This is just an aside to Gary F.'s parenthetical comment about Terrence
Deacon's knowledge of Peirce:
"In other words, he argues for the reality of Thirdness without calling
it that – indeed without using Peirce's phaneroscopic categories at all.
(Personally i doubt that he is familiar enough with them to use them
fluently, but maybe he decided not to use them for some reason.)"
Deacon has, apparently, been a lifelong student of Peirce's work. One of
his articles online, accessible from his Teleodynamics blog, is a paper
from 1976 entitled "Semiotics and Cybernetics: The Relevance of C. S.
Peirce", which includes an extensive discussion of Peirce's
phaneroscopy. It can be read here:
http://www.teleodynamics.com/?p=52
It makes me wonder: Has anyone tried to involve Deacon in discussion on
this list? I've seen him appear on blogs responding to questions about
his work. Seems he'd be both interested and welcome here...
Cheers,
Adrian Ivakhiv
On 3/11/12 11:24 AM, Gary Fuhrman wrote:
Jon, Gary, Ben and List,
There's another part of the /Minute Logic/ which may be related to the
connection Jon is making between “objective logic” and “categories”.
It is definitely related to the argument in Terrence Deacon's
/Incomplete Nature/, which Gary R. suggested some time ago as worthy
of study here. We haven't found a way to study it systematically, but
maybe it's just as well to do it one post at a time. Or one thread at
a time, if replies ensue.
The central part of Deacon's argument presents “a theory of emergent
dynamics that shows how dynamical process can become organized around
and with respect to possibilities not realized” (Deacon, p. 16).
Depending on the context, he also refers to these “possibilities not
realized” as “absential” or “ententional”. His argument is explicitly
anti-nominalistic and acknowledges the reality of a kind of final
causation in the physical universe (“teleodynamics”). It has a strong
affinity with Peirce's argument for a mode of being which has its
reality /in futuro/. In other words, he argues for the reality of
Thirdness without calling it that – indeed without using Peirce's
phaneroscopic categories at all. (Personally i doubt that he is
familiar enough with them to use them fluently, but maybe he decided
not to use them for some reason.)
“Incompleteness” is a crucial concept of what i might call Deaconian
realism. In physical terms, it is connected with Prigogine's idea of
/dissipative structures/ (including organisms) as /far from
equilibrium/ in a universe where the spontaneous tendency is /toward/
equilibrium, as the Second Law of thermodynamics would indicate.
Teleodynamic processes take incompleteness to a higher level of
complexity, but i don't propose to go into that now. Instead i'll
present here a Peircean parallel to Deacon's “incompleteness”. The
connection lies in the fact that /incompleteness/ is etymologically –
and perhaps mathematically? – equivalent to /infinity/.
First, we have this passage from Peirce's Minute Logic of 1902:
[[[ I doubt very much whether the Instinctive mind could ever develop
into a Rational mind. I should expect the reverse process sooner. The
Rational mind is the Progressive mind, and as such, by its very
capacity for growth, seems more infantile than the Instinctive mind.
Still, it would seem that Progressive minds must have, in some
mysterious way, probably by arrested development, grown from
Instinctive minds; and they are certainly enormously higher. The Deity
of the Théodicée of Leibniz is as high an Instinctive mind as can well
be imagined; but it impresses a scientific reader as distinctly
inferior to the human mind. It reminds one of the view of the Greeks
that Infinitude is a defect; for although Leibniz imagines that he is
making the Divine Mind infinite, by making its knowledge Perfect and
Complete, he fails to see that in thus refusing it the powers of
thought and the possibility of improvement he is in fact taking away
something far higher than knowledge. It is the human mind that is
infinite. One of the most remarkable distinctions between the
Instinctive mind of animals and the Rational mind of man is that
animals rarely make mistakes, while the human mind almost invariably
blunders at first, and repeatedly, where it is really exercised in the
manner that is distinctive of it. If you look upon this as a defect,
you ought to find an Instinctive mind higher than a Rational one, and
probably, if you cross-examine yourself, you will find you do. The
greatness of the human mind lies in its ability to discover truth
notwithstanding its not having Instincts strong enough to exempt it
from error. ]] CP 7.380 ]
This suggests to me that fallibility – which not even Peirce
attributes to God – is a highly developed species of incompleteness.
