Howard,
Your first parapraph here is a pretty concise statement of the conceptual framework I’ve been referring to. It conflates so many different dichotomies into one that it’s no wonder they all become “problems” for you. But if you’re asking me to use that very conceptual framework to explain what’s wrong with it, I can’t do that. Nobody can. Your reading of the Peirce quote is an example of how such a conceptual framework can twist an idea that comes from another framework. Your reading seems to be a translation, triggered by a few key words, into an idea that fits your framework; the trouble is that it doesn’t fit either the syntax or the Peircean context of the text you quoted. It’s the usual problem with language, that it’s deficient in indexicality. In Peircean terms, the collateral experience you bring to the text has to more or less match what is denoted by the text, otherwise you simply don’t see what it’s about. As for Peirce’s empiricism, I think that’s been taken up in another subthread that Frederik’s involved in, so no need for me to comment on that. Peirce makes a distinction between a sign and its object. He also makes a distinction between the object as represented in the sign and the object as it really is independently of the sign. I don’t see why you have a problem with that – or if you don’t, I don’t why see why you keep dragging this red herring of the “subject-object relation” across our path, and claiming that Peirce needs or tries to avoid it. Gary f. From: Howard Pattee [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: May 6, 2015 8:23 AM To: [email protected]; [email protected]; 'Peirce-L 1' Subject: [biosemiotics:8587] Re: Natural At 05:46 PM 5/5/2015, Gary Fuhrman wrote: It's quite a stretch to read [the Peirce quote] as an assertion that "the subject-object relation" is "obscure and mysterious," and it has nothing to do with the "mind-matter problem" which is the legacy of Cartesian dualism. What is the stretch? Your statement makes no sense to me. The quote is explicit. It is about the relation between the mathematical symbols in the chemist's mind (the subject), and the chemical matter in nature (the object). The relation between subject and object (or image and object, mind and matter or symbol and matter, observer and observed or the knower and the known, etc.) are all cases of the same old epistemic problem -- the relation of observed shadows (in Plato's cave) to the light of reality. Here is the quote again: Peirce: “The result that the chemist observes is brought about by nature, the result that the mathematician observes is brought about by the associations of the mind. . . the power that connects the conditions of the mathematicians diagram with the relations he observes in it is just as occult and mysterious to us as the power of Nature that brings about the results of the chemical experiment." HP: Peirce clearly distinguishes the mind of the observer from natural matter that is observed. I call this an epistemic mind-matter problem. (Descartes substance dualism is irrelevant.) All epistemic concepts like detection, observation, measurement, etc. do not make any sense without separating the categories of subject and object. This distinction is not just a metaphysical principle. It is a pragmatic empirical necessity that all sciences require. Metaphysically lumping "matter as effete mind" still leaves Peirce making the same basic epistemic subject-object distinctions: "A sign is a thing which serves to convey knowledge of some other thing, which it is said to stand for or represent. This thing is called the object of the sign; the idea in the mind that the sign excites, which is a mental sign of the same object, is called an interpretant of the sign.” I don't see why Peirce would have any problem with modern empiricism, other than his irrefutable and unfalsifiable metaphysics of "matter as effete mind." Howard
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