Frederik, John,
As far as I can tell (and I've been looking around), Peirce never
distinguishes between _/mind/_ and _/psyche/_. But he does distinguish
between a logical conception of mind and a psychological conception of
mind. (See for example Memoir 11 "On the Logical Conception of Mind"
http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/l75/ver1/l75v1-05.htm in his
Carnegie Application of 1902.)
Peirce said, "[...] just as we say that a body is in motion, and not
that motion is in a body, we ought to say that we are in thought, and
not that thoughts are in us." He's alluding by contrast to a misleading
old definition of momentum as the "quantity of motion in an object". I
don't know that it was ever current among physicists, I once read it in
a book by a 20th-Century neo-Scholastic, de Wulf I think. However, it
was misleading not because there is no motion in an object, but because
the momenta within an object are just the momenta that are "netted out"
when one considers the net momentum of an object, the amount of motion
that an object is in. The object is in some of the motion in a larger
object.
At any rate, Peirce did appear to hold that thoughts do not occur
_/apart/_ from a mind - except that in later years he had generalized to
the idea of a quasi-mind - in crystals, in the work of bees, etc. (in
"Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism," 1906, CP 4 paragraph 551
http://www.existentialgraphs.com/peirceoneg/prolegomena.htm#Paragraph551).
Earlier he had held out the idea of a representamen that does not have a
mental interpretant, and thus would be a representamen yet not a sign, a
representamen that is apart from thought - he said that an example would
be a sunflower that, by the sheer act of turning toward the sun, becomes
capable of reproducing a sunflower that also turns towards the sun and
also is capable of reproducing a further such sunflower (in "Syllabus,"
1903, EP 2:272-3
http://www.commens.org/dictionary/entry/quote-syllabus-syllabus-course-lectures-lowell-institute-beginning-1903-nov-23-s-20).
I don't know whether he later thought that such a case would fall into
the class of quasi-mind phenomena.
Now, in studies of special classes of positive phenomena, all mental
thought, if not all quasi-mental thought, would be regarded as subject
matter of psychological study, so John has a point - all actual thought,
the thoughts that we do think, are psychological, in some sense of that
word. As an objective idealist, Peirce held that "matter is effete mind,
inveterate habits becoming physical laws." Did he think that psychology
might be more general than physics, then? Yes, he did. In his 1904
intellectual autobiography he said of idioscopy (the special sciences),
that "It is extremely doubtful which of its two wings should be placed
first" - the two wings being physical and psychological sciences.
All actual thinking by minds will be limited by the actual powers of the
homo sapiens or whatever it is that is thinking, and implementation will
matter a great deal, as Stan said. Implementation will certainly matter
in AI. But none of those ideas constitute psychologism or
anti-anti-psychologism.
Peirce tries to address some such limits generically, and he evidently
thinks that there will always be such limits, and that thus it is proper
at the philosophical level to address their role in logic. He holds that
only inference that can be controlled by the one inferring is subject to
logical criticism, and he does inventory of cases where the one
inferring cannot control his or her inference process, one cannot doubt
at the time, etc. The result is a philosophical idea of reasoning where
reasoning hardly seems possible without such 'indubitables', perceptual
judgments that serve as first premisses. (That's in Memoir 21
http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/l75/ver1/l75v1-07.htm,
especially Draft D but, if I recall correctly, he discusses other
indubitables elsewhere.) I do see how one might be less confident that
some philosophical generalizations are truly general than one is as
regards many mathematical generalizations. It would be nice if we could
observe other intelligent species, E.T.'s etc, for corroboration as to
what is idiosyncratic to humans and what is philosophically general.
