Today, the TV program "60 Minutes" reran an interview with the neuroscientist Marcel Just at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Title: "Scientists are using MRI scans to reveal the physical makeup of our thoughts and feelings" Abstract "Ten years ago, 60 Minutes met a team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University who had begun to decode simple thoughts inside the brain. Now they've moved on to identifying complex thoughts from spirituality to suicide." URL: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/functional-magnetic-resonance-imaging-computer-analysis-read-thoughts-60-minutes-2019-11-24/ In effect, scientists are now doing something many philosophers had thought was impossible: make phenomenology (or as Peirce called it, phaneroscopy) an experimental science. In 2004, André De Tienne wrote "Peirce thought that, after mathematics, the most fundamental of all sciences was phenomenology, or phaneroscopy as he dubbed it to escape from Hegel... The fact that it hasnt become a major field of research raises the question of whether there is any actual need for it, whatever it is, and of whether it has any future, assuming it ever had a past. This paper attempts to address some of these questions candidly. It tries to determine what it is that Peirce held phaneroscopy to be, what type of discourse it is bound to produce, and whether its activity can be said to be scientific by Peirces own standards. It examines its place between mathematics and the normative sciences, especially semiotics, and takes stock of both the type and the method of analysis Peirce associated with it." See http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/detienne/isphanscience.pdf Peirce used existential graphs as a tool for doing phaneroscopy: "The Phaneron being itself far too elusive for direct observation, there can be no better method of studying it than through the Diagram of it which the System of Existential Graphs put at our disposition." (MS 293, NEM 4:320, 1906) "Let us call all that ever could be present to the mind in any way or any sense, when taken collectively, the Phaneron. Then every thought is a Constituent of the Phaneron, and much besides that would not ordinarily be called a Thought. And therefore there can be no better instrument for thinking about Constituents of the Phaneron -- which is itself too evanescent for definite comprehension -- than to think about Existential Graphs... The greatest lesson of the Logic of Relatives and of that which is merely its expression, Existential Graphs, is that the Simple Concepts, Indecomposable or Constituent or Elements of the Phaneron do not, as the old Logic taught, differ from one other only in their matter, but also in their form." (MS 499, 1906) I presented some slides that discuss work by Marcel Just and colleagues and its relationship to Peirce's logic and semiotic. See Section 6, slides 34 to 53, of http://jfsowa.com/talks/eswc.pdf . The footnote to slide 40 has the URL of a paper by Mason & Just (2015). Summary: This is one of many examples where Peirce's insights in logic, semiotic, and diagrammatic reasoning are at the forefront of the latest research in science, engineering, and computer applications. John
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ► 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 . ► To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message NOT to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with no subject, and with the sole line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm . ► PEIRCE-L is owned by THE PEIRCE GROUP; moderated by Gary Richmond; and co-managed by him and Ben Udell.
