowell Lectures on the Logic of Science” (1866) lays out in detail his “metaphorical argument” for the relationship between interpreters and interpretant signs.

#Peirce #Logic #Semiotics #Semiosis #SignRelations #TriadicRelations
#Cybersemiotics #Interpreter #Interpretant #Hermeneutics #Hermenaut
#Abstraction #HypostaticAbstraction #SopToCerberus #Interpretation

Interpreter and Interpretant • Selection 2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2025/01/07/interpreter-and-interpretant-selection-2-a/

A idea of what Peirce means by an Interpretant and the part it plays in a triadic sign relation is given by the following passage.

❝It is clearly indispensable to start with an accurate and broad analysis of the nature of a Sign. I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former. My insertion of “upon a person” is a sop to Cerberus, because I despair of making my own broader conception understood.❞ (Peirce 1908, Selected Writings, p. 404).

According to his custom of clarifying ideas in terms of their effects, Peirce tells us what a sign is in terms of what it does, the effect it brings to bear on a “person”. That effect he calls the interpretant of the sign. And what of that person? Peirce finesses that question for the moment, resorting to a “Sop to Cerberus”, in other words, a rhetorical gambit used to side‑step a persistent difficulty of exposition. In doing so, Peirce invokes the hypostatic abstraction of a “person” who conducts the movement of signs and embodies the ongoing process of semiosis.

Reference —

Peirce, C.S. (1908), “Letters to Lady Welby”, Chapter 24, pp. 380–432 in Charles S. Peirce : Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance), Edited with Introduction and Notes by Philip P. Wiener, Dover Publications, New York, NY, 1966.

#Peirce #Logic #Semiotics #Semiosis #SignRelations #TriadicRelations
#Cybersemiotics #Interpreter #Interpretant #Hermeneutics #Hermenaut
#Abstraction #HypostaticAbstraction #Interpretation