Thanks for this, Ben. John
From: Benjamin Udell [mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com] Sent: September 8, 2014 7:23 PM To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu; biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:6698] Re: Natural Propositions 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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