Dear Vinicius,
Thank you very much for the references. I've printed out the de Tienne
and am finding it most valuable. I'll look up the Houser piece as well.
Best,
Gary
Vin¨cius Romanini wrote:
Dear Gary,
You might want to check this references on the subject.
De Tienne, A. Learning qua Semiosis
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Houser, N. (1985). Toward a
Peircean Semiotic Theory of Learning. The American Journal of
Semiotics 5 – 2, 251-274.
Best,
Vinicius
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List,
Preparing for the new college term, and needing to think this Fall not
just about my students' learning, but as I am developing & leading
a faculty seminar as well (titled "Building Information Literacy in
the Disciplines") I am compelled now to think also about learning
in relation to teaching. As a dyed in the wool Peircean, I
naturally first quizzed myself about what I imagined Peirce said about
learning. After that preliminary questioning, some eCP searches quickly
convinced me that I was correct regarding at least one thing, namely,
that Peirce certainly had quite a bit to say about learning, research,
inquiry, the relation of logic and psychology, etc. to all that, and
much more.
So, at first I simply asked myself, what did I actually know, what
could I even remember--without doing "string searches" on the
eCP and such.--of what Peirce thought/taught about learning? The first
thing that came to mind is that learning is somehow deeply
implicated in reason itself and reason itself is not
a matter merely of the famous corollary to it, "Do not block the way
of inquiry" but something considerably deeper. So what exactly is
the famous "First Rule of Reason" I asked myself? Something about
'wanting to learn' I vaguely remembered, but I couldn't think of
the precise language. This is how Peirce puts it:
The First Rule of Reason
Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of
reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in
so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think,
there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon
every wall of the city of philosophy:
Do not block the way of inquiry.
Although it is better to be methodical in our investigations, and
to consider the economics of research, yet there is no positive sin
against logic in trying any theory which may come into our heads, so
long as it is adopted in such a sense as to permit the investigation to
go on unimpeded and undiscouraged. On the other hand, to set up a
philosophy which barricades the road of further advance toward the
truth is the one unpardonable offence in reasoning, as it is also the
one to which metaphysicians have in all ages shown themselves the most
addicted.
Let me call your attention to [some] shapes in which this venomous
error assails our knowledge:
The first is the shape of absolute assertion. That we can
be sure of nothing in science is an ancient truth. The Academy taught
it. Yet science has been infested with over confident assertion. . .
more concerned with teaching than with learning, at all times."
[emphasis added. From Notes on Scientific Philosophy" CP 1.135-137]
Learning is then certainly not teaching, it does not pretend to
know anything in any way approaching an absolute sense
(knowledge may grow infinitely, but it is in no sense ever complete).
One doesn't intellectually "have it" (whatever "it" may be) and then
merely promulgate it as a philosopher or teacher. That attitude has
been destructive of both philosophy and teaching. Of course it is
possible that one may be tending toward the truth (that's what
pragmatic inquiry is all about, right?), and certainly some individual
person may be the first to have a crucial insight, make a fresh and
important abduction, etc. so that the individual in certainly deeply
implicated in the inquiry process (never the less, it is possible to
"fall in love with" with ones own theory, but this is not inquiry as
Peirce conceives it), for inquiry is ultimately a communal affair, and
anyone who denies that is fooling himself.
Therefore, I conclude with Peirce that learning comes about and is
indeed an _expression_ of inquiry come of the very desire to learn
(this is not as circular an argument as it may first seem). But how
does this happen? One comes upon the notion that beyond simple
consciousness and the sense of resistance comes another, a "third,
synthetic consciousness, binding time together, sense of learning,
thought."
. . . . . [E]very phenomenon of our mental life is more or less like
cognition. Every emotion, every burst of passion, every exercise of
will, is like cognition. But modifications of consciousness which are
alike have some element in common. Cognition, therefore, has nothing
distinctive and cannot be regarded as a fundamental faculty. If,
however, we ask whether there be not an element in cognition which is
neither feeling, sense, nor activity, we do find something, the faculty
of learning, acquisition, memory and inference, synthesis. . .
It seems, then, that the true categories of consciousness are:
first, feeling, the consciousness which can be included with an instant
of time, passive consciousness of quality, without recognition or
analysis; second, consciousness of an interruption into the field of
consciousness, sense of resistance, of an external fact, of another
something; third, synthetic consciousness, binding time together, sense
of learning, thought.
If we accept these [as] the fundamental elementary modes of
consciousness, they afford a psychological explanation of the three
logical conceptions of quality, relation, and synthesis or mediation.
The conception of quality, which is absolutely simple in itself and yet
viewed in its relations is seen to be full of variety, would arise
whenever feeling or the singular consciousness becomes prominent. The
conception of relation comes from the dual consciousness or sense of
action and reaction. The conception of mediation springs out of the
plural consciousness or sense of learning. [from "A Guess at the
Riddle")
It would appear then that the very notion of mediation "springs out of
the plural consciousness or sense of learning". There are many
interesting inquiries which might follow from considering any or all
the above, for example:
*how is the plural consciousness a sense of learning?
