While checking the log for the blog to see who was coming here and why, I noticed one hit came from a Google search for "Derrida & indeterminacy." Now on the one hand this is a bit erroneous. Derrida focuses in on undecidability and not indeterminacy as such. However a lot of discussion of Derrida, especially in the context of Peirce, does focus on indeterminacy. While looking at the Google search, I came upon an excellent analysis of Derrida and Peirce in the context of a response to Umberto Eco. The paper is "Derrida and Peirce on Indeterminacy, Iteration, and Replication" by Uwe Wirth.
Now Eco's written a fair bit on both Peirce and Derrida. Indeed my first encounter with Derrida came within the pages of his book, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. However Eco takes issue with those who link together Derrida and Peirce, despite Derrida's extensive appeal to Peirce in On Grammatology. Indeed in his paper "Unlimited Semiosis and Drift" in The Limits of Interpretation Eco argues, "deconstructive drift and unlimited semiosis cannot be equivalent concepts." (36) The basic reason is that Peirce has the notion of an "absolute object" which is the end semiosis in a sense.
Wirth critiques this view fairly adroitly and I encourage anyone interested in the parallels between Peirce and Derrida to read the paper. I think it ties into the issue of undecidability in Derrida fairly well. More significant is, I think, Writh's view of where Derrida and Peirce differ.
The question of ‘what gets iterated’ could be answered by stating that neither the type, nor the token, but only the type-token relation is iterable. ‘Iteration’ concerns exclusively the ‘law of replication’ but not the forming of pragmatic habits or semantic codes. Hence, Derrida’s concept of ‘iterability’ as an endless ‘grafting’ on different contexts is incompatible with the Peircean concept of semiosis as an endless series of representations that render meaning and interpretation more and more determinate and precise. While Derrida holds that ‘iterability’ is the ‘organon’ even for the semantic aspects of a code, Peirce argues that the ‘repetitory character’ of representation concerns only the ‘sign in itself ’, i.e., the law of replication, which governs the type-token relation. (42)
I think that this gets to the heart of the Gadamer - Derrida debate as well. I've been meaning to write about that for a while now, but have been a tad too sleep deprived. I think that Gadamer and Peirce are on the same side of the debate. However it will be useful to examine that debate in more depth, if only to see why Derrida says what he does. I should also conclude with a great quote from Peirce that perhaps is applicable.
Notwithstanding their contrariety, generality and vagueness are, from a formal point of view, seen to be on a par. Evidently no sign can be at once vague and general in the same respect, since insofar as the right of determination is not distinctly extended to the interpreter it remains the right of the utterer. Hence also, a sign can only escape from being either vague or general by not being indeterminate. But that no sign can be absolutely and completely indeterminate is proved in 3.93 where Plutarch's anecdote about appealing from Phillip drunk to Phillip sober is put to use. Yet every proposition actually asserted must refer to some non-general subject; for the doctrine that a proposition has but a single subject has to be given up in the light of the Logic of Relations. (See The Open Court, pp. 3416 et seq.) [3.417ff.] Indeed, all propositions refer to one and the same determinately singular subject, well-understood between all utterers and interpreters; namely, to The Truth, which is the universe of all universes, and is assumed on all hands to be real. But besides that, there is some lesser environment of the utterer and interpreter of each proposition that actually gets conveyed, to which that proposition more particularly refers and which is not general. The Open Court paper referred to [above] made this plain, but left unnoticed some truths of the first importance about vagueness. No communication of one person to another can be entirely definite, i.e., non-vague. We may reasonably hope that physiologists will some day find some means of comparing the qualities of one person's feelings with those of another, so that it would not be fair to insist upon their present incomparability as an inevitable source of misunderstanding. Besides, it does not affect the intellectual purport of communications. But wherever degree or any other possibility of continuous variation subsists, absolute precision is impossible. Much else must be vague, because no man's interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man's. Even in our most intellectual conceptions, the more we strive to be precise, the more unattainable precision seems. It should never be forgotten that our own thinking is carried on as a dialogue, and though mostly in a lesser degree, is subject to almost every imperfection of language. I have worked out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness, but need not inflict more of it upon you, at present. (Collected Peirce 5:506)
BTW - Wirth has a good paper on Davidson and Peirce as well.
A tangential comment...
Peirce's observations that no one's interpretation can be based on the exact same context as another's and that our own thinking is "carried on as a dialogue" indirectly point to the value of literary discourse, in my opinion.
The very concept of capturing human experience in text The fact that it happens that there are written narratives proves the impossibility of absolute precision in communication. Fictional characters are in some ways an affront to human beings, a giving of context and voice to dialogic voices.
This also speaks somewhat to the abuses of Derrida by literary professors that has come up in the wake of his death. Despite the efforts of many -- the blows rained on the author, the privileging and yet distrust of the reader (who is stuck in his middlebrow, bougie mindset), the politicizing of narratives and reduction of narratives to one-dimensional examples of oppressive cultures, the fleeing to and fetish with the margins -- the story remains. And I would say -- so does the practice of reaching the story through closely reading the text (however impossible that might ultimately be).
Just to be helpful, I wrote later on the Gadamer - Derrida debate which is related to the above.
A few people have been going to this page and the other page on the Derrida - Gadamer debate. I just wanted to add a brief addition to William's comments above. I think that for Peirce, philosophy and thinking in general are inherently dialogical in nature. In a way I think philosophy has largely moved away from that way of doing philosophy that Plato ushered in. I'm rather convinced, for instance, that Plato conducted his philosophy as dialogs for a reason. Peirce, while not writing in that particular style, does embrace it. Yet I think many philosophers, especially in analytic tradition do not. Ones thought ought to be as self-sufficient as possible.
I think that while there clearly are differences between Peirce and Derrida, over iconicity at the least, there is that shared sense of dialog. Derrida's whole approach of Decontruction really does take the form of a dialog with other texts. Even if, as we see in the Gadamer debate, there isn't a nice straight evolution, I think that many of the points Peirce brings up are apt. I'm also not quite convinced that Derrida and Peirce are quite as far apart as they might at times appear, as the Peirce quote about miscommunication hints at.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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