Eric, this excerpt from my book (http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/cls.htm#3thought) may be helpful in adapting to Peirce’s usage of the word “thought”:
Gary f. Peirce's concept of thought is both broader and deeper than the common usage of the word. Peirce wrote to William James in 1902 that ‘one must not take a nominalistic view of Thought as if it were something that a man had in his consciousness. Consciousness may mean any one of the three categories. But if it is to mean Thought it is more without us than within. It is we that are in it, rather than it in any of us’ (CP 8.256; we will look further into ‘nominalism’ in Chapter 12). Thought is thus the formal component of the Big Current, not merely the little current of someone's private stream of consciousness. We often call that inner stream ‘thinking,’ and sometimes call it ‘thought,’ in the sense defined by the Century Dictionary as the ‘subjective element of intellectual activity.’ But the specifically Peircean sense (often marked by his capitalization of the word) is defined in the <http://www.gnusystems.ca/Peirce.htm#Century> CD as ‘the objective element of the intellectual product’ of thinking. To illustrate this exact sense of the word in the CD, Peirce cited the following quotation: [[Thought is, in every case, the cognition of an object, which really, actually, existentially out of thought, is ideally, intellectually, intelligibly within it; and just because within in the latter sense, is it known as actually without in the former.]] — G.J. Stokes, The Objectivity of Truth (1884), p. 53 Here ‘cognition’ appears as a self-bounding process, so that it has an inside and an outside. Indeed we can take Stokes' sentence as equivalent to the proposition that the world is inside out. The causal reciprocity between the intelligence and the reality external to it, considered as different things, is essential to cognition as a teleodynamic process (defined above <http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/cls.htm#teleod> ). Deacon emphasizes this by contrasting cognition with computation (the italics are his): [[computation only transfers extrinsically imposed constraints from substrate to substrate, while cognition (semiosis) generates intrinsic constraints that have a capacity to propagate and self-organize. The difference between computation and mind is a difference in the source of these formal properties. In computation, the critical formal properties are descriptive distinctions based on the selected features of a given mechanism. In cognition, they are distinctive regularities which are generated by recursive dynamics, and which progressively amplify and propagate constraints to other regions of the nervous system.]] — Deacon 2011, 498 This of course refers to the dialogue within the brain, which for a symbolic species like ourselves is continuously informed (constrained) by participation in the dialogue which constitutes the community of minds. Thoughts uttered and interpreted in that dialogue also propagate constraints (information) from mind to mind, body to body and brain to brain through the circular causality of the meaning cycle. This is possible because thought has generality: the same thought can be shared by many people in many situations, just as a single law of nature governs (regulates) a whole range of events. It is, as Gregory Bateson (1979, 8) put it, the ‘pattern that connects.’ [[ Thirdness is found wherever one thing brings about a Secondness <http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/ldm.htm#bring2> between two things. In all such cases, it will be found that Thought plays a part. By thought is meant something like the meaning of a word, which may be “embodied in,” that is, may govern, this or that, but is not confined to any existent. Thought is often supposed to be something in consciousness; but on the contrary, it is impossible ever actually to be directly conscious of thought. It is something to which consciousness may conform, as a writing may conform to it. Thought is rather of the nature of a habit, which determines the suchness of that which may come into existence, when it does come into existence. Of such a habit one may be conscious of a symptom; but to speak of being directly conscious of a habit, as such, is nonsense.]] — Peirce, EP2:269 From: Eric Charles [mailto:eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com] Sent: 15-Feb-17 11:17 To: Peirce-L <PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Nominalism vs. Realism - Jerry, Clark, Thank you for the thoughtful replies. I have great love for Peirce and his work. But there are parts that I love less, particularly where Peirce ... seems to me to.... forget the parameters of his own argument. Peirce tells us what clear thinking is, while fully and responsibly acknowledging that most people do not think clearly most of the time. On that basis, if anyone thinks of anyone else's thoughts as entailing at all times the third degree of clarity, something is seriously amiss. Further, when Peirce elsewhere starts making broad pronouncements about "thought" it oftentimes seems that he is referring solely to those rare instances of clear thinking, but other times is referring to the typical thinking, or all thinking? The later is particularly suspicious. Assertions regarding the nature of all thinking would presumably be subject to extreme empirical scrutiny. As we have rejected traditional metaphysics, and denied any special powers of introspection, one would expect "thought" to be examined in the same way Peirce's exemplars, the early bench chemists, examined their subject matter. All the same challenges and limitations, and the same potential for novel triumph. Thus when Peirce talks about clear thinking he seems on steady ground, and when he talks about how a scientist-qua-scientists thinks about the world he seems on steady ground, but when there are no caveats regarding what "thinking" he is referring to, I get nervous. To Clark's question: While one could certainly find people who would find those assertions uncontroversial, there are problems. One can readily, for example, find individuals who (by all evidence) seem to think more readily and more commonly in words than in "images and diagrams". One can also find people with limited brain damage who (by all evidence) have lost their ability to coherently verbalize (i.e., they cannot do language), and yet those people otherwise seem to think perfectly well.
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
