Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Defining Continuity

[Eugene Halton]

Dear John F S,
 You give a description of common sense as though it is simply early
childhood learning, its developments, and cultural accretion rather than
also including a deeper, tempered human nature. That is not what Peirce
meant by common sense when he drew from the Scottish common sensists in his
philosophy of critical-common sense to include indubitable ideas, as Reid
put it:

“which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are
under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life,
without being able to give a reason for them.”

Gene Halton



On Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 11:08 AM John F. Sowa  wrote:

> Jon, List
>
> Common sense is what a child learns before the age of six.  The
> innovations of one generation become the common sense of the next
> generation.
>
> The common sense of European culture is based on a version of
> Plato-Aristotle that has been absorbed into the European languages and
> life.  For Peirce, common sense included the New England version as
> enhanced with his father's tutoring in Greek, Latin, and mathematics.
>
> JAS:  I believe that my proposed terminology is more consistent with the
> common-sense notion of continuity that Peirce persistently sought to
> capture.
>
> For Peirce, diagrammatic reasoning is the one and only method of
> reasoning.  It involves analogies -- matching signs (diagrams or patterns)
> from memory to signs in the phaneron.  There is no difference in principle
> between the most precise pattern matching in mathematics and the looser
> pattern matching in everyday life.
>
> Whenever Peirce made any statement about continuity in ordinary English,
> all his mathematical patterns were in the back of his mind.  Even in the
> most informal comments, they served as a filter that blocked the typical
> mistakes of the "loose thinkers"  and "metaphysicians" he was constantly
> criticizing.
>
> Fundamental principle:  It's possible to get a rough idea of what Peirce
> meant by reading his words.  But it's not possible to understand his words
> in depth or to make accurate inferences from them without understanding the
> details of the mathematics that blocked the mistakes.
>
> John
>

On Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 11:08 AM John F. Sowa  wrote:

> Jon, List
>
> Common sense is what a child learns before the age of six.  The
> innovations of one generation become the common sense of the next
> generation.
>
> The common sense of European culture is based on a version of
> Plato-Aristotle that has been absorbed into the European languages and
> life.  For Peirce, common sense included the New England version as
> enhanced with his father's tutoring in Greek, Latin, and mathematics.
>
> JAS:  I believe that my proposed terminology is more consistent with the
> common-sense notion of continuity that Peirce persistently sought to
> capture.
>
> For Peirce, diagrammatic reasoning is the one and only method of
> reasoning.  It involves analogies -- matching signs (diagrams or patterns)
> from memory to signs in the phaneron.  There is no difference in principle
> between the most precise pattern matching in mathematics and the looser
> pattern matching in everyday life.
>
> Whenever Peirce made any statement about continuity in ordinary English,
> all his mathematical patterns were in the back of his mind.  Even in the
> most informal comments, they served as a filter that blocked the typical
> mistakes of the "loose thinkers"  and "metaphysicians" he was constantly
> criticizing.
>
> Fundamental principle:  It's possible to get a rough idea of what Peirce
> meant by reading his words.  But it's not possible to understand his words
> in depth or to make accurate inferences from them without understanding the
> details of the mathematics that blocked the mistakes.
>
> John
>

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Guidelines for scholarship (was On-line Symposium...

[Eugene Halton]

Edwina,
 Yes, but my point was that JFS's opinion that "Opinions are never
acceptable in a court of law or in a scholarly edition.",
   is an opinion that is incorrect, given that expert opinions are
admissible in a court of law.
Gene

On Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 8:47 AM Edwina Taborsky 
wrote:

> Gene - an opinion ‘per se’ is ambiguous and therefore irrelevant. An
> opinion-by-an-expert-in-the-field is similar to a conclusion that is based
> on evidence and analysis. Very different from an ‘opinion’.
>
> Edwina
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Jul 17, 2019, at 10:23 PM, Eugene Halton 
> wrote:
>
> JFS: "Opinions are never acceptable in a court of law or in a scholarly
> edition."
>
> I'm no expert, but in the US, if I may nitpick:
>
> THELAW.COM LAW DICTIONARY & BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 2ND ED.
> "EXPERT TESTIMONY The opinion stated in court by an expert witness. An
> admissible expert opinion given in court."
> Gene H
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 1:52 PM John F Sowa  wrote:
>
>> Jon,
>>
>> I agree that my comments were about methods of reasoning rather than
>> specific issues about Lane's book.  So I changed the subject line.
>>
>> JAS
>> > As for this thread, it is supposed to be about Peirce's views on
>> > realism and idealism as explored by Lane in his recent book, not
>> > our different purposes and respective approaches for studying and
>> > discussing Peirce's views on those topics (and others).
>>
>> I'm not talking about your preferences or mine.  I'm talking about
>> the long-established conventions for scholarship:  Maintain a sharp
>> distinction between an author's "ipsissima verba" and any commentary
>> about them.  If an author did not state something explicitly, any
>> claims about the text are opinions of the commentator.  Opinions
>> are never acceptable in a court of law or in a scholarly edition.
>>
>> > JFS:  The term 'objective idealism' could characterize a huge family
>> > of theories from antiquity to the present.
>> >
>> > JAS:  Sure, but we are only discussing the particular theory that
>> > Peirce called by that name in 1891.
>>
>> My complaint was not about the topic, but about the method
>> of reasoning.  The following example illustrates the issues:
>>
>> JAS
>> > The whole point of CP 6.24-25 (1891) is that once dualism is
>> > dismissed in favor of monism, there are only three options--mind
>> > and matter are independent (neutralism), matter is primordial such
>> > that mind depends on matter (materialism), or mind is primordial
>> > such that matter depends on mind (idealism).  Peirce unambiguously
>> > endorsed the last alternative and rejected the others, and as far
>> > as I know, he never abandoned that view.
>>
>> My concerns:  CP 6.24 is quite clear as Peirce stated it; there is
>> no need for a paraphrase to make it clearer.  But this paraphrase
>> distorts CP 6.24 in several ways:
>>
>>   1. The phrase "the whole point" implies that there is no other
>>  useful information in CP 6.24-25.  But the last sentence of
>>  CP 6.25 makes an important point about Peirce's methodology:
>>  "But before this can be accepted it must show itself capable
>>  of explaining the tridimensionality of space, the laws of
>>  motion, and the general characteristics of the universe, with
>>  mathematical clearness and precision; for no less should be
>>  demanded of every philosophy."
>>
>>   2. The phrase "there are only three options" is an unduly precise
>>  grouping of the huge number of issues that have been debated
>>  since antiquity.  It's true that Peirce only mentioned three,
>>  but he added the phrase "it seems" to each of the first two.
>>  That sounds far more tentative than an unambiguous endorsement.
>>
>>   3. He calls the third option "the only intelligible theory" but adds
>>  the qualification mentioned in point #1:  an explanation of 3-D
>>  space, laws of motion, and everything with "mathematical clearness
>>  and precision".  That would require a huge amount of work.
>>
>>   4. Since Peirce never accomplished the tasks in point #1, it would be
>>  premature to claim that he "unambiguously endorsed" that option.
>>  Einstein made more progress on those issues than Peirce did, but
>>  there are still many unanswered questions today.
>>
>>   5. In the statement &

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Guidelines for scholarship (was On-line Symposium...

[Eugene Halton]

JFS: "Opinions are never acceptable in a court of law or in a scholarly
edition."

I'm no expert, but in the US, if I may nitpick:

THELAW.COM LAW DICTIONARY & BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 2ND ED.
"EXPERT TESTIMONY The opinion stated in court by an expert witness. An
admissible expert opinion given in court."
Gene H





On Wed, Jul 17, 2019, 1:52 PM John F Sowa  wrote:

> Jon,
>
> I agree that my comments were about methods of reasoning rather than
> specific issues about Lane's book.  So I changed the subject line.
>
> JAS
> > As for this thread, it is supposed to be about Peirce's views on
> > realism and idealism as explored by Lane in his recent book, not
> > our different purposes and respective approaches for studying and
> > discussing Peirce's views on those topics (and others).
>
> I'm not talking about your preferences or mine.  I'm talking about
> the long-established conventions for scholarship:  Maintain a sharp
> distinction between an author's "ipsissima verba" and any commentary
> about them.  If an author did not state something explicitly, any
> claims about the text are opinions of the commentator.  Opinions
> are never acceptable in a court of law or in a scholarly edition.
>
> > JFS:  The term 'objective idealism' could characterize a huge family
> > of theories from antiquity to the present.
> >
> > JAS:  Sure, but we are only discussing the particular theory that
> > Peirce called by that name in 1891.
>
> My complaint was not about the topic, but about the method
> of reasoning.  The following example illustrates the issues:
>
> JAS
> > The whole point of CP 6.24-25 (1891) is that once dualism is
> > dismissed in favor of monism, there are only three options--mind
> > and matter are independent (neutralism), matter is primordial such
> > that mind depends on matter (materialism), or mind is primordial
> > such that matter depends on mind (idealism).  Peirce unambiguously
> > endorsed the last alternative and rejected the others, and as far
> > as I know, he never abandoned that view.
>
> My concerns:  CP 6.24 is quite clear as Peirce stated it; there is
> no need for a paraphrase to make it clearer.  But this paraphrase
> distorts CP 6.24 in several ways:
>
>   1. The phrase "the whole point" implies that there is no other
>  useful information in CP 6.24-25.  But the last sentence of
>  CP 6.25 makes an important point about Peirce's methodology:
>  "But before this can be accepted it must show itself capable
>  of explaining the tridimensionality of space, the laws of
>  motion, and the general characteristics of the universe, with
>  mathematical clearness and precision; for no less should be
>  demanded of every philosophy."
>
>   2. The phrase "there are only three options" is an unduly precise
>  grouping of the huge number of issues that have been debated
>  since antiquity.  It's true that Peirce only mentioned three,
>  but he added the phrase "it seems" to each of the first two.
>  That sounds far more tentative than an unambiguous endorsement.
>
>   3. He calls the third option "the only intelligible theory" but adds
>  the qualification mentioned in point #1:  an explanation of 3-D
>  space, laws of motion, and everything with "mathematical clearness
>  and precision".  That would require a huge amount of work.
>
>   4. Since Peirce never accomplished the tasks in point #1, it would be
>  premature to claim that he "unambiguously endorsed" that option.
>  Einstein made more progress on those issues than Peirce did, but
>  there are still many unanswered questions today.
>
>   5. In the statement "matter is effete mind" (CP 6.25), the words
>  'effete' and 'mind' are extremely vague, and the definitions
>  of 'matter' have changed enormously since the 19th century,
>  and new developments are continuing to make revisions.  Those
>  words are so vague that "it's easy to be certain".
>
>   6. I also wrote that point #5 is so vague that any of the following
>  terms would be just as certain as Peirce's 'objective idealism':
>  Theos = Logos = Tao = Dharma = God of Spinoza = pantheism.
>
> JAS
> > In any case, what I characterized as "unambiguous" was not Peirce's
> > statement itself, but his endorsement of objective idealism...
>
> The best possible proof that Peirce endorsed objective idealism is
> an exact quotation of CP 6.24-25.  No paraphrase by anybody is
> acceptable in a court of law or in a scholarly analysis.
>
> JAS
> > but how about dealing with the substance of my posts, rather than
> > continually nitpicking at my methodology and choice of words?
>
> Peirce's devoted his life's work to nitpicking.  That is the essence
> of logic and semeiotic:  Developing and justifying precise methods
> for analyzing language, thought, and reasoning down to the smallest,
> most precisely defined and justified steps (AKA nits).
>
> As for substance, I have been begging you to drop the 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Realism and Idealism

[Eugene Halton]

On Mon, Jul 8, 2019, 2:06 PM John F Sowa  wrote:

> On 7/8/2019 9:45 AM, Edwina Taborsky wrote:
> > One can get trapped in terminology!
>
> I strongly agree.
>
> We should be cautious about applying Peirce's words in ways
> that he never intended.
> John
>

I second that.
I mean ... I third that.
I mean ...
Gene

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce on the Reality of God (was Trinity, Continuity, and the Cosmotheandric)

[Eugene Halton]

no rational explanation.
> (R 870:43-44[37-38]; 1901)
>
>
> As Peirce demonstrated in his first Additament to "A Neglected Argument"
> (CP 6.490; 1908), denying the Reality of God as *Ens necessarium* effectively
> renders the Being of the three Universes of Experience *inexplicable*;
> and the illogical supposition that *anything *is inexplicable is a
> defining characteristic of nominalism.
>
> Regards,
>
> Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA
> Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman
> www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
>
> On Sat, Jun 1, 2019 at 6:56 PM Eugene Halton 
> wrote:
>
>> Dear Gary R,
>>
>> Your response seemed to me that you were upset with my
>> criticism of the father-son-spirit metaphor and broader post. I was not
>> directing it against you personally, but as a cultural critique, and I
>> apologize if it came across as a personal attack. I certainly respect your
>> role as moderator of this forum and contributor to it.
>>
>> To respond to your post, you say of Peirce’s first wife,
>> Harriet Melusina Fay:
>>
>> Gary R: “I don’t know whether she ‘saw through’ anything, while a growing
>> sense of patriarchy was dawning on especially English and American women in
>> her day.”
>>
>> First, this seems to me to diminish the originality of her
>> idea. And Harriet Melusina Fay herself used a visual metaphor when she
>> claimed in 1859 that the mother was veiled in the traditional scriptures.
>> That is part of why I said she “saw through” the veil, though one could
>> also say she removed it. Here are her words (cited from the edition of
>> Peirce’s *Writings*, Vol 1, introduction):
>>
>> “a Divine Eternal Trinity of Father, Mother and Only Son—the ‘Mother’
>> being veiled throughout the Scriptures under the terms ‘The Spirit,’
>> ‘Wisdom,’ ‘The Holy Ghost,’ ‘The Comforter,’ and ‘The Woman clothed with
>> the sun and crowned with the stars and with the moon under her feet’.”
>>
>> I’m not aware of any women who made that interpretation of
>> the Trinity before 1859, but would be interested to know if someone did.
>>
>> Here’s an interesting one from Peirce, also from the introduction to
>> Volume 1 of *Writings*: “And as late as 1907 we find a distant echo of
>> Zina’s feminist version of the trinity. In outlining a draft of what turned
>> out to be his best account of pragmatism within the framework of his
>> general theory of signs, he then wrote: ‘A Sign mediates between its Object
>> and its Meaning. . . Object the father, sign the mother of meaning.’ That
>> is, he might have added, of their son, the Interpretant.”
>>
>> In criticizing my use of a Feuerbach idea and a quote from Nietzsche, you
>> claim a direct line from Feuerbach through Nietzsche to Hitler, also via
>> Wagner. This is quite an axis of evil! Feuerbach was in turn influenced by
>> Hegel. Would you include Hegel in that influencing line of history leading
>> to Hitler? I am not a Feuerbachian materialist, I was simply citing an apt
>> idea which is credited to Feuerbach. He also said, “Der Mensch ist was er
>> isst,” which translates roughly to the English expression, “you are what
>> you eat.” Except the German is also a humorous play on the third person
>> singular of “is” and the third person singular of eating (isst), which
>> sounds like the same word when spoken. I like that audible play too, “Man
>> (humankind) is what he is.” You say of Feuerbach, “in my opinion, one ought
>> to have outgrown by the time one leaves one’s intellectual adolescence when
>> nihilist intellectual brilliance had been so seductive.” Again, I’m not a
>> Feuerbachian, so how could I “outgrow” him. One doesn’t need to buy into
>> all of a particular philosopher to find something useful in him or her. And
>> Wagner, who you mention, yes, well, I can’t agree with Mark Twain that his
>> music is better than it sounds.
>>
>> In any case you didn’t address the specific point I was making citing
>> Feuerbach, regarding the Heavenly family as an idealizing abstraction
>> masking the earthly family, and my further point that the human nuclear
>> family is also an inadequate metaphor today for divinity, too narrow
>> because of its anthropocentrism.
>>
>> You also question “innocence” of hunter gatherers: “So, we have lost our
>> innocence if we ever had it. Were those ‘hunter-gatherers’ you so admire,
>> Gene, really so pure of heart?” I did not discuss hunter gatherers in my
>> post. The point

Re: Trinity, Continuity, and the Cosmotheandric, was, [PEIRCE-L] Re: Continuity of Semeiosis Revisited

[Eugene Halton]

9/05/do-symbols-grow/ "as new meanings for a
> symbol develop, old ones fall away and die." And we can establish our
> social 'would-bes' in the direction of the worst meanings falling away and
> dying while the best are nurtured and grow.
>
> GH: The idea that “Man is made in God’s Image” is a conceit of human
> exceptionalism, a product of the historical development of the
> anthropocentric mentality. If you grant a creator, all living beings are
> made in the creator’s image, except for that human subset of
> anthropocentric humans, who are made from their own idolatry. Nietzsche
> asked, “Which is it: is man one of God’s blunders, or is God one of man’s
> blunders?” (*Twilight of the Idols*, 1889). Sadly, both may be true.
>
>
> Feuerbach, who not only influenced the problematic Nietzsche, who, in my
> opinion, one ought to have outgrown by the time one leaves ones
> intellectual adolescence when nihilist intellectual brilliance had been so
> seductive. Yes, Feuerbach influenced not only Nietzsche but also that
> arch-antiSemite. Wagner (read his thoroughly disgusting essay "The Jew in
> Music" if you have any doubt of that), Hitler's favorite composer. And
> Nietzsche appears to have been the Nazis' favorite philosopher. Übermensch
> indeed!
>
> So, we have lost our innocence if we ever had it. Were those
> 'hunter-gatherers' you so admire, Gene, really so pure of heart? Whether
> the answer is yes or no, we will most certainly never be hunter-gatherers
> again. All we can hope to do is to try to correct some of the errors which
> led to our blood-stained history. Oh, sure, one can point to the
> Inquisition and the bloody crusades, but Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot,
> etc., etc. tortured and murdered millions--and *not* in the name of God.
> And the misuse of religion by politicians, for example, is patent, perhaps
> most especially in the USA.
>
> In the Christian church which I attend, Riverside Church
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_Church
> we interpret the Gospel as strongly suggesting that we ought act together
> towards achieving social justice in our communities and beyond. Riverside
> is an inter-faith, inter-racial, LGBTQ welcoming place where one might hear
> a sermon by a Rabbi one Sunday, an Imam another, a gay or transgender
> Christian minister another, etc. Here are some of our social justice
> ministries and initiatives:
>
> *Maranatha ministry: fostering greater understanding of the LGBTQ
> community. I am on a committee which awards three scholarships to LGBTQ
> college students actively working within their educational institutions to
> this end.
> *Prison Ministry: supporting incarcerated men and women to obtain justice
> and services within the New York State prison system.
> *Coming Home: empowering those men and women who have been imprisoned and
> need support and opportunities to reenter their communities.
> *Beloved Earth: helping the community to become good stewards of the Earth
> (we plant trees and do much more).
> *Sojourners: works with immigrants in detention centers
>
> And there are other social-justice initiatives including a nationwide
> anti-gun violence program.
>
> As for the Holy Spirit, as a Person of the Trinity, She more than anything
> else represents a personification of the Love between the other two Persons
> of the Trinity involving the idea of the possibility of our living this
> love in our human relations as we come more and more to consecrate our
> lives to truly valuing the lives around us, and the Earth which is surely
> our Mother. The patriarchal grip can be broken in religion, but not by
> disparaging it out of hand. And, further, it is possible to have, as it
> seems to me that Peirce did, a conception of science which is neither naive
> nor at odds with science.
>
> Best,
>
> Gary
>
>
>
> *Gary Richmond*
> *Philosophy and Critical Thinking*
> *Communication Studies*
> *LaGuardia College of the City University of New York*
>
>
>
>
>
> <http://www.avg.com/email-signature?utm_medium=email_source=link_campaign=sig-email_content=webmail>
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>
> On Wed, May 29, 2019 at 5:15 PM Eugene Halton 
> wrote:
>
>> Gary R: “one might argue that God (Abba) is transcendent while Christ
>> (the Word) is immanent, and as Christians say, we come to know God the
>> Father through God the Son.”
>>
>> Peirce’s first wife, Harriet Melusina

Re: Trinity, Continuity, and the Cosmotheandric, was, [PEIRCE-L] Re: Continuity of Semeiosis Revisited

[Eugene Halton]

Gary R: “one might argue that God (Abba) is transcendent while Christ (the
Word) is immanent, and as Christians say, we come to know God the Father
through God the Son.”

Peirce’s first wife, Harriet Melusina Fay, saw through
father-son patriarchalism, and grasped how it abstracted the mother, the
third part of a family trinity, to ethereal spirit. And “Mary as the Mother
of God” and “the Holy Family” remain alienating veils, as Ludwig Feuerbach
pointed out, masking through abstraction the earthly family.

And apart from obvious patriarchalism, there is also the obvious
anthropocentrism. The human family as religious model, though perhaps a
good starter for relational thinking for the anthropocentric humans
predominant today, is simply too confined, too human-all-too-human, to
provide a basis for a sustainable religion.

The idea that “Man is made in God’s Image” is a conceit of human
exceptionalism, a product of the historical development of the
anthropocentric mentality. If you grant a creator, all living beings are
made in the creator’s image, except for that human subset of
anthropocentric humans, who are made from their own idolatry. Nietzsche
asked, “Which is it: is man one of God’s blunders, or is God one of man’s
blunders?” (*Twilight of the Idols*, 1889). Sadly, both may be true.

Gene Halton

On Wed, May 29, 2019 at 3:55 PM Gary Richmond 
wrote:

> Jon, List,
>
> In an earlier message in this thread I suggested that in order to avoid
> confusion, when speaking of *trinity *without explicit religious
> underpinnings that we type the 't' lowercase, but that we capitalize it
> when referring to *the Trinity* of theology. In my message below, Trinity
> is almost always capitalized since it means to relate to Peirce's religious
> metaphysics in conjunction with his cosmological views, not entirely
> separate as I see it. In any case, those who are adverse to theology might
> consider skipping reading this post.
>
> I'm going to be traveling abroad with perhaps limited Internet access
> beginning this weekend through the 12th of June, but before I left, I did
> want to ask a question that came to mind again regarding Peirce's religious
> metaphysics (his cosmological theology, if I may so phrase it). I hinted at
> it earlier, but now would like to deepen the question.
>
> It seems to me that, on the one hand, Peirce suggested, and you have
> argued in your Signs paper, Jon (as suggested by the Blackboard metaphor in
> the last of the 1898 lectures) that 'before' this Universe came into being,
> 'before' there was anything Existent (so 'before' Time, 'before' the
> so-called Big Bang), that God, from *all* the Platonic possibilities,
> that is, from all imaginable and unimaginable essential Platonic forms
> which might possibly be involved in the creation of *some* Universe (the
> Blackboard metaphor, if I finally have it right), that on a kind of subset
> of that Blackboard of ur-continuity--so upon a kind of Whiteboard--He
> scribed those potential qualities and characters which *would* factor in
> the creation of this Universe. (Btw, as I understand Peirce, this is not
> the only possible universe the Scriber might create, and Peirce hints at a
> kind of multiverse theory, one which seems to me quite different from most
> modern versions of such theories.)
>
> However, you also quoted Peirce to the effect that God is
> creating this Universe continuously, that the world was *not* created on
> some particularly busy day several thousands of years ago, as Genesis (and,
> mutatis mutandis, the Whiteboard metaphor) would have it, but is happening
> now and will be happening until the World's end.
>
> It seems to me that in consideration of the ur-Continuity of the
> Blackboard from which God selected those Platonic characters ('Platonic' is
> Peirce's word in this context) which would be inscribed on 'our'
> Whiteboard, that that Person is, if I understand you correctly, the
> semeiotic Object of this Universe, the Creator of the vast evolving Symbol
> which is *this* Cosmos, our Universe.
>
> But, in consideration of the continuous creation occurring *now*, it
> seems to me that if God the Father is not immanent in this Universe then
> that continuous creation must be the ongoing work of *He who is God with
> the Father *but who is not the Father, that is, Christ. And this is one
> of the reasons that I introduced this thread on trinity (there are, of
> course, others).
>
> [Note: I have already pointed to some thinkers having a trinitarian view
> of the cosmos which is not specifically Christian or even, for that matter,
> necessarily religious (although, personally, I don't see how a trinitarian
> view of the cosmos wouldn't lead to a Trinitarian and, so, religious one,
> while the religion need not be Christianity according to some advocates of
> trinitarian thinking).]
>
> For now this problematic of *both* an *ur-creation* leading to the
> putative 'Big Bang' *and* an ongoing 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Phaneroscopy and logic

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Dan,
 You say, "I discuss Kant’s work in my book, Dark Matter of the Mind,
where I argue that there is no innate knowledge. 'Duty' 'respect' even
things like colors are largely cultural constructs, in a way that I believe
fits in quite well with Peirce’s phaneroscopy. I am not aware of any
statement in Peirce’s architectonic where innate, a priori knowledge plays
a crucial causal role for building his philosophy."

