The ethics of terminology

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 72, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 197-243

  Deely, John ^a  

^a LORAS COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 60950017231     PISSN: 10513558     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/acpq199872217     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. The greatest American philosopher disowning the most famous American development in all of philosophy's history is a considerable embarrassment to those who cherish the idea of a home-grown philosophy, and prefer being able to cite their own to the constant deferral of philosophical greatness to the European past of the "colonies." So it is understandable that those desirous of promoting philosophy with a distinctively American accent have largely been discomfited or annoyed by Peirce's disavowal of "pragmatism", and have tried to pass it off as merely a verbal quibble, merely a far from isolated manifestation of the cantankerous prima-donnaness of a notably eccentric individual. Even Corrington, who, in writing the first Introduction to C S. Peirce (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993) with an explicitly semiotic consciousness, should well know better (but who is also a devotee of "the American tradition in philosophy"), introduces this aspect of Peirce's own thought under the label Peirce repudiated. I can hardly refrain from making a particular mention of Dewey, whose contempt for the history of philosophy was unmatched, save perhaps by his ignorance of what he dismissed. The old canard about "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" being a subject of scholastic disputation is classic: no medieval knowing the first thing about material substance, namely, that it has as its first accident quantity thanks to which it occupies space, would waste a moment on such a debate. Since angels are not material substances, they don't have quantity, and so don't occupy space, not even as much space as the head of a pin.
2. It was Dewey's writing on what he imagined to be the influence of Darwin on philosophy that instigated my essay on "The Philosophical Dimensions of the Origin of Species," The Thomist XXXIII (January and April, 1969), Part I, 75-149, Part II, 251-342.
3. Peirce 1905: CP 5.-414-415 (following the standard procedure of abbreviating to CP and identifying the volume and paragraph number from the 8-volume set, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks, published by Harvard University Press between 1931 and 1958.
4. n Fonseca, see John Deely, Introducing Semiotic. Its History and Doctrine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
5. On the Conimbricenses, see John P. Doyle, "The Conimbricenses on the Relations Involved in Signs," in Semiotics 1984, ed. John Deely, Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985): 567-76.
6. On Scotus and other background figures, see Mauricio Beuchot and John Deely, "Common Sources for the Semiotic of Charles Peirce and John Poinsot," Review of Metaphysics XLVIII. 3 (March): 539-66.
7. On the importance of such background discussion, see John Deely, "Why Investigate the Common Sources of Charles Peirce and John Poinsot?", in Semiotics 1994, ed. C. W. Spinks and John Deely (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1995), 34-50.
8. John Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis, originally published 1632 in Alcalà, Spain, within the Ars Logica (= Vol. I of the Cursus Philosophicus Thomisticus ed. B. Reiser [Turin: Marietti, 1930];
9. this has been translated and edited as an independent whole subtitled The Semiotic of John Poinsot by John Deely in consultation with Ralph Austin Powell (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985). Available in electronic from from Intelex Corporation.
10. See "Semiotics: Method or Point of View?", in John Deely, Basics of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 9-21.
11. CP 5.430.
12. The Essential Peirce, ed. Nathan Houser et al. (Bloomington: Indiana Unviersity Press, 1998), Vol. 11, 402-03.
13. The Essential Peirce, II, 346.
14. These remarks are based on researches that are to appear in a comprehensive history of philosophy on these points, Four Ages of Understandings in final stages with the University of Toronto Press.
15. Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis, Book II, Question 1, 226/43-45.
16. See John Deely, New Beginnings (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1994), Chapter 8.
17. Roman Jakobson, "Coup d'oeil sur le développement de la sémiotique," in Panorama sémiotique/A Semiotic Landscape, Proceedings of the First Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Milan, June 1974, ed. Seymour Chatman, Umberto Eco, and Jean-Marie Klinkenberg (The Hague: Mouton, 1979): 3-18;
18. English trans, by Patricia Baudoin titled "A Glance at the Development of Semiotics," in The Framework of Language (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Studies in the Humanities, Horace R. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, 1980), 1-30.
