Dear Gary, lists - Thanks for some important comments - you highlight an issue which has not been so central in our discussions on (anti-)psychologism until now - namely the fact that psychological reductions of logic very often downplay or even deny the generality of meaning. If we think meaning should be constructed from a myriad of different individual experiences in individual brains - then the explanation of general meanings become difficult if not impossible - general meanings in the sciences, to be sure, but also in large parts of everyday communication. Speakers of ordinary language share a large amount of general meanings and it is seminal not to confuse those meanings with individual imagery in individual brains. Quite on the contrary, it is a very central part of the role of external signs - spoken and written language, images, diagrams, gesture etc. - to fixate and communicate such general meanings. Those meanings are not secondary access canals to more detailed, genuine representations in brains - rather, general signs form a vehicle of though which individual minds enter in order to think and communicate generally. An important corollary here is that no two particular empirical phenomena over chemical level are completely identical. We have no reason to think that the any perception of an individual can be identical to that of another (or the same individual at another point of time). Quite different are general signs. Exactly because they - contrary to individual objects and ideas - are unspecified as to most of their properties and only focus upon few, selected properties and relations, they may be identical from one person to the next. So we should give up the empiricist idea that it is a cumbersome process of abstraction in the mind of each individual, taking us from detailed ideas to less determinate, abstract ones. Rather general ideas, on many different levels of generality, is rather the bread and butter of cognition. Or senses are simply machines for sifting and concentrating general features from the perceptual stream - as P says, generality pours into our senses all of the time. Sameness of meaning across minds is not because several individuals magically manage to perform the same abstractions from widely differing sense expressions (my experiences with dogs, being attacked by a Schaefer when I was 8, is surely different from many of yours - but still we have the very same linguistic concept of dogs, despite the associations I attach to that concept) - sameness of meaning is granted by externalized signs and our common activities and actions related to those signs.
Best F : Lists, I’d like to introduce here a couple of comments on Chapter 2 of NP (specifically, on the beginning of 2.5), but I’d also like to note that much of the valuable conversation on these issues has been taking place under other subject lines, and this post is meant to reflect on that previous conversation as well. Here are the first three sentences (also the first 3 paragraphs!) of NP 2.5: NP (p.44): Both Peirce's and Hussel's antipsychologicist semiotics are based on the observation that even if simple, singular signs exist, most interesting signs, beyond a certain degree of complexity, are tokens of types, and many of these, in turn, refer to general objects (Peirce) or ideal objects (Husserl). A very important rule here is the Frege-Peircean idea that the semiotic access to generality is made possible by general signs being unsaturated and schematic: the predicate function “_ is blue”, for instance, is general 1) because referring possibly to all things blue, 2) because of the generality of the predicate blue, having a schematic granularity allowing for a continuum of different particular blue shades.[i]<x-msg://789/#_edn1> This generality is what makes it possible for the sign to be used with identical—general—meaning, at the same time as the individual users are free to adorn their use with a richness of individual mental imagery and associations (like Ingardenian filling-in during literary reading) without this imagery in any way constituting meaning—sameness of meaning in language being granted by successful intersubjective communication, reference, and action. GF: The first sentence above explains the subtitle of this section, which is “The Indispensability of the Generality of Signs”. But it is not only the signs employed by science which must have generality, but also the objects of those signs. Science can say nothing about a unique phenomenon occurring only at a single point in spacetime, unless it can recognize the event as belonging to a type of occurrence (in which case it is not unique!). At this point the old debate between nominalism and realism rears its head. Peirce frames his usage of the word “thought” this way: “one must not take a nominalistic view of Thought as if it were something that a man had in his consciousness. Consciousness may mean any one of the three categories. But if it is to mean Thought it is more without us than within. It is we that are in it, rather than it in any of us” (letter to James, Nov. 1902). Clearly NP follows Peirce in taking a realistic view of “thought”; and from that point of view, Howard’s claim “that logical and mathematical operations can be observed existing as activites of human brains and brains of lower animals” is quite unfounded. What scientists can empirically observe (to a very limited extent!) is the activity going on in brains. They can then hypothesize about how brains manage to carry out “logical and mathematical operations”, but that is not direct observation of anything “existing”, it’s an interpretation based on the assumption that the brain activity is correlated with a process which we believe to be occurring; and that belief is not based on the observation of brain activity but on inference from what the ‘owner’ of that brain is doing or saying. Realists say that the type of operation (i.e. the “Thought”) is just as real as the empirically observed brain events. Not all scientists say that, but they all act as if they believed it — otherwise no type of thought process would be intelligible, or could be an object of scientific study. The second sentence/pargraph quoted from NP above adds to this realism the crucial point that “semiotic access to generality is made possible by general signs being unsaturated and schematic”. The term “unsaturated” here can be taken as a metaphor from chemistry, related to Peirce’s concept of logical “valency”, referring to the ‘blank(s)’ in a predicate which have not yet been filled by subject(s), where the number of blanks is an aspect of the schema or form of the predicate. This is a crucial point in Chapter 3, which we’ll be starting in another week, so I’ll just observe here that in NP it links the “indispensability of generality” with Peirce’s doctrine of the Dicisign. The third sentence/pargraph quoted above implicitly relates these issues to Peircean pragmaticism, by observing that “sameness of meaning in language” is “granted by successful intersubjective communication, reference, and action.” As I hope to have showed above, this is just as true for psychologists as it is for logicians. Science is a communal practice — and that’s why it can’t be done by individual brains studying singular phenomena — not unless we assume general types of phenomena to be as real as their existing tokens, rather than imaginary or “social constructions”. gary f.
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