Peirce's critical common-sensism marks a sharp contrast to your claim that
innate ideas play no crucial causal role in Peirce's philosophy. Consider
his statement from "Consequences of Common-Sensism" in the Collected Papers:

“Now every animal must have habits. Consequently, it must have innate
habits. In so far as it has has cognitive powers, it must have *in posse*
innate cognitive habits, which is all that anybody but John Locke ever
meant by innate ideas. To say that I hold this for true is implied in my
confession of the doctrine of Common-Sense—not quite of the old Scotch
School, but a critical philosophy of common-sense. It is impossible rightly
to apprehend the pragmatist’s position without fully understanding that
nowhere would he be less at home than in the ranks of individualists,
whether metaphysical (and so denying scholastic realism) or epistemological
(and so denying innate ideas).”  Peirce, 5.504
Gene Halton

On Sun, Apr 7, 2019 at 3:49 PM Dan Everett  wrote:

> John,
>
> I agree with you on this. A significant difference between Peirce’s a
> priori and Kant’s is that Kant’s is necessarily not derived from
> experience. Peirce did, as you say, allow that some things might be prior
> to experience, but one gets the feeling that he would be quite happy if it
> could be shown that they were not, apart from logical constraints. One
> strong difference between Peirce’s use of the term “universal grammar” and
> Chomsky’s later use of the same phrase (going back to the Modistae, as
> readers of this list know) is that for Peirce universal/speculative grammar
> is neither nature nor nurture. I think that he would have been pleased with
> any demonstration that showed the same for non-logically required
> categories.
>
> I discuss Kant’s work in my book, Dark Matter of the Mind, where I argue
> that there is no innate knowledge.
>
> “Duty” “respect” even things like colors are largely cultural constructs,
> in a way that I believe fits in quite well with Peirce’s phaneroscopy.
>
> I am not aware of any statement in Peirce’s architectonic where innate, a
> priori knowledge plays a crucial causal role for building his philosophy.
>
> Like Hume’s use of “instinct” Peirce’s use of that term (or phylogentic
> habits) does not necessarily support nativism as widely conceived in
> contemporary literature.
>
> - Dan
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> > On Apr 7, 2019, at 3:29 PM, John F Sowa  wrote:
> >
> >> On 4/7/2019 1:59 PM, Jeffrey Brian Downard wrote:
> >> As an example of an /a priori/ element in moral cognition, consider the
> role of the /feeling/ of respect in deliberation about the what is required
> as a matter of duty. As an example of an a priori element in aesthetic
> judgment, consider the condition of seeking harmony in the experience of
> the beautiful. As an example of an /a priori/ element in mathematical
> cognition, consider the role of the intuition of the whole of ideal space
> in geometrical reasoning.
> >> In each case, I tend to think that Peirce agrees with Kant that these
> are /a priori/ and not merely /a posteriori/ elements in our practical,
> aesthetic and mathematical cognition.
> >
> > That's an interesting argument.  But I recall something Peirce said
> > about that issue (but it would require quite a bit of search to find
> > exactly where).
> >
> > He said that Kant's Critik drV was his basic training in philosophy
> > (when he was 16).  But he diverged from Kant about what is a priori.
> > Peirce admitted that there are probably some innate tendencies and
> > preferences that determine value judgments.  But experience (i.e.,
> > informal phaneroscopy) is essential to develop the details.
> >
> > John
> >
> >
> >
> > -
> > 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
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> BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm
> .
> >
> >
> >
> >
>

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Another Perspective on 'Quasi-Mind'

[Eugene Halton]

John characterized Aristotle: “5. Rational psyche of an animal having logos
(zôon logon echein).

Each psyche inherits all the abilities of the more primitive
psyches.

For Aristotle, the rational psyche of humans is the most advanced.”



I prefer “Rational psyche of an animal having logos (zôon logon echein).”
The idea that humans adequately meet that criterion, if that is Aristotle’s
opinion and if I am correctly understanding it, is problematic.

 It would be typical of humans to overrate the rational capacity and to
self-glorify the rational as the most “advanced.” One could also say that
the rational psyche of humans is the most advanced in destructive
irrationality. The human rational psyche’s most notable achievement
retrospectively may be the now developing anthropocene extinction event,
which will likely have virtually extinguished the current model of humans
and decimated life more generally.

 Another perspective is that the “rational psyche of humans,” rather
than being the most advanced, is the most dependent on the rest of the
community of life. This is the way it was and still is usually conceived by
peoples of the earth, with understanding of the need for limits on the
overweening rational human psyche. And it may prove to be the more proper
balance, of a piece with Peirce’s ideas on rational mind as “Unmatured
Instinctive Mind”:

“The conception of the Rational Mind as an Unmatured Instinctive Mind which
takes another development precisely because of its childlike character is
confirmed, not only by the prolonged childhood of men, but also by the fact
that all systems of rational performances have had instinct for their first
germ” CP 7.381.

The others, us, the civilized peoples who in various ways thought and still
think that the earth could be controlled and transcended through
technology, religions of transcendence, and the progress of power, are in
the process of having that hubris brought down to earth.

James Lovelock, who invented the electron capture detector in 1957, with
which he was the first to measure CFCs in the atmosphere, and who later,
while working for NASA, proposed the Gaia hypothesis, said in an interview
in 2008:

"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very
similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep
separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on
the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly.
That’s the source of my optimism.” For more of his optimism of the long
run:
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange

Gene Halton

On Fri, Dec 7, 2018 at 10:48 PM Gary Richmond 
wrote:

> Jon, list,
>
> Thanks for this post as it appears to me from these passages (and many
> other which I'm sure could be cited and which I vaguely recall) that I will
> *not* have to revise/upend/reverse everything I've ever thought about how
> Peirce viewed form and matter; and that I can continue to safely associate
> form with 1ns, matter with 2ns.
>
> Whew! I was worried there for a moment!
>
> Best,
>
> Gary
>
>
> *Gary Richmond*
> *Philosophy and Critical Thinking*
> *Communication Studies*
> *LaGuardia College of the City University of New York*
>
> *718 482-5690*
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 7, 2018 at 9:52 PM Jon Alan Schmidt 
> wrote:
>
>> Gary F., List:
>>
>> Here is what Peirce actually wrote at EP 2:373 (1906).
>>
>> CSP:  *The idea of growth,*--the stately tree springing from the tiny
>> grain,--was the key that Aristotle brought to be tried upon this intricate
>> grim lock. In such trials he came upon those wonderful conceptions, *δύναμις
>> *and *ἐ**νέργεια*, *ὕ**λη *and *μορφή *or *ε**ἶ**δος*, or, as he might
>> still better have said, *τύπος*, the blow, the *coup*. (*A propos* of
>> what was said above about the way to read, the sentence just set down is an
>> instance of one beyond which a reader had better not proceed, until he
>> pretty nearly understands the point of view from which the force of that
>> remark appears.) This idea of Aristotle's has proved marvellously fecund;
>> and in truth it is the only idea covering quite the whole area of cenoscopy
>> that has shown any marked uberosity.
>>
>>
>> Notice what he stated immediately after mentioning *τύπος*.
>> Unfortunately, per the EP endnotes, the earlier pages where he apparently
>> discussed "the way to read" are missing.  That only gives greater weight to
>> his warning about not proceeding without understanding "the point of view
>> from which the force of that remark appears."
>>
>> It seems very tenuous to me to conclude from this one sentence that "
>> *form* is the active and forceful side of the matter/form duality, while
>> *matter* is the passive side," such that "*matter* corresponds to
>> Firstness and *form* to Secondness."  On the contrary, Peirce quite
>> unambiguously associated Form with 1ns and Matter with 2ns, not only in
>> "New 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Another Perspective on 'Quasi-Mind'

[Eugene Halton]

Thought provoking article I can ... resonate ... with. Thanks for sending,
Mike.
Gene Halton



On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 11:59 AM Mike Bergman  wrote:

> List,
>
> Speaking of quasi-minds, this reference is very thought provoking,
> though the author does not mention Peirce:
>
>
> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-hippies-were-right-its-all-about-vibrations-man/
>
> Mike
>
>
>

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Disinformation, dystopia and post-reality in social media: A semiotic-cognitive perspective

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Atila,

 Thanks for your interesting posts! Yes, "big data" can help establish
facts in a dystopic world of dissembling disinformation and delusional
denial of reality. But it can also act negatively as part of the
overquantification of life, the counting numbers until only numbers count.

 McLuhan's idea of a "global village" in 1964 pointed toward the
possibilities of increased extended electronic communications, such as this
list. But there is no "village." A village has properties much different
from those of a global network. Villages promote strong ties of kinds that
the global network tends not to. A very significant effect of living in the
global network in everyday life is how it acts to confine the human
creature within artificial screen worlds and schematas, not simply liberate
it. A key challenge is in how to keep the human spirit in the forefront of
“weak ties” communities.

 McLuhan said in that 1964 work, *Understanding Media*: "By
continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as
servo-mechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these
objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions."



 This is lunacy, to propose servanthood to servo-mechanisms instead of
mastery over them as means of living, whose purport we determine. Count me
out of this Deus-ex-machina religion. Here I find the words of
Prague-matist Vaclav Havel, from his op-editorial "The End of the Modern
Era," in The New York Times, March 1, 1992) far more insightful than the
ideas of McLuhan. What do you think?

 "What is needed is something different, something larger. Man’s
attitude to the world must be radically changed. We have to abandon the
arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine
with instructions for use waiting to be discovered, a body of information
to be fed into a computer in the hope that, sooner or later, it will spit
out a universal solution.

It is my profound conviction that we have to release from the sphere of
private whim such forces as a natural, unique and unrepeatable experience
of the world, an elementary sense of justice, the ability to see things as
others do, a sense of transcendental responsibility, archetypal wisdom,
good taste, courage, compassion and faith in the importance of particular
measures that do not aspire to be a universal key to salvation. Such forces
must be rehabilitated."



 Gene Halton



On Sat, Nov 3, 2018 at 1:23 PM Atila Bayat  wrote:

> New Media studies, or the field of media ecology, as it is called today,
> addresses these kinds of issues. I agree with the authors in finding Peirce
> is relevant as far as the fixation of belief, hypothesis formation, and
> fallibilism - if we can utilize ‘big data’ technology to falsify claims, it
> can serve us well. Nowadays, Media Ecology privileges the subjects of
> ‘alternative news’ and ‘dystopia.’
>
> I remember McLuhan's work well, and was in touch with his son Eric McLuhan
> discussing a project before he passed in the summer. M. McLuhan wrote of
> the global village in 1964, earlier and later, and wonder why it is listed
> as 2008? I will look up those references.
>
> As an aside, McLuhan was trying to help promote Eric Havelock’s book *Preface
> to Plato* into a motion picture/movie in 1968. Havelock made good mention
> of McLuhan in chapter 3 of his book *The Muse Learns to Write *1986.
>
>
> Atila
>
> On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 4:19 PM Gary Richmond 
> wrote:
>
>> List,
>>
>> The Brazilian Peirce scholar and semiotician, Vinicius Romanini, brought
>> this this recently published and pertinent article to my attention. It
>> employs Peircean concepts and methodology. Here's the abstract:
>>
>>
>> https://content.iospress.com/articles/education-for-information/efi180209?fbclid=IwAR1f_XKsqHnHA_3C9eFYUxxmtXBDpV5H0fliXLqqXKEZ1ZjBvjL9N43Y_uI
>>
>> Disinformation, dystopia and post-reality in social media: A
>> semiotic-cognitive perspective
>>
>> Article type: Research Article
>>
>> Authors: Guarda, Rebeka F.
>> 
>>  | Ohlson, Marcia P.
>> 
>>  | Romanini, Anderson V.
>> 
>> *
>> 
>>
>> Affiliations: School of Communications and Arts, University of São
>> Paulo, SP, Brazil
>>
>> Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Anderson V. Romanini, School
>> of Communications and Arts, University of São Paulo, Brazil. E-mail:
>> vinicius.roman...@usp.br.
>>
>> Abstract: Based on recent political happenings, such as Brexit (UK) and
>> the election of Donald Trump (USA), it has become clear that political
>> marketing has been using ‘Big Data’ 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Music in some theories of the origin of language, Was, A Sign Is Not a Real Thing

[Eugene Halton]

volved over millions of years to readily understand.
> Long before humans evolved, mammals have learned to interpret the sounds of
> nature to understand both threats and opportunities. Our speech—regardless
> of language—is very clearly based on the sounds of nature.
>
>
> Langer's work in this area has been largely neglected, while Changizi's
> remains controversial.
>
> Best,
>
> Gary
>
>
> Even more fascinating, Changizi shows that music itself is based on
> natural sounds. Music—seemingly one of the most human of inventions—is
> literally built on sounds and patterns of sound that have existed since the
> beginning of time.
> ccc
>
> *Gary Richmond*
> *Philosophy and Critical Thinking*
> *Communication Studies*
> *LaGuardia College of the City University of New York*
>
> *718 482-5690*
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 3:47 PM Eugene Halton 
> wrote:
>
>> I also agree. To twist Ernst Haeckel's saying: ontology does not
>> recapitulate philology, contra Derrida.
>>  Gene H
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 3:20 PM Mary Libertin 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I agree. With you, and with my interpretation of Sternfeldt.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 3:18 PM Daniel L Everett <
>>> danleveret...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Derrida is completely wrong. Both phylogenetically and ontogenetically.
>>>> Besides doing field research on Amazonian languages that lack any form of
>>>> writing, I have written extensively on language evolution. I have heard
>>>> Derrida’s unfortunate claim before.
>>>> https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307386120/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0307386120
>>>>
>>>> https://www.amazon.com/How-Language-Began-Humanitys-
>>>> Invention/dp/0871407957
>>>>
>>>> Dan Everett
>>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>>
>>>> On Aug 13, 2018, at 16:40, Mary Libertin 
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Jon A S and list,
>>>>
>>>> I find this discussion interesting. I have no thesis, instead just some
>>>> observations for possible discussion.
>>>>
>>>> Peirce in EP 2:488, as previously quoted, writes that the
>>>> tinge/tone/mark precedes the token/type. Are three senses possibly being
>>>> alluded to: sight, sound, and touch?
>>>>
>>>>  In regard to the sound and touch, I recall Peirce’s use of the utterer
>>>> and the graphist.
>>>>
>>>> The latter two suggest more agency. Saussure discussed the
>>>> signifier/signified relation in terms of the phoneme and speech, and rarely
>>>> the grapheme and writing.  Speech can not be removed or erased, and it
>>>> assumes permanence with quote marks.
>>>>
>>>> Derrida argued the grapheme preceded the phoneme, the written vs the
>>>> spoken. How relevant that is remains to be seen. Frederick Sternfelt in the
>>>> title of his insightful book _Diagrammatology_ makes implicit reference to
>>>> Derrida’s _Grammatology_, whose work is given short shrift. It may be that
>>>> preceed-ence is not an issue with the decisign, or not relevant.
>>>>
>>>> I do recall Peirce using tinge with regard to existential graphs, and
>>>> tinges perhaps served a purpose, perhaps with reference to layering and
>>>> juxtaposition in logic, that could not achieved with the spoken or written.
>>>>
>>>> It may be possible that Peirce ultimately chose mark rather than tinge
>>>> or tone because it is more permanent.
>>>>
>>>> I apologize for lacking a thesis and any mistakes, and I look forward
>>>> to your responses.
>>>>
>>>> Mary Libertin
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 1:45 PM Jon Alan Schmidt <
>>>> jonalanschm...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> John S., List:
>>>>>
>>>>> JFS:  I believe that the subject line blurs too many issues.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> It is a direct quote from Peirce (EP 2:303; 1904), and the point of
>>>>> the thread is to explicate it.
>>>>>
>>>>> JFS:  Since mark is his final choice, I'll use mark instead of tinge
>>>>> or tone.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> In the referenced passage, Peirce stated, "I dare say some of my
>>>>> former names are better than those I now use

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Music in some theories of the origin of language, Was, A Sign Is Not a Real Thing

[Eugene Halton]

a woman's menstrual cycle, the tides, etc.--certain
> ecstatically uttered sounds, perhaps first vocalized loudly by a tribal
> leader or shaman in a tribal dance, became associated with that shaman's
> utterance, was repeated by the community, and became their word for 'moon'.
>
>
> On the "significance of music" Langer wrote:
>
> Let us therefore call the significance of music its “vital import” instead
> of “meaning,” using “vital” . . . as a qualifying adjective restricting the
> relevance of “import” to the dynamism of subjective experience.
>
> Some have gone even deeper into the science involved in such a theory. One
> example is the cognitive scientist, Mark Changizi, in his book,
> *Harnessed*. From the publisher's blurb
>
> In *Harnessed,* cognitive scientist Mark Changizi demonstrates that human
> speech has been very specifically “designed” to harness the sounds of
> nature, sounds we’ve evolved over millions of years to readily understand.
> Long before humans evolved, mammals have learned to interpret the sounds of
> nature to understand both threats and opportunities. Our speech—regardless
> of language—is very clearly based on the sounds of nature.
>
>
> Langer's work in this area has been largely neglected, while Changizi's
> remains controversial.
>
> Best,
>
> Gary
>
>
> Even more fascinating, Changizi shows that music itself is based on
> natural sounds. Music—seemingly one of the most human of inventions—is
> literally built on sounds and patterns of sound that have existed since the
> beginning of time.
> ccc
>
> *Gary Richmond*
> *Philosophy and Critical Thinking*
> *Communication Studies*
> *LaGuardia College of the City University of New York*
>
> *718 482-5690*
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 3:47 PM Eugene Halton 
> wrote:
>
>> I also agree. To twist Ernst Haeckel's saying: ontology does not
>> recapitulate philology, contra Derrida.
>>  Gene H
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 3:20 PM Mary Libertin 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I agree. With you, and with my interpretation of Sternfeldt.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 3:18 PM Daniel L Everett <
>>> danleveret...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Derrida is completely wrong. Both phylogenetically and ontogenetically.
>>>> Besides doing field research on Amazonian languages that lack any form of
>>>> writing, I have written extensively on language evolution. I have heard
>>>> Derrida’s unfortunate claim before.
>>>> https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307386120/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0307386120
>>>>
>>>> https://www.amazon.com/How-Language-Began-Humanitys-
>>>> Invention/dp/0871407957
>>>>
>>>> Dan Everett
>>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>>
>>>> On Aug 13, 2018, at 16:40, Mary Libertin 
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Jon A S and list,
>>>>
>>>> I find this discussion interesting. I have no thesis, instead just some
>>>> observations for possible discussion.
>>>>
>>>> Peirce in EP 2:488, as previously quoted, writes that the
>>>> tinge/tone/mark precedes the token/type. Are three senses possibly being
>>>> alluded to: sight, sound, and touch?
>>>>
>>>>  In regard to the sound and touch, I recall Peirce’s use of the utterer
>>>> and the graphist.
>>>>
>>>> The latter two suggest more agency. Saussure discussed the
>>>> signifier/signified relation in terms of the phoneme and speech, and rarely
>>>> the grapheme and writing.  Speech can not be removed or erased, and it
>>>> assumes permanence with quote marks.
>>>>
>>>> Derrida argued the grapheme preceded the phoneme, the written vs the
>>>> spoken. How relevant that is remains to be seen. Frederick Sternfelt in the
>>>> title of his insightful book _Diagrammatology_ makes implicit reference to
>>>> Derrida’s _Grammatology_, whose work is given short shrift. It may be that
>>>> preceed-ence is not an issue with the decisign, or not relevant.
>>>>
>>>> I do recall Peirce using tinge with regard to existential graphs, and
>>>> tinges perhaps served a purpose, perhaps with reference to layering and
>>>> juxtaposition in logic, that could not achieved with the spoken or written.
>>>>
>>>> It may be possible that Peirce ultimately chose mark rather than tinge
>>>> or tone because it is more permanent.
>>>>
>>>> I apologize for lacking

Re: [PEIRCE-L] A Sign Is Not a Real Thing

[Eugene Halton]

I also agree. To twist Ernst Haeckel's saying: ontology does not
recapitulate philology, contra Derrida.
 Gene H

On Mon, Aug 13, 2018, 3:20 PM Mary Libertin  wrote:

> I agree. With you, and with my interpretation of Sternfeldt.
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 3:18 PM Daniel L Everett 
> wrote:
>
>> Derrida is completely wrong. Both phylogenetically and ontogenetically.
>> Besides doing field research on Amazonian languages that lack any form of
>> writing, I have written extensively on language evolution. I have heard
>> Derrida’s unfortunate claim before.
>> https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307386120/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_0307386120
>>
>>
>> https://www.amazon.com/How-Language-Began-Humanitys-Invention/dp/0871407957
>>
>> Dan Everett
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On Aug 13, 2018, at 16:40, Mary Libertin  wrote:
>>
>> Jon A S and list,
>>
>> I find this discussion interesting. I have no thesis, instead just some
>> observations for possible discussion.
>>
>> Peirce in EP 2:488, as previously quoted, writes that the tinge/tone/mark
>> precedes the token/type. Are three senses possibly being alluded to: sight,
>> sound, and touch?
>>
>>  In regard to the sound and touch, I recall Peirce’s use of the utterer
>> and the graphist.
>>
>> The latter two suggest more agency. Saussure discussed the
>> signifier/signified relation in terms of the phoneme and speech, and rarely
>> the grapheme and writing.  Speech can not be removed or erased, and it
>> assumes permanence with quote marks.
>>
>> Derrida argued the grapheme preceded the phoneme, the written vs the
>> spoken. How relevant that is remains to be seen. Frederick Sternfelt in the
>> title of his insightful book _Diagrammatology_ makes implicit reference to
>> Derrida’s _Grammatology_, whose work is given short shrift. It may be that
>> preceed-ence is not an issue with the decisign, or not relevant.
>>
>> I do recall Peirce using tinge with regard to existential graphs, and
>> tinges perhaps served a purpose, perhaps with reference to layering and
>> juxtaposition in logic, that could not achieved with the spoken or written.
>>
>> It may be possible that Peirce ultimately chose mark rather than tinge or
>> tone because it is more permanent.
>>
>> I apologize for lacking a thesis and any mistakes, and I look forward to
>> your responses.
>>
>> Mary Libertin
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 1:45 PM Jon Alan Schmidt <
>> jonalanschm...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> John S., List:
>>>
>>> JFS:  I believe that the subject line blurs too many issues.
>>>
>>>
>>> It is a direct quote from Peirce (EP 2:303; 1904), and the point of the
>>> thread is to explicate it.
>>>
>>> JFS:  Since mark is his final choice, I'll use mark instead of tinge or
>>> tone.
>>>
>>>
>>> In the referenced passage, Peirce stated, "I dare say some of my former
>>> names are better than those I now use" (EP 2:488; 1908).  In fact, less
>>> than two weeks earlier, he had asked Lady Welby specifically about Tone vs.
>>> Mark (SS 83; 1908); and if I remember right--I do not have a copy of her
>>> reply--she found Tone preferable because a tone of voice is a paradigmatic
>>> example.  Peirce also used Tone in what I think is one of his clearest
>>> passages about this division of Signs (CP 4.537; 1906).
>>>
>>> JFS:  General principle:  In any occurrence of semiosis, there is always
>>> a perceptible mark that is interpreted by some mind or quasi-mind as a
>>> token of some type.
>>>
>>>
>>> This may be a case of hair-splitting on my part, but I would suggest
>>> instead that in any Instance of a Sign, the Tone is the character (or set
>>> of characters) by which the interpreting Quasi-mind recognizes the
>>> Sign-Replica to be an individual Token of the Type.  Acquaintance with the
>>> system of Signs (Essential Information) is necessary and sufficient for
>>> this.  It is analogous to the role of the Immediate Object as that by which
>>> the interpreting Quasi-mind identifies the Dynamic Object of the Sign, for
>>> which Collateral Experience (Experiential Information) is necessary and
>>> sufficient (cf. CP 8.179, EP 2:494; 1909).
>>>
>>> As a Possible, the Tone can only have an Immediate Interpretant--"its
>>> peculiar Interpretability before it gets any Interpreter."  As an Existent,
>>> the Token is what produces the Dynamic Interpretant--"that which is
>>> experienced in each act of Interpretation."  As a Necessitant, only the
>>> Type has a Final Interpretant--"the one Interpretative result to which
>>> every Interpreter is destined to come if the Sign is sufficiently
>>> considered," which corresponds to the correct Habit of Interpretation
>>> (Substantial Information).  In other words, "The Immediate Interpretant is
>>> an abstraction, consisting in a Possibility. The Dynamical Interpretant is
>>> a single actual event. The Final Interpretant is that toward which the
>>> actual tends" (SS 111; 1909).
>>>
>>> JFS:  In summary, semiosis turns real possibilities into real
>>> actualities.
>>>

