Tori,
I don't see how you (or anyone in the sciences) can actually believe that "All responses to something as a sign tend to reconfirm a mental habit." You're saying that there is no such thing as a surprise or a habit-change as a response to it, i.e. no possibility of learning any new habits. This confirms that you are trying to banish Secondness from the semiotic universe, to do away with "Obsistence" as Peirce sometimes called it, emphasizing the root meaning of the prefix "ob-" as "against". gary f. From: VN A [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of VN Alexander Sent: 28-Mar-14 9:41 AM Gary F, Ben, John D, Jon A, All J Deely and J Awbrey very briefly, YES! Gary F. Ben, Clearly in all biosemiotic processes the object must be understood as "objective" in the sense that the response to something as a sign tends to reconfirm a (useful) habit. We need to understand mental processes in a similar way. All responses to something as a sign tend to reconfirm a mental habit. Self-confirmation is thus the "objective" of all semiotic processes, insofar as responses (interpretants) tend to increase the likelihood of that mental habit occurring again. Jon Awbrey writes 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. In other words, you take the "mentalism" out of the term "objective" and you understand it in terms of the reconfirmation of a tendency. Of course, then we have to talk about how learning occurs within this cycle of self-confirmation. That involves biopoiesis not biosemiosis, per se. Ben writes: >From the start with Aristotle, a form of a thing was a cause of it simply because it was its form; a natural end likewise; but in the modern perspective this means that even thermodynamic decay is an end and a cause in some Aristotelian sense, and people tend to regard as a final cause something more agentlike, as we see happening via minds and evolution. There is, however, nothing in mental life as we know it to suggest a level where ALL objects, as sources of determination, are really ends or objectives, given that people deal freely with genuinely mechanical causes and others' wills as causes, as well as with special ends whose influence is channeled through desire, expectation, etc., and people generally know the difference(s). Why should we suppose that evolution, as quasi-mind, has taken a narrower path than that with organisms generally? It seems like you're bringing in a pure telicism to compete with pure materialism and mechanism. I do not accept the, to me, purely rhetorical argument that "thermodynamic decay is an end." At best, decay is "like" an end because it's a tendency. There the comparison stops. Decay is unlike "end" in the sense of purpose or objective, which, in every case of purpose, is to maintain the dynamic identity of the complex system, not dissolve it. people tend to regard as a final cause something more agentlike, as we see happening via minds As I noted above, this conception of mentalism is probably mistaken. Thoughts are also physical tendencies and habits. Tori
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