19. Extended commentary in the Thomas A. Sebeok Fellowship Inaugural Lecture, "How Does Semiosis Effect Renvoi?," published as Ch. 8 of New Beginnings, and in The American Journal of Semiotics 11. 1-2 (1994): 11-61.
20. Here I would like to repeat my quixotic point on the pronunciation of this Peircean term made in "From Glassy Essence to Bottomless Lake," in Semiotics 1992, ed. J. Deely (Lanham, MD: University Press of America), 157n1. Contemporary Peirceans, with the exception of Vincent Colapietro who is unique among them in not being ignorant of Latin scholasticism, insist on mispronouncing "representamen" with that insouciance according to which Americans typically approach the sound-system of all languages outside of English. Since it is a question of pronunciation, an audial form, and here my sole medium is scriptal, my foray is perhaps doubly quixotic. Nonetheless, here goes. The term "representamen" is derived from the Latin for "to represent," or "a representation." In accordance with this etymology, the term should not be pronounced, as by the Anglophile Peirceans, "represént-a-men," but rather as "represen-ta-men."
21. CP 2. 228-229.
22. Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis (1632)
23. Second Preamble "On Relation,"
24. Article 2 "What Is Required for Any Relation To Be Categorial," 89/18-27.
25. CP 1. 551-553.
26. CP 5. 558.
27. For full discussion of the point, see John Deely, The Human Use of Signs (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), ¶ 3ff.
28. See, besides Part IV in The Human Use of Signs, ¶s 285-311
29. the traditionally grounded, yet ground-breaking, work of Vincent Guagliardo, in particular: "Being and Anthroposemiotics," in Semiotics 1993, ed. Robert Corrington and John Deely (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 50-56;
30. "Being-as-First-Known in Poinsot: A-Priori or Aporia?," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68. 3 "Special Issue on John Poinsot" (1994) 363-93;
31. and his "Introduction" to the Special Issue on Thomas Aquinas of Listening 30, 1 (Winter), 3-6.
32. Aquinas, In quattuor libros sententiarum Petri Lombardi, lib. 1. sent. dist. 19. q. 5. ad 7.
33. See Poinsot, Naturalis philosophiae quartapars, (1635);
34. (=Vol. III of the Cursus Philosophicus Thomisticus, ed. B. Reiser [Turin: Marietti, 1937], 315b6-13, 315b30-40);
35. Cajetan, Commentaria in summam theologicam. Prima pars. (Rome: 1507; reprinted in the Leonine edition of the Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici Opera Omnia, vols. 4 and 5), I p. q. 79. art. 7. The point that Poinsot, Cajetan, and Aquinas before them, struggle to make is perhaps clarified in the contemporary formulation of Corrington (1992: 41 ): on the one hand, "embodiment radically limits the reach of the self and binds it to the fragmentary conditions of origin": this is the virtus intellectus; on the other hand, "the human process is not confined to its sheer embodiment but moves outward through its products and utterances": this is the capacitas intellectus, the asymptotic (or syncategorematic) "full reach of the human process" beyond its condition of embodiment - a reach doomed to fall short, to be sure, if actual achievement of infinity is the measure, but a reaching nonetheless evermore-infinite in prospect and succession in time, according to the Peircean idea that the truth to which mankind has devotion ought not to be merely the "truth as we understand it," but precisely truths we do not yet understand, "truth as a symbolic growth in time."
36. See Aquinas, De veritate, q. 1. art. 1 c.
37. Poinsot, "De Primo Cognito", Q. 1, Art. 3
38. Philosophiae Naturalis Prima Pars (1633) (= Vol. II, 1-529, of the Cursus Philosophicus Thomisticus ed. B. Reiser [Turin: Marietti, 1933], 26b34-27a2). Poinsot's discussion of "being as first known" is the most extended treatment we have from the Latin Age after Aquinas, at least that I know of.
