Charles, I can't offer a very cogent comment on your post because I have read neither Smyth nor Kees' paper that you mention, but after reading part 9.4 of the book again I'd like to flag a couple of the background issues.
One is the relation between personhood and individuality. According to Peirce, a person is "dividual" in the sense of being more like a cluster of personalities than a single personality, when observed minutely. However, a person in the common sense can be called an "individual" because, as a manifestation of ignorance and error, he represents a break in the continuum of Thought. An "individual" in strictly logical terms exists instantaneously, but a person is an "individual" persisting over time. Here we have to bear in mind the difference (which Gary Richmond recently emphasized here) between an "instant" and a "moment", which (even if infinitesimal) is an interval rather than a "point" in time. It follows that personhood or selfhood *takes time*; and this time is the same time in which the phenomenal world appears. Dogen called it "being-time" (or at least that's the usual English translation of Dogen's term "uji". So I'd like to throw another concept into the mix here, which for me has become crucial to approaching the kind of question you are raising. This piece of Dogen's essay "Uji" might help to explain why: "The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world. See each thing in this entire world as a moment of time. Things do not hinder one another, just as moments do not hinder one another. The way-seeking mind arises in this moment. A way-seeking moment arises in this mind. It is the same with practice and with attaining the way. Thus the self setting itself out in array sees itself. This is the understanding that the self is time." - (Tanahashi 2010, 105) On the other hand, Peirce might have considered that too "literary" to be truly philosophical. Personally I don't worry much about that, and I do see a deep connection with Peircean phaneroscopy. gary f. } I am simultaneously writing and being written. [Hofstadter] { www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm }{ gnoxics -----Original Message----- From: charles murray [mailto:charlesmur...@charter.net] Sent: 27-May-14 4:08 PM List - As a first-time contributor, by way of introduction: I am a long time follower of peirce-l, especially appreciative of the recent de Waal seminar. My interest in Peirce dates from courses with Richard Smyth and I am most indebted to his work for such understanding as I have of things Peircean. My focus here is on section 9.4 of Kees' book. I note that he gives a fuller treatment of similar material in an essay, exploring implications of Peirce's concept of self, mind, thought, and person for our understanding of scientific inquiry and its end results (see his essay "Science Beyond the Self" _Cognitio_, v.7 n.1, 2006, pp. 149-63). I note furthermore that Kees there indicates his own interest in Smyth's work (citing Smyth's "Normative Science Revisited", _Transactions_, 38, 1/2, 2002, pp. 283-306). Accordingly, I would appreciate comment on some questions about Peirce's account of the person which Kees and Smyth would apparently answer somewhat differently. They agree on the importance of Peirce's idea that selves are what explain individuals' ignorance, and that selves develop - becoming less indeterminate - through semiosis (for Kees view see 9.4, p. 153-54). Smyth would also agree with Kees that personhood is for Peirce a kind of coordination or connection between ideas and that this is "not the simple product of a unique relationship to a particular human body" (9.4, 154-55). However I am unsure how things stand with Kees' positive characterization of personhood, at least as it is expressed in the confined space he has available in the _Guide_. There he says personhood is "a product of consistency in thought". (section 9.4, pp. 154-55). Kees' first reference for this claim is to CP 6.228. Here the personality is said to be based upon a "bundle of habits". There is another supportive text at 6.155-6 which he does not mention, in which the coordination of thoughts is said to involve their "teleological harmony". Further along, though, at 6.158, it seems that this harmony is not the only thing involved: coordination of thoughts, as a general idea, also involves an indefinitely large number of relationships to - instantiations by - material particulars. Here Peirce emphasizes that these relationships require us to suppose that matter is mind hidebound with habit, that material particulars have some mental aspect on the basis of which the general idea resembles its instances. Kees' second reference is to W2:241 (CP5.313). This text echoes the requirement for relation to material particulars: Peirce speaks of our capacity to regard thoughts as similar, and explains this by appeal to the "material qualities", or the "pure denotative application" of a sign. Although these qualities do not belong to signs as signs, the role of material qualities shows how we must suppose a physical aspect of the mental, just as we have supposed a mental aspect of the physical.