Dear Helmut and List:
Helmut asks: "Can things take habits?"
Discussion of Peirce's theory of habit reminds me of G. K.
Chesterton's discussion of the logic of fairy tales in "The Ethics of
Elfland", which in turn strongly resonates with Peirce's "Neglected
Agument." Here is an extract from the former of the part relevant to
the current discussion on Peirce-L. Chesterton writes of "a certain
way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales,
but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.":
It might be stated this way. There are certain sequences or
developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the
true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the
word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences.
We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit
that reason and that necessity. For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are
older than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) necessary
that Cinderella is younger than the Ugly Sisters. There is no getting
out of it. Haeckel may talk as much fatalism about that fact as he
pleases: it really must be. If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller
is the father of Jack. Cold reason decrees it from her awful throne:
and we in fairyland submit. If the three brothers all ride horses,
there are six animals and eighteen legs involved: that is true
rationalism, and fairyland is full of it. But as I put my head over
the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world,
I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in
spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened -- dawn and
death and so on -- as if they were rational and inevitable. They
talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as necessary as
the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an
enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the
imagination. You cannot imagine two and one not making three. But you
can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them
growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail. These
men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an
apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the
distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of
apples falling. If the apple hit Newton's nose, Newton's nose hit the
apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one
occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple
not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the
air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike.
We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between
the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and
the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only
weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental
impossibilities. We believe that a Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven;
but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the philosophical
question of how many beans make five.
Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in the nursery
tales. The man of science says, "Cut the stalk, and the apple will
fall"; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the
other. The witch in the fairy tale says, "Blow the horn, and the
ogre's castle will fall"; but she does not say it as if it were
something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause.
Doubtless she has given the advice to many champions, and has seen
many castles fall, but she does not lose either her wonder or her
reason. She does not muddle her head until it imagines a necessary
mental connection between a horn and a falling tower. But the
scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary
mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple
reaching the ground. They do really talk as if they had found not only
a set of marvellous facts, but a truth connecting those facts. They do
talk as if the connection of two strange things physically connected
them philosophically. They feel that because one incomprehensible
thing constantly follows another incomprehensible thing the two
together somehow make up a comprehensible thing. Two black riddles
make a white answer.
In fairyland we avoid the word "law"; but in the land of science they
are singularly fond of it. Thus they will call some interesting
conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm's
Law. But Grimm's Law is far less intellectual than Grimm's Fairy
Tales. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is
not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation
and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If
there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that
there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison
and the idea of picking pockets. And we know what the idea is. We can
say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties. But we cannot
say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a
bear could turn into a fairy prince. As ideas, the egg and the chicken
are further off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no
egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest
bears. Granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is
essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of
fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the "Laws
of Nature." When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in
autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if
Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell
from her at twelve o'clock. We must answer that it is magic. It is not
a "law," for we do not understand its general formula. It is not a
necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we
have no right to say that it must always happen. It is no argument for
unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary
course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it. We risk the
remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or
a world-destroying comet. We leave it out of account, not because it
is a miracle, and therefore an impossibility, but because it is a
miracle, and therefore an exception. All the terms used in the science
books, "law," "necessity," "order," "tendency," and so on, are really
unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do
not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing
Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, "charm," "spell,"
"enchantment." They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its
mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs
downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is
bewitched.
I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have
some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is
simply rational and agnostic. It is the only way I can express in
words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite
distinct from another; that there is no logical connection between
flying and laying eggs. It is the man who talks about "a law" that he
has never seen who is the mystic. Nay, the ordinary scientific man is
strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential
sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has
so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be
some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is
none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost
love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the
tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen
them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of
apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded
him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals
his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of
his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist
from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree
should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.
This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from
the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is
derived from this. Just as we all like love tales because there is an
instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the
nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the
fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales:
we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven
is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon.
But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a
door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales --
because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only
person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read
without boring him. This proves that even nursery tales only echo an
almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that
apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found
that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us
remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. I have said
that this is wholly reasonable and even agnostic.
