Peirce & OOP

Posted on August 13, 2010
Filed Under Derrida, OOP, Philosophy | 2 Comments

OK, last post on OOP. I promise. It’s just not fair to discuss it until I know it better otherwise I’ll just end up critiquing a strawman. That said something obvious struct me while thinking about Peirce (who talks about objects a lot given their place in his semiotics) and OOP.

The main focus of OOP is to move to the objects themselves and move past the incessant focus on human consciousness. Peirce talks about signs typically as signs affecting human interpretations. However he also expands them out into the non-human realm. (He was a physicist after all) Where I think the difference between Peirce and the little OOP I know appears to be though is over the place of mediation. For Peirce all object – object interactions are mediated. This is obvious in human – object interactions but Peirce extends this role of mediation into a general principle.

For OOP however there appears to be the idea of the unmediated.

Yes, it’s there in various incomplete ways. (Say the notion of withdrawal or incomplete object-object availability for each other)

And yes, to be fair, Peirce had his notion of secondness which is an unmediated contact with the other but in terms of behavior or understanding it always manifests as mediated thirdness.

I suspect this issue of mediation is behind some of the confusion between Derrida and OOP that has been playing out the past week or two on various blogs. Derrida, as I read him, is basically just acknowledging the play of mediation and how it is impossible to escape. Some are prone to read this just as an other Kantian avoidance of the things themselves. But Derrida’s notion of excess just isn’t Kant’s thing in itself. Rather it is the acceptance of finite mediation. Further Derrida’s point largely works from the object’s side rather than the interpreter’s side. (As such it can be seen as a sort of inversion of Heidegger)

While it may be completely unfair of me, and I don’t want to remain committed to this claim, it seems to me that OOP almost sounds like a Husserlian treatment only with object-object relations instead of human intentionality.

For Peirce, objects are signs.

. . .the object of a sign, that to which it, virtually at least, professes to be applicable, can itself be only a sign. For example, the object of an ordinary proposition is [a] generalization from a group of perceptual facts. It represents those facts. These perceptual facts are themselves abstract representatives, though we know not precisely what intermediaries, of the percepts themselves; and these are themselves viewed, and are,—if the judgment has any truth,—representations, primarily of impressions of sense, ultimately of a dark underlying something, which cannot be specified without its manifesting itself as a sign of something below. There is, we think, and reasonably think, a limit to this, an ultimate reality like a zero of temperature. But in the nature of things, it can only be approached, it can only be represented. The immediate object which any sign seeks to represent is itself a sign. (MS 599:36–37 [c. 1902]; cf. NEM 4:309–310)

Related posts:

  1. Peirce on Reference
  2. Virtual Peirce
  3. Gary and Peirce on Mind and Functionalism
  4. Peirce & Being
  5. Peirce on Limiting the Pragmatic Maxim
  6. Peirce on Truth

Comments

2 Responses to “Peirce & OOP”

You done with OOP?

(Yeah you know me)

No. I just don’t want to comment on it until I read more. I’ve got too many erroneous notions still.

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