I came across MS 831 in which Peirce mentions "the minds of the lower
animals" -- using the word 'mind' not 'quasi-mind'. Among them,
he mentioned birds, bees, and beavers. He also wrote "Such phenomena
evince an element of self-criticism, and therefore of reasoning."
That implies a fairly complex view of zoosemiotics.
See below for an excerpt from MS 831 and the URL of the full MS.
Unfortunately, it has no date. But the second paragraph of the
excerpt mentions "three kinds of reasoning, the Inductive, the
Deductive, and the Hypothetical." He has not yet introduced the
word 'abduction' or 'abductive'.
In the EP index, the first mention of 'abduction' is in a selection
from April 1901. That's a terminus ante quem for MS 831.
More excerpts from MS 831:
some fifteen or twenty years ago several “logical machines” were
constructed... in 1870 Prof Jevons actually constructed a machine
that would perform all the processes of ratiocination taught in
the logic-books of that day... an article by Mrs. Christina Ladd
Franklin in the Johns Hopkins ‘Studies in Logic,’ (Boston: Little,
Brown, & Co. 1883, p. 54.)
The date 1883 is a terminus post quem. If you add 15 or 20 to 1870,
the result would be 1885 or 1890. But it's possible that Peirce might
have been thinking of some earlier, less advanced machines before 1870.
The discussion about logical machines shows that he was thinking about
the issues he published in 1887. His failure to cite that publication
suggests that MS 831 was written before 1887. Therefore, a likely
date of the MS is 1885 or 1886.
Has anyone found earlier MSS in which Peirce talks about animal minds?
John
______________________________________________________________________
From MS 831, no date.
http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/ms831/ms831.htm
When the minds of the lower animals first began to be studied, it was
the unchangeableness of animals’ methods that led observers to draw a
sharp line of demarcation between Instinct and Reason. But facts
subsequently came to light showing that fixity was only relative, that
bees in a clime of perpetual summer, after some generations [page 13]
give up storing vast quantities of honey; that beavers, provided with
new materials, gradually evolve new styles of architecture; that sheep,
carried to valleys where poisonous hellebore grows, learn not to eat it;
that birds sometimes take to unaccustomed food, and come to prefer it;
that the palm-swifts of Jamaica in 1857 suddenly gave up living in
palms, after one of their favorite trees had been blown down, and
captured the swallows’ nests in the Assembly-House piazza. Such
phenomena evince an element of self-criticism, and therefore of reasoning.
There are three kinds of reasoning, the Inductive, the Deductive, and
the Hypothetical. The last consists in the introduction into a confused
tangle of given facts [page 14] of an idea not given whose only
justification lies in its reducing that tangle to order. This kind of
inference is little subject to control, and so not highly rational; and
one reason for this is that when once the facts have been apprehended in
the light of the hypothesis, they become so swallowed up in it, that a
strong exertion of intellect is required to disembarass them from it,
and to recall them in their pristine nudity. Where is the man, barring
historians, who shall find it easy to specify a poor dozen out of the
thousand facts of his immediate experience which have caused him to
suppose that the thirteen original states of this union were once
British provinces?
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