Howard, you wrote: "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?"" My response would be that of course nominalism and psychologism include thought, logic, semiotics and mind as instrinsic. We can see this in the many articles and conferences on both topics which revolve around these attributes. But both nominalism and psychologism are rooted in and indeed confined to the human cognition and consciousness and again, include 'thought, logic, semiotics and mind as intrinsic'. But they deny these attributes to non-human cognition and consciousness; indeed, they even deny that such actions take place in these 'lower levels of life'. Therefore, since Peirce rejected this perspective of their confinement to human processes, he acknowledged their existence within the natural world. Edwina ----- Original Message ----- From: Howard Pattee To: [email protected] ; [email protected] Sent: Sunday, October 19, 2014 11:56 AM Subject: [biosemiotics:7260] Re: Natural Frederik, Gary F, list: I apologize if I missed Frederik's 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 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
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