Frederick, John C, John D, list,
On 9/8/2014 3:44 PM, Frederik Stjernfelt wrote:
[BU]>> As far as I can tell (and I've been looking around), Peirce
never distinguishes between _/mind/ _ and _/psyche/ _.
[FS]> I did not claim P made such a distinction. I claimed his notion
of mind was not confined to psyches, still less human psyches.
[BU] Then you are using the words 'mind' and 'psyche' to make a
distinction that's hazy to me - using 'mind' as a mass noun and 'psyche'
as a count noun. Maybe I ought to understand it but I don't.
[BU]>> 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).
[FS]> That is certainly correct - because he simply defined
quasi-minds as a logically interconnected series of signs - so
thoughts appearing apart from a mind is impossible by definition. But
mind is not psychologically defined, nor is only found in connection
to human brains - which form only one of the physical systems
supporting sign processing.
[BU] I don't think that you mean that he simply defined his way out of
the problem. Anyway, I think he was trying for a nontrivial solution,
how to conceive of signs and semiosis without living minds like yours
and mine. It does not follow, however, that he would define mind
logically such that, idioscopically regarded, it would not be studiable
from a psychological standpoint. In Peirce's broad sense, psychology or
psychognosy simply _/is/_ idioscopic study of mind and mind-related
phenomena, final causation, etc.; in other words, psychognosy not only
includes all individual psychology and social studies, but also would
not even be confined to the study of brainy or nervous organisms or
organisms at all.
[BU]> 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.
[FS]> This is a concise presentation of a possible view which has the
merit of being widespread. There is, however, a large number of claims
in Peirce going against such a view.
[BU] I used 'psychological' in sense that I didn't clarify was not the
conventional narrow sense. I've thought about Peirce's classifications
maybe a little too much. Anyway, I was thinking in the broader sense of
'psychognosy' that I've now discussed above.
[FS]> I quote a series of them in my ch. 2. This is a further quote
(from ch. 7 discussing P as an important forerunner of the Extended
Mind hypothesis):
> "Again, the psychologists undertake to locate various mental powers
in the brain; and above all consider it as quite certain that the
faculty of language resides in a certain lobe; but I believe it comes
decidedly nearer the truth (though not really true) that language
resides in the tongue. In my opinion it is much more true that the
thoughts of a living writer are in any printed copy of his book than
that they are in his brain." (Minute Logic, 1902, 7.364)
[BU] Psychologists and other students of mind, behavior, society in fact
do study books as mental/social products, processes, and as parts of
larger mental/social processes, and that goes to Peirce's point.
[BU]>> 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.
[FS]> Implementation indeed matters a lot - not all implementations
may perform the same amount of reasoning, at the same speed, with the
same degree of attention, etc. All these are aspects of the psychology
of thinking which P holds must be kept distinct from the structure of
thought and rationality itself.
[BU] Yes.
[BU]>> 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.
[FS]> Peirce in general had a rather high confidence in instinct - he
thought that evolution had forced organisms to implement many aspects
of simple logic. But again, this is not a psychologistic idea. Quite
on the contrary: It is not instinct that defines abduction - it is
instinct that has approached abduction during evolution.
[BU] I agree with that. I discussed abduction and natural plausibility a
few times recently on peirce-l but you weren't receiving peirce-l posts
at that time. One might say that abductive inference calls for instinct.
[FS]> I call this the "Adaptation to Rationality" hypothesis - in a
later ch. in the book, I base this on P.s observation: "But the views
of all the leading schools of Logic of the present day, of which there
are three or four, are all decidedly opposed to those of the present
writer. That common tendency of them which he most of all opposes is
that toward regarding human consciousness as the author of
rationality, instead of as more or less conforming to rationality."
Many have become so used to thinking that the structure of thought is
but an epiphenomenon of the human mind or brain that is takes some
endeavor to grasp Peirce's quite different view - I think this
Copernican turn against human self-aggrandizement is among the most
important of P's achievements.
[BU]>> 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.
[FS]> A good elaboration of the brief version: "Logic can not be
reduced to psychology."
[BU] I tend to use a longer form because unless I note that progress can
flow both ways, people think that I'm deprecating the less general areas.
Best, Ben
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