Tori, List,
For the convenience of those who tremble to click a link as if it were a fatal invitation to some
undiscovered country, I will copy a couple of my previous blog comments here. I believe they say
what I was about to say better than I was about to say it this time.
Ask Meno Questions • Discussion 1
=================================
Jon Awbrey • October 14, 2012
☞http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2012/10/14/ask-meno-questions-%E2%80%A2-discussion-1/
Re: Victoria N. Alexander
☞http://web.archive.org/web/20121016233842/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/8790
I think you are stating several important insights —
1. The word ''object'' in pragmatism and pragmatic semiotics has a much wider range of meanings
than the extremely reductive sense of a “compact physical object”. Anyone wishing to explore the
richness of its meaning could hardly do better than to sample the senses of the Greek ''pragma''
that imbue the Latin-derived ''object''.
☞http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dpra%3Dgma
2. There is reason to think that the sense of the word ''object'' that means objective, purpose,
target, intention, goal, end, aim, and so on is more fundamental than the more restrictive sense of
a compact physical object. That is in fact one of the most critical insights that comes down to us
from long lines of physical theory and also from the traditions known as “process thinking”,
suggesting that our concepts of physical objects are derivative in relation to our concepts of
process, since they arise from our ability to discover “invariants under transformations”, that is,
the formal constructs that are preserved by the operations or processes that transform the states of
a system.
3. As a general rule, we should avoid language that confuses signs and objects. In particular,
referring to mental representations as “ideal objects” is just asking for trouble, and that on
several counts, including the risk of confusing mental ideas with Platonic ideas. Language like that
brings all the confusions of conceptualism, nominalism, and psychologism down on our heads.
4. Given that Peirce’s critique of Cartesian philosophy is of a piece with the rest of his thought,
it does not seem wise to backslide on this score and reinfect semiotics with the dualisms that
Peirce was so persistent in rooting out. For example, so far as the mind/body dualism goes, Peirce
regarded the body as one of the first objects that a developing being would naturally “construct”
from the flux of experience, that is, construe or conceptualize as an object from the impressions
available in the stream of awareness. One potential misunderstanding needs to be avoided here. It is
not that noticing a dualism is a bad thing — where one is operative it cannot be denied. The
important thing is this — by the time one notices a dualism, one has already become a third, a
mediator, a synthetic operator, and so one must recognize that more than two components are already
in play.
Ask Meno Questions • Discussion 2
=================================
Jon Awbrey • October 17, 2012
☞http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2012/10/17/ask-meno-questions-%E2%80%A2-discussion-2/
Re: Victoria N. Alexander
☞http://web.archive.org/web/20121018144935/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/8809
Tori & All,
I tend to favor that general way of speaking, having been brought up on classical cybernetics,
optimal control, and systems theory, where we think of a system as passing through its state space,
controlled by its objective to optimize a specific objective function defined on its space of
states. When it comes to choosing intuition-aiding names for the various components of systems and
regions of state spaces, those details can be fit to the particular type of system in view.
In the case of creatures like ourselves, it is possible to regard our conscious contents as
representing our body’s theory of what is likely to deserve our mind’s attention. If that theory is
a good one, then we may live to be conscious of another day.
Regards,
Jon
Jon Awbrey wrote:
Tori,
Yes, I remember discussing this once before, it appears to have been
back in October of 2012 —
http://web.archive.org/web/20121015192753/http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/8786
It was in connection with certain musings on the Meno question —
http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2012/10/12/ask-meno-questions/
http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2012/10/14/ask-meno-questions-%E2%80%A2-chrysalis/
http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2012/10/14/ask-meno-questions-%E2%80%A2-discussion-1/
http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2012/10/17/ask-meno-questions-%E2%80%A2-discussion-2/
http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2012/10/17/ask-meno-questions-%E2%80%A2-discussion-3/
The current drift toward "Billiard Ball Behaviorism" on the one hand and
"The Psychology Of Internal Sign Consciousness" on the other, here on the
List and elsewhere in Peirceana, no doubt makes it all but impossible to
get any appreciation for this whole systems cybernetic complementarity
of object and project, process and product POV, but maybe a more
integral phase will resurge itself someday soon.
Regards,
Jon
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