Dear Ben, lists [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. You're right, it is rarely possible to define your way out of any problem. I am not sure he thought signs and semiosis were possible without living minds. The crux lies in "living minds like yours and mine". P was anxious to distinguish between what must hold for any possible mind and what holds for human minds in particular. This was why he isloated the feature of connected signs of logic as the general structure pertaining to any possible mind. The "unpsychological" view of logic then claims this can be studied without the particularities of human brains and minds (or any other particular mind, for that matter). [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. But that is not the point of P's argument here. It is that the structure of arguments characterizing the thought is in the book rather than in the brain. Of course the book can be studied by psychologists, just like it can be studied by physicists, chemists, paper industrialists, book historians and much more. But Peirce's claim is there is a property of the book which is not studied by any of the above - the thoughts that it contains. So the book is not merely a mental/social product. It is also an the structure of a thought. [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. I would say the opposite. Instinct has been selected for its ability to perform abductive inference … Best F
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