39. Aquinas, from the Disputed Questions on the Power of God, q. 9. art. 7. ad 6: "among these four transcendental concepts [namely, being, unity, truth, and good], the first by far is being. And for this reason [when, after the internal differentiation of being by nonbeing, predication becomes possible] being must be predicated positively, for negation or privation cannot be the first thing understanding conceives, because what is denied or deprived always belongs to the understanding of negation or privation. But the other three necessarily add over and above being something which being does not reduce to itself; for if they reduce to being, they already would not be primitives. But this situation requires that they can add to being only something according to understanding alone: this is either a negation, which adds unity to being (as was said), or relation to something born to be referred to being in every instance. And this last is either the understanding itself to which being conveys the relation of true, or desire, to which it conveys the relation of good."
40. Sein und Zeit, 1927: 487.
41. See Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Power of God, q. 9. art. 7. ad 15.
42. In his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, lib. I. dist. 19. q. 5. art. 1. ad 7(C. 1254-56).
43. See, in Poinsot's Treatise on Signs, the First Preamble, Art. 2, 60/7-25; and Book 1, Quest. 2, 141/12-14: "not every mind-dependent objective relation is a second intention, because even though every mind-dependent relation results from cognition, yet not every such relation denominates a thing only in the state of a cognized being, which is a second state, but some also do so in the state of an existence independent of cognition, as, for example, the relations of being a doctor, being a judge. For the existing man, not the man as cognized, is a doctor or a judge, and so those mind-dependent relations [being a doctor, judge, teacher, etc.] denominate a state of existence." "You may gather from what has been said that even in the case of stipulated signs the rationale of sign must be explained by a relation to a signified."
44. From Cuvier's Recherches sur les ossements fossiles des quadrupèdes of 1812-1825
45. as cited in Henry Smith Williams, History of Science Vol. IV (New York, 1909), 104-06.
46. Thomas Aquinas, Summa ST (c. 1266) 1.84.7c.
47. See Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Book I, dist. 19. q. 5. art. 1. ad 7, p. 55.
48. See John Deely, "Are Sign-Science and Life-Science Coextensive?," in Biosemiotics. The Semiotic Web 1991, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 45-75.
49. Kenneth Laine Ketner, "Peirce's Ethics of Terminology," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society XVII. 4 (Fall, 1981): 327-47.
50. See Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), ed. Thomas Fowler (Oxford, 1889);
51. English trans, and ed. by Fulton H. Anderson, The New Organon (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960).
52. See further John Deely and Anthony F. Russell, "Francis Bacon", bibliographical entry for the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, Thomas A. Sebeok, General Editor (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986), Tome 1, 68-70.
53. Locke, An Essay concerning Humane Understanding, Book III, Ch. X.
54. Ketner, "Peirce's Ethics of Terminology," 327.
55. In Reasoning and the Logic of Things, ed. K. L. Ketner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 93.
56. See W. V. O. Quine, "Mathematosis," in Quiddities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 127-29. The euphony with "halitosis" is probably without significance.
57. See, for example, John Deely, "Reference to the Non-Existent," The Thomist XXXIX. 2 (April, 1975): 253-308.
58. Or of a coenoscopic rather than an idioscopic character, as Peirce would say (see note 19, p. 6 above). On the contrast between the relative appropriateness today of the terms scientia and doctrina to characterize philosophical knowledge as such, see John Deely, "On the Notion 'Doctrine of Signs'," Appendix I in Introducing Semiotic, 127-30;
59. "Doctrine," terminological entry for the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok et al., Tome I, (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter), 214;
60. "What's in a Name?," Semiotica 22/1-2 (1978): 151-81;
61. and "Looking Back on a Theory of Semiotics: One Small Step for Philosophy, One Giant Leap for a Doctrine of Signs," in Reading Eco. An Anthology, ed. Rocco Capozzi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 82-110.