Whoops, neglected the end. > On Feb 15, 2017, at 9:16 AM, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > One can readily, for example, find individuals who (by all evidence) seem to > think more readily and more commonly in words than in "images and diagrams". > One can also find people with limited brain damage who (by all evidence) have > lost their ability to coherently verbalize (i.e., they cannot do language), > and yet those people otherwise seem to think perfectly well. >
Yes. I think that’s a good criticism of Peirce who I think is biased towards thinking through questions in terms of people with a bias toward logic or the hard sciences. While ultimately I think that a plus in his writing rather than a negative, it does mean that his generalizations can be problematic. While I don’t think this ultimately affects his argument I’d say that people often have a bias towards either linguistic or visual thinking. The way a logician thinks will typically be different from a musician or a sculptor, broadly speaking. At least that has been my experience. That said I think most people think some of the time in wide range of styles. A fun experiment to illustrate this I used to use in college classes was to count to 100 and try to do something else at the same time. Depending upon the method you use mentally to count you’ll find that some things you can do while others you can’t. You’ll find that some people think visually with a number line to count and are able to speak while counting. Most people count linguistically and thus can’t easily speak or listen to words at the same time. I would dispute the limited brain damage example though. We have to be really careful there since ones cognitive linguistic systems may be functional yet key parts of the brain necessary for expression may be damaged. So we have to be very careful how we draw inferences from this. However that said we know of examples where children were not exposed to language and reach a point where they appear to be unable to develop those skills. Clearly they are still thinking but their brain simply hasn’t developed in a normal way. Peirce I think avoids the problems some models of the mind by philosophers end up with. (Of course most contemporary philosophers of the mind are at least somewhat familiar with the science of the brain and avoid a lot of these older problems) Peirce simply doesn’t think that thinking is only conscious deliberation the way that especially in early modernism many philosophers assumed.
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