Newsgroups: bit.listserv.qualrs-l
Date:         Sun, 6 Sep 1992 14:03:09 +1000
              <QUALRS-L@UGA.BITNET>
From:         dcunning@METZ.UNE.EDU.AU
Subject:      Re: making sense out of making sense: theoretical
Comments: To: "Qualitative Research for the Human Sciences"
              <QUALRS-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>

Jean,

My apologies for the delay, but I've been distracted.  My friends
at Indiana will be amused to hear I've been in two day long meetings
about strategic planning for the Faculty of Education.  It was
meetings like that which stimulated my departure from Indiana.

Your questions are quite good and quite challanging, but rather than
respond directly, let me think with my fingers about the major issue you
correctly identified - the triadic nature of semiotics and semiotic
inquiry.  The three elements in the sign process (or sign function)
are the object (that which the sign represents), the representamen
(that which represents the object, also often and somewhat confusingly
called the sign), and the interpretant (the effect of the sign).
Representamens
mediate between their object and interpretant.  But these three are not
independent elements, nor a collection of dyads.  Objects in part determine
signs and vice versa by the nature of the representation (by similarity, an
actual existant relationship or by a rule).  Likewise, the effects of a
sign
(for humans, our experience of it) both influence and are influenced by
the representamen.  [I realize I'm using a lot of jargon here and this may
not be helpful.  A very good introduction to Peirce's semiotic is in an
article by Nathan Houser in the American Journal of Semiotics - 1987]

I suppose the important point for me is that indetermanancy is built in to
a triadic model.  Separating things into elements like "the real world"
collective experience"  individual experience" is helpful only as a
regulative idea, a notion that we'll presuppose and see where it leads.
But it also leads to dyadic thinking of the sort Gary was objecting to:
"Well if we get enough collective experience, then we will have reality".
Gary was saying, I believe, there is more than collective experience
(group hermaneutics?), there is a world which makes sense in its own right.
The problem with Gary's account is that as soon as you posit a mind
independent world, you again can be trapped into dyadic thinking that
those meanings can be experienced unmediated.  And round and round
we go.

Determanism is at best contextualized to particular times, places, etc.
This
is inherent in the triadic nature of semiosis.  Functionally what it means
for inquiry is that you provide the best account of those local contexts as

you can, use the constructs in ways which maximize their value and minimize
their disadvantages, buy always be open to new ways of seeing meaning (what
Peirce called abduction - but that's another topic for another day.

There is also an interesting discussion of some related issues on a
semiotics
network Semios-l for those who are really interested in the abstract/obtuse
stuff.  I don't have the subscription address handy, but Gary does.
For instance here is a useful discussion of the comparison between
structuralism and post structuralism.

djc

Don Cunningham
Department of Learning, Development & Communication
University of New England
Armidale  2351  NSW
AUSTRALIA

dcunning@metz.une.oz.au
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU