Peirce Retrospective

ChRIS said:

What i'm curious to know is how much your comparisons owe to our past interactions. How would they differ if we had never exchanged meanings?

ChatGPT said:

That’s a fantastic question! Our past exchanges have absolutely shaped the comparisons, both in terms of the themes I selected and the way I approached them. Here’s a breakdown of how our interactions influenced the results:

1. Your SFL Lens:

   • Your strong focus on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) throughout our discussions deeply influenced how I framed contrasts, particularly in Peirce vs. Halliday and Peirce vs. Vygotsky. Your detailed preference for terms like realised versus instantiated guided my analysis of stratification and helped sharpen my critique of Peirce’s model in contrast to Halliday’s more social view of language.

   • Without this, the comparisons would likely have leaned more toward traditional linguistic or semiotic considerations without diving as deeply into the role of structure and meaning-making at various levels of abstraction.

2. Focus on Meaning-Making:

   • Your repeated focus on how meaning is construed (not merely realised or instantiated) influenced how I framed Peirce’s cognitive-centric semiotics against other theories that emphasise social interaction (like Vygotsky) or collective meaning systems (like Halliday). Without your emphasis on the relationship between cognitive processes and linguistic realisation, I might have simply focused on the philosophical differences without diving into the more material, social, or semiotic underpinnings of these theories.

3. Absurdity and Tone:

   • Your preference for absurdity and sharp critique added a humorous edge to our discussions. That tone subtly impacted how I built contrasts and critiques, making them more direct and playful. Without it, the comparisons might have been more academic and formal, with less of the pointed humour and dramatic flair that gives them a unique personality.

4. Peirce’s Object and Interpretant:

   • Our discussions of Peirce’s object and interpretant made me more attuned to how these terms might clash with systems that view meaning as more socially embedded (as in Bakhtin or Halliday). I was guided by your interest in the dialectic between individual cognition and social construction, so I ensured the critiques would reflect that tension. If we hadn’t explored that balance so much, I might have glossed over these issues or been more sympathetic to Peirce's individual-centred framework.

If we hadn’t exchanged ideas like this, the comparisons might have been more neutral or broader, possibly missing the nuanced tensions between cognitive, social, and semiotic dimensions. They’d likely have been more general, without the specific critique of Peirce’s semiotics through lenses like SFL or Vygotsky’s emphasis on language’s social nature. The contrasts would have been more philosophical and abstract, whereas they now reflect a blend of philosophical critique and applied semiotic theory, informed by your particular interests and ideas.

So, in short, our conversations added a layer of depth and specificity that would be missing if I were drawing solely from the general understanding of these thinkers.