[I do not know why the last paragraph copied in a different font size
than the ones before..., but you can find the whole essay in a
singular font online at:
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/orthodoxy/ch4.html [5]
Best,
Ben Novak
BEN NOVAK [6]
5129 Taylor Drive, Ave Maria, FL 34142
Telephone: (814) 808-5702
_"All art is mortal, __not merely the individual artifacts, but the
arts themselves._ _One day the last portrait of Rembrandt_ _and the
last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be—__though possibly a
colored canvas and a sheet of notes may remain—__because the last
eye and the last ear accessible to their message __will have gone."
_Oswald Spengler
On Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 1:19 PM, Helmut Raulien <h.raul...@gmx.de>
wrote:
Dear Gary F., list,
you wrote:
"Peirce says here that ‘the law of habit’ – as opposed to the
‘fundamental law of mind,’ which is the _tendency_ of all things
to _take_ habits – ‘is a simple formal law, a law of efficient
causation.’".
I donot think, that things can take habits. I think, only organisms
can. Also I think, that efficient cause cannot form a habit, but
only final cause can, which final cause is only a cause of
organisms, but not of inanimate nature. (and example cause too,
nervous animals/brain, but that is only my hobby topic). Ok, the
whole universe may well be an organism (and something comparable to
a brain animal too), but then it is the universe, that takes habits,
not the things. By the way: What about binary laws, eg. the
conservation laws, that only make sense if being exact? (Energy is
exactly conserved). There is no way for them to might have evolved
by growth of any kind. They are, if habits, saltatory emergent ones.
So habits, if you want to expand the term like Peirce did, are not
only growth affairs, but can be emergent too. See my last post in
the thread "the autors claim...". Binary laws cannot be due to "ever
so minute changes", and if Peirce has claimed that, he was wrong, I
think. Imagine a universe, in which energy is not exactly conserved,
but increases: This universe would glow white hot and explode in
nearly no time. If energy would decrease, it would immediately
shrink, cool down, and vanish. Peirce is not an overwise guru, he
might have been wrong in one or the other minor aspect, but all in
all he did a good job, and was right. But in this case, there is a
problem, I think. So please do not answer with Peirce-quotations,
but with your own thoughts. Can things take habits??
Best,
Helmut
13. Juli 2016 um 17:39 Uhr
g...@gnusystems.ca wrote:
Here’s another Peircean post from my blog, a rather long one
linking Peirce’s cosmology with semiotic causality.
Gary f.
According to Peirce’s cosmological hypothesis, evolution is a
continuing process of _growth_ which accounts for both the diversity
and the regularities we observe in a universe both mental and
physical.
The regularities or ‘laws’ of nature result from the
habit-taking tendency, which tends toward the extreme
‘crystallization’ of form which in physics we call ‘matter.’
But the behavior patterns of the physical universe are never
completely determinate, the laws of nature never absolutely exact,
because the habit-taking tendency is countered and complemented by a
spontaneity which keeps the universe alive and accounts for the
growing diversity and complexity of forms. This spontaneity is
primal to the mental side of evolution, which involves both taking
and breaking habits.
Here is Peirce’s explanation of the ‘Uniformity’ of nature in
Baldwin’s Dictionary [1]:
The hypothesis suggested by the present writer is that all laws are
results of evolution; that underlying all other laws is the only
tendency which can grow by its own virtue, the tendency of all
things to take habits. Now since this same tendency is the one sole
fundamental law of mind, it follows that the physical evolution
works towards ends in the same way that mental action works towards
ends, and thus in one aspect of the matter it would be perfectly
true to say that final causation is alone primary. Yet, on the other
hand, the law of habit is a simple formal law, a law of efficient
causation; so that either way of regarding the matter is equally
true, although the former is more fully intelligent. Meantime, if
law is a result of evolution, which is a process lasting through all
time, it follows that no law is absolute. That is, we must suppose
that the phenomena themselves involve departures from law analogous
to errors of observation. But the writer has not supposed that this
phenomenon had any connection with free-will. In so far as evolution
follows a law, the law of habit, instead of being a movement from
homogeneity to heterogeneity, is growth from difformity to
uniformity. But the chance divergences from law are perpetually
acting to increase the variety of the world, and are checked by a
sort of natural selection and otherwise (for the writer does not
think the selective principle sufficient), so that the general
result may be described as ‘organized heterogeneity,’ or,
better, rationalized variety. In view of the principle of
continuity, the supreme guide in framing philosophical hypotheses,
we must, under this theory, regard matter as mind whose habits have
become fixed so as to lose the powers of forming them and losing
them, while mind is to be regarded as a chemical genus of extreme
complexity and instability. It has acquired in a remarkable degree a
habit of taking and laying aside habits. The fundamental divergences
from law must here be most extraordinarily high, although probably
very far indeed from attaining any directly observable magnitude.
