John S, list, If I may, John, I would propose a modification to your Figure 4 in http://jfsowa.com/talks/escw.pdf:
This diagram indicates, at every level, a linear process beginning with perception and ending with action. But in living organisms (as explained in my book and a dozen or two sources that I quote), this process is one of the nonlinear mental/semiotic processes I mentioned in my post as being characteristic of life; in the book I frequently refer to it as “practiception <http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/mdl.htm#prxcpt> ”. Here is one example from the neuropsychological literature, referring to human as well as other organisms with brains: [[ Work on embodied cognition calls into question the idea that there is a sequential flow of processing whose stages neatly correspond to perceiving, thinking, and acting. When we engage the world in daily behaviour, we often do not do it by first passively taking in lots of information, then making a full plan, then implementing the plan courtesy of some sequence of motor commands. Instead, sensing, thinking, and acting conspire, overlap, and start to merge together as whole perceptuo-motor systems engage the world. ] —Andy Clark (2015, 249) ] If it’s the process of scientific inquiry we are considering, Peirce does analyze it in terms of a sequence, but in his usual analysis it begins with abduction (or retroduction) and ends with induction, which consists in testing the predictions deduced from the hypothesis against real-time (and reiterated) observations or measurements. Peirce also seems to say, in a passage that Robert quoted, that reasoning proceeds sequentially from perception to action: “The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason” (EP2:241). But the idea of sequence here is based on the idea that exits necessarily come after entrances, which is misleading if we are talking about embodied cognition as we understand it today. I would not claim that Peirce explicitly stated, or fully understood, this nonlinearity of cognition, but I did suggest in my post that he anticipated it, especially in his late analysis of semiosis. Backing up that hypothesis would take more quotation and explanation than I will venture in this post. But I think I could give an example of communicating an idea which would illustrate the nonlinearity or recursiveness of the process, if that is needed. Gary f. From: John F. Sowa <[email protected]> Sent: 12-Jun-20 17:23 To: Peirce-L <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Communicating an Idea (was commens and commons) Gary F, Edwina, Jon AS, List, I am delighted to read about GF's applications of Peirce's writings to the issues that Edwina copied: "the continuity between the processes of semiosis and those of life itself" and "the recursive and nonlinear nature of those processes". In 2006, I wrote an article on "Peirce's contributions to the 21st century", which summarized a few of the many ways in which Peirce not only anticipated, but frequently *improved upon* his successors: http:/jfsowa.com/pubs/csp21st.pdf . Some of the writings by Susan Haack, John Deely, Terry Deacon, and Frederick Stjernfelt influenced that article. In the 14 years since then, I have found many more examples. Last week, I presented a talk (virtually) at the European Semantic Web Conference in which I emphasized ways in which Peirce's work can help guide the future developments. Following is an extended version of the slides I presented: http://jfsowa.com/talks/escw.pdf .
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