Re: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Culture wires the brain

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Helmut,
 Thank you for your comments Helmut. I have been trying to address some
of these issues in different writings. In a chapter published a few years
ago titled "From the Emergent Drama of Interpretation to Enscreenment" I
also made use of Peirce and pragmatist philosopher George Herbert Mead to
argue for a model of "dramatic evolution," as an aspect of the emergence of
human symboling capacities, an aspect which can involve both genetic and
cultural elements, and Peirce's idea of energetic projaculation. I can send
a copy of the chapter if you would like one. For example, in the context of
my previous post:
 "Though communicative cooperation is the starting point for Mead’s
model of the interactive situation, it begins even earlier than Mead
imagined, stemming from the subcortical infant brain from within hours of
birth, as Meltzoff and Moore (1977; Meltzoff 2002) and Trevarthen (1980),
have shown. Such communicative cooperation is possible in newborn and
infant interaction with mothers, a dramatic dialogue without the presence
of a fully organized object that can be responded to, yet an object
sufficiently co-present that dialogical interaction can occur. This
situation stems from genetically transmitted, physiological needs of the
infant, called out through call and response gestural repartee with the
mother/caretaker (Hrdy 2009). This dialogue illustrates one of the ways in
which nature and culture play, and how homo sapiens sapiens needs to be
understood not simply as homo competitor, but as what Johannes Huizinga
originally introduced as homo ludens, man playing."
 I also have been pursuing related ideas with others. I helped
co-organize a conference 2 years ago on issues of indigenous wisdom for
contemporary flourishing, that will be published in the next year as an
edited book.
 Gene Halton


On Thu, Aug 9, 2018, 5:22 PM Helmut Raulien  wrote:

> Eugene, List,
>
> Thank you, Eugene! It is necessary to exactly distinguish, which parts of
> behaviour and intelligence are influenced by culture, and which not. One
> should not infer from differences regarding spatial orientation and
> awareness of specific environmental events (snakes, caimans) to social
> capabilities, predispositions, and behaviours.
>
> Regarding language: What about body language, especially facial
> expression? It is the same with all humans, the remotest and most isolated
> ones too. You go visit a stone age tribe in Papua-New Guinea, who never
> have met other people before, and you can communicate with them using
> hands, feet, and facial expressions. And they love their babies too, and
> bury their deceased ones (ok, they eat their brains, which we don´t do, and
> sometimes they shoot each other with arrows, unlike us who kill each other
> by social marginalisation with poverty, but that is details cherry picking).
>
> I wish, more experts such as you would intervene and put things right.
> Sociology and development psychology exists for centuries now. There is no
> justified space for ethnopluralism in a serious discussion I say.
>
> Best,
> Helmut
>
>
>  08. August 2018 um 23:00 Uhr
>  "Eugene Halton" 
>
> John quoted the statement from an earlier article I believe:
> > “Early infancy is a critical time for establishing the biology of a
> healthy mind. You’re not born with a social brain, you grow one.”
>
>  This statement seems to me to be patently false. Not only are there
> socialization processes between the developing fetus and the mother's voice
> in utero, but the human infant is born already with a social and
> communicative brain.
>  Colwyn Trevathan and Steven Malloch's research on what they term
> communicative musicality shows that the newborn infant very quickly begins
> to engage in dialogical banter with the mother. The banter from the infant
> has the quality, phrasing, call and response timing, and narrative of
> music. It is all coming from the subcortical brain of the newborn, because
> the upper brain connections have not yet been made.
>  That bantering interaction provides a basis for the later dialogical
> interaction out of which language will develop.
>  Gene H
>
> On Wed, Aug 8, 2018, 1:45 PM John F Sowa  wrote:
>
>> On 8/8/2018 8:41 AM, Edwina Taborsky wrote:
>> > if you see our species [homo sapiens] as a kind of 'black slate'
>>
>> Both of the articles cited are contributions to the nature/nurture
>> debates that have been going on for centuries.  Neither one said
>> that the infant's mind or brain is a "blank slate" at birth.
>>
>> > our species is not born with innate knowledge and requires a long
>> > nurturance period.  And our type of socialization requires language.
>> > So- how do yo

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Culture wires the brain

[Eugene Halton]

John quoted the statement from an earlier article I believe:
> “Early infancy is a critical time for establishing the biology of a
healthy mind. You’re not born with a social brain, you grow one.”

 This statement seems to me to be patently false. Not only are there
socialization processes between the developing fetus and the mother's voice
in utero, but the human infant is born already with a social and
communicative brain.
 Colwyn Trevathan and Steven Malloch's research on what they term
communicative musicality shows that the newborn infant very quickly begins
to engage in dialogical banter with the mother. The banter from the infant
has the quality, phrasing, call and response timing, and narrative of
music. It is all coming from the subcortical brain of the newborn, because
the upper brain connections have not yet been made.
 That bantering interaction provides a basis for the later dialogical
interaction out of which language will develop.
 Gene H

On Wed, Aug 8, 2018, 1:45 PM John F Sowa  wrote:

> On 8/8/2018 8:41 AM, Edwina Taborsky wrote:
> > if you see our species [homo sapiens] as a kind of 'black slate'
>
> Both of the articles cited are contributions to the nature/nurture
> debates that have been going on for centuries.  Neither one said
> that the infant's mind or brain is a "blank slate" at birth.
>
> > our species is not born with innate knowledge and requires a long
> > nurturance period.  And our type of socialization requires language.
> > So- how do you get away from the notion that the requirement for
> > language is innate?
>
> You need large numbers of researchers exploring the issues from
> many points of view.  And as Peirce said, do not block the way
> of inquiry.  Chomsky, for example, has spent the past 40 years in
> blocking attempts to disprove his hypotheses from 60 years ago.
>
> For example, consider "our type of socialization requires language."
> That's true.  But what kind of language?  What kind of socialization?
> And what aspects of each are required or optional?
>
> Dan E. shows how a language and culture that developed in centuries
> of isolation from "our type of socialization" can be radically
> different from "our kind of language".
>
> It's unethical to deprive infants of various stimuli to see what
> happens, but there are naturally occurring situations that create
> variations.  For an example from the other article:
>
> > So a child’s brain will develop differently depending on how
> > attentive her parents are, whether she lives in poverty, and
> > which culture she grows up in.
> >
> > “Early infancy is a critical time for establishing the biology
> > of a healthy mind. You’re not born with a social brain, you
> > grow one.”
>
> Another kind of study addresses the issues of infants raised
> by parents with two different native languages, spoken and
> signed.  (Not surprisingly, the study was done in Canada.)
> See below.
>
> John
> ___
>
>  From slide 14 of http://jfsowa.com/talks/vrmind.pdf
>
> A study of bilingual infants whose parents speak or sign different
> languages: *
>
> ● All six combinations of four languages: English, French, American
> Sign Language (ASL), and Langue des Signes Québécoise (LSQ).
>
> ● Monolingual and bilingual babies go through the same stages and
> at the same ages for both spoken and signed languages.
>
> ● Hearing babies born to profoundly deaf parents babble with their
> hands, but not vocally.
>
> ● Babies bilingual in a spoken and a signed language babble in both
> modalities – vocally and with their hands.
>
> ● And they express themselves with equal fluency in their spoken and
> signed language at every stage of development.
>
> The same brain areas that support spoken languages support
> signed languages, but other areas are also involved. **
>
> * Laura-Ann Petitto (2005) http://petitto.net/pubs/published
>
> ** R. Campbell, M. MacSweeney, & D. Waters (2007) Sign language
> and the brain: A review.
> https://academic.oup.com/jdsde/article/13/1/3/500594
>

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Recommendation: In email notes, avoid the word 'you'

[Eugene Halton]

Nope.

On Fri, Aug 3, 2018, 8:06 PM Gary Richmond  wrote:

> Gene, list,
>
> Gene quoted Peirce:
>
> "But the mere putting of a proposition into the interrogative form does
> not stimulate the mind to any struggle after belief. There must be a real
> and living doubt, and without this all discussion [is?] idle" (CP 5.376).
>
> I doubt that either quibbling or inquiry is likely to cease on this list
> or anywhere. Do you?
>
> Best,
>
> Gary
>
>
>
> *Gary Richmond*
> *Philosophy and Critical Thinking*
> *Communication Studies*
> *LaGuardia College of the City University of New York*
>
> *718 482-5690*
>
> On Fri, Aug 3, 2018 at 7:56 PM, Eugene Halton 
> wrote:
>
>>
>> I propose the term "the unlimited community of quibblers." It may at
>> first blush seem to suggest some parallels to Peirce's "unlimited community
>> of inquirers," but it somehow seems to last longer with no hope of
>> resolution, despite its promise of the last word.
>>  I won't say another word about it.
>>  Not another word.
>>  Nope.
>>  Gene
>>
>> "But the mere putting of a proposition into the interrogative form does
>> not stimulate the mind to any struggle after belief. There must be a real
>> and living doubt, and without this all discussion idle" (CP 5.376).
>>
>>
>>
>> -
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>> BODY of the message. More at
>> http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Recommendation: In email notes, avoid the word 'you'

[Eugene Halton]

I propose the term "the unlimited community of quibblers." It may at first
blush seem to suggest some parallels to Peirce's "unlimited community of
inquirers," but it somehow seems to last longer with no hope of resolution,
despite its promise of the last word.
 I won't say another word about it.
 Not another word.
 Nope.
 Gene

"But the mere putting of a proposition into the interrogative form does not
stimulate the mind to any struggle after belief. There must be a real and
living doubt, and without this all discussion idle" (CP 5.376).

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] How language began, a Ted talk by Dan Everett

[Eugene Halton]

Dear John,

 Thanks for posting the link, I enjoyed Dan Everett TEDx talk on homo
erectus, pushing back language origins. Two brief comments. Re persistence
hunting: Hand gestures can be much more helpful than spoken language for
group to maintain “radio silence.” So I would suspect there would be a hand
gesturing sign language from very early. This also could connect to an
older history, as observed in chimps now, of hand gestures as more flexible
early on than facial gestures or vocalizations.

And Dan, re your remarks near the end concerning Johnny Erectus as first
person who spoke. It seems to me more likey that it was Johnny’s Mom
bantering with him when he was a newborn. “Motherese” is huge in language
formation and origins, as Dean Falk (*Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants
and the Origins of Language*), Sarah Hrdy, (*Mothers and Others: The
Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding*), and others have discussed.
I wonder what you might think of this, Dan.

Gene Halton



On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 8:06 AM, John F Sowa  wrote:

> I came across a Ted talk by Dan E with the title
> "How language began".  At the halfway mark (9 minutes)
> he mentions Peirce and relates his semiotic to the issues:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFxg5vkaPgk
>
> My only comment would be that there was probably some
> kind of vocalization a few million years earlier.
>
> Chimpanzees in the wild use gestures to communicate among
> themselves.  When Australopithecus began to walk upright,
> they could carry stuff (food, weapons, and babies).  Sounds
> would be a useful supplement when their hands were full.
>
> John
>
>
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>
>
>
>
>
>

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Re: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Skepticism regarding "alien" life in the cosmos

[Eugene Halton]

Helmut, would that be ...
  ... alien ...
... abduction?
 Gene Halton

On Thu, May 17, 2018, 2:16 PM Helmut Raulien  wrote:

> List,
> I am not up to date with the thread, but about the aliens topic to me it
> seems most likely, that there is a galactic confederation, which has
> declared the earth for nature reserve. Visiting earth and giving us hints
> of aliens (sending signals) is prohibited. They only take discrete actions,
> when we are about to destroy ourselves, e.g. the (quite some) times we were
> close to nuclear war. The few UFO and aliens sightings that weren´t hoaxes
> were caused by alien outlaw teenagers on joyrides with stolen or from their
> parents borrowed UFOs with disabled (neutrino or quantums entanglement)
> transponders. And so on, I will write a scifi book some time.
> Best, Helmut
>
>  17. Mai 2018 um 07:16 Uhr
>  "Gary Richmond" 
> wrote:
> John S, list,
>
> And I think it's significant in the context of the several recent threads
> that Peirce was one of the first scientists to imagine that there had to be
> a cosmos beyond the Milky Way, our own galaxy.
>
> Best,
>
> Gary
>
>
>
>
> *Gary Richmond*
> *Philosophy and Critical Thinking*
> *Communication Studies*
> *LaGuardia College of the City University of New York*
> *718 482-5690*
>
> On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 8:12 PM, John F Sowa  wrote:
>>
>> On 5/16/2018 5:43 PM, Gary Richmond wrote:
>>>
>>> So, at very least, the jury is still out on this question.
>>
>>
>> I certainly agree.  Ray K's predictions about AI have usually
>> been unreliable or just wrong.
>>
>> The inverse square law implies that the energy of electromagnetic
>> radiation falls off very rapidly *unless* the transmission is beamed
>> directly at some intended target.
>>
>> The absence of any evidence of alien civilizations could just mean
>> that nobody in our region of the Milky Way noticed, or nobody beamed
>> any info at us, or that nobody on earth was listening if and when
>> somebody did send a message our way.
>>
>> The likelihood that any civilization in another galaxy could have
>> noticed our planet is vanishingly small.  If they had detected
>> our planet, they must have detected billions of others that were
>> closer or more interesting to them.  And if they had beamed a
>> message our way, it's certain that we never beamed a response
>> to them, and they probably gave up.
>>
>> John
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>
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[PEIRCE-L] Peirce’s insufficient religious conservatism (was Reconciling science and religion...)

[Eugene Halton]

5/15/18Peirce’s insufficient religious conservatism

I agree with you Gary R concerning Peirce’s direct explicit
statements on his belief in God, many cited by Jon Schmidt. You provide
some quotations from Peirce on a rapprochement between religion and science
(Peirce: "religion, so true to itself, that it becomes animated by the
scientific spirit..."), and I also agree with Peirce’s statements there as
regarding the attitude in which such a rapprochement can take place. But
there is something missing. Peirce seems to hold, and I assume virtually
everyone on this list would agree, that such a rapprochement would be
unprecedented. I do not agree with that outlook. In my view both religion
and the scientific spirit bodied into being together in the evolutionary
course of human development. It was only in a later development that the
split occurred, especially with the emergent religions of transcendence
roughly 2500 years ago, the religions of what John Stuart-Glennie called
“the moral revolution,” and Karl Jaspers 75 years later called “the axial
age.”

The religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,
exemplify “the moral revolution,” the greater reflective consciousness that
broke out in philosophy as well (I take this theme up in my book *From the
Axial Age to the Moral Revolution*). Jaspers and many scholars of the axial
age take this in a triumphalist progressive sense, but it came with many
costs. Elevating the moral element of religion came with a relative
devaluing of religion involving perceptive relations to wild habitat, and
even religion as an “uncontrollable sensual experience… an experience deep
down in the senses, inexplicable and inscrutable,” as D. H. Lawrence put
it. And further, through the “renouncers” of the moral revolution, morality
became constricted largely to the human realm (albeit less so in East Asian
variants); wild nature stopped being a great teacher and source of
spiritual wisdom in numerous subtle practices from wayfinding and tracking
to what we now call field biology. Wild nature was desacralized as human
prophets, cities, and books became sacrilized. Religion parted ways with
the wisdom of the wild earth. Nevertheless that wisdom remained as tempered
capacities of our bodies, of our capacities for common sense, for abductive
inference, for seeing *il lume naturale*.

A few months back I criticized Peirce for racist and imperialist
conservative views he held. But here I would have to say that *Peirce was
simply not conservative enough* in turning to religions of, and stemming
from, the moral revolution/axial age of roughly 2500 years ago, such as
Christianity and Buddhism, instead of entrusting to the long-term tempered
sentiments and religious mind sets forged in the past few hundred thousand
years as hunter gatherers at the least. No wonder Peirce was so restless in
seeking to articulate his religious views. He remained stifled by his
civilizational constraints and prejudices.

For me, the legacy of hunter-gatherer outlooks, characterized by John
Stuart-Glennie as *Panzooinism*, more easily align with Peirce's religious
and scientific views, especially “heurospudism.”

Peirce: “the heurospudists look upon discovery as making acquaintance with
God and as the very purpose for which the human race was created. Indeed as
the very purpose of God in creating the world at all. [...] when I say
that God is, I mean that the conception of a God is the highest flight
toward an understanding of the original of the whole physico-psychical
universe that we can make. It has the advantage over the agnostics and
other views of offering to our apprehension an object to be loved. Now
the heurospudist has an imperative need of finding in nature an object to
love. His science cannot subsist without it. For science to him must be
worship in order not to fall down before the feet of some idol of human
workmanship. Remember that the human race is but an ephemeral thing. In a
little while it will be altogether done with and cast aside. Even now is
merely dominant on one small planet of one insignificant star, while all
that our sight embraces on a starry night is to the universe far less than
a single cell of the brain is to the whole man. (MS 1334, 20, 1905).

“Finding in nature an object to love,” the scientifically inspired worship
that Peirce describes, goes to the source of the origins of religion as
well, as I’m claiming, to perceptive wonder.

Peirce also wrote, as you cited Gary R: “The complete generalization, the
complete regeneration of sentiment is religion, which is poetry, but poetry
completed” (CP 1.676; 1898).

But, as I put it a number of years back, if religion is poetry
completed, in the sense of a “regenerative metamorphosis of sentiment,”
then marveling in nature, without and within, is the completion of
religion, the generative metamorphosis of sentiment and cosmos. And that is
our long-term human legacy, from 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Perfect Sign Revisited

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Jon S,
 I enjoyed reading your Additament article.
 In your post from this morning you say: " As embodied metaphysical
Quasi-minds, we are both constituents and interpreters of the Universe as
God's great Symbol and Argument.  Furthermore, as morally responsible
Persons, we can also be contributors to it--we have the opportunity (and
privilege) to participate voluntarily in God's still-unfolding creative
activity.  The Perfect Sign thus serves as an ideal, or regulative hope,
which would be achieved if all of us were to become fully welded with the
eternal Mind who is our Creator."

 Accepting for the moment the context of your argument, I'm wondering,
if I understand you correctly, why you seem to limit human contribution to
ongoing creation to "morally responsible Persons," and participation to
"voluntarily." What about "aesthetically expressive Persons" contributing,
and participating, say, from a deeply enraptured wonder beyond simply
voluntary?

And, and I realize I am pushing it, what about the possibility of
"morally irresponsible Persons," or even of evil as a contributor to
ongoing creation? I realize this is an offputting idea, it is for me. But
Hillary Putnam quoted a passage from a Peirce unpublished manuscript (I
don't have its number): "The only solution to the problem of evil is to
recognize that the Supreme Love embraces hate as a variety of itself, and
that sin is a creation of God, and as such, is good in certain stage[s] of
development. God delights in evil."

 Gene Halton


On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 8:58 AM, Jon Alan Schmidt 
wrote:

> List:
>
> If my latest hypothesis is correct that the Universe is the Perfect Sign,
> what would be its Object?  What is perpetually acting upon it with new
> Signs that give it fresh energy and kindle its previously dormant energy?
> What has the absolute freedom to introduce spontaneous changes into it?  In
> other words, what *sustains* the Universe as something that is living and
> growing, rather than succumbing to "the complete induration of habit
> reducing the free play of feeling and the brute irrationality of effort to
> complete death" (CP 6.201; 1898)?
>
>
>
> CSP:  ... the Universe is a vast representamen, a great symbol of God's
> purpose, working out its conclusions in living realities. Now every symbol
> [3ns] must have, organically attached to it, its Indices of Reactions [2ns]
> and its Icons of Qualities [1ns]; and such part as these reactions and
> these qualities play in an argument, that they of course play in the
> Universe, that Universe being precisely an argument. (CP 5.119, EP
> 2:193-194; 1903)
>
>
>
> Consistent with the conclusion of my recently published essay, "A
> Neglected Additament:  Peirce on Logic, Cosmology, and the Reality of
> God," the Dynamic Object of the Universe as the Perfect Sign is its perfect
> Utterer, *God Himself*, infinitely incomprehensible to us.  Its Immediate
> Object is *God's purpose*, which is the development of Reason, including
> the growth of our knowledge of God and of this Universe that He has
> created--*and is still creating*.
>
>
>
> CSP:  This development of Reason consists, you will observe, in
> embodiment, that is, in manifestation. The creation of the universe, which
> did not take place during a certain busy week, in the year 4004 B.C., but
> is going on today and never will be done, is this very developement of
> Reason. I do not see how one can have a more satisfying ideal of the
> admirable than the development of Reason so understood. The one thing whose
> admirableness is not due to an ulterior Reason is Reason itself
> comprehended in all its fullness, so far as we can comprehend it. (CP
> 1.615, EP 2:255; 1903)
>
>
>
> This is the *summum bonum* in accordance with the normative science of
> esthetics.  Peirce went on to draw the corresponding ethical and logical
> implications, since what he described as "Practice" and "Theory" in EP
> 2:304 correspond to "embodiment" and "manifestation" here, respectively.
>
>
>
> CSP:  Under this conception, the ideal of conduct will be to execute our
> little function in the operation of the creation by giving a hand toward
> rendering the world more reasonable whenever, as the slang is, it is "up to
> us" to do so. In logic, it will be observed that knowledge is
> reasonableness; and the ideal of reasoning will be to follow such methods
> as must develop knowledge the most speedily. (CP 1.615, EP 2:255; 1903)
>
>
>
> As embodied metaphysical Quasi-minds, we are both *constituents* and
> *interpreters* of the Universe as God's great Symbol and Argument.  
> Furthermore,
> as morally responsible Persons, we can also be *contributors* to it--we
> have the opportunity (and privilege) to participate *voluntarily *in
> God's still-unfolding creative activity.  The Perfect Sign thus serves as
> an ideal, or regulative hope, which *would* be achieved if all of us
> *were* to become fully welded 

[PEIRCE-L] APA Pacific Meeting Author Meets Critics: From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution

[Eugene Halton]

For anyone who might be interested, who will be at the American
Philosophic Association Pacific meeting in San Diego at the end of this
month. There will be an author meets critics session sponsored by the Karl
Jaspers Society of North America, which will discuss my book, From the
Axial Age to the Moral Revolution: John Stuart-Glennie, Karl Jaspers, and a
New Understanding of the Idea
<https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137441584>  (New York: Palgrave
MacMillan).

My book involves discussions of the revolutionary changes across different
civilizations in the period roughly 2,500 years ago, which Jaspers labelled
“the axial age” in 1949. I rediscovered a 19th century thinker, John
Stuart-Glennie, who had advanced a full theory of the phenomena, which he
termed "the moral revolution," and philosophy of history 75 years earlier,
in 1873, only to be forgotten after he died in 1910. I also discovered
while writing the book, that 20 years before Jaspers, D. H. Lawrence also
addressed the phenomena, in ways that connect to contemporary discussions
today on rationalization. Stuart-Glennie and Lawrence also address issues
that relate to current discussions of “the new animism,” a relational
ontology that easily connects to what could be called Peirce’s semiotic
animism.

   Here is information on the session below.