*to what extent is research & inquiry a communal process?
*if the individual is in ways like a community and the community is
like an individual, how do these two interpenetrate?
*learning is fallible; learning is continuous--what is the intersection
here?
*as the first stage of inquiry is hypothesis formation which, while
tending to come out of cumulative & communal understandings is
essentially a matter of a personal abductive power (even when several
individuals might come upon a particular abduction--e.g., evolution--at
approximately the same time).
*at the personal/social levels, how do abduction/deduction/induction
connect to each other in personal/historical processes?
*what is the role of the interpretant in all this? that is, how do
symbols grow?
There are certainly many other questions and issues which could be
raised here. I would be very interested in what other members of the
list think about inquiry and learning. Below my signature are a very
few additional carefully selected passages which I hope may serve as
catalyst to fresh thinking in this important matter [note: emphasis is
added by me in all cases]
Best,
Gary
CP 1.390 C. The genuine synthetic consciousness, or the sense of the
process of learning, which is the preeminent ingredient and
quintessence of the reason, has its physiological basis quite evidently
in the most characteristic property of the nervous system, the power of
taking habits.
CP 2.227 CHAPTER 2 DIVISION OF SIGNS: §1. GROUND, OBJECT, AND
INTERPRETANT
Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe I have shown, only
another name for semiotic ({s¨meiötik¨}), the quasi-necessary, or
formal, doctrine of signs. By describing the doctrine as
"quasi-necessary," or formal, I mean that we observe the characters of
such signs as we know, and from such an observation, by a process which
I will not object to naming Abstraction, we are led to statements,
eminently fallible, and therefore in one sense by no means necessary,
as to what must be the characters of all signs used by a
"scientific" intelligence, that is to say, by an intelligence capable
of learning by experience.
CP 6.3 The difference comes to this, that the practical man stakes
everything he cares for upon the hazard of a die, and must believe with
all the force of his manhood that the object for which he strives is
good and that the theory of his plan is correct; while the scientific
man is above all things desirous of learning the truth and, in order to
do so, ardently desires to have his present provisional beliefs (and
all his beliefs are merely provisional) swept away, and will work hard
to accomplish that object. This is the reason that a good practical man
cannot do the best scientific work.
CP 7.536 It remains to be shown that this element is the third
Kainopythagorean category. All flow of time involves learning; and
all learning involves the flow of time. Now no continuum can be
apprehended except by a mental generation of it, by thinking of
something as moving through it, or in some way equivalent to this, and
founded upon it. For a mere dull staring at a superficies does not
involve the positive apprehension of continuity. All that is given in
such staring is a feeling which serves as a sign that the object might
be apprehended as a continuum. Thus, all apprehension of continuity
involves a consciousness of learning. In the next place, all
learning is virtually reasoning; that is to say, if not reasoning, it
only differs therefrom in being too low in consciousness to be
controllable and in consequently not being subject to criticism as
good or bad, -- no doubt, a most important distinction for logical
purposes, but not affecting the nature of the elements of experience
that it contains. In order to convince ourselves that all learning
is virtually reasoning, we have only to reflect that the mere
experience of a sense-reaction is not learning. That is only
something from which something can be learned, by interpreting it. The
interpretation is the learning. If it is objected that there must
be a first thing learned, I reply that this is like saying that there
must be a first rational fraction, in the order of magnitudes, greater
than zero. There is no minimum time that an experience of learning must
occupy. At least, we do not conceive it so, in conceiving time as
continuous; for every flow of time, however short, is an experience
of learning.
CP 7.536 Thus, every reasoning involves another reasoning, which in its
turn involves another, and so on ad infinitum. Every reasoning
connects something that has just been learned with knowledge already
acquired so that we thereby learn what has been unknown. It is thus
that the present is so welded to what is just past as to render what is
just coming about inevitable. The consciousness of the present, as the
boundary between past and future, involves them both. Reasoning is
a new experience which involves something old and something hitherto
unknown. The past as above remarked is the ego. My recent past is my
uppermost ego; my distant past is my more generalized ego. The past of
the community is our ego. In attributing a flow of time to unknown
events we impute a quasi-ego to the universe. The present is the
immediate representation we are just learning that brings the future,
or non-ego, to be assimilated into the ego. It is thus seen that
learning, or representation, is the third Kainopythagorean category.
CP 7.537 . There are no more Kainopythagorean categories than these
three. For the first category is nonrelative experience, the second is
experience of a dyadic relation, and the third is experience of a
triadic relation. It is impossible to analyze a triadic relation, or
fact about three objects, into dyadic relations; for the very idea of a
compound supposes two parts, at least, and a whole, or three objects,
at least, in all. On the other hand, every tetradic relation, or
fact about four objects can be analyzed into a compound of triadic
relations.
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