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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