Clark, in reference to the Peirce passage you quoted about the “community of quasi-minds”, you said that “While we could obviously and perhaps should discuss this purely as efficient causation, I love how Peirce discusses it instead in terms of signs.” But it’s not at all obvious to me how or why we could or should discuss this purely as efficient causation. To me, the material and formal (if not final) causes of the fact determined by this process appear much more prominent than the efficient causes.
gary f. From: Clark Goble [mailto:cl...@lextek.com] Sent: 16-Sep-14 9:01 PM To: Peirce List Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2 On Sep 16, 2014, at 12:09 PM, Benjamin Udell <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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