Stephen - what the heck does 'ad feminem' mean? Surely you aren't 'feminizing' the fallacy of 'ad hominem' ? [ I'm opposed to political correctness]. My comment to Kirsti had nothing to do with her personally (which is what ad hominem is all about) but about her posting a comment and then, refusing to explain or discuss what it means. Such an approach denies the nature of a discussion site - if you post something and then, refuse to explain or discuss what you posted.
And what does 'renegade moderation' mean? Please explain. Are you privy to Peirce's thoughts? Is that how you justify that you know what he would think? That, by the way, is a logical fallacy of 'ad verecundiam' or 'an appeal to authority'. Your comments should stand on their own, as logical and debatable - and not be removed from discussion by any 'appeal to authority' or other fallacy. Edwina ----- Original Message ----- From: Stephen C. Rose To: Edwina Taborsky Cc: Määttänen Kirsti ; PEIRCE-L ; [email protected] Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2015 9:49 AM Subject: Re: [peirce-l] [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:8863] The problem with instinct - it's a category Ad feminem. I used to moderate a forum that went on for a good while in the 90s. All forums suffer the slings and arrows of various dynamics. But this is a case of renegade moderation and I am tired of it. I think Peirce would be too. Books http://buff.ly/15GfdqU Art: http://buff.ly/1wXAxbl Gifts: http://buff.ly/1wXADj3 On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 9:43 AM, Edwina Taborsky <[email protected]> wrote: Kirsti- that's not a logical response. If you wish to keep your short assertions without explanation and refuse to either explain or discuss them, then, don't post them on to a discussion site! Also, if you can't accept disagreement - again, don't post your opinions to a discussion site! The whole nature of such a site is not for the readers to passively sit back and accept what each person posts - but - to THINK about the posts, to ask questions, to debate, discuss - and that involves both agreement AND disagreement. And to declare that you are 'too busy' to explain - is a red herring cop-out. Again, a discussion site by its very essence, involves discussion - not simple short assertions which you expect the reader to accept as Truth and when you are questioned about them - you refuse to explain their cryptic meaning or enter into any discussion. Edwina ----- Original Message ----- From: <[email protected]> To: "Edwina Taborsky" <[email protected]> Cc: "PEIRCE-L" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2015 9:30 AM Subject: Re: [peirce-l] [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:8863] The problem with instinct - it's a category Dear Edwina, My suggestion is that we both keep our views. And proceed according to them. - So far, we have only disagreed. We both have work to do, so lets proceed with it, separately. My short comments are, of course, available to use as you please. With kind regards, Kirsti Edwina Taborsky kirjoitti 17.9.2015 15:27: I'd disagree with Kirsti's view that instincts are unrelated to the Peircean categories. I'd say that instinct in itself is in a form of Thirdness, in that it is a genetically based knowledge. As to how it is activated and accessed - that can be via both Firstness and Secondness. As for 'the common understanding of instinct' and 'what was common in HIS times; and CSP's understanding - all of these definitions would have to be outlined by Kirsti. As well as Kirsti's own view - which she does not describe. Edwina ----- Original Message ----- From: <[email protected]> To: "Clark Goble" <[email protected]> Cc: "PEIRCE-L" <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2015 8:11 AM Subject: Re: [peirce-l] [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:8863] The problem with instinct - it's a category I find Helmut's comments to the point. In terms of CSP's categories, "instincts" do not, as such have a place. - Well, a kind of firstnesslike, but that is it. Nowdays, the quite common understanding of "instict" is different than in CSP's times. Not to forget that HIS understanding differed from what was common in HIS times. These are the problems we need to tacle. Taking 'meaning' as a simple relation of reference does not so. As such, the question is reduced into two-placed-relations. - Which is un-Peircean, for starters. What are we referring to, when taking up "instincts"? - Well, I for my part, am referring to something very, very different from the views expressed here. Best, Kisti Clark Goble kirjoitti 15.9.2015 21:13: Apologies - I just found out I’d sent this to the old Peirce list rather than the new one. My apologies for the problem. Apple Mail appears to autosuggest based upon what emails you have archived. Sometimes this leads to the old list getting picked up. Unfortunately Mail’s UI also doesn’t display the full email unless you click on it. So unless I click on the Peirce-L name I occasionally get the wrong email. When I’m posting regularly I always remember. When I’m posting infrequently (as has of late been the case) then I can forget. Once again my apologies again. On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 12:03 PM, Clark Goble <[email protected]> wrote: On Sep 8, 2015, at 1:36 PM, Helmut Raulien <[email protected]> wrote: Stephen, you wrote: "The axiomatic principles of cognition (Peirce’s categories) will establish how mind-bodies define the things that matter." Again, I think that we have different concepts of the term "know" or "cognition". In my understanding, cognition does not appear in the three categories from the start, but is a matter of subcategories. I agree, that everything underlies the three categories possibility/quality, actuality/relation, representation/continuity. Secondness has two modes, and thirdness has three modes. These modes, or subcategories, again have submodes, or subcategories as before. I think, that knowledge is a matter of eg. thirdness of thirdness of thirdness, or something like that. It seems to me Peirce adopts a position where things are more mind-like or more matter-like as a matter of degree rather than kind. I’m not sure it relates directly to the categories beyond the idea of consciousness seems tied to firstness in certain ways. Yet the categories are always at play in an irreducible way. At times Peirce appears to see the more mind-like as what is less constrained. So evolution is leading to the development of substance as a kind of permanence. Up to that