Dear Gary, Doug, lists, I do think the upshot of taking "thinking about thinking" and hypostatic abstraction as human privileges must be that non-human animals are (largely) incapable of second-order logic, both in the standard sense of quantifying over predicates, but also in the more cognitive sense of being able to form abstractions based on already established thought content. I do not know about trained parrots and chimps which are known to be brought to surprising semiotic abilities. Cognitive ethology seems to be in an exciting period finding more and more complex behaviours in many species so I would not categorically preclude non-humanoids from any aspect of "thinking about thinking" - rather, I'd take it as an empirical hypothesis that much human activity is highly dependent upon it while most non-human activity does not depend upon it.
The "German" senses of "objective" and "subjective" seem to derive to a large degree from Kant, and it is true Peirce strives not to use them. Instead, he uses "subject" in the logical sense involved in Dicisigns - and also in the related common-sense use of meaning "the subject matter", the focus of discussion - while, as you know, he uses "object" about that which is referred to by a "subject". I think Doug is right in bringing it up here in connection to the Peirce-Clark Extended Mind discussion, for one of the main reasons I think Peirce wishes to avoid the German subject-object dichotomy is in order to avoid subjective idealism - you know: ideas are figments of the psyche which are projected onto an outside object thereby "covered" by those projections and hence unknowable in itself. This is why Peirce's notion of "mind" tends to confuse many - it is not something in the head - it refers to structures of entities, no matter whether those structures are in the world or in the head. In a certain sense it is a version of objective idealism - which, of course, Peirce interprets scientifically - objective ideas being the subject of science, not only of metaphysical speculation. Best F Den 14/12/2014 kl. 14.11 skrev Gary Fuhrman <g...@gnusystems.ca<mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca>>: Doug, in answer to look your request, If anyone can elaborate on how Peirce used the terms “subjective” and “objective” differently from the 'varieties of German senses', I am confused about how the quotation from the letter to Lady Welby on p. 194 makes his approach an original one. The standard usage of the terms “subjective” and “subjectivity” are descended from the “German” senses to which Peirce refers (and objects). Peirce’s reasons for avoiding those usages are somewhat complex, and I’ve dealt with the issue in Chapter 12 of my work in progress, Turning Signs. Here’s the most directly relevant excerpt — the links included here will not work in this email, so if you want to further into these matters, you’ll need to read the webpage version at http://www.gnusystems.ca/rlb.htm#bjctv. gary f. Chapter 2<file:///C:\Users\The%20Story%20Book\Documents\gnoxic\sitemirror\dlg.htm#Ten> directed your attention to ‘the tension between language, which is essentially public, and experience, which is necessarily private.’ Since then we have been using the word ‘experience’ in a more Peircean way, with reference to the ‘Outward Clash’ or collision of expectation with reality which manifests Secondness as otherness. Both uses are salient. We are accustomed to speak of an external universe and an inner world of thought.… Experience being something forced upon us, belongs to the external type. Yet in so far as it is I or you who experiences the constraint, the experience is mine or yours, and thus belongs to the inner world. — Peirce (CP 7.438-9<file:///C:\Users\The%20Story%20Book\Documents\gnoxic\sitemirror\dsn.htm#outworld>) We are also accustomed to speak of the experience belonging to the inner world as ‘subjective’ and the experience of the external world as ‘objective’ – even though the world is inside out.<file:///C:\Users\The%20Story%20Book\Documents\gnoxic\sitemirror\nsd.htm> As we saw in Chapter 10<file:///C:\Users\The%20Story%20Book\Documents\gnoxic\sitemirror\cls.htm#conthought>, the Century Dictionary tells us that the word ‘thought’ can refer either to the ‘subjective element of intellectual activity’ or to ‘the objective element of the intellectual product’ of thinking. But thepolyversity<file:///C:\Users\The%20Story%20Book\Documents\gnoxic\sitemirror\dlg.htm#polyv> pervading language is even more strikingly exemplified by the history of the adjectivesobjective and subjective. According to currently common usage, knowledge of X is objective to the extent that it reflects the way X really is in itself (independently of anyone's knowledge or perception), and subjective to the extent that it is due to the habits or intentions of the knower. A purely subjective idea would have no real relation to external reality; a purely objective ‘perception’ would be completely unaffected by the inherent nature of the perceiver – if a real perception or conception could be purely one or the other. This usage is closely related to our habit of referring to X as the object experienced, and to the experiencer as the subject of experience (as for instance we did in Chapter 4<file:///C:\Users\The%20Story%20Book\Documents\gnoxic\sitemirror\bdy.htm#corp>). But when these terms were first imported into the English language (from the Latin of the scholastic philosophers), their meanings were quite different. This is explained in Peirce's Century Dictionarydefinition of the adjective ‘objective’: objective: I. a. 1. As perceived or thought; intentional; ideal; representative; phenomenal: opposed to subjective or formal—that is, as in its own nature. [This, the original meaning which the Latin word received from Duns Scotus, about 1300, almost the precise contrary of that now most usual, continued the only one till the middle of the seventeenth century, and was the most familiar in English until the latter part of the eighteenth.] (brackets in original; for more of this CD entry see Chapter ·13<file:///C:\Users\The%20Story%20Book\Documents\gnoxic\sitemirror\snm.htm#CDobj>) As the word has been used since ‘the latter part of the eighteenth’ century, an objective attitude (orientation, intention, ..... ) is ascribed to someone intent, as a person, upon external objects of thought, whether things or persons, and not watching one's self and one's ways, nor attending to one's own sensations; setting forth, as a writing or work of art, external