Gene Halton



APA PACIFIC DIVISION ANNUAL MEETING

Saturday, March 31 6:00 - 8:00 p.m., G10C, Westin Gaslamp Quarter Hotel,
San Diego, CA



Karl Jaspers Society of North America Session Two: Author meets Critics

From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution: John Stuart-Glennie, Karl
Jaspers, and a New Understanding of the Idea (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)



Author: Eugene Halton (University of Notre Dame)



Chair: Elena Bezzubova (University of California, Irvine)



Critics: Victor Lidz (Drexel University)

Christopher Peet (The King's University, Canada)

Benjamin Schewel (University of Virginia)

John Torpey (The City University of New York)

Helmut Wautischer (Sonoma State University)

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Re: Scientific inquiry does not involve matters "of vital importance," was, [PEIRCE-L] A footnote on reason

[Eugene Halton]

ot hard to find if we do look. To give the one example I’m most
>> familiar with, Kate Raworth in *Doughnut Economics* gives a critique of
>> the “dismal science” which is not much different from (though more specific
>> than) yours or Peirce’s. And she presents an alternative economics which is
>> much more consistent with current ecological sciences (and, I might add,
>> with social justice).
>>
>> If science in general is so congenial to the political powers that
>> currently be in the U.S., why are they so eager to muzzle scientists, take
>> down climate change websites, etc.?
>>
>> Gary f.
>>
>>
>>
>> } What is now proved was once only imagined. [Blake] {
>>
>> http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ *Turning Signs* gateway
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Eugene Halton <eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu>
>> *Sent:* 5-Mar-18 16:01
>> *To:* Peirce List <peirce-l@list.iupui.edu>
>> *Subject:* Re: Scientific inquiry does not involve matters "of vital
>> importance," was, [PEIRCE-L] A footnote on reason
>>
>>
>>
>> Dear Gary R.
>>
>> You mention the problem of greed, Gary, denying that it is a
>> problem of science and claiming that it is a misuse of science by “the
>> world’s power players,” ie., outsiders to science. You say, “Peirce himself
>> almost certainly did find the essential “wicked problems” to be a
>> consequence of the political-economic system, not science itself.” I
>> disagree. Peirce actually did severly criticise the science of political
>> economy itself as a philosophy of greed:
>>
>> “The nineteenth century is now fast sinking into the grave, and we all
>> begin to review its doings and to think what character it is destined to
>> bear as compared with other centuries in the minds of future historians. It
>> will be called, I guess, the Economical Century; for political economy has
>> more direct relations with all the branches of its activity than has any
>> other science. Well, political economy has its formula of redemption, too.
>> It is this: Intelligence in the service of greed ensures the justest
>> prices, the fairest contracts, the most enlightened conduct of all the
>> dealings between men, and leads to the *summum bonum*, food in plenty
>> and perfect comfort. Food for whom? Why, for the greedy master of
>> intelligence. I do not mean to say that this is one of the legitimate
>> conclusions of political economy, the scientific character of which I fully
>> acknowledge. But the study of doctrines, themselves true, will often
>> temporarily encourage generalizations extremely false, as the study of
>> physics has encouraged necessitarianism. What I say, then, is that the
>> great attention paid to economical questions during our century has induced
>> an exaggeration of the beneficial effects of greed and of the unfortunate
>> results of sentiment, until there has resulted a philosophy which comes
>> unwittingly to this, that greed is the great agent in the elevation of the
>> human race and in the evolution of the universe.” 6.290:
>>
>>
>>
>> Peirce was criticizing the science of political economy of
>> his time as reaching what Peirce held to be a false generalization. But it
>> was the science itself that held this false generalization, not simply
>> outsiders. And Peirce’s criticism extended to Darwin’s scientific theory of
>> natural selection:
>>
>>
>>
>> “The Origin of Species of Darwin merely extends
>> politico-economical views of progress to the entire realm of animal and
>> vegetable life. The vast majority of our contemporary naturalists hold the
>> opinion that the true cause of those exquisite and marvelous adaptations of
>> nature for which, when I was a boy, men used to extol the divine wisdom, is
>> that creatures are so crowded together that those of them that happen to
>> have the slightest advantage force those less pushing into situations
>> unfavorable to multiplication or even kill them before they reach the age
>> of reproduction. Among animals, the mere mechanical individualism is vastly
>> re-enforced as a power making for good by the animal's ruthless greed. As
>> Darwin puts it on his title-page, it is the struggle for existence; and he
>> should have added for his motto: Every individual for himself, and the
>> Devil take the hindmost!” 6.293
>>
>> Peirce did not reject Darwin’s theory, which he admired, but
>> argued that it was a partial view of evolution, to which Peirce added two
>> other modalitie

Re: Scientific inquiry does not involve matters "of vital importance," was, [PEIRCE-L] A footnote on reason

[Eugene Halton]

isting science and
> technology must be critically confronted as part of the problem.
>
>
> I think we may disagree mainly in terms of what we have been emphasizing.
>
> I certainly agree with you that greed, power, and what you call
> "crypto-religious reverence for deus-ex-machina goals" are threats to our
> very existence on the earth, but I locate these *more* within the
> political-economic 'system' (as I believe Peirce did), while you apparently
> locate them within the 'system' of "actually existing science and
> technology." Despite your seeing "admirable individuals" within the
> scientific-technological 'system', you maintain that greed, power, and
> "deus-ex-machina goals" are "*essential *features" of that system. I
> disagree.
>
> Take climate change, for example. A multi-authored 2016 paper based on a
> number of independent studies found a 97% consensus that humans are causing
> global warming. This is entirely consistent with other surveys and studies
> that I know of. See: Bray, Dennis; Hans von Storch
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_von_Storch> (1999). "Climate Science:
> An Empirical Example of Postnormal Science
> <http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0477%281999%29080%3C0439%3ACSAEEO%3E2.0.CO%3B2>
> (PDF). *Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society*. *80* (3):
> 439–455.
>
> In my view the global climate change deniers are *not* for the most part
> scientists, but greedy and unethical global corporate magnates and greedy
> and unethical politicians, typically in cahoots with each other to support
> policies which, for example, greatly benefit "Big Oil" to the detriment of
> the development of sustainable energy sources (solar, wind, water, etc.)
> The power brokers use (and even employ and pay) the 3% of scientists who
> deny human caused global warming in service to their greed, power, and
> "crypto-religious reverence for deus-ex-machina goals."
>
> But, again, there are counter-arguments to my view of science and
> scientists, many of which you employ in your books. Still, I remain
> unconvinced that it is science that is the essential problem, but rather
> the *misuse* of science and technology by the world's power players. That
> they seemingly hold all (or most) of the strings isn't very promising for
> our future on the Earth. Whether "many Peirceans" hold this view of
> science, I have no idea. But some do, and Peirce himself almost certainly
> did find the essential "wicked problems" to be a consequence of the
> political-economic system, not science itself. In what I see to be his
> view, science is not, as you seem to imply, some "blue sky" ideal. Rather
> science and technology can be seen as part of our human destiny, part of
> what we humans *ought* to be doing, part of our aspiration to know the
> world, ourselves, and the cosmos better. How unfortunate that corporate and
> political power elites have virtually kidnapped the potential for humane
> good of science in the interest of their own greed. And how unfortunate
> that so few can experience Nature in the direct way that even Peirce and
> Whitman and the generation were still able to. How amazing it has been for
> me when, far away from my beloved NYC, say in northern Michigan or central
> Colorado, I've looked up to the sky and been able to see myriad stars!
>
> As an aside notice that the "powers that be," at least in the US, have
> also undermined public education, stripping many, perhaps most school
> systems of opportunities for aesthetic education (the arts, music, etc.)
> and critical thinking (for example, the GOP platform in Texas a few years
> ago had a clause which stipulated that critical thinking *not* be taught
> in the schools), while what one might call an ethical education (which, in
> my view, builds upon aesthetic education and is facilitated by reflection
> and discussion around works of art, literature, philosophy--including
> philosophy of science--and, in my opinion, comparative religion, including
> in the US, First Nation spirituality) is almost entirely missing from
> American public education (itself under siege under the present
> administration).
>
> In addition, some of the most potent media in the USA are owned and
> operated by those in league with the political-economic powers mentioned
> above, so that much of the population seems, well, almost brain-washed by
> the propaganda and "alternative facts" thrown at them every day such that
> they, for example, often vote against their own best interests. And all
> this too is, I believe, anticipated in a close reading of certain of
> Peirce's writings, including those 

Re: Scientific inquiry does not involve matters "of vital importance," was, [PEIRCE-L] A footnote on reason

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Gary R.,
 Yes, thanks, you understood my critique and likely difference of
opinion.
 From my point of view your response, like that of many Peirceans, and
sci-tech proponents more generally, takes an ideal of what science and
technology should be as an excuse to deny their actual complicity in the
delusion of limitless development of human-all-too-human purposes that has
brought us to the likelihood of an emerging collapse. The greed, power, and
especially crypto-religious reverence for deus-ex-machina goals are not
simply external to actually existing science and technology, but are
essential features of the system, despite the many admirable individuals
within it. That is why actually existing science and technology represent
possibly the greatest threat to a sustainable world with humans still a
part of it, and why actually existing science and technology must be
critically confronted as part of the problem.
  Gene


On Sat, Mar 3, 2018 at 1:27 PM, Gary Richmond 
wrote:

> Gene, list,
>
> Gary R: "Of course it goes without saying, I'd hope, that the positive
> results of scientific inquiry, for example, new technologies, may be
> applied to matters of vital importance (for example, in medicine, etc.)"
>
> Actually Gary, the jury is still out on that one. Ask the dying,
> overpopulated earth.
>  Such is man's glory!
>
>
> You know, of course, that I agree with the underlying sensibility of your
> comment. All​
> ​
> ​ I meant to say in the snippet you quoted, by writing "*positive*
> results of scientific inquiry," was that there were definite, concrete,
> incontrovertible results of such inquiry, not that they were necessarily
> well applied "to matters of vital importance." All too often they haven't
> been, or there have been unforeseen negative, even tragic results of their
> application (think gun powder, fossil fuels, etc.)
>
> However, in my opinion, the principal cause of "the dying, overpopulated
> earth" is precisely the *misuse* of the fruits of science by greedy,
> power-crazed, unethical, cruel, and thoughtless men and institutions. Yet,
> can I say that some of the advances, say, in my example of medicine,
> haven't been of value? Well, surely not to many or even most (but, again,
> that's because of greed, etc.)
>
> Still, I'm glad to have been able to in recent years have had both hips
> replaced, cataract surgery on both eyes allowing me to, for example, read
> books again after a couple of years of not being able to do so. And, again,
> there are many other technologies--such as those associated with
> computation--which, again, can be well or badly used. But the science and
> technology are, in my estimation, at least *less* the root cause than the
> greed and power grabbing. From reading your books I have a sense that you
> wouldn't agree with this last stated opinion.
>
> In short, in my estimation the "wicked problems" of the world are less a
> matter of the advance of science (theory) and its fruits, such as
> technology, and more the lack of humane and ethical conduct (practice) by
> too many men (being yet the tiniest fraction of a percentage of the world
> population) and the corrupt institutions they've put in place and over
> which they have almost unlimited control.
> Best,
> Gary
>  ​
>

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Re: Scientific inquiry does not involve matters "of vital importance," was, [PEIRCE-L] A footnote on reason

[Eugene Halton]

Gary R: "Of course it goes without saying, I'd hope, that the positive
results of scientific inquiry, for example, new technologies, may be
applied to matters of vital importance (for example, in medicine, etc.)"

Actually Gary, the jury is still out on that one. Ask the dying,
overpopulated earth.
 Such is man's glory!
 Gene H

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RE: [PEIRCE-L] Lowell Lecture 3.11

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Gary F,
 Your comment concludes:
 "That last sentence takes us to the crux of the challenge of Peircean
semiotics and Peircean phenomenology: *Experience is our only teacher* in
science, as he says elsewhere, and all of our experience is *human* experience
— yet we are tasked to “take away the psychological or accidental human
element” from our comprehension of the elements of the phenomenon, and
specifically of semiosic phenomena. Nominalists and others will say it
can’t be done; Peirce says “Why not?”

   As a quibble, it seems to me that one can also say that some elements of
our experience are primate experience, and also even mammal experience,
rather than specifically human experience. And perhaps these prejudices
need to be bracketed out in scientific experience as well.
 Nietszche said something that may speak to Peirce’s words, though
perhaps not completely parallel:
 "Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the
real raw material of your being is, something quite ineducable, yet in any
case accessible only with difficulty, bound, paralyzed: your educators can
be only your liberators." (Untimely Meditations III)
 Gene Halton


On Jan 6, 2018 9:34 AM,  wrote:

> Gary R, I think that’s a good exposition of the “reference” issues,
> including some aspects of the matter that I hadn’t thought of.
>
>
>
> This is heartening because I find it difficult to write about these
> ‘categorial’ issues as they are presented in Lowell 3 — difficult because
> they take us back to the very basics of experience itself, or to the
> elements of the phenomenon, which is the other side of the same coin. The
> deeper we probe into this, the more vast the implications and the
> applications, and the harder it is to illustrate the conceptions with
> concrete examples, because any example that comes to mind (like Spike the
> cat) brings irrelevant or misleading associations along with it. Also, if
> the writer thinks about the reader’s response, he’s apt to say (as Peirce
> did earlier in Lowell 3), “It must be extremely difficult for those who
> are untrained to such analyses of conceptions to make any sense of all
> this.” But then other readers (on a list like this one) are likely to feel
> that they’ve heard it all before and want to skip ahead. Hence the writer’s
> despair. But I might as well stumble on regardless.
>
>
>
> Before probing further into Lowell 3.11, and specifically CP 1.536, I’d
> like to requote this bit from earlier in Lowell 3:
>
> [[ The secondness of the Second, whichever of the two objects be called
> the Second, is different from the Secondness of the first. That is to say
> it *generally* is so. To kill and to be killed are different. In case
> there is one of the two which there is good reason for calling the First,
> while the other remains the Second, it is that the Secondness is more
> accidental to the former than to the latter; that there is more or less
> approach to a state of things in which something, which is itself First,
> accidentally comes into a Secondness that does not really modify its
> Firstness, while its Second in this Secondness is something whose *being*
> is of the nature of Secondness and which has no Firstness separate from
> this.… The extreme kind of Secondness which I have just described is the
> relation of a *quality* to the *matter* in which that quality inheres.
> The mode of being of the quality is that of Firstness. That is to say, it
> is a possibility. It is related to the matter accidentally; and this
> relation does not change the quality at all, except that it imparts
> *existence,* that is to say, this very relation of inherence, to it. But
> the *matter,* on the other hand, has no being at all except the being a
> subject of qualities. This relation of really having qualities constitutes
> its *existence.* But if all its qualities were to be taken away, and it
> were to be left quality-less matter, it not only would not exist, but it
> would not have any positive definite possibility — such as an unembodied
> quality has. It would be nothing, at all.]  (CP 1.527)]
>
>
>
> Now, the very word “matter” has common associations that would make this
> line of thinking hard to follow. We are often inclined to think of “matter”
> as physical stuff, like the clay which an artisan or artist might shape
> into a bowl or a sculpture, or like the clay that God shaped into Adam in
> one of the *Genesis* stories. But clay already has *qualities* that make
> it *clay*. Can we imagine “quality-less matter” at all? Or an “unembodied
> quality”? If not, we can’t imagine a pure First or a pure Second either.
> Neither one could *exist* (as clay can exist) because  *existence* is the
> “very relation of inherence” of qualities in matter. So thinking of the
> quality as First and the matter as Second, we can say that the quality
> *determines* the matter to its existence.
>
>
>
> This is different from 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Nativity scenes

[Eugene Halton]

Yes, Gary, perhaps I did not state it clearly enough. Without the capacity
to be the other at the same time as oneself, key to Mead's definition of
the significant symbol and to empathy, nothing will be imparted. With that
capacity, the scene can impart something new to the witness, an
identification of the family of Jesus as refugees with contemporary
refugees today. One can experience "the other" as oneself, feel what that
situation is, and presumably, have compassion for it.
 And yes, Gary, evangelical Christian fundamentalists in the US, such
as the 80% of those in Alabama who voted for an accused child molester
recently, disregarding the accusations and even often denigrating the
accusers because he represents their political ideology, like all
fundamentalists perhaps, have retreated into a bubble wherein the other is
not simply denied, but attacked. Here callousedness replaces empathy, and
"the other" is scapegoated. Mead's "ability to be the other at same time
that he is himself" is reversed: the ability to not be the other at the
same time that he is himself becomes the recipe for the loss of the
capacity for self-criticism.
 Gene H


On Dec 28, 2017 1:06 PM, "Gary Richmond" <gary.richm...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Eugene, Peter, list,
>
> I very much like your analysis, Gene. You wrote:
>
> The implication here is that the experience of the nativity scene, with
> refugees representing today as echoing Jesus as a refugee, imparts in the
> witness an ability to empathize with "the other."
>
> However, I think that rather than 'imparting' "an ability to empathize
> with 'the other' " (although it may do that in some, perhaps few,
> individuals) that one needs already to possess that 'ability' to appreciate
> the analogy and respond to it. In the USA at least it would appear that
> many Christians, esp. of the evangelical fundamentalist stripe, have lost
> it (or at least suppress it).
>
> Best,
>
> Gary R
>
>
> [image: Gary Richmond]
>
> *Gary Richmond*
> *Philosophy and Critical Thinking*
> *Communication Studies*
> *LaGuardia College of the City University of New York*
> *718 482-5690 <%28718%29%20482-5690>*
>
> On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 12:10 PM, Eugene Halton <eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> Dear Peter,
>>  Peirce described the way in which symbols can grow over time. And
>> clearly one of the meanings of the symbol of the nativity is the family.
>> Feuerbach called attention to how the holy family symbol is a
>> representation of the earthly family. Marx took it further by claiming that
>> the holy family symbol of the earthly family is also a projection of the
>> bourgeois family in his time.
>>  A year ago Pope Francis adapted the symbol to the refugee situation
>> by including a Maltese fishing boat in the nativity scene at the Vatican, a
>> reference to refugees arriving by boat.
>>  Perhaps George Herbert Mead can have more to say on this than
>> Peirce, in Mead's description of what he termed "the significant symbol."
>> In Mead's significant symbol the other is included reflectively in the
>> meaning of the symbol:
>> "it is through the ability to be the other at same time that he is
>> himself that the symbol becomes significant."
>> (From "A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol").
>> The implication here is that the experience of the nativity scene,
>> with refugees representing today as echoing Jesus as a refugee, imparts in
>> the witness an ability to empathize with "the other."
>>  Gene H
>>
>>
>> On Dec 28, 2017 9:34 AM, "Skagestad, Peter" <peter_skages...@uml.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Listers,
>>>
>>>
>>> I have a somewhat unusual question. My sister is writing an Art History
>>> thesis on nativity scenes and their contemporary relevance. An example is
>>> one at a street mission in Trondheim, Norway, depicting the Holy Family as
>>> present-day refugees from the Middle East. Now the question is what, if
>>> anything, might semiotics have to say about such depiction? The answer may
>>> be obvious, but it escapes me, at least for the moment. Any suggestions?
>>>
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Peter
>>>
>>>
>>> -
>>> 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
>>

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Nativity scenes

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Peter,
 Peirce described the way in which symbols can grow over time. And
clearly one of the meanings of the symbol of the nativity is the family.
Feuerbach called attention to how the holy family symbol is a
representation of the earthly family. Marx took it further by claiming that
the holy family symbol of the earthly family is also a projection of the
bourgeois family in his time.
 A year ago Pope Francis adapted the symbol to the refugee situation by
including a Maltese fishing boat in the nativity scene at the Vatican, a
reference to refugees arriving by boat.
 Perhaps George Herbert Mead can have more to say on this than Peirce,
in Mead's description of what he termed "the significant symbol." In Mead's
significant symbol the other is included reflectively in the meaning of the
symbol:
"it is through the ability to be the other at same time that he is himself
that the symbol becomes significant."
(From "A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol").
The implication here is that the experience of the nativity scene, with
refugees representing today as echoing Jesus as a refugee, imparts in the
witness an ability to empathize with "the other."
 Gene H


On Dec 28, 2017 9:34 AM, "Skagestad, Peter"  wrote:

> Listers,
>
>
> I have a somewhat unusual question. My sister is writing an Art History
> thesis on nativity scenes and their contemporary relevance. An example is
> one at a street mission in Trondheim, Norway, depicting the Holy Family as
> present-day refugees from the Middle East. Now the question is what, if
> anything, might semiotics have to say about such depiction? The answer may
> be obvious, but it escapes me, at least for the moment. Any suggestions?
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Peter
>
>
> -
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>
>
>
>
>
>

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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Lowell Lecture 1.4

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Edwina,
 Yes, the finding is astounding, and has changed the understanding of
the earliest transitions to domestication. But your doubt that hunter
gatherers built these sculptures is based on some ideology without
evidence, and contradicts not only Klaus Schmidt, but a number of other
archaeologists who have pored over the evidence for extended periods. Now
might be a good time to apply Peirce's method of inquiry for the fixation
of belief to the issue. I'll consider my comments completed.
 Cheers,
 Gene


On Sun, Oct 1, 2017 at 8:07 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:

>
> Gene- I doubt that hunter-gatherers built these sculptures; it would have
> been a two-class societal order, with a 'godly elite' so to speak, to order
> the many  'workers' required to carry out the task. This would also have
> meant a settled residency...and some form of agriculture, for the workers
> dealing with the sculpture would not be able to hunt or gather...or work in
> the fields.. but would have to be looked after by others who did - and who
> provided a surplus. Surplus and different tasks is only found in
> agriculture.
>
> I don't agree with 'first the temple, then the city'; the two go together,
> for building the temple requires a large population, sustaining the belief
> in the temple's rhetoric requires a hierarchical population...
>
> I don't agree that domesticated plants 'co-emerged' with the ideology.
> That is, I don't put the ideology FIRST, but I put the ecology first; the
> ecology in that area has to have plants that are productive already and
> that can enable a population to acknowledge this, to settle and nurture
> these plants - rather than migrate and hunt and gather what simply
> naturally grows.
>
> And the ideology of man controlling nature is really an 18th century
> mentality. Prior to that, God or the many gods or the spirits were really
> in control.
>
> Edwina
>
>
> On Sun 01/10/17 7:33 PM , Eugene Halton eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu sent:
>
> Dear Edwina,
>  Re "myth of control of nature." 11,000 years ago hunter gatherers
> built the first monumental sculptures, 4 to 5 meters tall, 5 to ten tons
> each, of human forms, at Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, where some of
> the earliest domesticated grains from the same time period were found
> nearby. As the archaeologist of that site Klaus Schmidt remarked, "First
> comes the temple, then the city."
>  The domesticated plants co-emerged with a new ideology that put the
> human form and its capacity to control nature in the foreground.
>  Gene
>
> On Oct 1, 2017 7:01 PM, "Edwina Taborsky" < tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:
>
>>
>> Gene -  please see my comments below:
>>
>>
>> On Sun 01/10/17 6:33 PM , Eugene Halton eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu sent:
>>
>> Dear Edwina,
>>  The evidence contradicts a number of your claims.
>> 1] Edwina: "Most tribal economies are focused around stability and
>> can't economically afford peripheral deviations from the hard work of their
>> economic mode."
>> GENE: It has been known for some time that hunter gather economies
>> traditionally require far less work than agricultural, see, for example,
>> Marshall Sahlins, The Original Affluent Society. Agricultural
>> civilizations typically radically increased work load.
>>
>> EDWINA: So what? Hunter-Gather economies require less work than
>> agricultural because they do not make the land produce food; they only
>> hunt-what-is-there; and gather-what-is-there. BUT this means that this type
>> of economy can only support a SMALL population; the normal band size is
>> about 30 people - and - they are usually migratory. See Lee and Devore's
>> various studies;
>>
>> 2] GENE:  A simple definition of civilization is living of and from
>> cities. But that entails a number of attributes such as bureaucracy and
>> institutional division of labor, and, historically, inventions such as
>> kingship, literacy, etc.
>>  Just as the domestication of animals and plants through confinement
>> was originally rooted in a myth of control of nature, civilization
>> legitimated the confinement of human beings to radically increased work
>> loads, greater social inequality, and reduced nutrition, through mythic
>> kingship and its religious faces (the Babylonian creation myth, The
>> Atrahasis, is a great example). I have also written on some of these issues
>> in different places, including my book, From the Axial Age to the Moral
>> Revolution. The human body was literally confined, shrinking an average
>> of 4 to 6 inches wherever agriculturally-base

Re: Re: Re: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Lowell Lecture 1.4

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Edwina,
 Re "myth of control of nature." 11,000 years ago hunter gatherers
built the first monumental sculptures, 4 to 5 meters tall, 5 to ten tons
each, of human forms, at Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, where some of the
earliest domesticated grains from the same time period were found nearby.
As the archaeologist of that site Klaus Schmidt remarked, "First comes the
temple, then the city."
 The domesticated plants co-emerged with a new ideology that put the
human form and its capacity to control nature in the foreground.
 Gene

On Oct 1, 2017 7:01 PM, "Edwina Taborsky" <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:

>
> Gene -  please see my comments below:
>
>
> On Sun 01/10/17 6:33 PM , Eugene Halton eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu sent:
>
> Dear Edwina,
>  The evidence contradicts a number of your claims.
> 1] Edwina: "Most tribal economies are focused around stability and
> can't economically afford peripheral deviations from the hard work of their
> economic mode."
> GENE: It has been known for some time that hunter gather economies
> traditionally require far less work than agricultural, see, for example,
> Marshall Sahlins, The Original Affluent Society. Agricultural
> civilizations typically radically increased work load.
>
> EDWINA: So what? Hunter-Gather economies require less work than
> agricultural because they do not make the land produce food; they only
> hunt-what-is-there; and gather-what-is-there. BUT this means that this type
> of economy can only support a SMALL population; the normal band size is
> about 30 people - and - they are usually migratory. See Lee and Devore's
> various studies;
>
> 2] GENE:  A simple definition of civilization is living of and from
> cities. But that entails a number of attributes such as bureaucracy and
> institutional division of labor, and, historically, inventions such as
> kingship, literacy, etc.
>  Just as the domestication of animals and plants through confinement
> was originally rooted in a myth of control of nature, civilization
> legitimated the confinement of human beings to radically increased work
> loads, greater social inequality, and reduced nutrition, through mythic
> kingship and its religious faces (the Babylonian creation myth, The
> Atrahasis, is a great example). I have also written on some of these issues
> in different places, including my book, From the Axial Age to the Moral
> Revolution. The human body was literally confined, shrinking an average
> of 4 to 6 inches wherever agriculturally-based civilization broke out, old
> world or new (Mummert A, Esche E, Robinson J, et al. (2011) Stature and
> robusticity during the agricultural transition: Evidence from the
> bioarchaeological record. Economics and Human Biology 9(3): 284–301).
>
> EDWINA: I don't think that the domestication of animals and plants emerged
> from a 'myth of control of nature'. I think that, first, the local
> environment had to include plants that could be domesticated and animals
> that could be domesticated. That is, you seem to be putting the ideology
> first..and actions after. Whereas, I put the objective reality of a
> nature-that-is-amenable to 'making food'...first. Ideology comes later. The
> environment has to be accessible to agriculture.
>
>  As I pointed out, you can't harness a zebra to a plough. And I still
> don't 'get' your definition of 'civilization' as 'living of and from
> cities'. You don't get a city, i.e., a large hierarchical and specialized
> population without FIRST being located in an ecological area that can
> produce a surplus of food; that can support a large population; that then
> becomes specialized in tasks.
>
>   3] GENE:   The idea that humans in industrial countries have been
> getting taller in the past hundred or so years is simply a return of the
> human body to pre-agricultural levels with recently improved diet.
> Civilization introduced a radical departure from the long-term evolutionary
> tempering that constitutes the human genome. And it introduced the idea
> that humans, of all creatures, could control nature, if not ourselves. We
> are on the verge of the extinction of that idea.
>
>
> EDWINA: Again, I disagree with your definition of 'civilization'. What led
> to the development of agriculture, was an amenable ecology, where the local
> 'flora and fauna' were able to be domesticated. Nothing to do with cities.
> Agriculture doesn't require cities: you can have medium size populations
> [in the hundreds, low thousands] in swidden agriculture, in pastoral
> nomadism, in small scale horticulture] - and there are no cities in these
> modes.
>
> And I don't agree that 'civilization'...introduced the idea that humans
> could control nature'. 