Peirce's anti-psychologism isn't the idea that we don't depend on often
unconscious cerebral processes that we don't understand in order to
reason. For example, he regards abductive inference as guided by
instinct, and regards the plausibility or natural simplicity desirable
in a hypothetical explanation as something's seeming simple and natural
in terms of one's evolved instinctual attunement to nature, as opposed
to logical simplicity, which he regards as badly secondary.
https://sites.google.com/site/cspmem/terms#simple . Yet even here he
includes a normative "ought", saying "By plausibility, I mean the degree
to which a theory ought to recommend itself to our belief independently
of any kind of evidence other than our instinct urging us to regard it
favorably." (A Letter to Paul Carus 1910, Collected Papers v. 8, see
paragraph 223.) Philosophical logic, in Peirce's view, then will be
concerned with instinct's role in abductive inference, but not with the
specific evolutionary history and kind of instinct possessed by homo
sapiens.
Anti-psychologism in logic is, or involves, the idea that mathematical
and philosophical theories of logic are not chapters in psychology and
are not based mathematically or logically on research findings in
psychology, any more than calculus and the math of conical refraction
are based mathematically or logically on physics or physical optics,
even though questions of physical theory inspired the development of
calculus etc. and could be called a genealogical basis for the more
abstract subjects.
Best, Ben
On 9/8/2014 10:26 AM, Frederik Stjernfelt wrote:
[John Collier]>>>> He thought that we set aside a certain class of
experiences that we take (fallibly in each instance) to be
externally caused (an abduction) because they surprise us. However
our thought does not get outside of the sequence of signs that are
connected in our thought (or experience more generally, if you make
a distinction).
[FS]>>> He does indeed claim that all thought is in signs - but I do
not recall him saying those signs are "in our thought". I think he
is careful not to make his concept of mind a concept of the psyche,
let alone "our" psyche.
[JC]>> Ok, I find this idea too bizarre to contemplate seriously. We
will have to part company here. I think if you read carefully his
papers on the faculties you will see why I make the interpretation I
do, even if you don't agree with it.
[FS]> I am sad to hear you offer no better argument against Peirce's
p-o-v than that it be "bizarre". Same: I think if you read carefully
his papers on semiotics you will see why I make the interpretation I do.
- Q: Why do you have to re-read your own papers before teaching them
in the classroom?
[JC]>>>> This "sucks the world up inside the head",
[FS]> - if the world is sucked up inside the head - where are the
head then, not in the world presumably? - is the head then in still
other heads? - and where are those heads? - etc.
[JC]>>>> (Peirce thought that nothing could be established a priori.)
[FS]>>> He vacillated on that, sometimes calling semiotics the a
priori theory of signs.
[JC]>> Yeh, I know. Always sounded like wishful thinking to me. I had
a friend studying mathematics who, when he did not know or could not
find a proof, he started with what he did know led towards the
conclusion, and jumped over the missing parts with the justification
WT for "wishful thinking". Of course the conclusion is connected
logically to the premises and steps he did put down, so the
connection is there, quite independently of his own thinking.
In Peirce's favour, there are two senses of a priori. One, which
Peirce describes as problematic, depends on reason alone. The other,
which may apply to the theory of signs, does not depend on particular
experience, but we can discover that there is no alternative, no
matter how the world is. I don't have much problem with the latter
kind, but one has to be careful about failures of imagination. This
can take unexpected forms, for example many people think they can
imagine a universe with exactly two objects of identical properties
(Max Black's balls).
[FS]> Ha!
[JC]>> However I would ask if they never interact what does it mean
to say they are in the same universe? I am not at all convinced the
supposed example is meaningful. Or for a more mundane case, many
people would think we can imagine a centaur. As my mentor David Hull
liked to point out, this is dubious -- how many hearts, lungs, or
livers, for that matter, does a centaur have?
[FS]> Right. Imagination leaves blank what is not explicitly
presented. As I said in a posting a couple of days ago, I think
Peirce's implicit (sometimes explicit) notion of the a priori comes
closer to that of the Husserlian tradition than to Kant's: it deals
with inescapable structures of reality which you must often consult
the foundations of the special sciences in order to learn about. But
those sciences are also not only "in the head".
The signs we exchange in this very List conversation are distributed
by servers to computer screens and are not confined to anybody's head.
Here, I think common sense supports my p-o-v no less than yours.
Best
F
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