The connection with infinity, and with Thirdness, is further brought
out in Peirce's Harvard Lecture of 1903 “On Phenomenology”:
[[[ The third category of which I come now to speak is precisely that
whose reality is denied by nominalism. For although nominalism is not
credited with any extraordinarily lofty appreciation of the powers of
the human soul, yet it attributes to it a power of originating a kind
of ideas the like of which Omnipotence has failed to create as real
objects, and those general conceptions which men will never cease to
consider the glory of the human intellect must, according to any
consistent nominalism, be entirely wanting in the mind of Deity.
Leibniz, the modern nominalist /par excellence/, will not admit that
God has the faculty of Reason; and it seems impossible to avoid that
conclusion upon nominalistic principles.
But it is not in Nominalism alone that modern thought has attributed
to the human mind the miraculous power of originating a category of
thought that has no counterpart at all in Heaven or Earth. Already in
that strangely influential hodge-podge, the salad of Cartesianism, the
doctrine stands out very emphatically that the only force is the force
of impact, which clearly belongs to the category of Reaction; and ever
since Newton's /Principia/ began to affect the general thought of
Europe through the sympathetic spirit of Voltaire, there has been a
disposition to deny any kind of action except purely mechanical
action. The Corpuscular Philosophy of Boyle — although the pious Boyle
did not himself recognize its character — was bound to come to that in
the last resort; and the idea constantly gained strength throughout
the eighteenth century and the nineteenth until the doctrine of the
Conservation of Energy, generalized rather loosely by philosophers,
led to the theory of psycho-physical parallelism, against which there
has, only of recent years, been any very sensible and widespread
revolt. Psycho-physical parallelism is merely the doctrine that
mechanical action explains all the real facts, except that these facts
have an internal aspect which is a little obscure and a little shadowy.
To my way of regarding philosophy, all this movement was perfectly
good scientific procedure. For the simpler hypothesis which excluded
the influence of ideas upon matter had to be tried and persevered in
until it was thoroughly exploded. But I believe that now at last, at
any time for the last thirty years, it has been apparent, to every man
who sufficiently considered the subject, that there is a mode of
influence upon external facts which cannot be resolved into mere
mechanical action, so that henceforward it will be a grave error of
scientific philosophy to overlook the universal presence in the
phenomenon of this third category. ]] CP 5.62-4; slightly variant
reading in EP2:157. ]
In these terms, Deacon's argument is that “actions” governed by
functions and purposes are not /parallel/ to the physical world but
/continuous/ with it, i.e. emergent from it but still requiring it for
actualization. He is essentially carrying forward Peirce's argument
above, that there are real forms of action that are not mechanical, by
incorporating into it some of the physical theories and observations
that were not available to Peirce. Others have been doing this since
the mid-20th Century, but Deacon's is the most fully developed version
i've seen yet that is worked out in purely physical terms. This is his
way of bringing the psychical facts out of the shadows.
Notice however that Peirce speaks of Thirdness as /present/ in the
phenomenon. Deacon on the other hand speaks of it as Absence (the
title of his first chapter, appropriately numbered 0). This makes
Deacon's terminology incompatible with Peirce's phaneroscopy, which
“is the description of the /phaneron/; and by the /phaneron/ I mean
the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present
to the mind” (CP 1.284). However, i don't think Deacon would argue
that his Absence (Peirce's Thirdness) is not present to the mind /in
any sense/; so i don't see this terminological difference as
theoretically significant.
Gary F.
} Stay us wherefore in our search for tighteousness, O Sustainer
[Finnegans Wake 5] {
www.gnusystems.ca/Peirce.htm <http://www.gnusystems.ca/Peirce.htm> }{
gnoxic studies: Peirce
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the
PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message
to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the
body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to
PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To
remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the
line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the
list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