Re: Re: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Lowell Lecture 1.4

[Eugene Halton]

 our species is not innate, is not genetic, but is social. We have
> to learn-how-to-live. The advantage, of course, is that we can change our
> mode of life, can adapt far faster than any species which has its knowledge
> base stored in genes. The disadvantage is when we get it wrong - and - I
> consider that greed, anger, hostility, [Firstness, Secondness]are as basic
> to our species as co-operation [Thirdness].
>
> Edwina
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun 01/10/17 2:53 PM , Eugene Halton eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu sent:
>
> What's missing in John's comments on the counter rise of greed and
> related, and in Edwina and Daniel's responses, are the transformative
> effects of agriculture and civilization. The agricultural revolution
> produces population explosion systematically, and it has never ended. The
> advent of civilization produces shifts toward greater hierarchical
> organization and in equality, much harder work time, and other systemic
> changes.
>  But the interesting point is that the long-term evolutionary
> characteristics John mentions, which include increased social
> cooperativeness, remain deeply embedded in the human temperament.
>  Gene Halton
>
> On Oct 1, 2017 2:25 PM, "Edwina Taborsky" <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:
>
>> Thanks, Daniel Everett - I was indeed referring to the hunting-gathering
>> economy - using information from such as Richard Lee [the !Kung], Devore
>> and others who worked in the field. Just as you say, they do not have the
>> luxury of accommodating people who cannot participate in the production of
>> sustenance [ie. by hunting/gathering]. AND - it also depends on the
>> ecological viability of the land. Since this economy does not 'make' the
>> land produce, then, they must rely on what the 'natural land' can produce'.
>> And that land has a critical threshold for population sustenance.
>>
>> When the societal organization is one where it actively 'makes' the land
>> produce sustenance - and this is found only in a land base where this
>> 'interference' is possible and productive - the society can afford a few
>> more 'non-productive members' but only at a low threshold. There is simply
>> no economic means to support the huge numbers of non-productive members
>> that we, in the industrial world, service. And what we don't realize, is
>> that this industrial mode of supporting a large percentage of
>> non-productive members of the population comes at enormous economic price:
>> trillions in debt, and a reduced productive capacity.
>>
>> Most of us don't think about economic thresholds and the
>> sustenance limits of a particular economic method - but, these
>> critical lines are real, and one of the most important variables, besides
>> the ecology of the land, is the size of the population. That is, societal
>> behaviour doesn't all depend on the 'psychological', on the goodwill [or
>> lack of it] of the human psyche. It also depends on the economy.
>>
>> Edwina
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun 01/10/17 2:12 PM , "Everett, Daniel" dever...@bentley.edu sent:
>>
>> I have spent about 40 years working with hunter-gatherer populations in
>> the Amazon. I have lived among one group, the Pirahãs, for an aggregate of
>> eight years and speak their language, having also written several books and
>> articles about the experience.
>>
>> My experience matches what Edwina says in (1). They are initially
>> welcoming. But you must make yourself useful to the community. They do not
>> have the luxury of accommodating people who cannot carry their own weight.
>>
>> Dan
>>
>> On Oct 1, 2017, at 1:45 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:
>>
>> John, list
>>
>> That's an interesting set of comments. I certainly agree that survival
>> alone is impossible but often it's a network of different species rather
>> than just the members of one species.I've a few points:
>>
>> 1] I think that 'primitive' bands will only welcome visitors IF their
>> economic mode is sufficient to support these visitors. That is, If the
>> visit is short-term, the band might acknowledge this short stay; but - if
>> the visitor becomes a settler - this is a different position, for it
>> requires that the current economic method can support the new person -
>> particularly if he is not productive.
>>
>> 2] Certainly, tribes, which have larger populations than small population
>> bands, will not necessarily accept anyone other than a formal short-term
>> visitor; that is, they cannot, economically, readily support the 

Re: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Lowell Lecture 1.4

[Eugene Halton]

What's missing in John's comments on the counter rise of greed and related,
and in Edwina and Daniel's responses, are the transformative effects of
agriculture and civilization. The agricultural revolution produces
population explosion systematically, and it has never ended. The advent of
civilization produces shifts toward greater hierarchical organization and
in equality, much harder work time, and other systemic changes.
 But the interesting point is that the long-term evolutionary
characteristics John mentions, which include increased social
cooperativeness, remain deeply embedded in the human temperament.
 Gene Halton

On Oct 1, 2017 2:25 PM, "Edwina Taborsky"  wrote:

> Thanks, Daniel Everett - I was indeed referring to the hunting-gathering
> economy - using information from such as Richard Lee [the !Kung], Devore
> and others who worked in the field. Just as you say, they do not have the
> luxury of accommodating people who cannot participate in the production of
> sustenance [ie. by hunting/gathering]. AND - it also depends on the
> ecological viability of the land. Since this economy does not 'make' the
> land produce, then, they must rely on what the 'natural land' can produce'.
> And that land has a critical threshold for population sustenance.
>
> When the societal organization is one where it actively 'makes' the land
> produce sustenance - and this is found only in a land base where this
> 'interference' is possible and productive - the society can afford a few
> more 'non-productive members' but only at a low threshold. There is simply
> no economic means to support the huge numbers of non-productive members
> that we, in the industrial world, service. And what we don't realize, is
> that this industrial mode of supporting a large percentage of
> non-productive members of the population comes at enormous economic price:
> trillions in debt, and a reduced productive capacity.
>
> Most of us don't think about economic thresholds and the sustenance limits
> of a particular economic method - but, these critical lines are real, and
> one of the most important variables, besides the ecology of the land, is
> the size of the population. That is, societal behaviour doesn't all depend
> on the 'psychological', on the goodwill [or lack of it] of the human
> psyche. It also depends on the economy.
>
> Edwina
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun 01/10/17 2:12 PM , "Everett, Daniel" dever...@bentley.edu sent:
>
> I have spent about 40 years working with hunter-gatherer populations in
> the Amazon. I have lived among one group, the Pirahãs, for an aggregate of
> eight years and speak their language, having also written several books and
> articles about the experience.
>
> My experience matches what Edwina says in (1). They are initially
> welcoming. But you must make yourself useful to the community. They do not
> have the luxury of accommodating people who cannot carry their own weight.
>
> Dan
>
> On Oct 1, 2017, at 1:45 PM, Edwina Taborsky  wrote:
>
> John, list
>
> That's an interesting set of comments. I certainly agree that survival
> alone is impossible but often it's a network of different species rather
> than just the members of one species.I've a few points:
>
> 1] I think that 'primitive' bands will only welcome visitors IF their
> economic mode is sufficient to support these visitors. That is, If the
> visit is short-term, the band might acknowledge this short stay; but - if
> the visitor becomes a settler - this is a different position, for it
> requires that the current economic method can support the new person -
> particularly if he is not productive.
>
> 2] Certainly, tribes, which have larger populations than small population
> bands, will not necessarily accept anyone other than a formal short-term
> visitor; that is, they cannot, economically, readily support the long-term
> settlement of migrants, immigrants, ...any increase in their population
> size.
>
> 3] Certainly, war is a key method of reducing the population. But famine
> and disease are other 'natural' methods and can be found repeatedly when a
> particular economic method is stressed beyond its capacity to produce
> sustenance. That is, the local small-scale farming methods of Europe's
> medieval period could not sustain increasing populations and we saw waves
> of not only wars but also plagues and disease. Eventually, the technology,
> the actual method of food production had to change [larger farming
> areas, deep plough, three-field rotation, market exchanges..] - and for
> technology to change, the individual must be free to think.
>
> That is - I am suggesting something else is needed beyond your
> 'cooperation and conservation'.
>
> 4]This thinking had to be based in objective empirical observation - and
> the basic right and freedom of the individual to doubt, to question, to
> explore this objective reality and figure out new methods of interaction
> with the envt, new methods 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Lowell lecture 1.1

[Eugene Halton]

I agree with Kirsti and Jerry:

IS THIS OPENING FLOURISH  A CASE OF CSP STYLE? OR HUBRIS? OR

BRAGGING? OR SOPHISTRY?


Commenting with these questions is sufficient, given that the initial
Peirce quotation was simply insufficient to provide genuine discussion. The
Lowell lecture introductory 1.1 should have been presented along with 1.2
to provide enough material for discussion in my opinion.
 Gene

On Sep 24, 2017 10:00 PM, "Gary Richmond"  wrote:

> Kirsti, List,
>
> I really can't say that I understand what your complaint is. Your post
> began with and highlighted the snippet pointed to
> ​. Here it is exactly as it appears in your post​
> :
>
>
> List,
>
> I agree with Jerry.
> Kirsti
>>
>>  IS THIS OPENING FLOURISH  A CASE OF CSP STYLE? OR HUBRIS? OR
>
> BRAGGING? OR SOPHISTRY?
>
>
> You offered, btw, no reasons for your 'agreement'. You now say:
>
> Kirsti: You misread my message. If it seemed as especially pointing at the
> snippet you took up, it has been unintentional.
>
>
> Looking again at what I just quoted, it certainly seems intentional to me.
> But if it wasn't, so what? That wasn't at all the point of my post. You
> continued:
>
> ​​KR:
> A
> ​​
> s a list manager your concern on the snippet is understandable.
>
>
> ​I wasn't looking at this as list manager at all. In fact, when I post
> something as 'list manager' or, ore characteristically, since it's my
> principal role on peirce-l, viz., 'list moderator', I add to my signature,
> ("writing as list moderator" and sometimes when Ben and I have drafted a
> post together, "writing as list moderator and co-manager with Ben Udell).
>
> You continued:
>
> Kirsti: However, as an approach by a list manager, I must say I do not
> feel good about the way you expressed your concern.
>
> Putting your addressees in a proper order could be a start. Addressing the
> substance in the issue put forth as a main concern could facilitate
> valuable discussions.
>
> Which, as I believe, are the reason for keeping up with as well joining in
> the list.
>
> So, in the context of my posting merely as a member of the forum, your
> other comments (just quoted) seem at least untoward since, again, I make a
> fairly sharp distinction between my role as moderator and that of simple
> participant in forum discussions.
>
> To reiterate: my post was merely to suggest that (a) one couldn't simply
> say that one agreed with Jerry when he was indeed suggesting several (4)
> options, and even as he seemed to be leaning strongly toward one or two in
> particular and (b) that *if I *were to choose one of the four that it
> would be Jerry's #1, *style*, that the 'introductory flourish' which
> Jerry remarked was perhaps an expression of Peirce's style of thinking,
> especially when he was delving into logical questions as fully and as
> deeply as he could. I gave my reasons for my choice and even tried to
> moderate them (pardon the pun) by suggesting that Peirce *may* have
>  rhetorically overstated his case.
>
> I must admit that this kind of exchange which you introduced seems to me
> besides the point, is, in my opinion, a waste of my and the list's time. I,
> for one, would rather be addressing Gary F's thoughtful comments having
> briefly commented on Jerry's remarks. Although I may be mistaken, it would
> appear that you have some 'beef' with the way I moderate (or co-manage?)
> the list. But that is an entirely different matter which you might have, as
> discussed here even rather recently, first addressed to me as list
> moderator off-list.
>
> Best,
>
> Gary R (writing as list moderator)
>
> ​
>
>
>
>
>
>
> [image: Gary Richmond]
>
> *Gary Richmond*
> *Philosophy and Critical Thinking*
> *Communication Studies*
> *LaGuardia College of the City University of New York*
> *718 482-5690 <(718)%20482-5690>*
>
> On Sun, Sep 24, 2017 at 7:06 PM,  wrote:
>
>> Gary R.
>>
>> You misread my message. If it seemed as especially pointing at the
>> snippet you took up, it has been unintentional.
>>
>> As a list manager your concern on the snippet is understandable.
>>
>> However, as an approach by a list manager, I must say I do not feel good
>> about the way you expressed your concern.
>>
>> Putting your addressees in a proper order could be a start. Addressing
>> the substance in the issue put forth as a main concern could facilitate
>> valuable discussions.
>>
>> Which, as I believe, are the reason for keeping up with as well joining
>> in the list.
>>
>> Kirsti
>>
>>
>> Gary Richmond kirjoitti 24.9.2017 23:25:
>>
>>> Kirsti, Jerry, Gary F, list,
>>>
>>> Kirsti, you wrote that you "agree with Jerry" and pointed to this
>>> snippet from his message:  "IS THIS OPENING FLOURISH  A CASE OF CSP
>>> STYLE? OR HUBRIS? OR BRAGGING? OR SOPHISTRY?"
>>>
>>> But Jerry has here offered 4 _possibilities of interpreting_ the
>>> opening comments by Peirce. While I think there may be even more, I
>>> would suggest that Peirce was the _most 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Phaneroscopy & Phenomenology

[Eugene Halton]

Adding to John's last statement concerning Peirce's letters to Lady Welby,
let's remember the influential book by Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of
Meaning (1923), which brought discussion of Peirce to a wider audience over
many following decades. It was Lady Welby's influence on Ogden that brought
Peirce into the discussion, using quotes from Peirce's letters to Lady
Welby.
 The Wikipedia page on the book could use some introduction of the
place of Peirce in the book. For example look at the diagram on this
webpage of the "triangle of reference," and the loose similarities to
Peirce’s idea of the sign:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Meaning

Gene Halton

On Aug 9, 2017 1:41 AM, "John F Sowa"  wrote:

> Kirsti, Gary F., and Clark,
>
> Kirsti
>
>> Meanings are contextual. - Do we agree in that?
>>
>
> Yes.  Peirce said many times in many ways that any meaningful
> concept must show its passport at the gates of perception
> and action.  That is a major part of its context.
>
> Kirsti
>
>> Letters to lady Welby need to be interpreted and evaluated on the
>> basis to whom they were addressed to. Lady Welby was highly interested
>> in sign classifications.
>>
>
> The person who is addressed is also part of the context, and I agree
> that would influence the topics Peirce considered.
>
> His work in writing and editing definitions would have had a strong
> influence on "meaning", since that is the primary goal for dictionary
> definitions.  Note what he wrote to B. E. Smith, the editor of the
> _Century Dictionary_:
>
>> "The task of classifying all the words of language, or what's the same
>> thing, all the ideas that seek expression, is the most stupendous of
>> logical tasks. Anybody but the most accomplished logician must break
>> down in it utterly; and even for the strongest man, it is the severest
>> possible tax on the logical equipment and faculty."
>>
>
> That comment indicates his high regard for his work on lexicography.
>
> Gary F.
>
>> Almost all of Peirce’s work on minute classification of sign types
>> was done in the period 1903-1908, and his work on almost everything
>> got set aside after that, because his health was deteriorating.
>>
>
> Clark
>
>> Peirce may have used the letter writing to clarify his thoughts,
>> but he appears to have been thinking on the issues for some time.
>>
>
> I agree with both of those comments.  Peirce did not have the time
> and energy to prepare an article for publication.  A letter was more
> likely to get attention for his ideas than a few pages in a notebook.
> Of all his correspondents, Lady Welby was the most likely to appreciate
> and circulate his letter about signs.
>
> Given his health at the time, the fact that he made the effort to write
> a long letter shows that he considered the subject matter important.
>
> John
>
>
> -
> PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON
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> .
>
>
>
>
>
>

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RE: [PEIRCE-L] RE: AI

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Gary F,
 Here is a link to the Sarah Konrath et al. study on the decline of
empathy among American college students:
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eob/edobrien_empathyPSPR.pdf
   And a brief Scientific American article on it:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-me-care/

 You state: "I think Peirce would say that these attributions of
empathy (or consciousness) to others are *perceptual judgments* — not
percepts, but quite beyond (or beneath) any conscious control, and . We
*feel* it rather than reading it from external indications."

 This seems to me to miss the point that it is possible to disable the
feeling of empathy. Clinical narcissistic disturbance, for example,
substitutes idealization for perceptual feeling, so that what is perceived
can be idealized rather than felt.
 Extrapolate that to a society that substitutes on mass scales
idealization for felt experience, and you can have societally reduced
empathy. Unempathic parenting is an excellent way to produce the social
media-addicted janissary offspring.
 The human face is a subtle neuromuscular organ of attunement, which
has the capacity to read another's mind through mirror micro-mimicry of the
other's facial gestures, completely subconsciously. These are "external
indications" mirrored by one.
  One study showed that botox treatments, in paralyzing facial muscles,
reduce the micro-mimicry of empathic attunement to the other face in an
interaction. The botox recipient is not only impaired in exhibiting her or
his own emotional facial micro-muscular movements, but also is impaired in
subconsciously micro-mimicking that of the other, thus reducing the
embodied feel of the other’s emotional-gestural state (Neal and Chartrand,
2011). Empathy is reduced through the disabling of the facial muscles.
 Vittorio Gallese, one of the neuroscientists who discovered mirror
neutons, has discussed "embodied simulation" through "shared neural
underpinnings." He states: “…social cognition is not only explicitly
reasoning about the contents of someone else’s mind. Our brains, and those
of other primates, appear to have developed a basic functional mechanism,
embodied simulation, which gives us an experiential insight of other minds.
The shareability of the phenomenal content of the intentional relations of
others, by means of the shared neural underpinnings, produces intentional
attunement. Intentional attunement, in turn, by collapsing the others’
intentions into the observer’s ones, produces the peculiar quality of
familiarity we entertain with other individuals. This is what “being
empathic” is about. By means of a shared neural state realized in two
different bodies that nevertheless obey to the same morpho-functional
rules, the “objectual other” becomes “another self”. Vittorio Gallese,
“Intentional Attunement. The Mirror Neuron System and Its Role in
Interpersonal Relations,” 15 November 2004 Interdisciplines,
http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror/papers/1
  Gene Halton




On Jun 20, 2017 7:00 PM,  wrote:

> List,
>
>
>
> Gene’s post in this thread had much to say about “empathy” — considered as
> something that can be measured and quantified for populations of students,
> so that comments about trends in “empathy” among them can be taken as
> meaningful and important.
>
>
>
> I wonder about that.
>
>
>
> My wondering was given more definite shape just now when I came across
> this passage in a recent book about consciousness by Evan Thompson:
>
> [[ In practice and in everyday life … we don’t infer the inner presence of
> consciousness on the basis of outer criteria. Instead, prior to any kind of
> reflection or deliberation, we already implicitly recognize each other as
> conscious on the basis of empathy. Empathy, as philosophers in the
> phenomenological tradition have shown, is the direct perception of another
> being’s actions and gestures as expressive embodiments of consciousness. We
> don’t see facial expressions, for example, as outer signs of an inner
> consciousness, as we might see an EEG pattern; we see joy directly in the
> smiling face or sadness in the tearful eyes. Moreover, even in difficult or
> problematic cases where we’re forced to consider outer criteria, their
> meaningfulness as indicators of consciousness ultimately depends depends on
> and presupposes our prior empathetic grasp of consciousness. ]]
>
>   —Thompson, Evan. *Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in
> Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy* (Kindle Locations 2362-2370).
> Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.
>
>
>
> If we don’t “infer the inner presence of consciousness on the basis of
> outer criteria,” but perceive it directly *on the basis of empathy*, how
> do we infer the inner presence (or absence) of empathy itself? In the same
> way, i.e. by *direct perception*, according to Thompson. I think Peirce
> would say that these attributions of empathy (or consciousness) to 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] RE: AI

[Eugene Halton]

Yes John S, I realize the conclusion of my previous post seemed to echo
your statement that AI system kill goal would have to be programmed by
human/s. I believe I was claiming something somewhat different. That such
programming is an aspect of a broader systemic directive, stemming from the
modern rational-mechanical mindset, whose nominalistic basis is
pathologically unsustainable. In short, the "programming" has a subhuman
source.

It is a mindset not only happily divorced from the living earth, but one
that takes the escape from earth as a worthy goal: augment yourself, upload
yourself into etherial "information" and shed the body, colonize Mars or
other planets, as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and others misguidedly
advocate. That is a far cry from Lynn Margulis's embrace of Gaia.
Interestingly, she spoke about being denied funding for her research on
symbiogenesis. It apparently did not conform to the dogmatic expectations
of the science gatekeepers.

Yes, Gary F., omnipresent surveillance as panacea. The American NSA has a
goal identical to that of the old East German secret police, the Stasi. It
is to indiscriminately gather all information. All information.
 Not only does AI have the societal implications I tried to address in
my previous post, but there is obviously the whole context of the rise of
modern capitalism and its relations to the rise of Science and Technology.
Let's not forget that Newton was also the treasurer for England. Let's
remember Facebook wants your ever increasing attention for its profit.
 The calculating mind, left to itself, can easily generalize
calculating life as a way of life. Don Delillo's novel, Zero K, provides a
great depiction.
 Facebook will police extremist violence, but remain docile on nation
state violence.
  Here is another view of AI:
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/06/military-
omnipresence-unifying-concept-americas-21st-century-
fighting-edge/138640/?oref=d_brief_nl

Omnipresence in the service of omnipotence and omniscience: who needs deus
when you can have deus ex machina to save the appearances?
 Consider the implications of Peirce's critical common sensism as an
alternative balance to the modern mindset, where the deep two million year
tempering from living of and with the earth provides an earthy common sense
basis on which critical capacities, bounded, can flourish.
 Gene Halton


On Jun 16, 2017 2:08 PM, "Gary Richmond"  wrote:

> Gary F, list,
>
> Very interesting and impressive list and discussion of what AI is doing in
> combatting terrorism. Interestingly, after that discussion the article
> continues:
>
> *Human Expertise*
>
> AI can’t catch everything. Figuring out what supports terrorism and what
> does not isn’t always straightforward, and algorithms are not yet as good
> as people when it comes to understanding this kind of context. A photo of
> an armed man waving an ISIS flag might be propaganda or recruiting
> material, but could be an image in a news story. Some of the most effective
> criticisms of brutal groups like ISIS utilize the group’s own propaganda
> against it. To understand more nuanced cases, we need human expertise.
>
> The paragraph above suggests that "algorithms are not yet as good as
> people" when ti comes to nuance and understanding context. Will they ever
> be?  No doubt they'll improve considerably in time.
>
> In my opinion, AI is best seen as a human tool which like many tools can
> be used for good or evil. But we're getting pretty far from anything
> Peirce-related, so I'll leave it at that.
>
> Best,
>
> Gary R
>
>
>
>
>
>
> [image: Gary Richmond]
>
> *Gary Richmond*
> *Philosophy and Critical Thinking*
> *Communication Studies*
> *LaGuardia College of the City University of New York*
> *C 745*
> *718 482-5690 <(718)%20482-5690>*
>
> On Fri, Jun 16, 2017 at 1:36 PM,  wrote:
>
>> Footnote:
>>
>> In case anyone is wondering what AIs are actually doing these days, this
>> just in:
>>
>> https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/06/how-we-counter-terrorism/
>>
>>
>>
>> gary f.
>>
>>
>>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: John F Sowa [mailto:s...@bestweb.net]
>> Sent: 15-Jun-17 11:43
>> To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu
>> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] RE: AI
>>
>>
>>
>> On 6/15/2017 9:58 AM, g...@gnusystems.ca wrote:
>>
>> > To me, an intelligent system must have an internal guidance system
>>
>> > semiotically coupled with its external world, and must have some
>>
>> > degree of autonomy in its interactions with other systems.
>>
>>
>>
>> That definition is compatible with Peirce's comment that the search for
>> "the first nondegenerate Thirdness" is a more precise goal than the search
>> for the origin of life.
>>
>>
>>
>> Note the comment by the biologist Lynn Margulis:  a bacterium swimming
>> upstream in a glucose gradient exhibits intentionality.  In the article
>> "Gaia is a tough bitch", she said “The growth, reproduction, and
>> communication of 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] RE: AI

[Eugene Halton]

Gary f: "I think it’s quite plausible that AI systems could reach that
level of autonomy and leave us behind in terms of intelligence, but what
would motivate them to kill us? I don’t think the Terminator scenario, or
that of HAL in *2001,* is any more realistic than, for example, the
scenario of the Spike Jonze film *Her*."

