Maybe your could help clarify something for me. Taking the ‘vehicles not tags’ concept and placing it next to the idea of the third realm, the image that comes to mind is a bridge. I suspect I’m being ridiculous, but I read a lot of Richard Scarry books these days, and that’s the imagery that leapt to mind as I read this.
The difficulty of the system* and the intent of human-centeredness makes me expand this image a bit more: It’s fine to have a picture of the things on the other side of the river, and we can grasp quite a lot about how things work over there in the third realm, but to approximate an embodied experience of that realm, to get as close to it as possible, requires something beyond the tools which, though serviceable for most purposes on this side of the river bank, fall short of getting us close enough to touch the border between this world and that one. For that, you need to build a bridge.
*I’m not familiar with begriffschrift, but reading the description reminded me of this visualization of lambda calculus, which I add here only because it’s beautiful to watch: https://youtu.be/RcVA8Nj6HEo?si=Ld4lqH2YwKs4_42d
Mr. Hamblock! Happy to hear from you, my friend! I can't believe you found me in this wilderness.
It's remarkable that you would suggest the metaphor of a bridge, because that's exactly one of the metaphors Frege himself uses in the 1882 paper. He says that signs can serve as "a bridge from the perceptible to the imperceptible." So you're definitely picking up what I'm laying down.
But where you spelled out the metaphor beautifully and fittingly, Frege left it alone. Partly this is because of the nature of his essay, which was published in a relatively more generalist and "popular" journal and thus meant to be brief. But it's also due to the nature of the semiosis that Frege was trying to theorize. That mode of semiosis — which he called "der Ausdruck eines Inhaltes," the expression of a content — is, I argue, a sui generis semiosis and so quite unlike the more familiar semiotic activities of indicating, naming, referring, picturing, etc.
In the 1882 essay and in others across his corpus, Frege deploys a whole bunch of metaphors to get at the sui generis nature of the semiosis he's envisioning. The metaphors are all highly suggestive, all slightly different, and all pulling in slightly different directions. In my attempt (in my dissertation) to recover Frege's overall vision for his writing system, I had to figure out what he was trying to get at with all these different metaphors and to figure out how they fit with other things he says.
I'll spare you the argumentative details, but I determined that to make the best sense of why Frege designed his writing system the way he did, we should take his notion of expression seriously. Though it has its limitations, and so we should be careful not to let it mislead in certain ways, the best metaphor for understanding the relationship between Frege's concept-signs and concepts is facial expression. I'll likely write a post about this, but the idea is that concept-sign is to concept as an expression of joy is to the joyfulness expressed. The important aspect here is that the joyfulness is *in*, and not *behind* or *on the other side of* the expression; the expression *contains* the joyfulness; the joyfulness is *present in* its expression.
And so we come to my point. The bridge metaphor — helpful as it is, and in precisely the way you spell out — just doesn't quite get at that important aspect of expression. Where the expression places us with the expressed *right here*, the bridge is necessarily connected to a territory *over there*. But, as you so perfectly showed, it's a powerful metaphor in other ways.
I especially like the way it affords this thought of yours: "It’s fine to have a picture of the things on the other side of the river, and we can grasp quite a lot about how things work over there in the third realm, but to approximate an embodied experience of that realm, to get as close to it as possible, requires something beyond the tools which, though serviceable for most purposes on this side of the river bank, fall short of getting us close enough to touch the border between this world and that one. For that, you need to build a bridge."
I’m delighted to have the clarification! It brings to mind another children’s book- Harold and the Purple Crayon.
As Harold draws a road, or an apple tree, or a bed, it is there. Does that fit better- his writing system not as a bridge, but as a means of bringing into being, or a bringing to the writer (not as an act of creation, but of summoning, which sounds real witchy).
For Frege, it would certainly be some kind of summoning: he thinks that while we can give concepts a presence and appearance suited to our perceptual capacities, we cannot create the concepts themselves.
On the other hand, in my dissertation I show Frege to have thought that concepts, while uncreated and ideal, can nonetheless be developed, or given form and definition, in being given an appearance. He says that with certain ideographical signs we have the capacity to "imprint" the concepts we are signifying. The verb he uses is "ausprägen," which has the connotation of simultaneously shaping and revealing.
We have to understand the summoning metaphor in the right way, though. In some ghost stories, for example, the summoned spirit is present but often merely *gives indications of* its presence (windows opening, strange knocks, scraping on the wooden floor, and so on), sort of like how the movement of tree leaves gives an indication of the presence of wind. In these scenarios, the spirit, while present, is not *appearing*, however. When a concept is present and appearing in a concept-sign, we see *it*; we do not just see indications of it. Again, facial expressions and bodily gestures are the paradigm here. Your bodily gestures are not just signs of you; they are you, embodied. You are present in them, and present in virtue of them; you are not external to them or beside them causing their movements. They are letting you appear.
(But as I admitted earlier, there are serious disanalogies lurking between concepts and personalities or emotions. I am not pretending to have found the perfect metaphor — just the one that brings out what I think is the key to understanding the most important aspects of Frege's view of semiosis.)
Wonderful article, sir.
