Clark, list,
You wrote,
831. [Reasoning and Instinct]
A. MS., n.p., n.d., pp. 2-29, incomplete.
The fine gradations between subconscious or instinctive mind
and conscious, controlled reason. Logical machines are not
strictly reasoning machines because they lack the ability of
self-criticism and the ability to correct defects which may
crop up. Three kinds of reasoning: inductive, deductive,
hypothetical. Quasi-infIerences.
> [CG] That’s a fantastic little quote I’d not seen before.
To be sure, that's not a direct quote of Peirce, instead it's a quote of
Richard Robin's summary of MS 831
http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/robin/robin_fm/toc_frm.htm
<http://www.iupui.edu/%7Epeirce/robin/robin_fm/toc_frm.htm> .
I'm still wondering how to sort out these quasi's.
Semiosis dependent on learning or on the capacity to learn:
Learning in a concentrated mind. "*Mathetic*" semiosis?
Learning in a dispersed commind. "*Symmathetic*" semiosis?
Quasi-learning by, e.g., large-scale social (without individuals
commentally aware) or biological evolution, a quasi-mind or
quasi-commind. "*Mathoidic*" semiosis?
Any and all of them: "*Mathinic*" semiosis?
Maybe somebody has already sorted out these or similar distinctions and
suggested terms for them.
Then I'd make similar distinctions at the level of (quasi-)semiosis for
systems that don't learn but still regulate themselves automatically. It
involves ideas of communication and control, and the idea that the
system arose from a mathinic process even though the system (e.g., a
vegetable organism) is not itself mathinic. A Jacquard loom seems
actually a weak example of this, although a mathinic process is required
for the Jacquard loom to be set up. A pheromone is very like an
indexical instance of a symbol. Something has to know the 'lingo' or the
code in order to 'understand' it. It has its 'meaning' because of how it
_/will/_ be interpreted by certain organisms, and the whole thing
depends on its purpose, to which congenial underlying material and
dynamic processes were adapted. I'd make a distinction between life and
quasi-life (e.g., quasi-life would include the hypothetical Gaia,
self-regulative climate systems, etc.). I suppose the idea of quasi-life
could be extended like that of quasi-mind to even lower phenomena, the
liquids that Peirce mentions in your quote of him. These start to seem
like quasi-quasi-life and quasi-quasi-mind to me. I'm used to thinking
of mind as both capable of learning _/and/_, in Peirce's excellent
phrase, "theater of consciousness". I'm thinking that Peirce sees both
as essential to genuine mind, if we take 'learning' as 'habit-taking'.
But I'm not sure of this.
Then there are also stochastic processes (material or quasi-material
causation, large numbers of particles; or behaving probabilistically as
if randomly selected from swarm of particles, or something like that, my
background is very limited here) and more-or-less deterministic
physical/dynamic processes (efficient causation), some of which will be
complex decision processes in some sense, following and affecting rules
and constraints. It gets pretty murky for me here. A 'quasi-dynamic'
actual process won't be a lower form if there's nothing lower
physically, it could only be a higher form.
Best, Ben
On 9/16/2014 9:00 PM, Clark Goble wrote:
On Sep 16, 2014, at 12:09 PM, Benjamin Udell <bud...@nyc.rr.com
<mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com>> wrote:
In regard to the Peirce quote from 1907 that you provided, it's also
pertinent to the discussion of biosemiosis, physiosemiosis, etc.,
taking place lately here. It was in the 1906 "Prolegomena to an
Apology for Pragmaticism" that he discusses quasi-mind,
quasi-utterer, quasi-interpreter
http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/quasi-mind .
Yes, when I came upon it I noticed that connection. (Thank heavens for
Kindle and having at least EP2 available - if only a cheap CP
collection was around that worked on Macs & iPads)
And the 1906 Prolegomena definitely is one of my favorite of Peirce’s
texts - second probably only to some of the Lady Welby texts.
It seems to me that quasi-mind, quasi-utterer, quasi-interpreter and
even quasi-signs are very important for the discussion. That’s not to
say that I disagree with Frederik once caveats are made. Just that I
think Peirce sees this very much as a continuum in complexity. While
I’m dubious the continuum works quite as broadly as Peirce sometimes
suggests, the notion as a regulatory concept is amazingly productive.
That quote you gave gets very much at the issue I initially brought
up. As Peirce says, we don’t ordinarily call this a sign but clearly
there are some resemblances.
831. [Reasoning and Instinct]
A. MS., n.p., n.d., pp. 2-29, incomplete.
The fine gradations between subconscious or instinctive mind and
conscious, controlled reason. Logical machines are not strictly
reasoning machines because they lack the ability of
self-criticism and the ability to correct defects which may crop
up. Three kinds of reasoning: inductive, deductive, hypothetical.
Quasi-inferences.
That’s a fantastic little quote I’d not seen before. It also points to
levels of complexity. Obviously some complex phenomena do
self-correct. The recent advent of self-healing materials are but one
example. This suggests that the continuum is one of complexity in many
ways.
My favorite discussion of these “quasi” aspects of the sign. (BTW one
of my favorite Peircean uses of “quasi” was in quasi-self when talking
about secondness and how we attribute the causes of secondness to
objects despite the same thing never happening twice in secondness.
(This was in “Sundry Logical Conceptions”)
While I may be overly generalizing I’ve long seen Peirce’s use of
“quasi” as tied to his notion of continuity but also recognizing where
we sense differences from the ideal definition but for which there is
a strong resemblance.
Since any sign function can itself be typically broken down into
parts, the role of quasi-mind becomes more clear. Peirce uses
quasi-mind to deal with these sub-parts of the sign but must also
recognize there is something more fundamental than what we call mind.
Today we’d recognize this as a notion of complexity and emergence.
However it also avoids some of the messiness that Continental
philosophy took when it recognized mind, as conceived of by Descartes,
just wouldn’t work. There had to be something lower level going on.
This led to all number of excesses of metaphor and performance while
Peirce had a much more fruitful approach to describing all this.
I like to think that had people embraced Peirce’s later mature thought
more seriously a lot of the problems of philosophy in the second half
of the 20th century could have been avoided.
I should note also, getting back to the Prolegomena, the following
passage that I should have quoted in my response to Sungchul.
Let a community of quasi-minds consist of the liquid in a number
of bottles which are in intricate connexion by tubes filled with
the liquid. This liquid is of complex and somewhat unstable mixed
chemical composition. It also has so strong a cohesion and
consequent surface-tension that the contents of each bottle take
on a self-determined form. Accident may cause one or another kind
of decomposition to start at a point of one bottle producing a
molecule of peculiar form, and this action may spread through a
tube to another bottle. This new molecule will be a determination
of the contents of the first bottle which will thus act upon the
contents of the second bottle by continuity . The new molecule
produced by decomposition may then act chemically upon
the original contents or upon some molecule produced by some other
kind of decomposition, and thus we shall have a determination of
the contents that actively operates upon that of which it is a
determination, including another determination of the same
subject. (EP 2.392)
While we could obviously and perhaps should discuss this purely as
efficient causation, I love how Peirce discusses it instead in terms
of signs. It’s that type of analysis within physics that I think could
be very fruitful even if right now I fully confess it’s not done much.
(So far as I know the only prominent theoretical physicist who is a
Peircean is Lee Smolin - who has admittedly pushed a lot of Peircean
notions even if not always calling them Peircean)
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