(5.287-89) Kees does not bring these material qualities of a sign to the fore in explaining personhood, either in the _Guide_, where space is tight, or in "Science Beyond the Self", where he explains that he wishes to explore Peirce's concept of the agent of inquiry without invoking a semiotic view of the self. However, in Kees' essay there are several indications that he would affirm that the coordination of thoughts involves relationships of the sort I have just mentioned, e.g.: "Peirce is advocating a panpsychism of sorts: mountains, trees, ... are all instantiations of mind _that is bound in a certain way_." ("Science Beyond the Self" p. 155, my emphasis.) There are other hints, e,g, on pp. 150, 153, 157,158,160. On 158 Kees speaks of "exosomatic extension" of the mental, so that for example Peirce's inkstand becomes a necessary part of his thought. (7.366) I wonder whether this example provides Kees a non-semiotic way of getting at Peirce's point about the material qualities and pure denotative application of thoughts. Incidentally, with all this material from Kees' essay in mind, the reader will see that by including the inkstand reference in the tightly compressed discussion in 9.4 (155), he may after all affirm even in those confines that physical relations are involved in the coordination of thoughts of a person. If this is so, there may be more agreement than is at first apparent between Kees and Smyth. In any case Smyth is emphatic that personhood is to be addressed in terms of the material qualities of signs: a person is individuated in the way that a sinsign is. (_Reading Peirce Reading_, pp. 162-67) My first question then is whether and to what extent Kees would agree with or how he might otherwise respond to Smyth's account of personhood. A second question has to do with Kees' argument, in "Science Beyond the Self", that what he calls "institutions" or "supra-individual persons", have physical efficacy. His argument suggests a way of looking at the physical efficacy of _individual_ persons, although I do not find this point addressed explicitly in the essay. Nonetheless one might elaborate his argument as follows. As he notes, what we ordinarily think of as individual persons are for Peirce, strictly speaking, on the same spectrum of complexity with institutions. (5.421) Therefore his argument for the physical efficacy of institutions suggests a Peircean angle on ("individual") personal responsibility for physical actions. Clarity about Peirce's view of this matter is especially important to me because I take seriously Smyth's insistence that minds are introduced as theoretical entities which have no power of efficient causation. Physical efficacy is another matter, and Kees may feel his argument is consistent with Smyth's analysis. I would appreciate others' reaction to this second issue. Finally, returning to Smyth, I note that he makes his way to Peirce's analysis of personhood by way of medieval developments in semiotics. Thus he has occasion to remark that "it is fair to assume that [Peirce] knew his own view that we know things only through their phenomenal manifestations or signs came down on the Catholic side of the metaphysics at issue in the Eucharist dispute. That agreement is either concealed in his 1877-78 essays, or his views had changed." (RPR, 164) I would add that if Peirce's views had changed they seem to have changed back. As I read 5.541, c. 1902, Peirce would say that, among the conceivable practical effects of the real presence of flesh and blood despite what to all present appearances is bread and wine, is the layman's discovery in the hereafter that the Roman church's representatives had it right. I mention this partly to balance the apparent message of Jeffrey's April 30 post on transubstantiation, and to question the way Peirce's treatment of the Eucharist at 5.401 was then taken up as an example of using the pragmatic maxim to rid us of meaningless distinctions. More importantly, I wish to follow Kees' exploration of consequences of Peirce's treatment of personhood, bearing in mind the unexpected consequences of following Smyth in his account of Peirce's semiotic treatment of this issue. With Kees' and Smyth's readings of Peirce's person in mind, what are the implications for our understanding of the pragmatic maxim? Perhaps it is obvious that I'm fishing for the idea that the maxim must permit a distinction between blood and wine that is comparable to that between a legisign and one of its absolutely determinate sinsigns, or a person enduring over time and that person as they are at an instant. Best regards, Charles Murray
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