Gary, We live in a world gone mad with unbounded technological systems
destroying the life on the Earth and you want to parse the particulars of
whether "a machine" can be destructive? Isn't it blatantly obvious?
 And as John put it: "If no such goal is programmed in an AI system, it
just wanders aimlessly." Unless "some human(s) programmed that goal [of
destruction] into it."
 Though I admire your expertise on AI, these views seem to me
blindingly limited understandings of what a machine is, putting an
artificial divide between the machine and the human rather than seeing the
machine as continuous with the human. Or rather, the machine as continuous
with the automatic portion of what it means to be a human.
 Lewis Mumford pointed out that the first great megamachine was the
advent of civilization itself, and that the ancient megamachine of
civilization involved mostly human parts, specifically the bureaucracy, the
military, the legitimizing priesthood. It performed unprecedented amounts
of work and manifested not only an enormous magnification of power, but
literally the deification of power.
 The modern megamachine introduced a new system directive, to replace
as many of the human parts as possible, ultimately replacing all of them:
the perfection of the rationalization of life. This is, of course, rational
madness, our interesting variation on ancient Greek divine madness. The
Greeks saw how a greater wisdom could over flood the psyche, creatively or
destructively. Rational Pentheus discovered the cost for ignoring the
greater organic wisdom, ecstatic and spontaneous, that is also involved in
reasonableness, when he sought to imprison it in the form of Dionysus: he
literally lost his head!
We live the opposite from divine madness in our rational madness:
living from a lesser projection of the rational-mechanical portions of
reasonableness extrapolated to godly dimensions: deus ex machina, our
savior!
 This projection of the newest and least matured portions of our
brains, the rationalizing cortex, cut free from the passions and the
traditions that provided bindings and boundings, has come to lord it over
the world. It does not wander aimlessly, this infantile tyrant. It projects
it's dogmas into science, technology, economy, and everyday habits of mind
(yes, John, there is no place for dogma in science, but that does not
prevent scientists from being dogmatic, or from thinking from the
unexamined dogmas of nominalism, or from the dogmas of the megamachine).
 The children and young adults endlessly pushing the buttons of the
devices that confine them to their screens are elements of the megamachine,
happily being further "programmed" to machine ways of living. Ditto many
(thankfully, not all) of the dominant views in science and technology, and,
of course, also in anti-scientific views, which are constructing with the
greatest speed and a religious-like passion our unsustainable dying world,
scientifically informed sustainability alternatives notwithstanding.
Perfection awaits us.
 What "would motivate them to kill us?"
 Rationally-mechanically infantilized us.

Gene Halton

"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness."


On Jun 15, 2017 11:42 AM, "John F Sowa"  wrote:

> On 6/15/2017 9:58 AM, g...@gnusystems.ca wrote:
>
>> To me, an intelligent system must have an internal guidance system
>> semiotically coupled with its external world, and must have some degree of
>> autonomy in its interactions with other systems.
>>
>
> That definition is compatible with Peirce's comment that the search
> for "the first nondegenerate Thirdness" is a more precise goal than
> the search for the origin of life.
>
> Note the comment by the biologist Lynn Margulis:  a bacterium swimming
> upstream in a glucose gradient exhibits intentionality.  In the article
> "Gaia is a tough bitch", she said “The growth, reproduction, and
> communication of these moving, alliance-forming bacteria” lie on
> a continuum “with our thought, with our happiness, our sensitivities
> and stimulations.”
>
> I think it’s quite plausible that AI systems could reach that level
>> of autonomy and leave us behind in terms of intelligence, but what
>> would motivate them to kill us?
>>
>
> Yes.  The only intentionality in today's AI systems is explicitly
> programmed in them -- for example, Google's goal of finding documents
> or the goal of a chess program to win a game.  If no such goal is
> programmed in an AI system, it just wanders aimlessly.
>
> The most likely reason why any AI system would have the goal to kill
> anything is that some human(s) 

Re: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:9235] Rupert Sheldrake TED Talk

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Edwina et al,
Regarding your first point. Edwina: "If I understand you correctly, you
are suggesting that 'empathy', as a societal characteristic, i.e., a
habit/Thirdness within a population, might be removed from that
population's behaviour.  Such a population, I suggest, couldn't last beyond
a generation, for the psychological reality of 'empathy' or connection
-with-others, is vital in human society, which learns most of its behaviour
from others [rather than inheriting it]."

Yes, you understand that correctly, but I allow that empathy is a deeply
engrained, biosocial instinctive capacity requiring sufficient empathic
parenting to develop, and "eradicable" only as pathology, notably as
clinical narcissistic disturbance. And I am in agreement with your
conclusion.
 Gene Halton



On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 3:06 PM, Edwina Taborsky  wrote:

> Yes  as noted in the Wiki article [yes, I know, I know, how plebeian of
> me]..on Sheldrake, Brian Josephson [Nobel Laureate in Physics] - who does
> know of Peircean semiosis and indeed, supports it..wrote in criticism of
> Maddox's rejection of Sheldrake's hypotheses as 'not testable'. Josephson
>
> criticised Maddox for "a failure to admit even the possibility that
> genuine physical facts may exist which lie outside the scope of current
> scientific descriptions"
>
> Again, testing for the reality of potentiality, which plays a huge role in
> the ability of an organism to Anticipate and Hypothesize, is very
> difficult, since our scientific method, powerful as it is, is focused on
> discrete individual actualities.
>
> Edwina
>
>
>
> On Mon 12/06/17 1:53 PM , Gary Richmond gary.richm...@gmail.com sent:
>
> John, Kirsti, list,
>
> John Sowa wrote:
>
> A useful term is 'prescientific'.  That is not the
> same as 'unscientific'.  It just means that the methods of
> science are not applicable.   Perhaps someday they might be.
> But nobody knows how.
>
>
> I agree. Peirce used the term 'prescientific' in places in reference to
> his early cosmological (what we'd call pre-Big Bang) musiings. On this list
> Jon Schmidt has argued that such early prescientific comsological
> 'hypotheses', for example, those occurring in certain of the 1898 lectures
> published as Reasoning and the Logic of Things, esp. in consideration of
> the famous Blackboard example, offer support for a belief in God as “Really
> creator of all  three Universes of Experience” (CP 6.452) . (In addition,
> those prescientific musings can be seen to offer an origin of Peirce's
> three universal categories; but that's for another discussion.)
>
> Meanwhile, scientific method has caught up with some previously not
> (adequately) testable hypotheses about our own post-Big Bang cosmos, so
> that experiments on such 'spooky' phenomena as quantum action at a distance
> have recently (2015) been shown to be real to the satisfaction of at least
> some scientists working in quantum physics. See:
> https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2015/11/nist-team-prov
> es-spooky-action-distance-really-real
>
> As described in a  paper posted online 
> and published in  Physical Review
>  
> researchers
> from NIST and several other institutions created pairs of identical light
> particles, or photons, and sent them to two different locations to be
> measured. Researchers showed the measured results not only were correlated,
> but also—by eliminating all other known options—that these correlations
> cannot be caused by the locally controlled, "realistic" universe Einstein
> thought we lived in. This implies a different explanation such as
> entanglement.
>
>
> It seems to me very unlikely, to the point of impossibility, that science
> will ever (can ever?) develop methods to test pre-Big Bang hypotheses (so,
> again, the term 'prescientific' seems apt), or for the reality of God. But
> if quantum action at a distance can be supported experimentally, other
> 'spooky' phenomena (like telepathy) may prove testable in time as well.
>
> Best,
>
> Gary R
>
>
>
> [image: Blocked image]
>
> Gary Richmond
> Philosophy and Critical Thinking
> Communication Studies
> LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
> C 745
> 718 482-5690 <(718)%20482-5690>
>
> On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 8:08 AM, John F Sowa  wrote:
>
>> On 6/12/2017 7:33 AM, kirst...@saunalahti.fi wrote:
>>
>>> It may well be that it is LOGICALLY impossible to prove.
>>>
>>
>> That may be true.  That may be like the existence of God.
>> There are no proofs that God exists.  There are no proofs that
>> God does not exist.
>>
>> In fact, there are no two people -- believers or nonbelievers --
>> who will give you the same definition of God.  Just ask them.
>>
>> But I do think they are worth some attention.
>>>
>>
>> I agree.  A useful term is 'prescientific'.  That is not the
>> same as 'unscientific'.  It just means 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:9235] Rupert Sheldrake TED Talk

[Eugene Halton]

In the past generation in the United States, empathy among college
students, as measured by standardized tests, has dropped about 40%
according to a 2010 University of Michigan study, with the largest drop
occurring after the year 2000. This is the new normal. Should we now
suppose the previous norm to be paranormal, above or beyond the norm? Other
standardized tests show that Narcissism has gone up for this age group, as
would be expected, since Narcissism involves empathy deficiency.

Could there be a day when empathy is regarded as a paranormal phenomenon?
Imagine that society where rigorous experiments on the subjects show no
signs of empathy above chance, because the society has systematically
self-altered itself to diminish or virtually extinguish a passion older
than humanity itself.

Of course all of this involves socialization and especially parenting.
Imagine a society where frequent empathic touch and gaze between parent and
young children is regarded as paranormal, because the norms reveal very
little empathic touch or gaze. Harlow’s monkey experiments showed what this
would be like.

A society shaped by a rational-mechanical bureaucratic mindset
is likely to manifest it not only in its norms of parenting and social
interaction, but tacitly in its science and technology as well, despite the
best intentions and technical methods. The passions tend to be denigrated
in such a world.

In mid-twentieth century “the new synthesis” in genetics, as
Julian Huxley called it, showed a determinist perspective in which
socialization, experience, and Lamarckian-like phenomena, such as Peirce’s
idea of “evolutionary love,” evolution by Thirdness, were unacceptable,
perhaps again, literally “paranormal.” Epigenetics and related developments
in biology have shown the limitations of "the new synthesis."

I grant that Sheldrake attempted rigorous experiments with original
designs, which I'd like to look further into, including the dog ones. On
the upside I can see that the dog experiments at least included beings
living more from their passions. It throws a light on the more typical
experimental assumptions: Why would we think that randomized untrained
subjects from the humanly diminished altered state of a rational-mechanical
bureaucratic society performing cognitive tasks would provide rigorous
objective data in experiments on phenomena such as telepathy?

Gene Halton

On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 10:41 AM, Jerry LR Chandler <
jerry_lr_chand...@icloud.com> wrote:

> List:
>
> Kirsti’s very solid post is worthy of a very careful read, although I not
> state the case so forcefully.
>
> In general, although I have not studied Sheldrake’s work as closely as
> she, I have followed it for several decades from the perspective of
> biochemical dose-response relationships.  In general, I find his scientific
> logic sound.
>
> Historically, quantitative scientific measurements of phenomena can
> proceed decades or centuries before a quantitative theories of how the
> phenomena can be symbolized.
>
> A clear example of the factual measurements before quantitative
> explanations are genetic phenomena.  Inheritable traits appear as if by
> magic. Another example,  the need for specific vitamins in diets and the
> influence of hormones on behavior.  CSP grounds his view of realism on the
> facts associated with quali-signs, sin-signs and legi-signs, in illation to
> possible measurement.   Scientific theories are necessarily grounded in
> such facts, either qualitative of quantitative.
>
>  It (observation) is what it is, regardless of assertions about the formal
> logics of mathematics.
>
> Sheldrake's statements about scientific “dogmas” contain some grains of
> truth but are not well stated from either a chemical, mathematical or
> logical point of view.
>
> Sheldrake is certainly NOT applying a Procrustian bed to observations in
> order to accommodate his personal philosophy.
>
> Cheers
>
> Jerry
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Jun 12, 2017, at 6:33 AM, kirst...@saunalahti.fi wrote:
> >
> > John,
> > Actually Sheldrake was able to test a hypothesis (which, to my knowledge
> he did not himself believe in at the time)on non-local effects. His series
> of experiments (one will never do) on pidgeons are truly ingenious and
> suberb AS experimental designs.
> >
> > If that is agreed (after thorough studying), then his findings arew
> noteworthy. Within my expertice his experimental designs were impeccable.
> - If the result feel odd and mysterious, that is no  scientific ground to
> reject them.
> >
> > This has nothing to do with sympathy or antipathy. The result of any
> well-conducted experiment are what they are. They present 'brute
> secondness' as I think CSP would have put it.
> >
> > Being so seasoned as I am in doing and evaluating experimental research,
> I do not take seriously any 'results' I have not been able to check
> according to the design, process and statistical methods used. - Sheldrake

Fwd: Re: RE: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Laws of Nature as Signs

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Edwina,

Thanks, but it was not so perfectly. The last Peirce phrase should be
“reasonableness energizing in the world.”

Not “universe.”

I’m glad you thought my words expressed what you were trying to say, given
that I am not an atheist, perhaps something closer to a “religious
atheist,” though that doesn't quite get it either. I find D.H. Lawrence
gets closer to it, the idea of "immersed in creation,"from his 1924
description of attending an Apache ritual:

“There is, in our sense of the word, no God. But all is godly.
There is no Great Mind directing the universe. Yet the mystery of creation,
the wonder and fascination of creation shimmers in every leaf and stone, in
every thorn and bud, in the fangs of the rattle-snake, and in the soft eyes
of the fawn. Things utterly opposite are still pure wonder of creation, the
yell of the mountain lion, and the breeze in the aspen leavesThere is
no God looking on. The only god there is, is involved all the time in the
dramatic wonder and inconsistency of creation. God is immersed, as it were,
in creation, not to be separated or distinguished. There can be no Ideal
God”

Gene


On Apr 8, 2017 6:39 PM, "Edwina Taborsky" <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:

Gene - thanks. Your last paragraph on knowledge says what I was trying to
say and I didn't express it very well  - you've said it perfectly.

Edwina

-- 
This message is virus free, protected by Primus - Canada's
largest alternative telecommunications provider.

http://www.primus.ca

On Sat 08/04/17 6:30 PM , Eugene Halton eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu sent:

John Sowa: “But every kind of Thirdness must be learned by abduction.
Observation can only detect post hoc.  Propter hoc is an abduction. An
infant observes patterns in the parents' babbling, imitates the babbling,
and discovers that certain patterns bring rewards.”



The expectations for communicative dialogical babbling are already
instinctively and musically embedded in the subcortical affirmative mind of
the infant. The dialogue facilitates the observational process rather than
inaugurates it through observation. We are born to be wild intersocial,
communicative abductors! The dialogue continues over time as the infant’s
upper brain starts to come online, becoming more vocally-gesturally
engaged, eventuating in both the birth of symboling and a rebirthing of the
toddler as a symbolizer.



Jon Alan Schmidt:  “this raises the question of what Peirce meant by "God's
purpose."  As I mentioned in the other thread, I take it to be the summum
bonum--the "development of Reason," which is the growth of knowledge about
both God and the universe that He has created and continues to create (CP
1.615; 1903).”



Surely the development of reasonableness is far more than the mere growth
of knowledge/knowledge about, or being a kind of spectator of creation.
Those are ideas from a civilization that has divorced itself from the
living spontaneity, as though true living would have as its ultimate goal
to become a know-it-all. True living involves participation in creation
through the primacy of affirmative mind, in bodying forth and learning, to
which knowing is at best secondary. That is how I take Peirce’s statements
that “the continual increase of the embodiment of the idea-potentiality is
the summum bonum,” one involving a “reasonableness energizing in the
universe.”



Gene Halton

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Re: RE: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Laws of Nature as Signs

[Eugene Halton]

John Sowa: “But every kind of Thirdness must be learned by abduction.
Observation can only detect post hoc.  Propter hoc is an abduction. An
infant observes patterns in the parents' babbling, imitates the babbling,
and discovers that certain patterns bring rewards.”



The expectations for communicative dialogical babbling are already
instinctively and musically embedded in the subcortical affirmative mind of
the infant. The dialogue facilitates the observational process rather than
inaugurates it through observation. We are born to be wild intersocial,
communicative abductors! The dialogue continues over time as the infant’s
upper brain starts to come online, becoming more vocally-gesturally
engaged, eventuating in both the birth of symboling and a rebirthing of the
toddler as a symbolizer.



Jon Alan Schmidt:  “this raises the question of what Peirce meant by "God's
purpose."  As I mentioned in the other thread, I take it to be the *summum
bonum*--the "development of Reason," which is the growth of knowledge about
both God and the universe that He has created and continues to create (CP
1.615; 1903).”



Surely the development of reasonableness is far more than the mere growth
of knowledge/knowledge about, or being a kind of spectator of creation.
Those are ideas from a civilization that has divorced itself from the
living spontaneity, as though true living would have as its ultimate goal
to become a know-it-all. True living involves participation in creation
through the primacy of affirmative mind, in bodying forth and learning, to
which knowing is at best secondary. That is how I take Peirce’s statements
that “the continual increase of the embodiment of the idea-potentiality is
the *summum bonum*,” one involving a “reasonableness energizing in the
universe.”



Gene Halton

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Nominalism vs. Realism

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Eric,
  Here is one practical implication. Is a human really by nature, as
Aristotle said, a zoon politikon, a political (polis or community) animal,
determined to live well, whose end is to be found in the good life of the
community?
 Or is a human by nature simply an animal, determined, as Hobbes
nominalistically put it, to live in an individualistic "state of nature" as
"...a condition of Warre of every one against every one," which required a
social contract for there to be society.
 This nominalistic view of the social as conventional and as divorced
from nature entails a view that society is a non-natural construction.
Peirce's realism allows the social as constituent of nature and reality
itself.
 Gene Halton

On Jan 27, 2017 6:19 PM, "Eric Charles" 
wrote:

> Oh hey, my first post to the list
>
> I must admit that I find much of the recent discussion baffling. In part,
> this is because I have never had anyone explain the Nominalism-Realism
> distinction in a way that made sense to me. Don't get me wrong, I think I
> understand the argument in the ancient context. However, one of the biggest
> appeals of American Philosophy, for me, is its ability to eliminate (or
> disarm) longstanding philosophical problems.
>
> With that in mind, I have never been able to make sense of the
> nominalist-realist debate in the context of Peirce (or James, etc.). The
> best I can do is to wonder: If I am, in a general sense, a realist, in that
> I think people respond to things (without any *a priori* dualistic
> privileging of mental things vs. physical things), what difference does it
> make if I think collections-of-responded-to-things are "real" as a
> collection, or just a collection of "reals"?
>
> I know it might be a big ask, but could someone give an attempt at
> explaining it to me? Either the old fashioned way, by explaining what issue
> is at argument here or, if someone is feeling *even more*
> adventurous, by explaining what practical difference it makes in my action
> which side of this debate I am on (i.e., what habit will I have formed if I
> firmly believe one way or the other?).
>
> Best,
> Eric
>
> ---
> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
> Supervisory Survey Statistician
> U.S. Marine Corps
>
>
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>
>
>
>
>

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] phenomenology of stories

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Stefan,
 Interesting. One rarely ever hears of a student of Simmel.
 Despite widespread appeal as a lecturer in Berlin,  Simmel was denied
a regular professorship for decades because of anti-semitism. He was
Privatdozent at Berlin from 1885 to 1901, then Ausserordentlicher Professor
until 1914 when he finally (good news) got a professorship at the
University of Strassbourg, (bad news) on the eve of the first world war. He
died in 1918, and turned to Lebensphilosophie in his last work.
 In his essay, "The Conflict of Modern Culture," he applied the Kantian
distinction between form and content as that of form and life, arguing that
history can be seen as a dialectic of new forms encapsulating formless
life. He saw in the emergence of twentieth-century culture a seemingly
unviable paradox that the emerging form was life itself; that is, that
formless life would be the new form for culture in the 20th century.
Artistic expressionism was one of his interesting examples.
 But Simmel also saw pragmatism as an example, criticizing it for
elevating life over objective truth:
 "The repudiation of the principle of form culminates not only in
pragmatism, but also in all those thinkers imbued with a modern sense of
life who reject the coherent systems in which an earlier age, dominated by
the classical notion of form, saw its entire philosophical salvation."
 Though not naming him, Simmel seems to have in mind William James as
the basis for his characterization of pragmatism. Clearly Peirce's
pragmatism does not fit that characterization. And pragmatism more broadly
as a philosophical movement, including Dewey and George Herbert Mead,
allows both sociality and biosemiosis to nature in ways that undercut the
rigid confines of Simmel's neo-Kantian dichotomizing of nature and culture,
life and form.

 Gene Halton

On Tue, Nov 15, 2016 at 4:33 PM, sb  wrote:

> John, Kirsti, List,
> for those interested in the philosophy of stories and able to read german
> i recommend:
>
>- Wilhelm Schapp (2012) In Geschichten verstrickt. Zu Sein von Mensch
>und Ding. 5. ed. Klostermann.
>- Wilhelm Schapp (1981) Philosophie der Geschichten. 2. ed.
>Klostermann.
>
> His academic teachers were Rickert, Simmel and Dilthey. He got his PhD in
> 1910 in Göttingen from Husserl. His Doktorarbeit "Beiträge zur
> Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung" is one of the classic texts of german
> phenomenology. He didn't pursue a career as an academic and worked his life
> long as a lawyer. His phenomenology of stories is strongly influenced by
> his work as a lawyer.
>
> Schapps style is lucent and clear. He is fun to read and the absolute
> opposite of Husserls dry turkey books.
>
> Best,
> Stefan
>
> P.S: http://www.wilhelm-schapp-forschung.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/
>
> Am 10.11.16 um 14:51 schrieb kirst...@saunalahti.fi:
>
> John, list,
>
> Most important points you take up, John. Time-sequences   between stories
> do not apply. - The big-bang is just a story,one on many just as possible
> stories.
>
> Time-scales are just as crucial with the between - issue as are storywise
> arising issues. There are no easy ways out ot the time-scale issues.
>
> Best, Kirsti
>
> John F Sowa kirjoitti 9.11.2016 21:25:
>
> Edwina, Kirsti, list,
>
> ET
>
> I wish we could get into the analysis of time in more detail.
>
>
> I came across a short passage by Gregory Bateson that clarifies the
> issues.  See the attached Bateson79.jpg, which is an excerpt from p. 2
> of a book on biosemiotics (see below). Following is the critical point:
>
> GB
>
> thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds
> whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones...
> A story is a little knot or complex of that species of
> connectedness which we call relevance.
>
>
> This observation is compatible with Peirce, but CSP used the term
> 'quasi-mind' to accommodate the species-bias of most humans:
>
> CP 4.551
>
> Admitting that connected Signs must have a Quasi-mind, it may further
> be declared that there can be no isolated sign.  Moreover, signs
> require at least two Quasi-minds; a Quasi-utterer and a Quasi-
> interpreter; and although these two are at one (i.e., are one mind)
> in the sign itself, they must nevertheless be distinct.  In the Sign
> they are, so to say, welded.  Accordingly, it is not merely a fact
> of human Psychology, but a necessity of Logic, that every logical
> evolution of thought should be dialogic.
>
>
> Re time:  We have to distinguish (1) time as it is in reality
> (whatever that may be); (2) time in our stories (which include the
> formalized stories called physics); (3) the mental sequence of
> thought; and (4) the logical sequence (dialogic) of connected signs.
>
> ET
>
> The question is: Are the Platonic worlds BEFORE or AFTER the so-called
> Big Bang?  I read them as AFTER while Gary R and Jon S [not John S]
> read them as BEFORE. In my reading, before the Big 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce's Theory of Thinking

[Eugene Halton]

I sent the post below on Sept 19 when there was some discussion of
musement, but it appears it did not go thru so I'm posting again. Apologies
if it did go thru the first time. Gene H


…and musement musings…

Peirce’s “The play of musement” is a beautiful way of putting
it. It is a portal to a way of opening one’s body soul mind to experience.
But what if, on entering that realm of spontaneity and freedom through the
“play of musement” portal, one begins to realize there are shadings of
musement as various as, for example, the varieties of signs Peirce
outlined?

And what if you allowed yourself to enter the realm of musement
and found your Indo-European or related noun-centered language left behind?
A realm where your noun-God, your concept-God, could not enter? You have
entered the musement language world, alive in verb processes, occasionally
stopping at a noun here and there, but never lingering; alive in the
wonder.

In this realm you realize through energetic projaculation that
the Neglected Argument lies not in picturing Big Daddy Noun-concept in the
Sky, fixed and unspontaneous, but rather, as D. H. Lawrence put it in
describing Walt Whitman’s poetry, “lies in the sheer appreciation of the
instant moment, life surging itself into utterance at its very
well-head…The quivering nimble hour of the present, this is the quick of
Time. This is the immanence.”

You conjecture that not only, as Peirce put it, “When we gaze
upon the multifariousness of nature we are looking straight into the face
of a living spontaneity” (Peirce, 1887, 6.553), but that you yourself are
participant in that living spontaneity. You realize that Peirce is not
claiming “intelligent design” for the universe, but rather an “intelligent
sign” argument energizing into being, a universe in active creation.

And there you find yourself, back from the play of musement, yet still
immersed in the living spontaneity.

Gene Halton

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce's Theory of Thinking

[Eugene Halton]

…and musement musing…

Peirce’s “The play of musement” is a beautiful way of putting
it. It is a portal to a way of opening one’s body soul mind to experience.
But what if, on entering that realm of spontaneity and freedom through the
“play of musement” portal, one begins to realize there are shadings of
musement as various as, for example, the varieties of signs Peirce outlined?

