List -
As a first-time contributor, by way of introduction: I am a long time
follower of peirce-l, especially appreciative of the recent de Waal
seminar. My interest in Peirce dates from courses with Richard Smyth
and I am most indebted to his work for such understanding as I have of
things Peircean.
My focus here is on section 9.4 of Kees' book. I note that he gives a
fuller treatment of similar material in an essay, exploring
implications of Peirce's concept of self, mind, thought, and person
for our understanding of scientific inquiry and its end results (see
his essay "Science Beyond the Self" _Cognitio_, v.7 n.1, 2006, pp.
149-63). I note furthermore that Kees there indicates his own
interest in Smyth's work (citing Smyth's "Normative Science
Revisited", _Transactions_, 38, 1/2, 2002, pp. 283-306).
Accordingly, I would appreciate comment on some questions about
Peirce's account of the person which Kees and Smyth would apparently
answer somewhat differently.
They agree on the importance of Peirce's idea that selves are what
explain individuals' ignorance, and that selves develop - becoming
less indeterminate - through semiosis (for Kees view see 9.4, p.
153-54). Smyth would also agree with Kees that personhood is for
Peirce a kind of coordination or connection between ideas and that
this is "not the simple product of a unique relationship to a
particular human body" (9.4, 154-55).
However I am unsure how things stand with Kees' positive
characterization of personhood, at least as it is expressed in the
confined space he has available in the _Guide_. There he says
personhood is "a product of consistency in thought". (section 9.4, pp.
154-55).
Kees' first reference for this claim is to CP 6.228. Here the
personality is said to be based upon a "bundle of habits". There is
another supportive text at 6.155-6 which he does not mention, in which
the coordination of thoughts is said to involve their "teleological
harmony". Further along, though, at 6.158, it seems that this harmony
is not the only thing involved: coordination of thoughts, as a general
idea, also involves an indefinitely large number of relationships to -
instantiations by - material particulars. Here Peirce emphasizes that
these relationships require us to suppose that matter is mind
hidebound with habit, that material particulars have some mental
aspect on the basis of which the general idea resembles its instances.
Kees' second reference is to W2:241 (CP5.313). This text echoes the
requirement for relation to material particulars: Peirce speaks of our
capacity to regard thoughts as similar, and explains this by appeal to
the "material qualities", or the "pure denotative application" of a
sign. Although these qualities do not belong to signs as signs, the
role of material qualities shows how we must suppose a physical aspect
of the mental, just as we have supposed a mental aspect of the
physical.(5.287-89)
Kees does not bring these material qualities of a sign to the fore in
explaining personhood, either in the _Guide_, where space is tight, or
in "Science Beyond the Self", where he explains that he wishes to
explore Peirce's concept of the agent of inquiry without invoking a
semiotic view of the self. However, in Kees' essay there are several
indications that he would affirm that the coordination of thoughts
involves relationships of the sort I have just mentioned, e.g.:
"Peirce is advocating a panpsychism of sorts: mountains, trees, ...
are all instantiations of mind _that is bound in a certain
way_." ("Science Beyond the Self" p. 155, my emphasis.)
There are other hints, e,g, on pp. 150, 153, 157,158,160. On 158 Kees
speaks of "exosomatic extension" of the mental, so that for example
Peirce's inkstand becomes a necessary part of his thought. (7.366) I
wonder whether this example provides Kees a non-semiotic way of
getting at Peirce's point about the material qualities and pure
denotative application of thoughts. Incidentally, with all this
material from Kees' essay in mind, the reader will see that by
including the inkstand reference in the tightly compressed discussion
in 9.4 (155), he may after all affirm even in those confines that
physical relations are involved in the coordination of thoughts of a
person.
If this is so, there may be more agreement than is at first apparent
between Kees and Smyth. In any case Smyth is emphatic that personhood
is to be addressed in terms of the material qualities of signs: a
person is individuated in the way that a sinsign is. (_Reading Peirce
Reading_, pp. 162-67)
My first question then is whether and to what extent Kees would agree
with or how he might otherwise respond to Smyth's account of personhood.
A second question has to do with Kees' argument, in "Science Beyond
the Self", that what he calls "institutions" or "supra-individual
persons", have physical efficacy. His argument suggests a way of
looking at the physical efficacy of _individual_ persons, although I
do not find this point addressed explicitly in the essay. Nonetheless
one might elaborate his argument as follows. As he notes, what we
ordinarily think of as individual persons are for Peirce, strictly
speaking, on the same spectrum of complexity with institutions.
(5.421) Therefore his argument for the physical efficacy of
institutions suggests a Peircean angle on ("individual") personal
responsibility for physical actions. Clarity about Peirce's view of
this matter is especially important to me because I take seriously
Smyth's insistence that minds are introduced as theoretical entities
which have no power of efficient causation. Physical efficacy is
another matter, and Kees may feel his argument is consistent with
Smyth's analysis. I would appreciate others' reaction to this second
issue.
Finally, returning to Smyth, I note that he makes his way to Peirce's
analysis of personhood by way of medieval developments in semiotics.
Thus he has occasion to remark that "it is fair to assume that
[Peirce] knew his own view that we know things only through their
phenomenal manifestations or signs came down on the Catholic side of
the metaphysics at issue in the Eucharist dispute. That agreement is
either concealed in his 1877-78 essays, or his views had
changed." (RPR, 164) I would add that if Peirce's views had changed
they seem to have changed back. As I read 5.541, c. 1902, Peirce
would say that, among the conceivable practical effects of the real
presence of flesh and blood despite what to all present appearances is
bread and wine, is the layman's discovery in the hereafter that the
Roman church's representatives had it right.
I mention this partly to balance the apparent message of Jeffrey's
April 30 post on transubstantiation, and to question the way Peirce's
treatment of the Eucharist at 5.401 was then taken up as an example of
using the pragmatic maxim to rid us of meaningless distinctions.
More importantly, I wish to follow Kees' exploration of consequences
of Peirce's treatment of personhood, bearing in mind the unexpected
consequences of following Smyth in his account of Peirce's semiotic
treatment of this issue. With Kees' and Smyth's readings of Peirce's
person in mind, what are the implications for our understanding of the
pragmatic maxim? Perhaps it is obvious that I'm fishing for the idea
that the maxim must permit a distinction between blood and wine that
is comparable to that between a legisign and one of its absolutely
determinate sinsigns, or a person enduring over time and that person
as they are at an instant.
Best regards,
Charles Murray
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