time there is more “swerve” and that swerve, when seen from the inside, is likely traditional phenomenal mind. This ontology of Peirce is probably the most controversial aspect of his thought but it does lead to all sorts of interesting considerations. An analogy someone else brought up recently was Richard Feynman’s QED really being thinking what it must be like to be an electron. In this conception there’s always an inside and outside and Peirce isn’t quite so divorced from Kant as people assume. Yet in taking this inner view we don’t have the thing in itself in quite the same fashion. If only because Peirce lets firstness create a sign. Indeed remembering our experience of a phenomena is always a sign (thirdness) in response to firstness. That may be what you mean by modes or subcategories though. (Forgive me - haven’t yet caught up on my reading of the list) On Sep 8, 2015, at 12:18 PM, Stephen Jarosek <[email protected]> wrote: Bees are conscious in accordance with the same principles that we are conscious. This is one important aspect of the axiomatic framework that I base my thinking on. That is to say, Peirce’s categories apply to _all_organisms, even cells. Pierce says bees have mind. I’m not sure he means by that they are conscious in any strong way. It seems a matter of degree for Peirce. Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there. Consistently adhere to that unwarrantable denial, and you will be driven to some form of idealistic nominalism akin to Fichte’s. Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there. But as there cannot be a General without Instances embodying it, so there cannot be thought without Signs. We must here give “Sign” a very wide sense, no doubt, but not too wide a sense to come within our definition. Admitting that connected Signs must have a Quasi-mind, it may further be declared that there can be no isolated sign. Moreover, signs require at least two Quasi-minds; a Quasi-utterer and a Quasi-interpreter; and although these two are at one (i.e., are one mind) in the sign itself, they must nevertheless be distinct. In the Sign they are, so to say, welded. Accordingly, it is not merely a fact of human Psychology, but a necessity of Logic, that every logical evolution of thought should be dialogic. You may say that all this is loose talk; and I admit that, as it stands, it has a large infusion of arbitrariness. It might be filled out with argument so as to remove the greater part of this fault; but in the first place, such an expansion would require a volume - and an uninviting one; and in the second place, what I have been saying is only to be applied to a slight determination of our system of diagrammatization, which it will only slightly affect; so that, should it be incorrect, the utmost certain effect will be a danger that our system may not represent every variety of non-human thought. (“Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism CP 4.551) Whenever you have signs, even physical signs, you have a quasi-mind. So of course thirdness applies to them the same as it does us. The question of feeling or firstness seems a bit more tricky. As I recall to the degree he talks about consciousness it’s the inner aspect of the “swerve” or chaos. In other places he says we have consciousness to the degree we have self-control. I think this aspect of his ontology is among the most controversial of his views. I think one can adopt most of his system without adopting this particular thread. (Which I think comes out of the remnant of Kant’s “in-itself” that survives no external thing-in-itself) …whatever is First is _ipso facto _sentient. If I make atoms swerve - as I do - I make them swerve but very very little, because I conceive they are not absolutely dead. And by that I do not mean exactly that I hold them to be physically such as the materialists hold them to be, only with a small dose of sentiency superadded. For that, I grant, would be feeble enough. But what I mean is, that all there IS, is First, Feelings; Second, Efforts; Third, Habits - all of which are more familiar to us on their psychical side than on their physical side; and that dead matter would be merely the final result of the complete induration of habit reducing the free play of feeling and the brute irrationality of effort to complete death (CP 6.201) What further is needed to clear the sign of its mental associations is furnished by generalizations too facile to arrest attention here, since nothing but feeling is exclusively mental. But while I say this, it must not be inferred that I regard consciousness as a mere “epiphenomenon”; though I heartily grant that the hypothesis that it is so has done good service to science. To my apprehension, consciousness may be defined as that congeries of non-relative predicates, varying greatly in quality and in intensity, which are symptomatic of the interaction of the outer world,— the world of those causes that are exceedingly compulsive upon the modes of consciousness, with general disturbance sometimes amounting to shock, and are acted upon only slightly, and only by a special kind of effort, muscular effort,— and of the inner world, apparently derived from the outer, and amenable to direct effort of various kinds with feeble reactions, the interaction of these two worlds chiefly consisting of a direct action of the outer world upon the inner and an indirect action of the inner world upon the outer through the operation of habits. If this be a correct account of consciousness, i.e., of the congeries of feelings, it seems to me that it exercises a real function in self-control, since without it, or at least without that of which it is symptomatic, the resolves and exercises of the inner world could not affect the real determinations and habits of the outer world. I say that these belong to the outer world because they are not mere fantasies but are real agencies. (Pierce, Pragmatism EP 2.418-419) As I said this is controversial. At the time it put Peirce quite at odds with the mechanistic determinacy that was taken for granted in physics. Today we allow chance or swerve, yet it seems a kind of deterministic probability that still is at odds with Peirce’s notion of control. It would seem that Peirce would allow sentiency to even an electron in some degree yet it seems the ability to control ones behavior and form habits that makes for the degree of consciousness. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm . ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. 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