And what if you allowed yourself to enter the realm of musement
and found your Indo-European or related noun-centered language left behind?
A realm where your noun-concept-God, could not enter? You have entered the
musement language world, alive in verb processes, occasionally stopping at
a noun here and there, but never lingering; alive in the wonder.

In this realm you realize through energetic projaculation that
the Neglected Argument lies not in picturing Big Daddy Noun-concept in the
Sky, fixed and unspontaneous, but rather, as D. H. Lawrence put it in
describing Walt Whitman’s poetry, “lies in the sheer appreciation of the
instant moment, life surging itself into utterance at its very
well-head…The quivering nimble hour of the present, this is the quick of
Time. This is the immanence.”

You conjecture that not only, as Peirce put it, “When we gaze
upon the multifariousness of nature we are looking straight into the face
of a living spontaneity” (Peirce, 1887, 6.553), but that you yourself are
participant in that living spontaneity. And there you find yourself, back
from the play of musement, engaging conjecturing, yet still immersed in the
living spontaneity.

Gene Halton

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Do trees talk to each other? Express emotions and make friends? Barking?

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Edwina,
 Yes, thanks for adding the context of mind to brain, the Peircean
view, in one sense that brain is involved in mind, but also that mind is
much broader than brain, and that there many cases of mind not involving
brain.
 Gene

On Sep 16, 2016 10:26 AM, "Edwina Taborsky" <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:

> Eugene, list; yes, that's a great example of Mind operating without a
> separate brain. And the natural world does just that. We humans have
> developed a symbolic method of communication, language, but, that doesn't
> mean that the rest of the natural world doesn't operate via informational
> interaction and knowledge development!
>
> It is indeed like a neural net - that semiosic triad that networks and
> links to other nets. And you don't need symbolic language to generate or
> exchange or receive information.
>
> Edwina
>
> - Original Message -
> *From:* Eugene Halton <eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu>
> *To:* Peirce List <peirce-l@list.iupui.edu>
> *Sent:* Friday, September 16, 2016 10:13 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [PEIRCE-L] Do trees talk to each other? Express emotions
> and make friends? Barking?
>
> Dear Charles,
>  Myecologist Paul Stamets describes ways trees and other plants have
> communication through fungal networks. They provide something like a neural
> net would for a brain.
>  Perhaps one could say that trees have a "brain" without needing a
> brain. And that humans, despite having brains, can be utterly brainless
> when it comes to deforesting the earth.
>  Here is a video on fungi where Stamets reports some of his work:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAw_Zzge49c
>  Cheers,
>  Gene Halton
>
> On Sep 16, 2016 9:33 AM, "Charles Pyle" <charlesp...@comcast.net> wrote:
> >
> > There's increasing evidence to show that trees are able to communicate
> with each other. More than that, trees can learn.
> >
> > If that's true — and my experience as a forester convinces me it is —
> then they must be able to store and transmit information.
> >
> > And scientists are beginning to ask: is it possible that trees possess
> intelligence, and memories, and emotions? So, to cut to the quick, do trees
> have brains?
> >
> >
> > It sounds incredible, but when you discover how trees talk to each
> other, feel pain, nurture each other, even care for their close relatives
> and organise themselves into communities, it's hard to be sceptical.
>
> > -
> >
> > The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They
> Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World
> >
> > Are trees social beings? In this international bestseller, forester and
> author Peter Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is
> a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to
> describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with
> their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share
> nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other
> of impending dangers. Wohlleben also shares his deep love of woods and
> forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration
> he has observed in his woodland.
>
> --
>
>
> -
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>
>
>
>

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Do trees talk to each other? Express emotions and make friends? Barking?

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Charles,
 Myecologist Paul Stamets describes ways trees and other plants have
communication through fungal networks. They provide something like a neural
net would for a brain.
 Perhaps one could say that trees have a "brain" without needing a
brain. And that humans, despite having brains, can be utterly brainless
when it comes to deforesting the earth.
 Here is a video on fungi where Stamets reports some of his work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAw_Zzge49c
 Cheers,
 Gene Halton

On Sep 16, 2016 9:33 AM, "Charles Pyle"  wrote:
>
> There's increasing evidence to show that trees are able to communicate
with each other. More than that, trees can learn.
>
> If that's true — and my experience as a forester convinces me it is —
then they must be able to store and transmit information.
>
> And scientists are beginning to ask: is it possible that trees possess
intelligence, and memories, and emotions? So, to cut to the quick, do trees
have brains?
>
>
> It sounds incredible, but when you discover how trees talk to each other,
feel pain, nurture each other, even care for their close relatives and
organise themselves into communities, it's hard to be sceptical.

> -
>
> The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They
Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World
>
> Are trees social beings? In this international bestseller, forester and
author Peter Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is
a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to
describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with
their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share
nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other
of impending dangers. Wohlleben also shares his deep love of woods and
forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration
he has observed in his woodland.

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Mind evolving

[Eugene Halton]

on/reaction and
> individual 'will'), 2ns*
>
> Well, I won't yet insist on this, although I think it makes sense enough
> to me for the moment and in the context of 'consciousness' as Lawrence
> describes it. The quotation continues:
>
>
>  The one universal element in consciousness which is fundamental to
> life is the element of wonder. You cannot help feeling it in a bean as it
> starts to grow and pulls itself out of its jacket. You cannot help feeling
> it in the glisten of the nucleus of the amoeba. You recognize it,
> willy-nilly, in an ant busily tugging at a straw; in a rook, as it walks
> the frosty grass.
>They all have their obstinate will. But they all live with a sense of
> wonder. Plant consciousness, insect consciousness, fish consciousness, all
> are related by one permanent element, which we may call the religious
> element inherent in all life, even in a flea: the sense of wonder. That is
> our sixth sense, and it is the natural religious sense.
>
>
> His notion of  wonder as "one permanent element, which we may call the
> religious element inherent in all life," or, as he somewhat qualifies it,
> in the living  "consciousness" of plants and animals--"the natural
> religious sense" doesn't seem to me to be at all foreign to Peirce's
> thinking in the matter, and there are places where he discusses religion as
> a primitive or quasi-fundamental sense of wonder or awe (he also associates
> this sense with the creative arts).
>
> This kind of thinking further suggests to me a possible non-dogmatic,
> non-doctrinaire, but *not* non-religious way of looking at such matters for
> those who can't abide organized religion, on the one hand, nor a
> nothing-but reduction of everything to the matterial of the physical realm
> science.
>
> Lawrence continues, shifting the focus slightly to what he calls "mystery":
>
>  "Somebody says that mystery is nothing, because mystery is something
> you don’t know, and what you don’t know is nothing to you. But there is
> more than one way of knowing. Even the real scientist works in the sense of
> wonder. The pity is, when he comes out of his laboratory he puts aside his
> wonder along with his apparatus, and tries to make it all perfectly
> didactic. Science in its true condition of wonder is as religious as any
> religion. But didactic science is as dead and boring as dogmatic religion.
> Both are wonderless and are productive of boredom, endless boredom.”
>
>
> So, "Science in its true condition of wonder is as religious as any
> religion. But didactic science is as dead and boring as dogmatic religion."
> I personally can't help but fully agree with Lawrence here.
>
> And Peirce had himself made this point in slightly different language (I
> haven't the time at the moment to look up sources), for I don't recall his
> using the term 'boring' in these contexts. But surely he employed the word
> 'dead' to describe the lifeless character of both science and religion when
> either has lost its sense of wonder. Now I'm further suggesting that
> 'wonder' in this sense is a kind of 1ns.
>
> Best,
>
> Gary R
>
> ​
>
> [image: Gary Richmond]
>
> *Gary Richmond*
> *Philosophy and Critical Thinking*
> *Communication Studies*
> *LaGuardia College of the City University of New York*
> *C 745*
> *718 482-5690 <718%20482-5690>*
>
> On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 7:22 AM, Eugene Halton <ehal...@nd.edu> wrote:
>
>> Yes, beautiful Chesterton quotation, Ben N.
>>  I loved the "Tommy opened the door" example; and also "This proves
>> that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and
>> amazement." That "almost prenatal leap" is our genetic heritage, and why we
>> are prepared already at birth to leap into intersocial musical dialogue
>> with the mother/caretaker, as Malloch and Trevathen's research with
>> newborns has demonstrated. They found "precise formulation in terms of
>> three parameters: pulse, quality, and narrative,” which are revealed in
>> turn taking interactions with mothers, and charted through spectrographs
>> and pitch plots. And all of it from the days to weeks old subcortical brain!
>>  I agree with Gary F's post on Peirce's view of the mindedness in
>> matter. Peirce claimed elsewhere, all matter is mind hidebound with habit.
>> His claim for a psycho-physical universe and critique of necessitarianism
>> as incapable of adequately explaining variegating life remains a challenge
>> to materialism and its denial of thirdness.
>>  Helmut, you seem to be denying Peirce's claim that things are
>> involved in thi

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Mind evolving

[Eugene Halton]

Yes, beautiful Chesterton quotation, Ben N.
 I loved the "Tommy opened the door" example; and also "This proves
that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and
amazement." That "almost prenatal leap" is our genetic heritage, and why we
are prepared already at birth to leap into intersocial musical dialogue
with the mother/caretaker, as Malloch and Trevathen's research with
newborns has demonstrated. They found "precise formulation in terms of
three parameters: pulse, quality, and narrative,” which are revealed in
turn taking interactions with mothers, and charted through spectrographs
and pitch plots. And all of it from the days to weeks old subcortical brain!
 I agree with Gary F's post on Peirce's view of the mindedness in
matter. Peirce claimed elsewhere, all matter is mind hidebound with habit.
His claim for a psycho-physical universe and critique of necessitarianism
as incapable of adequately explaining variegating life remains a challenge
to materialism and its denial of thirdness.
 Helmut, you seem to be denying Peirce's claim that things are involved
in thirdness as well as having their secondness. On another level, your
characterization of "stone age peoples" ignores the nature of semiotic
animism, which involves the livingness of things in relationships, not in
isolate substances. That great stone mountain genuinely moves me, and my
feeling of wonder genuinely involves me, the mountain, and the living
relationship between us. Our minds live and learn in our transactions,
which really involve the objects of those transactions, internal or
external.

 Perhaps resonating somewhere between the Peirce and Chesterton
quotations, though not the same as either's perspective, is this statement
on the wonder inherent in life by D H Lawrence:
 “When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder.
Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are
based on wonder. Love without wonder is a sensational affair, and power
without wonder is mere force and compulsion.
 The one universal element in consciousness which is fundamental to
life is the element of wonder. You cannot help feeling it in a bean as it
starts to grow and pulls itself out of its jacket. You cannot help feeling
it in the glisten of the nucleus of the amoeba. You recognize it,
willy-nilly, in an ant busily tugging at a straw; in a rook, as it walks
the frosty grass.
   They all have their obstinate will. But they all live with a sense of
wonder. Plant consciousness, insect consciousness, fish consciousness, all
are related by one permanent element, which we may call the religious
element inherent in all life, even in a flea: the sense of wonder. That is
our sixth sense, and it is the natural religious sense.
 Somebody says that mystery is nothing, because mystery is something
you don’t know, and what you don’t know is nothing to you. But there is
more than one way of knowing. Even the real scientist works in the sense of
wonder. The pity is, when he comes out of his laboratory he puts aside his
wonder along with his apparatus, and tries to make it all perfectly
didactic. Science in its true condition of wonder is as religious as any
religion. But didactic science is as dead and boring as dogmatic religion.
Both are wonderless and are productive of boredom, endless boredom.”
Gene Halton
Salzburg

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Fwd: New York Pragmatist Forum 2/29/16: Bruce Wilshire's Primal Pluralism, Phenomenology, Pragmatism, and Native American Philosophy

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Gary R and list,
 What I admire most in Bruce Wilshire's work is the sense of freedom of
exploration, a continuation of the spirit of Emerson, James, and Peirce in
the age of deadened academic bureaucracy. Yes, it is perhaps ironic that he
was at Rutgers University and its philosophy department's analytic outlook.
One example of Wilshire's plea for more than technicalism is his 1990 book,*The
Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation*.
 The connection of Peirce and Black Elk? Well I guess you'd have to
read his *Wild Hunger: The Primal Roots of Modern Addiction*. And maybe the
connection is more William James than Peirce. But the argument he makes
there goes beyond literal substance abusing degenerative addictions to a
more generalized claim that the conditions of modern civilized life involve
"ecstasy deprivation," and the conditions of wildness through which human
"body-selves" evolved into being over a two million year trajectory remain
embedded in us as regenerative "primal needs," repressed or thwarted by the
conditions of agriculturally based civilization and especially modern life.
It is a kind of call to reincorporate the regenerative place of primal
needs in modern life, to regain the lost touch of the earth. Early on
Wilshire states:
 "Probably our early ancestors did not sharply divide activities into
practical and spiritual. Each celebration recreated the whole history of
the people by reinserting them into the regenerating Whole. The most
spiritual was also the most practical. The source that created them was
never absent. Can we not suppose that, despite what we would call
hardships, they were in possession of themselves, because in perpetual
possession of their source and place in Nature, and that they lived in
ecstatic kinship with things around them?" (P. 13).
 Elsewhere, he paraphrases Carl Sauer and says, "the ideology of
technological productiveness, its 'realism,' had become a monomaniacal
ecstasy that threw us out of touch with our own reality as sensuous beings
capable of multi-dimensional ecstatic lives of gratitude and awe...Black
Elk, native American holy man and thinker, spoke of Europeans' reduction of
Nature's gifts to commodities--buffalo hides, buffalo tongues, timber, and
so on. Gold was 'the metal that drove them crazy.' Ultimately Europeans,
for all their apparent successes, reduced and alienated themselves; they
mangled their roots in Nature" (pp. 38-39).
 And in his newly published book Wilshire cites my essay on "Peircean
Animism and the End of Civilization, and some Peirce quotations from it
that show the overlap between Peirce's relational understanding of signs
and traditional animism.
 Gene Halton



On Thu, Feb 18, 2016 at 5:49 PM, Gary Richmond 
wrote:

> Gene, list,
>
> While I've been aware of Wilshire's work for some time, I must admit that
> I haven't read any of his books in their entirety, and nothing at all of
> his for many years. So I'm looking forward to the New York Pragmatists
> Forum discussion this month, and perhaps to reading the posthumous work of
> his you pointed to: *The Much-at-Once: Music, Science, Ecstasy, the Body* (New
> York: Fordham University Press, February 2016; ISBN 0823268349
> ).
>
> I can certainly see why you in particular seem responsive to Wilshire,
> especially given his interest in Native American thought, that of Emerson
> and William James, his criticisms of analytical philosophy (while teaching
> at Rutgers, then the hot bed of analytical thinking in the USA), his
> interest in Joseph Conrad, the theater, music, etc. Indeed, I'd be very
> interested to learn to what extent and in what ways you see his work as
> influencing your own.
>
> Today I came upon this intriguing comment from an article on him:
>
> He also explored the hitherto unsuspected link between American philosophy
> and Native American thought, arguing in *The Primal Roots of American
> Philosophy* for deep affinities between Ralph Waldo Emerson
> , William James, and 
> Charles
> Sanders Peirce 
>  with Black Elk .
>
>
> Peirce and Black Elk? I'd heard mention of this connection in the past but
> never followed up on it (as I vaguely recall, you may have commented on it
> in one of your own books). If you've any present thoughts on it, I'd be
> very interested in them.
> Best,
> Gary R
> [image: Gary Richmond]
>
>
>

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Fwd: New York Pragmatist Forum 2/29/16: Bruce Wilshire's Primal Pluralism, Phenomenology, Pragmatism, and Native American Philosophy

[Eugene Halton]

Thanks for the notice on the February New York Pragmatist Forum devoted to
Bruce Wilshire's work, Gary R. In case it is of interest to the list,
Bruce’s posthumous book is just being published this month, *The
Much-at-Once: Music, Science, Ecstasy, the Body* (New York: Fordham
University Press, February 2016; ISBN 0823268349
).

I had read an earlier draft and it includes some wonderful discussions of
music, among other topics. Here is a description of it from Project Muse:
“In this capstone work, the late Bruce Wilshire seeks to rediscover the
fullness of life in the world by way of a more complete activation of the
body’s potentials. Appealing to our powers of hearing and feeling, with a
special emphasis on music, he engages a rich array of composers, writers,
and thinkers ranging from Beethoven and Mahler to Emerson and William
James. Wilshire builds on James's concept of the much-at-once to name the
superabundance of the world that surrounds, nourishes, holds, and
stimulates us; that pummels and provokes us; that responds to our deepest
need--to feel ecstatically real.”

Gene Halton

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 5:53 PM, Gary Richmond 
wrote:

> *THE NEW YORK PRAGMATIST FORUM*
>
> *Fordham University at Lincoln Center, Lowenstein Building 708*
>
> *9**th** (Columbus) Avenue at 60**th** Street, New York, USA 10023*
>
>
> “*Bruce Wilshire's Primal Pluralism: Phenomenology, Pragmatism, and
> Native American Philosophy”*
>
>
> *Friday, February 26, 2016*
>
> *5:30-7:30 p.m.*
>
>
>
> *David McClean, Rutgers University*
>
>
> *"Wilshire, Bugbee, and the Holy Refusal of Diminishment"*
>
>
> *- - - - - - -*
>
>
> *Alfred Prettyman, Ramapo College of New Jersey*
>
>
> *"The Roles We Live: Mimesis and Identity in Everyday Life"*
>
>
> *- - - - - - -*
>
>
> *Future Spring 2016 Meetings*
>
>
> *Friday, April 1, 2016, 5:30-7:30 p.m.*
>
> *Eva Kittay and Richard Rubin, “Philosophy and Cognitive Impairments”*
>
>
> *Friday, April 29, 2016, 5:30-8:30 p.m.*
>
> “*The Critical Pragmatism of Axel Honneth: A Symposium”*
>
>
> *For more information or to propose papers and topics: *
>
> *jmgr...@fordham.edu *
>
>
>
> -
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> .
>
>
>
>
>
>

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] 'When Philosophy Lost Its Way"

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Gary et al,
 Yes, only that article on the desiccation of philosophy comes about a
century late and a dollar short. Already in 1903 William James showed what
was happening in his short essay "The Ph.D. Octopus."

 And Peirce's former student at John's Hopkins University, Thorstein
Veblen,  skewered the deadening bureaucratization of the mind already
underway, not simply in philosophy, but in university life in general in
America in his book, *The Higher Learning in America*. It was originally
subtitled “A Study in Total Depravity,” but softened to “A Memorandum on
the Conduct of Universities by Business Men,” when it appeared in 1918.

  Veblen noted:
“The school becomes primarily a bureaucratic organization and the first and
unremitting duties of the staff are those of official management and
accountancy. The further qualifications requisite to the members of the
academic staff will be such as make for vendibility, volubility, tactical
effrontery [and] conspicuous conformity to the popular taste in all matters
of opinion, usage and conventions.”

 You can add "clever" to "conformity to the popular taste in all
matters of opinion." And Grant Procurement to "vendibility." The outcome is
a replacement of the passion for learning, the love of wisdom, the
"addiction to study":
 "A substitution of salesmanlike proficiency -- a balancing of bargains
in staple credits -- in the place of scientific capacity and addiction to
study.”

 And if anyone would like to see the results of "the act of
purification that gave birth to the concept of philosophy most of us know
today," they can be viewed here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orozco_-_Dartmouth_b.JPG

 Gene

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Seeing things

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Gary F.,

I would add that it is not only metaphor that, “reverses the process by
unmaking a familiar distinction, revealing a richer and stranger
relationship,” as you put it. This is also the essence of aesthetic
experience. Dewey termed this “perception,” where the qualitative immediacy
of the object determines the interpretation, rather than the habits of
interpretation brought to the situation by the interpreter, which Dewey
termed “recognition.” In Dewey's use of these terms, recognition is
arrested perception, where full openess to the object is foreclosed by
habituation. Fuller openness to the qualities of the object can indeed
unmake a familiar distinction to reveal a richer and perhaps stranger
relationship, such as Peirce’s example of snow in shade as actually
appearing blue.

Aesthetic experience in this sense, as a potential element in all
experience, involves an openness, a vulnerability to experience.
 Gene

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Scientific Attitude

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Steven,
 I have to disagree. In one sense, however, well-put, but for the
opposite meaning you intended.
 Charles went off-the-rails of the delusional scientific worldview of
necessitarianism, of the clockwork universe moving with the necessity of a
clock, or train constrained to its tracks. In showing the place of
spontaneity and the evolution of laws, and in the further development of
his realism, he challenged science to come to terms with a more
comprehensive living universe, alive in still active creation and a
reasonableness energizing into being.
 Although Peirce might not have put it this way, he showed how the
attempt by modern science, the pawn of nominalism, to kill nature, was a
logical failure, that science required something more.
 Of course practically nominalistic science and technology have shown
great short run success in killing nature thus far, at least locally on our
earth, and remain on track toward that end.
 Gene Halton
 On Mar 11, 2015 11:02 PM, Steven Ericsson-Zenith ste...@iase.us wrote:


 In fact, I have to say that Charles had many good and interesting things
 to say, especially while his father was alive (to 1880), but that he did go
 off-the-rails toward the end of his work. This notion of spontaneity and
 the consequent evolution of laws, in particular, offer science no hope of
 the certainty his father pursued.

 Steven

 On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 7:54 PM, Steven Ericsson-Zenith ste...@iase.us
 wrote:


 So it is the infinitesimal departures from law that I disagree with. If
 Charles were referring only to randomness within the laws, then that would
 be fine and he'd have on disagreement from me. But as it stands it
 undermines the whole scientific endeavor.
 Regards,Steven

 On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 5:40 PM, Edwina Taborsky tabor...@primus.ca
 wrote:

  No, it doesn't undermine everything else. Spontaneity is not anarchy
 or randomness. Spontaneity, as Peirce noted, and I repeat:

 by thus admitting pure spontaneity of life as a character of the
 universe, acting always and everywhere though restrained within narrow
 bounds by law, producing infinitesimal departures from law continually, and
 great ones with infinite infrequency, I account for all the variety and
 diversity of the universe 6.59..The ordinary view has to admit the
 inexhaustible multitudinous variety of the world, has to admit that its
 mechanical law cannot account for this in the least, that variety can
 spring only from spontaneity. (ibid)...

 Spontaneity is a basic property of life, just as habit-formation is a
 basic property; just as kinetic mechanical action is yet another property
 (Firstness, Thirdness and Secondness in that order)...and they work
 interactively together.

 Edwina

  - Original Message -
 *From:* Steven Ericsson-Zenith ste...@iase.us
 *To:* Edwina Taborsky tabor...@primus.ca
 *Cc:* Steven Ericsson-Zenith ste...@iase.us ; Jon Awbrey
 jawb...@att.net ; Peirce List peirce-l@list.iupui.edu
 *Sent:* Wednesday, March 11, 2015 7:39 PM
 *Subject:* Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Scientific Attitude

 But you understand the epistemic implications of accepting spontaneity
 as a law, it undermines everything else.

 Steven

 On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 5:19 AM, Edwina Taborsky tabor...@primus.ca
 wrote:

  I continue to differ. Scientific knowledge is not reduced to
 knowledge about necessary actions but must include an acknowledgement of
 the reality of spontaneity. I presume you've read Peirce's 1892 'The
 Doctrine of Necessity Examined'. I provided a brief quote from that in an
 earlier post. I think his argument stands as rational and valid and not, as
 you suggest, 'off the rails'.

 Therefore, to confine scientific knowledge only to the results of law
 and refuse to accept as real, as valid, as anything other than 'random
 aberration' - these spontaneous events, reduces not science but life itself
 to mere mechanical iterations.

 I'm saying that spontaneity is, in itself, a 'kind of law' which is to
 say, it is a basic reality, a vital component, of life. Again, I don't
 define spontaneity as 'randomness' which is in itself mechanical and empty;
 I define spontaneity as probability (not possibility) - which means that
 there is in life, a basic capacity to 'be different from the norm'. This
 capacity is not, again, due to randomness which is a mere mechanical
 result; it is an active auto-organized capacity of information gathering by
 the organism of its environment - and within itself, a capacity to deviate
 from its normative mode - and, spontaneously, differ and form an
 adaptation, an evolved state.

 How does your view of 'results only due to necessary laws' - allow for
 this deviation? I would presume that you would consider deviation to be
 random. I reject randomness as a total waste of energy, and suggest that
 the organism has in itself, the capacity to deviate - and this is not and
 cannot be law-driven but must be spontaneous. Again, spontaneity 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] More Pragmatism, Not Less

[Eugene Halton]

, because it did not involve the American situation. As he put
it in 1939, “If we but made up our minds that it is not inevitable, and if
we now set ourselves deliberately to seeing that no matter what happens we
stay out, we shall save this country from the greatest social catastrophe
that could overtake us, the destruction of all the foundations upon which
to erect a socialized democracy.”  Dewey criticized the idea that American
involvement was “inevitable” while simultaneously assuming such
participation would somehow produce inevitable results.

