Dear list members,
recently at Peirce-list there was the (justified, I think) warning, that the categories-theory should not be used in a way that reminds of astrology. I understand it like to not found a theory on premisses, which are either not proven, or not axiomatic (not a part of everybody´s obvious experience). So, a hypothesis is ok, I guess, as every theory is a hypothesis to some extent, but it´s premisses should not be hypotheses. They should either be results of deduction (with no abductions in their evolutional history), or results of close-to-complete inductions. In the latter case this incompleteness of evidence should be documented and never forgotten during the line of upfollowing investigation or argumentation. Now there is the mind-matter-problem. For Peirce, matter is effete mind, this is a mind-monism (like in buddhism). For the neuroscientists Edelman and Tononi, mind is an epiphenomenon of matter, or even nonexisting, as far as I have understood it. That would be a matter-monism. Both kinds of monism remind me of the hen-egg-problem. I suspect, they are in fact dualisms with one part contempted. I would say, it is futile to suggest mind or matter for the first or more fundamental thing of the two, but suggest instead the triad mind-matter-umwelt. But this is only my own proposal. What question I want to raise now, is: Is the concept of the phaneron really scientific and pragmatic? Or is it based solely on a hypothesis?
"[B]y the phaneron I mean the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not. If you ask present when, and to whose mind, I reply that I leave these questions unanswered, never having entertained a doubt that those features of the phaneron that I have found in my mind are present at all times and to all minds." (Adirondack Lectures, 1905; in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 1 [eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931], paragraph 284)
So Peirce has not entertained a doubt. But that is not a scientifical premiss. Or has he justified this idea somewhere else? Because this idea of the phaneron perhaps is the only idea from Peirce I cannot approve, because I do not understand it: Our minds are separated, arent they? Besides very rare events that seem to be telepathic.
Best,
Helmut
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