> On Jun 23, 2016, at 12:14 PM, Benjamin Udell <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > Peirce somewhere talks about taking a companion's experience as one's own, > say, if the companion has better eyesight. The companion reports discerning a > ship on the horizon, while one sees just a blurry patch there, which one lets > count as the object in question. There's an idea of the commind floating > around there. Anyway, Peirce didn't always use the narrowest interpretation > of the word "experience." Still, the less direct an experience, the less > experiential it seems.
It’s worth going even farther than that. All experiences are themselves mediated. The phenomena you present above is just one example of a mediated experience. Yet mediation is always occurring and mediation entails transformation in various ways. An obvious example is memory where my experience during the events is always different from my memory of the events as an experience of the original events. History itself is a classic example of that kind of mediation. The example of everydayness I gave from Peirce the other day of erroneous views of Richard III really is just this. A kind of low level often extremely fallible kind of indirect experience we draw upon for intelligibility in communication. It’s an average not in the sense of mean but in the sense of including quite a lot in a more kind of sea of chaos as a source of meanings to draw from. > I remember years ago Joe Ransdell posted a message "What 'fundamenal > psychological laws' is Peirce referring to?" (22 Sept. > 2006)https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg01394.html > <https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg01394.html> . Joe > wrote: > > In "The Fixation of Belief" Peirce says that > > "a man may go through life, systematically keeping out of view all that might > cause a change n his opinions, and if he only succeeds -- basing his method, > as he does, on two fundamental psychologicl laws -- I do not see what can be > said against his doing so". > > [End quote of Joe & Peirce] > > As I recall, people in reply agreed that one of the laws that Peirce had in > mind must have been the law of association, but then what would the other law > be? > I just reread part of that thread. That’s fascinating and I somehow had zero memory of it. One of Joe's initial thoughts is worth quoting. I was thinking of the argument one might make that social consciousness is prior to consciousness of self, and the method of tenacity seems to me to be motivated by the value of self-integrity, the instinctive tendency not to give up on any part of oneself, and one's beliefs are an important aspect of what one tends to think of when one thinks of one's identity. Losing some beliefs e.g. in religion, in one's parents, in the worthiness of one's country, etc., can be experienced as a kind of self-destruction and people often seem to demonstrate great fear of that happening to them. But this sense of self-identity could be argued to be a later construct than one's idea of the social entity of which one is a part. (Joe Ransdell 9/23/06) Something else that came up in that discussion is what Peirce means by psychologizing here. Again let me quote from Joe, as I think it has direct bearing on the notion of “average” or “everydayness.” In the terminology Peirce adopted from Jeremy Bentham, we should distinguish between a COENOSCOPIC sense of "mind" or "thought" or other mentalistic term and an IDIOSCOPIC sense of such terms.. The former is the sense of "mind" or "thought" which we have in mind [!!] when we say something like "What are you thinking about?", "What's on you mind?", "He spoke his mind", and so forth, as distinct from the sense which is appropriate for use in the context of some special scientific study of mind. To understand what is meant by the word "mind" as used in scientific psychology, let us say, we have to find out what people who have established or mastered something in that field understand by such terms since the meaning of such terms in that context is a matter of what the course of special study of its subject matter has resulted in up to this point. That is the idioscopic sense of "mind", "thought", etc. But long before there was anything like a science of psychology and long before we were old enough to understand that there is any such thing as psychology we had already learned in the course of our ordinary dealings with people something about the nature of mind in the "coenoscopic" sense of the term. For we all learn early on, as small children, that we have to figure out what people are thinking in order to understand what they are wanting to say, for example; we learn that people can be sincere or insincere, saying one thing and thinking another; we learn that they sometimes lie, pretending to think what what they do not actually think or believe; people change their minds; they tell us what is on their minds; and we learn also that they believe us or doubt us, too, when we say something, and so forth. We become constantly -- I don't mean obsessively but just as a mater of course -- aware of that sort of thing in any conversation we have or any communications we read. In other words it is just the plain old everyday understanding that is indispensable for ordinary life, which may be shot through with contradiction and incoherence but,.for better or worse, is indispensable nonetheless He then quotes Peirce on something I think extremely pertinent to our notion of average. (Emphasis mine) Now it is a circumstance most significant for the logic of science, that this science of dynamics, upon which all the physical sciences repose, when defined in the strict way in which its founders understood it, and not as embracing the law of the conservation of energy, neither is nor ever was one of the special sciences that aim at the discovery of novel phenomena, but merely consists in the analysis of truths which universal experience has compelled every man of us to acknowledge. Thus, the proof by Archimedes of the principle of the lever, upon which Lagrange substantially bases the whole statical branch of the science, consists in showing that that principle is virtually assumed in our ordinary conception of two bodies of equal weight. Such universal experiences may not be true to microscopical exactitude, but that they are true in the main is assumed by everybody who devises an experiment, and is therefore more certain than any result of a laboratory experiment. (CP 8.198, CN3 230 — 1905) I think this notion of “true in the main” is more or less what average means relative to the immediate object. It’s not really average in the sense of mean in its strict mathematical sense. Rather it’s the distinction between what Peirce calls the coenoscopic and idioscopic senses of such terms.
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