Perhaps American involvement did lead to the military-industrial-academic
complex and McCarthyism after the war--though the former would likely have
emerged in any case--but Dewey’s localism blinded him to the fact that
Western and World civilization were being subjected to a barbaric assault,
an assault from fascism and from within, which would not listen to verbal
reasoning. By ignoring the question of civilization as a legitimate broader
context of the situation and the possibility that the unreasonable forces
unleashed in Hitler’s totalitarian ambitions could not be avoided
indefinitely, Dewey was unable to see the larger unfolding dynamic of the
twentieth-century, and was led to a false conclusion concerning American
intervention which only the brute facts of Pearl Harbor could change.

Was Mumford the reactionary that the pre-war left attacked him for being?
Consider that by the end of World War two Mumford was attacking the allies’
adoption of Nazi saturation bombing, both in the firebombing of Dresden and
in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He decried the fall of
military standards and limits in the deliberate targeting of civilians.
Mumford was among the earliest proponents of nuclear disarmament, having
written an essay on the nuclear bomb within a month of the bombing of
Hiroshima and a book within a year, as well as helping to organize the
first nuclear disarmament movement. He was an early critic of the Vietnam
War, expressing opinions publicly in 1965 which again cost him friendships.
Mumford’s last scholarly book, *The Pentagon of Power* (1970) was, among
other things, a fierce attack on the antidemocratic
military-industrial-academic establishment.”

Eugene Halton, *Bereft of Reason*, University of Chicago Press, 1995,
pp147f.






---

On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 12:10 PM, Helmut Raulien h.raul...@gmx.de wrote:

   My post was a bit polemic, because I was mad at Mumfords neglection of
 the value of life and that he called that universalism. And I was indeed
 thinking of the nazis. I think, a culture that is not based on the value of
 life is not universalist, but the opposite: Particularist. Universalism for
 me is eg. Kants categorical imperative, and Kants other imperative, that
 humans (so also human life) should be treated as aims, not as means. And
 scientists like Kohlberg and pragmatists like Peirce were scolars of Kant.
 So my conclusion was, that, when someone is attacking scientists and
 pragmatists, his universalism is in fact particularism. And his concept
 of culture too, because for him, culture is not based on the value of
 life, but vice versa. But I was refering to a quote out of its context,
 maybe.
 Best,
 Helmut

  Gary Richmond gary.richm...@gmail.com

   Ben, Helmut, Stephen, list,

 I certainly won't defend Brooks because I think he misuses Mumford. and
 even in the choice of this early material taken out of context, to support
 his argument *contra* Pragmatism in the article cited. I have always had
 a generally positive take on Mumford's ideas, although I don't believe I
 have ever read an entire book by him.

 This evening as I browsed through a selection of quotations from his books
 I found more which resonated positively with me than did not--which is not
 to say that I agree with him in each of the ideas expressed. Still, some of
 his ideas do not seem opposed to philosophical pragmatism, although his
 critical purposes aren't much attuned to it, at least as I see it at the
 moment.
 See: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford

 Best,

 Gary


 *Gary Richmond*
 *Philosophy and Critical Thinking*
 *Communication Studies*
 *LaGuardia College of the City University of New York*
 *C 745*
 *718 482-5690 718%20482-5690*

 On Sat, Oct 11, 2014 at 8:13 PM, Benjamin Udell bud...@nyc.rr.com
 wrote:

  Helmut, list,

 I seldom am inclined to defend Brooks. I haven't read Mumford, although I
 have somewhere his book on Melville that I meant to read. For what it's
 worth, I'll point out that Mumford wrote the Brooks-quoted remark in 1940,
 when the horrors of WWII had not fully unfolded yet. Maybe he never backed
 down from it, I don't know. In a box somewhere I have another book that I
 meant to read, about how in the Nazi death camps sheer survival, fighting
 just to live, became a kind of heroism. The higher ideals ought to serve
 life, not tell it that it's full of crap, only to replace the crap with
 other crap

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:6920] Re: Natural Propositions

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Frederik,
Would you agree that the fleeting moment nominalist is only half of the
picture, that the other half is the nominalist who exists in name only,
nominally, that is, in a social contruct, such as Hobbes's nominalist
social contract, or, say, Rorty's relative belief communities, or as a
social constuctionist? That nominalism presents a dual picture of isolate
particulars and blank conventions?
Gene


On Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 5:10 PM, Frederik Stjernfelt stj...@hum.ku.dk
wrote:

  Actual nominalists do exist, of course, but only in the fleeting moment.

 In the next moment, they may be different  - maybe realists? - because no
 law or tendency exists which grants their existence over time -

  Best
 F

  Den 21/09/2014 kl. 21.36 skrev Stanley N Salthe ssal...@binghamton.edu
 :

 How about an ACTUAL nominalist?

  STAN




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Re: [PEIRCE-L] How Forests Think

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Gary F.,
 Thanks for the post on Kohn's book, *How Forests Think*. In looking
through chapter 1 through the link you posted, I was happy to see that Kohn
makes ample use of Peirce's semiotic in fruitful ways without descending
into the rabbit hole of technical terminology, which usually results in
overkill.
 Cheers,
 Gene


On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 12:54 PM, Gary Fuhrman g...@gnusystems.ca wrote:

 A friend just tipped me off to a recent book that looks like it should be
 of interest to both Peirceans and biosemioticians:

 Eduardo Kohn: *How Forests Think*

 Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human



 http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520276116



 Anyone here familiar with it? It draws quite a bit on both Peirce and
 Terrence Deacon.



 gary f.



 } In Paradise stands the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, the
 latter forming a hedge about the former. Only he who has cleared a path for
 himself through the Tree of Knowledge can come close to the Tree of Life.
 [Haggadah] {

 www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm }{ gnoxics




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[PEIRCE-L] From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution

[Eugene Halton]

My new book, *From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution: John
Stuart-Glennie, Karl Jaspers, and a New Understanding of the Idea, *presents
the forgotten and unknown ideas of John Stuart-Glennie, who began writing
on what Karl Jaspers called the axial age 75 years before Jaspers. The book
also discusses Stuart-Glennie’s philosophy of history and the place of what
he called “the moral revolution” within that history, as well as some other
of his interesting and forgotten ideas, such as “panzoonism” and the
“bioticon.”

It also brings to light the previously undiscussed ideas of D. H. Lawrence
on the theme from 20 years before Jaspers, the seldom mentioned
contributions of Lewis Mumford, and proposes a new context for
understanding the phenomenon.

Peirce makes guest appearances for his ethics of terminology,
theories of 500 year cycles of history, mind as in the nature of things,
and why the “upper consciousness” should avoid “impertinent intermeddling”
in the subconscious observation involved in practical reasoning.

You can read the preface on the kindle edition page on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/From-Axial-Moral-Revolution-Stuart-Glennie-ebook/dp/B00LGUOC4S/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1



Gene

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RE: Re: [PEIRCE-L] REPLY TO HELMUT RAULIEN on Peirce's Questions, i.e. icon and Destiny?

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Helmut,

Or maybe rather: Die Quantität der Potate ist indirekt proportional zur 
Intelligenskapazität ihres Kultivators! (Or, as it is put in the south:  Der 
Dümmste Bauer hat die grösste’ Kartoffel’!).

Loosely translated: “The size of the potato is indirectly proportional to the 
IQ of the farmer; or, the dumbest hick has the biggest spud.”
Gene


From: Helmut Raulien [mailto:h.raul...@gmx.de]
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2014 11:14 AM
To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu
Subject: Aw: Re: [PEIRCE-L] REPLY TO HELMUT RAULIEN on Peirce's Questions, 
i.e. icon and Destiny?

Maybe the ability of having a self concept is proportional with the 
intelligence or the well functioning of the mind, because the mind is a 
reflecting system, and also self-reflecting, if it is highly developed. But 
intelligence does not guarantee social competence: Asperger people and are 
often very intelligent, but lack social competence. I like the term social 
agreement, though many agreements have been established long before a human 
was born, and are eg. present in the epigenes and genes. Social agreements, I 
think, are the structure of a social system (Luhmann said, expectations and 
expectations of expectations are the structure). And the more one shares these 
agreements or expectations, the more social competence he or she has. 
Intelligence, of course, helps too, but not alone. And a trauma, like having 
been neglected as a child, or experience of violence, like in a war, can 
destroy or block social agreements and with it social competence.
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 12. Juni 2014 um 13:41 Uhr
Von: Stephen C. Rose stever...@gmail.commailto:stever...@gmail.com
An: Jerry LR Chandler 
jerry_lr_chand...@me.commailto:jerry_lr_chand...@me.com
Cc: Helmut Raulien h.raul...@gmx.demailto:h.raul...@gmx.de, Peirce List 
peirce-l@list.iupui.edumailto:peirce-l@list.iupui.edu
Betreff: Re: [PEIRCE-L] REPLY TO HELMUT RAULIEN on Peirce's Questions, i.e. 
icon and Destiny?
There are myriad individuals who are not by our standards fully formed, normal, 
etc. I will never forget a visit in Winston-Salem to a facility literally 
filled with almost identical human beings all of whom were condemned to 
existences of complete stasis. I have worked in mental hospitals of various 
sorts and could go on about this. But my conclusion would be this: Our normalcy 
is a social agreement that may exclude those who are deemed outside of the 
circle. But life is ultimately wrapped in a penumbra of mystery and we cannot 
be the judges of what constitutes normalcy or even of the quality of existences 
of those who could be deemed to be irretrievably altered due to chemically 
explicable causes. That we do judge does not mean that the lives lived by all 
do not constitute a destiny. To say that is merely to say they are as real as 
any life.

@stephencrosehttps://twitter.com/stephencrose

On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 12:42 AM, Jerry LR Chandler jerry_lr_chand...@me.com 
wrote:

On Jun 11, 2014, at 12:24 PM, Stephen C. Rose wrote:

It's probable that the initial consciousness of a person at birth is already 
formed and that images have already been seen as they are, it seems, when we 
lie abed with our eyes closed. This is what makes current debate regarding 
conception so damnably difficult. It most probably begins prior to 'birth'. The 
existence of someone else - parent, other - simply expands this consciousness 
to social operability. My own sense is that a form of destiny is already 
existent, thus personality.
Stephen, List:

You write:
My own sense is that a form of destiny is already existent, thus personality.

Nearly a year ago, I was introduced to a young, man, named Logan, age 12, with 
sparkling eyes and a gentle demeanor. His body was so very normal.  He was 
excited about the forth-coming athletic contest. He loved his special ed 
teacher and they expressed their mutual affection for one another.

Logan's IQ is 50.
So low that he never will be capable of living independently.
His IQ is a consequence of a chemical difference in his DNA, inherited from his 
parents and made manifest by developmental processes.
Technically, this can be called a mis-arrangement of the electric particles 
composing his DNA.
In other words, a component of the causality of Logan's IQ is electrical in 
it's abstract nature.
How does Logan's fate relate to CSP's philosophy?

Does this realistic and pragmatic example of Logan constitute a form of 
chemical destiny?

Is Logan's case an exception to the general hypothesis that very human 
individual has a genetic sequence and hence that we all should be, 
philosophically, a consequence of the chemical destiny we inherit from of 
parents?
Is this our birthright?  Technically, are the (abstract) electric particles the 
antecedent leading principle of the (gamma existential) graph from which our 
bodies and mind emerge, part of our chemical destiny?

For my philosophy of logic, the word destiny requires multiple symbol systems 
 in order to 

RE: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science and religion: text 1

[Eugene Halton]

I agree with Gary Fuhrman's point on the significance of the natural light as 
the root for Peirce's conception of instinctive beliefs, common sensism and 
practical beliefs, religion, and the potential connection of science with 
religion. It opens up evolutionary questions that also can inform a critique of 
religion and science.
If the natural light represents some evolved resonance of human 
intelligence with the laws of nature, it is, as Peirce argued, because we are 
evolved out of determination by and alignment with those laws, and so are able 
to have insight, in-sight, and see the light, even with the great range of 
human plasticity. So that for modern science, built on the model of Galileo's 
emphasis on il lume natural, ...it is the simpler Hypothesis in the sense of 
the more facile and natural, the one that instinct suggests, that must be 
preferred; for the reason that unless man have a natural bent in accordance 
with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all. 6.477.
Something more than human must be the object which determines human beliefs, to 
cite the quotation from the revised version of The Fixation of Belief, To 
satisfy our doubts, therefore, it is necessary that a method should be found by 
which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external 
permanency...by something Real... CP 5:383-4 (revised version of Fixation of 
Belief).
Religion, in my view, evolved into being with a very similar 
outlook, taking what we feebly call nature, in its minute particulars, as the 
living determinant of human belief and also object of reverence. The gods, or 
God, were insignificant or non-existent, only becoming significant much later 
as human social constructions. Civilized religions turned away from the 
primordial attunement to wild nature and turned toward the domesticated world, 
radically altering the conception of religion, and gave rise to supernatural 
conceptions of divinity as transcendent, as well as anthropocentrism. But 
modern science also imposed a grid between itself and wild nature, the grid of 
the machine, the clockwork grid, and derived a subnatural conception of nature.
There can be no reconciliation between supernatural religions and 
subnatural science. The filter of anthropocentrism and its human-centered 
conception of supernatural divinity or transcendence is unsustainable, having 
lost the touch of the earth. But so too is the filter of subnatural science, 
which would disqualify the qualitative dimensions of experience, as Galileo 
nominalistically did. Galileo: I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on 
are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are 
concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature 
were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated Galileo 
Galilei, The Assayer, 1623.
The possible reconciliation of religion and science would have to 
involve the broader evolutionary foraging past through which religion and 
humans co-evolved, and the original natural illumination that the more one 
attunes to the variescent surrounding wild living earth, practically and 
reverentially, the more one becomes participant in the drama of creation. I 
will call this the NEA, Neglected Evolutionary Argument. Our foraging ancestors 
believed in a psycho-physical universe, and religion, as seen in numerous 
ethnographies, exhibits itself as a two-sided reverential and practical way of 
living in a psycho-physical universe, however fantastically imagined. Peirce's 
term Buddhisto-Christian seems to try to get at something like this, but 
simply does not go far enough to break through the Buddha-Christ human-centered 
anthropomorphism endemic to these products of the past 2,500 years. But his 
philosophy and appreciation of the natural light does allow for the longer 
evolutionary perspective.

Gene


From: Gary Fuhrman [mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca]
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 11:21 AM
To: 'Peirce List'
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science and 
religion: text 1

Søren, list,

Peirce did not use the term panentheism because it wasn't available in his 
time. But he did use both mysticism and revelation - even defined the 
latter for the Century Dictionary - and his usage of both is fairly consistent 
with his own philosophical work as a whole, and with current usage of those 
terms as well. So I don't think it's helpful to apply them to Peirce's work in 
a sense quite different from Peirce's usage.

I agree with what you say below about musement, even to calling it a form of 
meditation. But what animates musement, and the whole Neglected Argument 
which begins with it, is neither mysticism nor revelation; rather it's the 
natural light of reason, as Kees explains in 9.5. This natural light is the 
root, as it were, of Peircean common-sensism and of Peirce's view of 

RE: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapters 7 8

[Eugene Halton]

Response to Michael Shapiro’s post that Peirce should be seen as a 
structuralist. Shapiro: “The use by Peirce of the form rationalized (rather 
than rational) as a modifier of variety in the quotation above should be 
taken advisedly. This use of the participial form, with its adversion to 
process, should serve as a caveat that when Peirce talks about objective 
idealism, what he ought to have said is objectified idealism.

Peirce: “The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective 
idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws” 
Peirce, CP 6.25.

Note “becoming.” And even those physical laws are still subject to evolution. A 
habit is a process, semiosis is an inferential process, “rationalized variety” 
is a kind of habituated variety yet still in process. I see no reason for 
calling Peirce a structuralist, since even a structure, in Peirce, is a 
habit-process, however slow or even seemingly invariant that inveterate habit 
may be: it remains potentially subject to growth. Why not simply acknowledge 
Peirce’s thoroughgoing processualism?

Gene Halton


From: Michael Shapiro [mailto:poo...@earthlink.net]
Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2014 7:51 AM
To: PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapters 7  8

Dear Fellow-Listers,

I'd like to offer up the following as a take on ch. 7 and an anticipation of 
ch. 8, from the perspective of a non-philosopher interested in developing a 
Peircean theory of language for the twenty-first century:

Because he was a practicing scientist in the modern sense, Peirce 
is the one great philosopher who escapes my definition of a philosopher as 
someone who only solves problems of his own devising. This makes him also a 
proto-structuralist (a structuralist avant la lettre).
The essential concept of structuralism, whether applied to physics 
or linguistics or anthropology, is that of invariance under transformation. 
This makes theory, following Peirce's whole philosophy and his pragmaticism in 
particular, the rationalized explication of  variety: [U]nderlying all other 
laws is the only tendency which can grow by its own virtue, the tendency of all 
things to take habits  In so far as evolution follows a law, the law or 
habit, instead of being a movement from homogeneity to heterogeneity, is growth 
from difformity to uniformity. But the chance divergences from laws are 
perpetually acting to increase the variety of the world, and are checked by a 
sort of natural selection and otherwise ... , so that the general result may be 
described as 'organized heterogeneity,' or, better, rationalized variety'' (CP 
6.101). Or, translating law and habit into the appropriate phenomenological 
category: Thirdness ... is an essential ingredient of reality (EP 2:345).
   Once we properly understand structuralism not as the putatively 
debunked epistemology that originated in Geneva with Saussure, but rather as 
the revised, essentially correct version originating with Jakobson in Prague 
and Hjelmslev in Copenhagen, we can recognize the patterning of Thirdness and 
Secondness in language––the so-called passkey semiotic––for what it is. 
Consequently, the fundamental notion of alternation between basic form and 
contextual variant becomes understandable as immanent in theory, and not merely 
a construct or an artifact of description. The importance of this notion cannot 
be overestimated.
   A child learning its native language, for instance, is exactly 
in the same position as an analyst. It has to determine which linguistic form 
is basic, and which is a contextual variant. Take a simple example from 
English, that of the voiceless stops
   English voiceless (actually, tense) stops are aspirated when 
they are word-initial or begin a stressed syllable, as in pen, ten, Ken. They 
are unaspirated when immediately following word-initial s, as in spun, stun, 
skunk. After an s elsewhere in a word they are normally unaspirated as well, 
except when the cluster is heteromorphemic and the stop belongs to an unbound 
morpheme; compare dis[t]end vs. dis[tʰ]aste. Word-final voiceless stops are 
optionally aspirate.
   This variation makes aspiration non-distinctive (non-phonemic) 
in English, unlike, say, in Ancient Greek or Hindi, where aspirated stops 
change the meaning of words by comparison with items that have their 
unaspirated counterparts ceteris paribus.
   I think it is only by taking such variation for what it is, i. 
e., the working out of Thirdness in the context of Secondness,  that we can we 
understand what Peirce had in mind with his version of Pragmatism.
Best regards,
Michael
P. S. The use by Peirce of the form rationalized (rather than rational) as 
a modifier of variety in the quotation above should be taken advisedly. This 
use of the participial form, with its adversion to process, should serve as a 
caveat that 

RE: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapters 7 8

[Eugene Halton]

Dear Michael,
Sorry, but it is not in the least redundant to characterize 
Peirce’s philosophy as processual. It clarifies what pervades his thinking. 
Calling Peirce a structuralist, on the other hand, does not, in my opinion.
Gene

From: Michael Shapiro [mailto:poo...@earthlink.net]
Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2014 12:11 PM
To: Eugene Halton; PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapters 7  8

Gene, list,

Structuralism properly understood does not exclude process or growth, just the 
opposite, so calling Peirce's doctrine processualism is both redundant and 
terminologically inadvisable, given the latter's unusualness. Cf. my 1991 
book's title The Sense of Change: Language as History.

Michael
-Original Message-
From: Eugene Halton
Sent: Apr 27, 2014 12:02 PM
To: PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edumailto:PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapters 7  8


Response to Michael Shapiro’s post that Peirce should be seen as a 
structuralist. Shapiro: “The use by Peirce of the form rationalized (rather 
than rational) as a modifier of variety in the quotation above should be 
taken advisedly. This use of the participial form, with its adversion to 
process, should serve as a caveat that when Peirce talks about objective 
idealism, what he ought to have said is objectified idealism.

Peirce: “The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective 
idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws” 
Peirce, CP 6.25.

Note “becoming.” And even those physical laws are still subject to evolution. A 
habit is a process, semiosis is an inferential process, “rationalized variety” 
is a kind of habituated variety yet still in process. I see no reason for 
calling Peirce a structuralist, since even a structure, in Peirce, is a 
habit-process, however slow or even seemingly invariant that inveterate habit 
may be: it remains potentially subject to growth. Why not simply acknowledge 
Peirce’s thoroughgoing processualism?

Gene Halton


From: Michael Shapiro [mailto:poo...@earthlink.net]
Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2014 7:51 AM
To: PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edumailto:PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapters 7  8

Dear Fellow-Listers,

I'd like to offer up the following as a take on ch. 7 and an anticipation of 
ch. 8, from the perspective of a non-philosopher interested in developing a 
Peircean theory of language for the twenty-first century:


Because he was a practicing scientist in the modern sense, Peirce 
is the one great philosopher who escapes my definition of a philosopher as 
someone who only solves problems of his own devising. This makes him also a 
proto-structuralist (a structuralist avant la lettre).
The essential concept of structuralism, whether applied to physics 
or linguistics or anthropology, is that of invariance under transformation. 
This makes theory, following Peirce's whole philosophy and his pragmaticism in 
particular, the rationalized explication of  variety: [U]nderlying all other 
laws is the only tendency which can grow by its own virtue, the tendency of all 
things to take habits  In so far as evolution follows a law, the law or 
habit, instead of being a movement from homogeneity to heterogeneity, is growth 
from difformity to uniformity. But the chance divergences from laws are 
perpetually acting to increase the variety of the world, and are checked by a 
sort of natural selection and otherwise ... , so that the general result may be 
described as 'organized heterogeneity,' or, better, rationalized variety'' (CP 
6.101). Or, translating law and habit into the appropriate phenomenological 
category: Thirdness ... is an essential ingredient of reality (EP 2:345).
   Once we properly understand structuralism not as the putatively 
debunked epistemology that originated in Geneva with Saussure, but rather as 
the revised, essentially correct version originating with Jakobson in Prague 
and Hjelmslev in Copenhagen, we can recognize the patterning of Thirdness and 
Secondness in language––the so-called passkey semiotic––for what it is. 
Consequently, the fundamental notion of alternation between basic form and 
contextual variant becomes understandable as immanent in theory, and not merely 
a construct or an artifact of description. The importance of this notion cannot 
be overestimated.
   A child learning its native language, for instance, is exactly 
in the same position as an analyst. It has to determine which linguistic form 
is basic, and which is a contextual variant. Take a simple example from 
English, that of the voiceless stops
   English voiceless (actually, tense) stops are aspirated when 
they are word-initial or begin a stressed syllable, as in pen, ten, Ken. They 
are unaspirated when immediately following word-initial s, as in spun, stun, 
skunk. After an s elsewhere in a word

RE: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapter 4, The Normative Science of Logic

[Eugene Halton]

I’m attempting to extrapolate from the exchange between Phyllis and Stefan, 
though these comments are not directed to them.

Phyllis Chiasson: “In the full statement, Peirce said that The only moral evil 
is not to have an ultimate aim that can be 'consistently pursued'--or something 
to that effect. Don't have my references with me. If one aimed at eliminating 
one's breed or the human race, one (in the sense of a community of whatever one 
is a community of) could not consistently apply such an aim because there would 
eventually be a point (perhaps not in one's lifetime, but eventually) when the 
ultimate aim is met and therefore could not be consistently pursued and 
therefore evil….Thus, elimination of the human race may or may not occur, but 
its pursuit cannot be considered an ultimate aim because such elimination 
provides a clear and measurable outcome and a point of completion, negating its 
worthiness and capability for consistent pursuit and thus its eligibility for 
being an ultimate aim.
Regards,
Phyllis Chiasson

“Even now, perhaps a majority of our countrymen still believe that science and 
technics can solve all human problems. They have no suspicion that our runaway 
science and technics themselves have come to constitute the main problem the 
human race has to overcome…Strangely, the palpable rationality of the 
scientific method within its own accredited area gave rise in the great 
majority of its practitioners to a compulsive irrationality—an uncritical faith 
in science’s godlike power to control the destinies of the human race.” Lewis 
Mumford, “Prologue to Our Time: 1895-1975,” Findings and Keepings: Analects for 
an Autobiography, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 374.

So if Mumford was/is correct, would it then be possible to consider actually 
existing science and technics today, that is, as they actually are and operate 
as manifestations of nominalistic civilization, throwing open 10 Pandora’s 
boxes for every one they attempt to close, as pursuing an ultimate end that 
cannot be consistently pursued, that is, as evil?

And if that is the case, yes, the list would reply that science could be 
rehabilitated by Peirce’s method of science. But perhaps not humanly pursued 
science, if the compulsive irrationalities now driving humans over the cliff 
eliminate the human race.

And if that would be the case, what a cold, inhuman way to think.

Gene


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