Howard,
>From my point of view, you avoid facing the obvious chicken-and-egg problem >intrinsic to your hypothesis of “self-replication as the first self”. (Which >is no more testable as a hypothesis than Peirce’s “matter as effete mind.”) Your conceptual framework apparently does not allow for a semiosic process which is also a physical process, or for a “subject” in the original sense of the word, which can be a physically real entity, and the object of a sign, and the interpreter of another sign, all at the same time. This to you is a contradictory idea. To a Peircean, it isn’t. Of course all theoretical explanations have to make distinctions, and the subject/object distinction (under some name) is obviously necessary in some theories. Nobody questions that. The problem is that you confuse this particular theoretical distinction with an ontological distinction, and thus convert it into a contradiction in your framework. I call this a “red herring” because it’s your problem, not Peirce’s or Frederik’s. Gary f. From: Howard Pattee [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: May 7, 2015 9:06 AM To: [email protected]; [email protected] Cc: Peirce-L 1 Subject: [biosemiotics:8600] Re: Natural At 11:26 AM 5/6/2015, Frederik Stjernfelt wrote: Did I not already answer this? (below) I do not think Peircean semiotics avoids that question. I think it avoids the subject-object terminology in order not to import anthropocentric conceptions from German idealism. HP: Yes, Frederik, that was an answer. My short term memory is bad. However, what first motivated my question was your fearful language. You speak in several places of the "dangers" and the "quagmire" of the subject-object and many other complementary dichotomies. What do you see as dangerous? Most philosophers trained in logic avoid facing apparent contradictions. Gary F. says, "I don’t why see why you [Howard] keep dragging this red herring of the “subject-object relation” across our path." Here is why: The most important lesson of modern physics is that nature cannot be successfully modeled without dichotomous irreducible complementarities. Peirce studied one of them: discreteness and continuity. He discovered that you can't eliminate either one, nor can you logically or conceptually reduce one to the other. A second necessary dichotomy is reversible and irreversible (time symmetric and antisymmetric) models. All fundamental microscopic laws are reversible (time symmetric). These are called objective because they are the same for all individual subjects. Observations or measurements of initial conditions are irreversible (causes and effects) and subjective because the subject determines what and when to observe. This is clearly a subject-object dichotomy. A third necessary dichotomy is between deterministic and probabilistic models. For example, all our mathematics and our mathematical models are treated syntactically as strictly deterministic, like proofs. But they are often interpreted as representing probabilities. One cannot reduce or derive determinism from probability or vice versa. This is also dependent on a irreducible subject-object dichotomy, but exactly how has been controversial since Fermat and Pascal. The controversy depends on how one interprets the subject-object dichotomy. Of course there are other conceptual dichotomies, like particle and wave, chance and necessity. I agree completely with Peirce's conception of science, as an attitude, not as a method. I also agree with his aim of carrying logic beyond humans, or his naturalization as you call it, but I think he went too far with "matter as effete mind" because he did not recognize the uniqueness of self-replication as the first self and therefore the first subject-object dichotomy, as well as the first semiosis. Howard
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