Frederik, Gary F, list:
I apologize if I missed Frederiks answers to my
Chapter 2 questions. My short term memory is
deteriorating. I do not understand why my answers
to Gary's questions caused such a bad reaction. I
have moved on to NP Chapter 4, where the complete
rejection of nominalism and psychologism still seems to be the starting point.
Frederik says, Peirce refused nominalism and
psychologism often, if not always together.
Peirce refused both with the upshot that his
naturalism automatically includes thought, logic,
semiotics, and mind as intrinsic aspects
HP: Why don't nominalism and psychologism also,
automatically include thought, logic, semiotics, and mind as intrinsic?
I agree with what Frederik is trying to do,
naturalizing human mental activities by
considering their function so they apply to lower
organisms. I have been trying to naturalize the
origin of function so that semiosis is possible.
I think this first occurs in an empirically
testable sense at the origin of life (e.g., see
<https://www.academia.edu/863857/Cell_psychology_an_evolutionary_approach_to_the_symbol-matter_problem>Cell
Psychology). Peirceans disagree with this. I
would like to hear Frederik's view. I see no
basic conflict in our aims, but our approaches
are separated by 4 billion years and two
cultures, which I think is the basic reason that disagreements arise.
Frederik: Nowhere is this [refusal of
nominalism] more apparent than in his idea that
propositions may be defined purely functionally.
This implies four things: (1) Propositions do
not require an explicit linguistic system in which to function. (p.107)
HP: Here I disagree. The biological evidence is
clear that all life requires a linguistic system
to replicate, engage the environment, and
survive. I am defining a linguistic system and
symbols functionally, just as Frederik defines a
proposition functionally. Isolated symbols do not
exist. To be functional there must be an
interpreting agent with an underlying symbol
system, i.e., the genetic language, which
experiments shows to be far more complex than
anyone imagined. It must have evolved from
simpler origins, but of course that is just the origin problem.
In Chapter 6, Frederik gives good examples of
Dicisign signaling from bacteria, fireflies, and
bees to vervet monkeys. What needs to be
emphasized is that all of his examples are
special-purpose signals that depend on
instructions (and constructions) from the
general-purpose genetic language (vervet signals
may also depend on some learning).
I also infer that Frederik would interpret the
deflated truth value of a primitive proposition
as its survival value. I agree with that
interpretation, but could a realist be satisfied
with that interpretation of truth? Also, how is a
genetic instruction (an imperative or
conditional) interpretable as a proposition?
Howard
-----------------------------
PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L
to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To
UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the
line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at
http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