Maybe your could help clarify something for me. Taking the ‘vehicles not tags’ concept and placing it next to the idea of the third realm, the image that comes to mind is a bridge. I suspect I’m being ridiculous, but I read a lot of Richard Scarry books these days, and that’s the imagery that leapt to mind as I read this.
The difficulty of the system* and the intent of human-centeredness makes me expand this image a bit more: It’s fine to have a picture of the things on the other side of the river, and we can grasp quite a lot about how things work over there in the third realm, but to approximate an embodied experience of that realm, to get as close to it as possible, requires something beyond the tools which, though serviceable for most purposes on this side of the river bank, fall short of getting us close enough to touch the border between this world and that one. For that, you need to build a bridge.
*I’m not familiar with begriffschrift, but reading the description reminded me of this visualization of lambda calculus, which I add here only because it’s beautiful to watch: https://youtu.be/RcVA8Nj6HEo?si=Ld4lqH2YwKs4_42d
Also: thank you so much for your comment!
Mr. Hamblock! Happy to hear from you, my friend! I can't believe you found me in this wilderness.
It's remarkable that you would suggest the metaphor of a bridge, because that's exactly one of the metaphors Frege himself uses in the 1882 paper. He says that signs can serve as "a bridge from the perceptible to the imperceptible." So you're definitely picking up what I'm laying down.
But where you spelled out the metaphor beautifully and fittingly, Frege left it alone. Partly this is because of the nature of his essay, which was published in a relatively more generalist and "popular" journal and thus meant to be brief. But it's also due to the nature of the semiosis that Frege was trying to theorize. That mode of semiosis — which he called "der Ausdruck eines Inhaltes," the expression of a content — is, I argue, a sui generis semiosis and so quite unlike the more familiar semiotic activities of indicating, naming, referring, picturing, etc.
In the 1882 essay and in others across his corpus, Frege deploys a whole bunch of metaphors to get at the sui generis nature of the semiosis he's envisioning. The metaphors are all highly suggestive, all slightly different, and all pulling in slightly different directions. In my attempt (in my dissertation) to recover Frege's overall vision for his writing system, I had to figure out what he was trying to get at with all these different metaphors and to figure out how they fit with other things he says.
I'll spare you the argumentative details, but I determined that to make the best sense of why Frege designed his writing system the way he did, we should take his notion of expression seriously. Though it has its limitations, and so we should be careful not to let it mislead in certain ways, the best metaphor for understanding the relationship between Frege's concept-signs and concepts is facial expression. I'll likely write a post about this, but the idea is that concept-sign is to concept as an expression of joy is to the joyfulness expressed. The important aspect here is that the joyfulness is *in*, and not *behind* or *on the other side of* the expression; the expression *contains* the joyfulness; the joyfulness is *present in* its expression.
And so we come to my point. The bridge metaphor — helpful as it is, and in precisely the way you spell out — just doesn't quite get at that important aspect of expression. Where the expression places us with the expressed *right here*, the bridge is necessarily connected to a territory *over there*. But, as you so perfectly showed, it's a powerful metaphor in other ways.
I especially like the way it affords this thought of yours: "It’s fine to have a picture of the things on the other side of the river, and we can grasp quite a lot about how things work over there in the third realm, but to approximate an embodied experience of that realm, to get as close to it as possible, requires something beyond the tools which, though serviceable for most purposes on this side of the river bank, fall short of getting us close enough to touch the border between this world and that one. For that, you need to build a bridge."
I’m delighted to have the clarification! It brings to mind another children’s book- Harold and the Purple Crayon.
As Harold draws a road, or an apple tree, or a bed, it is there. Does that fit better- his writing system not as a bridge, but as a means of bringing into being, or a bringing to the writer (not as an act of creation, but of summoning, which sounds real witchy).
Is that closer?
Oh, that's nice. Love it.
For Frege, it would certainly be some kind of summoning: he thinks that while we can give concepts a presence and appearance suited to our perceptual capacities, we cannot create the concepts themselves.
On the other hand, in my dissertation I show Frege to have thought that concepts, while uncreated and ideal, can nonetheless be developed, or given form and definition, in being given an appearance. He says that with certain ideographical signs we have the capacity to "imprint" the concepts we are signifying. The verb he uses is "ausprägen," which has the connotation of simultaneously shaping and revealing.
We have to understand the summoning metaphor in the right way, though. In some ghost stories, for example, the summoned spirit is present but often merely *gives indications of* its presence (windows opening, strange knocks, scraping on the wooden floor, and so on), sort of like how the movement of tree leaves gives an indication of the presence of wind. In these scenarios, the spirit, while present, is not *appearing*, however. When a concept is present and appearing in a concept-sign, we see *it*; we do not just see indications of it. Again, facial expressions and bodily gestures are the paradigm here. Your bodily gestures are not just signs of you; they are you, embodied. You are present in them, and present in virtue of them; you are not external to them or beside them causing their movements. They are letting you appear.
(But as I admitted earlier, there are serious disanalogies lurking between concepts and personalities or emotions. I am not pretending to have found the perfect metaphor — just the one that brings out what I think is the key to understanding the most important aspects of Frege's view of semiosis.)