Stephen, here’s a Peirce quote that illustrates the point Peter is making:
[[ A psychologist cuts out a lobe of my brain (nihil animale me alienum puto) and then, when I find I cannot express myself, he says, “You see your faculty of language was localized in that lobe.” No doubt it was; and so, if he had filched my inkstand, I should not have been able to continue my discussion until I had got another. Yea, the very thoughts would not come to me. So my faculty of discussion is equally localized in my inkstand. It is localization in a sense in which a thing may be in two places at once. On the theory that the distinction between psychical and physical phenomena is the distinction between final and efficient causation, it is plain enough that the inkstand and the brain-lobe have the same general relation to the functions of the mind. ] CP 7.366, 1902] What I referred to as his “anti-psychologism” is his frequent insistence that the science of logic has nothing to learn from the science of psychology (which was generally understood at the time to be about how human minds work (although it did include some experiments on other animals). Frederik Stjernfelt takes a close look at the anti-psychologism of Peirce and other logicians in his book Natural Propositions. Gary f. From: Peter Skagestad [mailto:skagest...@gmail.com] Sent: 21-Jan-18 16:15 To: Stephen C. Rose <stever...@gmail.com>; Gary Fuhrman <g...@gnusystems.ca>; Peirce List <Peirce-L@list.iupui.edu> Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Biosemiosis (was Lowell Lecture 3.12 Stephen, list, Two comments. First, I think this is a big deal and have written extensively about it, most recently in the Peirce Quote Book, but also in earlier writings found on the Arisbe website. Second, I see no actual contradiction between what you are saying and what Gary said. Peirce nowhere puts down the brain or denies that it is the locus of conscious activity; he simply does not restrict reasoning to this conscious activity in the brain, but includes activities that involve arms, hands, pencils, and paper, most famously the activity of creating and manipulating diagrams. So yes, in Peirce’s view as I understand it, brains are indeed wonderful, but so are pencils and paper, which vastly augment the reasoning power of the brain. Best, Peter Sent from Mail <https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986> for Windows 10 From: Stephen C. Rose <mailto:stever...@gmail.com> Sent: Sunday, January 21, 2018 3:52 PM To: Gary Fuhrman <mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca> ; Peirce List <mailto:Peirce-L@list.iupui.edu> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Biosemiosis (was Lowell Lecture 3.12 Is Peirce's anti-psychologism really putting down the brain as a source of conscious thinking? I thought he was simply flagging the limits of psychology as a basis for explaining things. Not a big deal but I do think the brain or whatever we take to be our inner thinking mechanism is quite a precious piece of work and that we can combat psychologist just the same. We can question Cartesianism without throwing out thinking.
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