But their effect is to cause the laws of mind to be themselves of so
fluid a character as to simulate divergences from law. All this,
according to the writer, constitutes a hypothesis capable of being
tested by experiment.
Peirce says here that ‘the law of habit’ – as opposed to the
‘fundamental law of mind,’ which is the _tendency_ of all things
to _take_ habits – ‘is a simple formal law, a law of efficient
causation.’ Ten years earlier, in his ‘Reply to the
Necessitarians,’ Peirce had written that the necessitarian, while
believing that irregular events are inexplicable, also says
that the laws of nature are immutable and ultimate facts, and no
account is to be given of them. But my hypothesis of spontaneity
does explain irregularity, in a certain sense; that is, it explains
the general fact of irregularity, though not, of course, what each
lawless event is to be. At the same time, by thus loosening the bond
of necessity, it gives room for the influence of another kind of
causation, such as seems to be operative in the mind in the
formation of associations, and enables us to understand how the
uniformity of nature could have been brought about. (W8:123, CP
6.60)
This ‘other kind of causation’ is called by Jesper Hoffmeyer
_semiotic causality_, which ‘gives direction to efficient
causality, while efficient causality gives power to semiotic
causality’ (Hoffmeyer 2008, 64). This duality or complementarity
of causes accounts for the two sides of evolution, the physical and
the psychical or mental.
Semiotic causality is implicit in Peirce’s definitions of
‘sign,’ which generally follow the path of _determination_
object > sign > interpretant:
I will say that a sign is anything, of whatsoever mode of being,
which mediates between an object and an interpretant; since it is
both determined by the object _relatively to the interpretant_, and
determines the interpretant _in reference to the object_, in such
wise as to cause the interpretant to be determined by the object
through the mediation of this ‘sign.’ (EP2:410)
The reverse side of this path of determination is a path of
representation: the sign _represents_ the object _to_ the
interpretant, which then represents the sign – by determining
another interpretant sign, or else a ‘habit-change,’ which is
both an end of semiotic causality and a governor of efficient
causation, i.e. a determinant of future transformations in the
physical realm. Any actual occurrence of semiotic
_determination_/_representation_ must itself determine and represent
a change in a state of mind, quasi-mind or bodymind: in other words,
it must _make a difference_ to that bodymind, and this difference is
_both_ semiotically and efficiently caused.
In other words, the _logical interpretant_ of a sign, as a
‘habit-change’ or modification of the guidance system which
‘gives direction’ to the subsequent _practice_ of the guided
system or bodymind, will determine the energetic interpretants [2]
of future signs, which over time will make the path of practice by
walking it. This in turn will make a difference to the physical (as
well as the mental) context of further semiosis.
In terms of evolutionary biology, the way a type of organism
interacts with its environment can effect changes in both organism
and environment, which may in turn affect the ability of the species
to be represented in another generation of organisms. Over time,
then, natural selection will weed out the _ethos_ which does not
maintain its viability as an occupant of its ecological niche. But
natural selection must have a variety of possibilities to select
from, and does not in itself account for that variety. Hence the
need for the hypothesis that spontaneity or ‘chance’ is a primal
element in an evolving universe such as the one we all inhabit.
} Freedom lies only in our innate human capacity to choose between
different sorts of bondage, bondage to desire or self esteem, or
bondage to the light that lightens all our lives. [Sri Madhava] {
http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ [3] }{ _Turning Signs_ gateway
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[1] http://www.gnusystems.ca/BaldwinPeirce.htm#Uniformity
[2] http://gnusystems.ca/TS/prx.htm#semenerg
[3] http://gnusystems.ca/wp/
[4] http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm
[5] http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/orthodoxy/ch4.html
[6] http://bennovak.net
