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interested not only in objects as ontological sets of properties, but also in objects as occasions and results of active experience. To discover an object means to discover the way by which we operate upon the world producing objects or producing practical uses of them. |
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A sign can produce an emotional and an energetical interpretant. If we consider a musical piece, the emotional interpretant is our normal reaction to the charming power of music, but this emotional reaction may elicit a sort of muscular or mental effort. This kind of response is the energetic interpretant. But an energetic response does not need to be interpreted; rather, it produces (I guess, by further repetitions) a change of habit. This means that, after having received a series of signs and having variously interpreted them, our way of acting within the world is either transitorily or permanently changed. This new attitude, this pragmatic issue, is the final interpretant. At this point the unlimited semiosis stops (and this stopping is not final in a chronological sense, since our daily life is interwoven with those habit mutations). The exchange of signs produces modifications of the experience. The missing link between semiosis and physical reality as practical action has been found. The theory of interpretants is not an idealistic one. |
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Moreover, cosmologically speaking, even nature has habits and these are laws or regularities. The medieval realism of Peirce can be summarized by the statement "general principles are really operative in nature" (5.101). Since there are general principles, the ultimate meaning (or the final interpretant) of a sign can be conceived as the general rule permitting us to test or to produce that habit. Therefore the habit produced by a sign is both a behavioral attitude to act in some regular way and the rule or prescription of that action. Remember the definition of lithium. It is both the physical rule governing the production of it and the disposition we should acquire in order to produce an experience of it. The objectivity of such a pragmatic law is given by the fact that it is inter-subjectively testable. Here is the opposition between James' Pragmatism and Peirce's Pragmaticism: there are general tendencies and there are operational rules allowing all of us to test them. Therefore habit is the 'final' interpreted definition of an operational rule. |
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It is extremely interesting to detect that such a conception is applicable even to iconic signs. In 5.483 Peirce explains the criterion of similitude between triangles and says that similarity is nothing else but a rule of construction: "to predicate any such concept of a real or imaginary object is equivalent to declaring that a certain operation, corresponding to the concept, if performed upon that object, would (certainly, or probably, or possibly, according to the mode of predication) be followed by a result of a definite general prescription." But to have understood a sign as a rule through the series of its interpretants means to have acquired the habit to act according to the prescription given by the sign: |
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