[CG] Interpretants, as analyzed and discussed by T. L. Short

Edwina, I was just copying what Short said. If you don't have it, I'll send you the PDF of his entire book. All Peirce scholars agree that Peirce had settled on three kinds of interpretants. I don't deny that. But there is no information about how anybody can determine how the utterer can express the content of the phaneron as a linguistic sign, and how the listener can interpret the uttered sign. The critical issue for both of them is the context which may be much more difficult to determine than the words in the utterance. In a previous note, I recommended the 70 page article by Keith Devlin, "Confronting context effects in intelligence analysis". You don't have to read the whole thing because the early examples show why context is so overwhelmingly important in determining the interpretant. Just look below for an example from page 9 of https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228579637_Confronting_context_effe… Just one example like that undermines everything Peirce wrote about determining the interpretant. And examples like that can be repeated endlessly. Devlin's article is one source, but any detailed analysis of language in context will turn up endless numbers of examples. John ______________________________________________ From: "Edwina Taborsky" <edwina.taborsky(a)gmail.com> John, list I disagree with your view that Peirce never had a coherent theory of the interpretants’. I find his outlines clear and coherent and are all through his writings- in that it is logical and obvious that the triad includes not merely a single interpretant but several - and these several are basic and functional. That is- the notion of not merely one but three Interpretants is, I feel, basic to the Peircena semiosis.... _________________________________________________________ Example from page 9 of "Confronting context effects in intelligence analysis" by Keith Devlin. The actual sentences that were spoken are in BOLD. And the context is in italics. Without the context, it's impossible to determine the interpretant of the sentence. HUSBAND: Dana succeeded in putting a penny in a parking meter today without being picked up. This afternoon as I was bringing Dana, our four-year-old son, home from the nursery school, he succeeded in reaching high enough to put a penny in a parking meter when we parked in a meter zone, whereas before he has always had to be picked up to reach that high. WIFE: Did you take him to the record store? Since he put a penny in a meter that means that you stopped while he was with you. I know that you stopped at the record store either on the way to get him or on the way back. Was it on the way back, so that he was with you or did you stop there on the way to get him and somewhere else on the way back. HUSBAND: No, to the shoe repair shop. No, I stopped at the record store on the way to get him and stopped at the shoe repair shop on the way home when he was with me. WIFE: What for? I know of one reason why you might have stopped at the shoe repair shop. Why did you in fact? HUSBAND: I got some new shoe laces for my shoes. As you will remember I broke a shoe lace on one of my brown Oxfords the other day so I stopped to get some new laces. WIFE: Your loafers need new heels badly. Something else you could have gotten that I was thinking of. You could have taken in your black loafers which need heels badly. You’d better get them taken care of pretty soon. A number of things are obvious about this particular exercise. First, the original conversation is remarkably everyday and mundane, and concerns an extremely restricted domain of family activity. Second, the degree of detail given in the subsequent ‘explanations’ or ‘elaborations’ of what each person said seems quite arbitrary. It is easy to imagine repeating the exercise over again, this time providing still further explanation. And then it could be repeated a third time. Then a fourth. And so on, and so on, and so on. Apart from boredom or frustration, there does not seem to be any obvious stopping point.