facts or imaginations of such matters as they exist or are supposed to exist, without drawing attention to the author's emotions, reflections, and personality. — CD, ‘objective’, 4 Supposing that ‘objectivity’ signifies attention to external objects, it is not necessarily opposed to subjectivity, because both are involved in genuine semiosis. There is no Object without a Sign, no Sign without an Interpretant, and no Interpretant without an Object which is the same as the Sign's Object. Each of the three is defined by its relationship to the other two. Objects are precisely what we are aware of. For objects are events with meanings; tables, the milky way, chairs, stars, cats, dogs, electrons, ghosts, centaurs, historic epochs and all the infinitely multifarious subject-matter of discourse designable by common nouns, verbs and their qualifiers. — Dewey (1929, 259) A proposition or argument typically connects a number of objects together to make one: ‘every proposition professes to be true of a certain real individual object, often the environing universe’ (Peirce, EP2:341). However complex it may be, the object you look at colludes with your looking to determine what you see. And the more real the object, the more it can collide with your looking. Recognition slips into the space between collusion and collision. So does communication, when the habit-systems of utterer and interpreter collide and collude to determine the Cominterpretant, so that the Form conveyed is ‘a determination of the dynamical object of the commind.’ From: Douglas Hare [mailto:ddh...@mail.harvard.edu<http://mail.harvard.edu>] Sent: 13-Dec-14 3:14 PM To: Gary Richmond Cc: Peirce-L; biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee<mailto:biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Stjernfelt Seminar: Chapter 7, Dicisigns Beyond Language ~ 7.1 Thanks Gary R. for pointing out that our author will shortly address the trifurcation of icons into images/diagrams/metaphors beginning on p. 207 of section 8.2. I look forward to our forthcoming conversation of operational iconicity. 7.4 Extended Dicisigns Given the human (psychological vs. intellectual?) limitation for processing complex diagrams, externally stored representations, or extended Dicisigns, serve as “supplements to the complexity of controllable, imagined imagery in individuals” (NP, 191) providing externally stored information as well as various forms of external processing. Examples abound. Stjernfelt suggests that extended Dicisigns make possible communal diagrammatic reasoning, which I cannot but help relate to Peirce's notion of Community of Inquiry. This section goes on to make a compelling case—not only that we might we call Peirce an externalist philosopher of mind avant la lettre—but further that a cross-pollination of Peirce's semeiotic and philosophy of mind with Clark's Extended Mind Hypothesis might yield an even more radicalized version of the latter. Reading the apt quotations on top of page 192, few would doubt that for both Peirce and Clark: cognitive processes “ain't (all) in the head.” Apart from work directly concerned with manipulation of external diagrams, Clark's notion of 'active sensing', his recognition that perception's generalizing tendency makes it 'systematically insensitive' to detail, and the Principle of Ecology Assembly emphasizing “a mixed-media approach to reasoning with little regard to the internal-external boundary” (NP, 193) all exhibit obvious similarities to implications of the Dicisign doctrine so far discussed. The blurring of the internal/external distinction resulting from the variability of interrelationships between perception/cognition/action in both thinkers favors a cognitive ecumenicism which naturally leads to their shared cognitive eclecticism. The multiple realizability of propositions does appear aligned with the multiple realizability of the same cognitive task. Those who favor an embodied mind hypothesis run up against the criticism that they mistakenly restrict human thought and reason “inextricably and nontrivially” (Clark, 204) to the details of human form. Epistemological commitments to embodied minds, or overly sharp bifurcations between mind and environment, draw us dangerously close to a forms of psychologism/nominalism, whereas the multiple realizability of cognitive forms evades being a vicious form of relativism given the pluralistic, self-correcting, adaptive nature of inquiry. Peirce's pregnant remark from the Prolegomena that “there can be no isolated sign” suggests his theory of unlimited semiosis might eventually serve cosmological, metaphysical, and theological speculations given that Dicisigns and Arguments could not exist without a dialogical Quasi-Mind whose plasticity, multiplicity, and inherent potentiality make sharp delimitations of regions of mental activity a misguided endeavor. The author briefly mentions the parallelism between Hypostatic Abstraction (“making second-order objects out of properties, relations, facts, etc—making it possible to address, analyze, control, and criticize them as if they were ordinary first order objects” (NP, 194/ c.f. Section 6.12) and Clark's recognition that 'thinking about thinking' might be a distinctly human activity. Peirce's contention that self-control originating in the very capacity of (aesthestic?) hypostatic abstraction can also be neatly grafted onto Clark's remarks on the 'ability to associate concrete tokens with abstract relations', while we will find in section 7.5 that Peirce sees more clearly than Clark how these processes of second-order cognitive dynamics are far from arbitrary maneuvers. Please allow me a few unrelated questions. If anyone can elaborate on how Peirce used the terms “subjective” and “objective” differently from the 'varieties of German senses', I am confused about how the quotation from the letter to Lady Welby on p. 194 makes his approach an original one. Are non-human animals not capable of second-order logic? How is Quasi-Mind different from Mind? Finally, I wonder if anyone sees possible connections between this section and Hilary Putnam's blurring of the fact/value dichotomy. I have one more posting to close out Chapter 7 which I will hopefully send out tomorrow. Yours, Doug ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu<mailto:peirce-L@list.iupui.edu> . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu<mailto:l...@list.iupui.edu> with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. 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