List, I'm certain Yogi meant to send this post to peirce-l as well as to the biosemiotics list.
Best, Gary [image: Gary Richmond] *Gary Richmond* *Philosophy and Critical Thinking* *Communication Studies* *LaGuardia College of the City University of New York* *C 745* *718 482-5690* ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: yogi hendlin <[email protected]> Date: Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 6:04 PM Subject: [biosemiotics:8132] Natural Propositions: Chapter 11/12 Strategies of Research: Peirces Enlightenment Maxims To: [email protected] Natural Propositions: Chapter 11/12 "Strategies of Research: Peirce's Enlightenment Maxims" Dear List, returning to the final part of Natural Propositions, we can finish the discussion of the book. In Stjernfelt's closing chapters, he assembles what he calls Peirce's three Enlightenment maxims. According to "The Pragmatic Maxim," which states that "all sorts of metaphysical ideals which do not have any 'practical bearings' or 'effects' (1878), any ensuing 'imperative practical maxims' (1903), are null and void" (p. 295). For biosemiotics, this puts hypostatic abstraction in an interesting position of only being "real" insofar as such abstractions make "marks on bodies" in the world (to take Karen Barad's (2007) quote of Niels Bohr as the reference point of Bateson's "differences that make a difference"). This concretization of the ideational creation of hypostatic abstraction means that such abstractions are only graspable to the extent they are translated into something in the world observable to and having effects on others. A sign's *immediate* meaning is the "sum of all the obvious logical implications of that sign," while the *dynamic* meaning of the same sign is "inferable from the context of the utterance," and the *final* meaning of that sign "compris[es] all implications of it in the state of knowledge" at its ideal limit" (p. 295). Stjernfelt is right to stress Peirce's "important tension" between the given incomplete current regarding of a sign, and the sign understood from a place of perfect knowledge (p. 296). Pragmaticism, however, requires not eliding this tension and alleging perfect knowledge (metaphysics) when all one has is incomplete knowledge. Although Stjernfelt accepts the scientific optimism of Peirce, Tejera (1996) points out that this optimism is far from a foregone conclusion, and may in fact be in part a misreading of Peirce, at least as far as the discourse ethicists Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas are concerned. According to Peirce's second maxim, "Symbols Grow," Stjernfelt can be seen as extending the commentaries of Heidegger regarding the world, Wittgenstein vis-à-vis language games, and Habermas in terms of the lifeworld. What I mean is that this maxim acknowledges that there is a world of signs that all beings are born into, and that in becoming, they too become signs that will influence others in ways that persist after they are gone. This evolution of signs is, according to Hoffmeyer (2008) (following Sebeok), at least, coextensive with the evolution of life. Hence, this biosemiotic extension from the creative way in which signs disclose themselves dynamically in relation to their objects and interpretants brings us to a more relational, less serial, semiotics. Building on the notion that "indicatives are concealed conditional imperatives" (p. 296), the dynamic movement of signs links the advent of signs with the advent of thought ("as soon as you have signs giving rise to other signs, however simple, you have thought" p. 297). But the dynamism of thought/signs transcends the agental approach of willful subject/passive object, and instead, signs themselves become part of the natural selection process of the survival of the fittest signs, and the evolution of signs into highly diverse and differentiated interacting (and growing) manifestations. Despite the diversity of thought and signs, the ideal state for Peirce then acts as an "attractor" that shepherds signs and though to certain ends despite path dependency (p.299). This flow towards perfectionist ends or teleologies, however, is not entirely automatic, and indeed can be thwarted by pernicious prejudices (such as dualisms of all sorts, see Plumwood 2002), or otherwise obstructed (at least for certain periods of time) by human impertinence. (I must admit, this Peirce sounds very much like a Kantian notion of not blocking Reason, as if Reason had but one telos, however; and I'm not sure if Peirce was so a Kantian perfectionist as he is here made to sound). The third maxim, "Do Not Block the Way of Inquiry," shows up as a portfolio of eliding: (1) overconfidence in the supremacy of one's models (i.e. Non-Euclidean geometries exist and function just as elegantly (and sometimes more so) as Euclid's 2,000 monopoly on the subject); (2) the mystic's "it's all a mystery" conclusions that quell an otherwise developable curiosity (the classic philosophical source of inquiry is wonder, *thaumadzein*; but one must not stop with mouth agape, rather one must active engage in doing one's best to figure out those things one wonders about); (3) calls of the "end of science" (or, "the end of history") where one dusts one's hands and declares the work of inquiry over, and; (4) the conceit of having achieved perfect knowledge, which for Peirce always remains asymptotal, no matter how far along we believe we are. Summing up Peirce's Enlightenment maxims, Stjernfelt interprets them to be: "do not assume absolute starting points, do not accept separated ontological realms, do not accept fields definitely closed to any investigation, never take questions to be completely settled, do not believe in absolute doubt, do not refuse the existence of universals, do not believe in the wholesale reduction of one field to another, do not accept the erroneous hypostatization of limit cases into independent objects, prefer bundles of inferences over single counterexamples" (303). Interestingly, Stjernfelt confronts us with the remark, "Before man, this implies that the process of Enlightenment was already brewing in organic nature... and continues indefinitely" (304). Ultimately, it is the "increasing self-control of reasoners" that escorts the realization of reason (in a sort of Hegelian way?) (305). Just as Peirce's Enlightenment notions may be better characterized as radical than moderate, Stjernfelt's rereading of Peirce is revolutionary not least of all because of the potential repercussions it has on the many philosophers take Peirce's work to be central to their own. Philosophers on the cusp of overcoming symbolocentrism, such as Jordan Zatlev and Peter Gärtenfors have much to benefit from this re-analysis. Against Deacon's hierarchical model of signs, separating iconic and indexical "forms" of signs from the putatively uniquely human realm of symbolic communication, Stjernfelt's reading of Peircean semiotics allows us to eschew such theoretically and biologically unhelpful and blinkered obsessions with affixing a *differencia specifica *between humans and nonhuman life. Philosophers such as Habermas that use certain anthropocentric versions of Peirce's semiotics to bolster their own projects on such speciesist bases must rethink some of the core tenets of their theory based on propositionality (qua diagrams, as one of several possible examples) rather than language, since it is propositionality (and signs that act as (proto-)arguments) rather than language per se that does the heavy semiotic lifting. The sociality of organisms beyond just human ones depend on shared symbolic as well as iconic and indexical communication in ways that are inseparable. Stjernfelt gives us a middle path between exaggerating the symbolicity of nonhuman capabilities and denying it altogether. Barad, Karen. 2007. *Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entangelement of Matter and Meaning*. Durham: Duke University Press. Plumwood, Val. 2002. *Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason*. Environmental Philosophies Series. London and New York: Routledge. Tejera, Victorino. 1996. "Has Habermas Understood Peirce?" *Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society* 32 (1): 107-25. *Yogi Hale Hendlin* Philosophie und Ethik der Umwelt Philosophisches Seminar Christian Albrechts Universität zu Kiel Leibnizstr. 6 24118 Kiel, Germany Tel. +49 431 880 2815 [email protected]
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