Tom, list,
Thanks for the link to the dissertation. I've read the first 40 or so
pages, which include an outline of the history of the philosophy and
psychology of affectivity. I didn't know that words like 'faculty',
'passion', and 'affection' have been freighted with so much meaning, and
that the use of a seemingly innocent phrase like 'the faculty of
affectivity' could be taken to mark one as a throwback to a defunct
school of thought.
Let me take the opportunity to correct another error in my previous
posts: Peirce in the _Century Dictionary_ said that Kant's definition of
'feeling' was a modification (he didn't say a restriction) of Tetens's
definition, a modification that, Peirce said, involved a restriction to
one part of the Century Dictionary's definition (not Tetens's definition).
Regarding some of your comments, I'd say that instincts can also be
triggered _/inside/_ the body, e.g., by prolonged emptiness of the
stomach. I think that nerve-endings help, but do not suffice, to explain
sexual instinct, in my experience anyway.
I think that just about anybody will agree with you that we shouldn't
see emotion and logic (or, more generally, affectivity and inference)
as just the same thing! They may always be present together, but one
needs to be able to discern them from each other in order to discern how
they work together, for better (e.g., pleasure in successful reasoning)
or worse (e.g., wishful reasoning), and also in affective versions of
inference - e.g, gratitude and anger: X did Y, so X is good (one is
grateful to X) or X is bad (one is angry at X) or X is neither (one is
neither grateful to nor angry at X). Traditionally, deliberation is the
volitional version of reasoning (one deliberates one's choices), yet
reasoning (in at least one sense of the word) is conscious, deliberate
inference, a deliberation over what to infer. So, yes, careful
distinctions help one see complex relations.
Peirce was particularly opposed to hedonism as a general explanation of
behavior, so you won't generally find him saying something like that we
reason for pleasure. In one of the quotes in the older post to which I
linked http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/15055 ,
he said,
Esthetic good and evil are closely akin to pleasure and pain. They
are what would be pleasure or pain to the fully developed superman.
[....]
[End quote, in CP 5.552, from "The Basis of Pragmaticism" (1906)]
That implies that, to mark one's ends or goals, one should not go simply
by actual or proximate pleasure and pain, but by what one conceives
would be pleasing or painful to one if one were to be sufficiently
developed - that is, if one, in one's heart, were to have learned enough
about what is good or evil. I think that a useful distinction here (one
on which Peirce seems not to put a lot of weight
https://sites.google.com/site/cspmem/terms ) is between (A) _/telos/_ as
end, culmination, and (B) entelechy, having-in-completeness,
being-at-an-end. Hedonism focuses culmination and doesn't anticipate the
entelechy, the final state, with its potential unintended consequences,
clashes of values, etc. (I discussed this question in September 2013,
how time flies!
https://list.iupui.edu/sympa/arc/peirce-l/2013-09/msg00145.html .)
Again, thanks for the link to Robert J. Beeson's dissertation (_Peirce
on the passions: The role of instinct, emotion, and sentiment in inquiry
and action_).
Best, Ben
On 7/16/2015 2:19 PM, Thomas wrote:
Ben ~
Thanks for posting this item. I particularly focused on this
reference to emotion: "an affective satisfaction which one may get
with an abductive inference and which helps motivate one to abductive
inference." I believe it is important to distinguish logic from the
motive force(s) that propels it. Otherwise "logic" and "emotion" are
not sighs that can be independently manipulated in this (or other)
analyses. Other forms of life may use "logic," but not be motivated
by emotion.
After looking at the dictionary definition of instinct, it seems that
pain, pleasure and other "instincts" can be traced back to dna:
structures of the body including nerves in our central nervous
system. Instincts are triggered by things taking place in the
"environment" -- i.e., outside of the body. The instinct to have sex,
for example, is explained by thousands of nerve endings that make the
act pleasurable for both parties. Take those nerve endings away, and
you have a species that doesn't procreate rapidly enough to avoid
extinction. (That is presumably why those nerves evolved in the first
place.)
When Peirce referred to the emotion produced by music, I don't believe
he was referring to the noise that our senses detect, but the feelings
of nostalgia, comfort, etc. triggered by a particular combination of
noises. They harken to some past experience that has emotional value
to the listener. Those feelings are idiosyncratic, not hard-wired
into all humans. Otherwise, everyone would listen to the same songs.
Probably reggae ;)
I started reading a dissertation on Peirce's views of emotion,
instinct, etc. The author (a psychologist) has high regard for
Peirce, but cautions against accepting things he write as the final
word on a topic, because Peirce would often revisit the same issue a
few years later and develop a somewhat different analysis, or
sometimes use different terms to describe the same thing. For those
with an interest, see the title below:
http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1133&context=etd
Regards,
Tom Wyrick
The dissertation title:
Peirce on the passions: The role of instinct, emotion, and sentiment
in inquiry and action
On Jul 16, 2015, at 10:35 AM, Benjamin Udell <bud...@nyc.rr.com
<mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com>> wrote:
an affective satisfaction which one may get with an abductive
inference and which helps motivate one to abductive inference
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