> The pragmatistic character of that last paragraph should be obvious enough. > What may not be so obvious is the definition of consciousness as “connection > with an internal world.” This is rather vague on the face of it, but I think > it offers the key to a concept of “consciousness” which harmonizes very well > with contemporary neuroscience — at least among those who, like Peirce, hold > that consciousness is functional and not an epiphenomenon — and with the von > Uexkull’s Innenwelt/Umwelt distinction, which is widely applied in > biosemiotics. I won’t say more about it just now, but I’m hoping that as the > seminar continues we’ll be able to draw on these other disciplines to spell > out more clearly what “connection with an internal world” might mean in a > pragmatistic semiotics.
A few quotes to go along with Gary’s great post. The first is an excerpt from Peirce speaking on the meaning of experience. But in order to bring what I have to say to a close, I will quote from the definition of experience given by the father of modern experiential philosophy, Dr. John Locke. In the Essay concerning Humane Understanding, (II, i, 2) we read (and the italics are in the original): "Whence has [the mind] all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from _experience_: in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either about _external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understanding with all the materials of thinking._" This definition so formally stated, by such an authority, quite peerless for our present purpose, should be accepted as definitive and as a landmark that it would be a crime to displace or disturb. (Collected Papers 5.611, 1906) I had this in my notes discussing experience where there are three aspects: the sensory, brute compulsion and habituation (now more better captured by the word disposition). Quoting from a post of Joe Ransdell’s from Feb 25, 2004 (which included the above quote) Sometime after Locke, the idea of experience became associated in philosophy primarily with the idea of physical sense-perception; but even as late as Locke that is not yet its primary sense inasmuch as what he calls "reflection" is regarded as one of the two forms of experience, and although it is referred to by Locke as "inner sense", what that means for him is not what we would now tend to associate with that, namely, awareness of our own feelings, passions, and emotions, but rather what we now think of as introspection of the operations of our mind. (Roughly, Locke's "reflection" is the rubric under which he deals with what the scholastics called "second intentions", i.e. sensation and reflection are, respectively, first intentional and second intentional awareness.) By the time of the 20th Century "experience" had come to be associated in philosophy primarily with sensation, sense-data, etc. But the Greek "empeiria" and the Latin "experientia" were primarily used to refer to what one had learned in consequence of practical action, which is what "experience" is still used to refer to in ordinary discourse in English, as when employers want to hire somebody with the sort of experience relevant to a given task. They are not interested in a record of one's sense-data but are interested rather in what one has learned by doing or attempting to do something. I raise this for the consciousness discussion because I think it’s rather hard to separate out the notion of experience from the notion of consciousness. They are intertwined in many ways. I think in particular reading Joe’s comments one can see consciousness lurking in the background. Finally here’s an other quote from Peirce I find helpful. It’s from Peirce’s early period (1865) but still worthwhile. There is a third world, besides the inner and the outer; and all three are co-extensive and contain every experience. Suppose that we have an experience. That experience has three determinations -- three different references to a substratum or substrata, lying behind it and determining it. In the first place, it is a determination for an object external to ourselves -- we feel that it is so because it is extended in space. Thereby it is in the external world. In the second place, it is a determination of our own soul, it is our experience; we feel that it is so because it lasts in time. Were it a flash of sensation, there for less than an instant, and then utterly gone from memory, we should not have time to think it ours. But while it lasts, and we reflect upon it, it enters into the internal world. We have now considered that experience as a determination of the modifying object and of the modified soul; now, say, it may be and is naturally regarded as also a determination of an idea of the Universal mind; a pre-existent, archetypal Idea. Arithmetic, the law of number, was before anything to be numbered or any mind to number had been created. It was though it did not exist. It was not a fact nor a thought, but it was an unuttered word. En archei en ho logos. We feel an experience to be a determination of [i.e. it is determined by] such an archetypal LOGOS, by virtue of its //_depth of tone_/logical intension//, and thereby it is in the logical world. Note the great difference between this view and Hegel's. Hegel says, logic is the science of the pure idea. I should describe it as the science of the laws of experience in virtue of its being a determination of the idea, or in other words as the formal science of the logical world. In this point of view, efforts to ascertain precisely how the intellect works in thinking, -- that is to say investigation of internal characterictics -- is no more to the purpose which logical writers as such, however vaguely have in view, than would be the investigation of external characteristics. (W1, 168f; 1865, Harvard Lecture on Logic I) [the slash mark enclosures are the editor's way of showing that in the MS Peirce hesitated between two alternative wordings.] It seems that for Peirce experience (and thus cognitive thought) consist of three worlds: the internal, the external and the logical. Joe felt (and argued here quite regularly) that this should undermine the readings of Peirce by figures such as Tom Short. The place of the logical world is perhaps very much wrapped up in our discussion of dicisigns.
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