[peirce-l] Re: What fundamenal psychological laws is Peirce referring to?
Joe, thanks for your response. I "get it" now. Festinger came to mind because "selective exposure" as amode of dissonance avoidance was a major topic in communication research. I haven't read that literature in years--and I didn't particularly buy into it then--so don't trust me now. As I recall, one mode of dissonance reduction wassimilar tothe pre-dissonance mode:"selective perception," or "cherry picking"--selecting only the data consonant with the threatened belief or behavior. "Rationalization"was a dissonance reduction means, I think, though it seems nearly tautological.In terms of Festinger's smoking-health dissonance I remember itin this form: "We're all going to die of something." There is also the heroic, the transcendent "We all owe a death." Simple denial is a common means: "If smoking causes cancer, most smokers would get it, but in fact most don't." Researchers turned up so many techniques of dissonance reduction I no longer remember which were originallyproposed by Festinger and which came later. Some, by the way (I think Eliot Aronson among them), argued cognitive dissonance was nota logical but a psychological phenomena, and that humans were not rational but rationalizers. And, relevant to your remarks below, some argued that the need to reduce the dissonance resulted not from logical tensions, but from the social concept of the self. For example, the argument goes, if it were only a logical tension operating, there'd be no tension experienced from telling a lie for money. It would make logical sense to say anything asked of you for either a few or many bucks. The tension arisesonly as a result of social norms:"What kind of person am I to tell a lie for a lousy couple of bucks." In my personal experience with smoking, I could have cared less about the dissonance between my smoking and the health information. It was simply desire; I didn't want to quit. I became involved in "dissonance reduction" behaviors only when socially challenged or when I thought about dealing such challenges. As regards the argument that social consciousness is priorto theconsciousness of self, doesn't "social consciousness" somewhat load the dice? Social consciousness requires some degree of "exteriorizing," creating an "out there" of objectsthrough processes of representation that must be acquired through learning and language. Aparallelconsciousness of self would necessarily be a consequent and never an antecedent development. Now, I believe that is the case for the "consciousness of . . . " modality of mind in which the self is a representational construct. But from what did all that construction arise? I think we are necessarily forced to accept a more primary mode of information processing, the more autistic or "child-like" consciousness in which feelings, actions, and perceptions are merged in a single plane of experience. Iview the learned social consciousness as a secondaryoverlay onto the primary mode--which persists throughout out lives as our everyday mind. In the primary mode,events and object are experienced pretty much in terms of their immediate relevances--what we are feeling and doing.The contents of the acquired secondary mode are assimilated into the primary mode of information processing. Hence we can very subjectively find beauty and enjoyment in the spontaneous elaboration of theories that cause freshmen, stumbling alongin the secondary mode, acuteheadaches. Isn't it the imposition of social consciousness which forces upon us rationalization if not rationality itself?Even those who live in literature and want to eat the fruit from still life paintings must rationalize the irrational. (I thinkthe "irrational" in human behavioris seldom the opposite of "rational," but more nearly something like "autistic," "narcissistic," or "egocentric," and as such more nearly the opposite of "social.") Bill Bailey "Joe, I don't understand why you think the order might be reversed. To resort to authority is essentially to cease thinking and to unquestioningly accept. There's no cognitive dissonanceavoidance necessary. But if we begin with trying to avoid dissonance, and society forces us to confront it, then authority is one possible resort. (Leon Festinger's school ofresearch would suggeststill other possibilities of dissonance reduction.)"REPLY:Well, I was thinking of the argument one might make that social consciousness is prior to consciousness of self, and the method of tenacity seems to me to be motivated by the value of self-integrity, the instinctive tendency not to give up on any part of oneself, and one's beliefs are an important aspect of what one tends to think of when one thinks of one's identity. Losing some beliefs e.g. in religion, in one's parents, in the worthiness of one's country, etc., can be experienced as a kind of self-destruction and people often seem to demonstrate great fear of that happening to them.
[peirce-l] Re: What fundamenal psychological laws is Peirce referring to?
As regards tthe logical vs. psychological distinction: Jeff Kasser wrote an important paper on what that distinction meant for Peirce a few years ago. The title is "Peirce's Supposed Psychologism". It;s on the ARISBE website: http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/kasser/psychol.htm Jeff makes it pretty clear, I think, that what Peirce meant by "psychologism" -- which Peirce frequently inveighs against but is often accused of himself -- is not what most people who talk about this now assume that it is. I won't attempt to state Jeff's conclusions here with any exactitude -- he will be joining the discussion himself in a few days when he gets some free time -- but just roughly indicate what he is getting at -- or at least what I learned or think I learned from his paper -- namely, that the conception of thought or mind is not uniquely the proper province of any special science, be it psychology (scientific or otherwise) or sociology or linguistics or the theory of computing machines or whatever. The idea of mind or thought is also a basic commonsense conception which has been around in the West in an overt form since the time when people first started speculating about thought and mind in ancient Greece. In the terminology Peirce adopted from Jeremy Bentham, we should distinguish between a COENOSCOPIC sense of "mind" or "thought" or other mentalistic term and an IDIOSCOPIC sense of such terms.. The former is the sense of "mind" or "thought" which we have in mind [!!] when we say something like "What are you thinking about?", "What's on you mind?", "He spoke his mind", and so forth, as distinct from the sense which is appropriate for use in the context of some special scientific study of mind. To understand what is meant by the word "mind" as used in scientific psychology, let us say, we have to find out what people who have established or mastered something in that field understand by such terms since the meaning of such terms in that context is a matter of what the course of special study of its subject matter has resulted in up to this point. That is the idioscopic sense of "mind", "thought", etc. But long before there was anything like a science of psychology and long before we were old enough to understand that there is any such thing as psychology we had already learned in the course of our ordinary dealings with people something about the nature of mind in the "coenoscopic" sense of the term. For we all learn early on, as small children, that we have to figure out what people are thinking in order to understand what they are wanting to say, for example; we learn that people can be sincere or insincere, saying one thing and thinking another; we learn that they sometimes lie, pretending to think what what they do not actually think or believe; people change their minds; they tell us what is on their minds; and we learn also that they believe us or doubt us, too, when we say something, and so forth. We become constantly -- I don't mean obsessively but just as a mater of course -- aware of that sort of thing in any conversation we have or any communications we read. In other words it is just the plain old everyday understanding that is indispensable for ordinary life, which may be shot through with contradiction and incoherence but,.for better or worse, is indispensable nonethelessNow it is a nice question to get clear on exactly what we must be minimally assuming or taking for granted in drawing such commonsense distinctions in our ordinary day-in, day-out dealing with people, and we may very well make big mistakes in trying to say what they are; but whatever the right analysis of that yields -- which may take some considerable skill to get right -- it will be our common sense understanding of what mind is, what thinking is, etc. That is our "coenoscopic" understanding of what mind is and that is what philosophers -- including logicians -- are (or ought to be) concerned to explicate when they are doing their proper job..Such is, I believe, Peirce's view of the distinction of two kinds of understanding of what mind is. There is, by the way, a corresponding distinction to be drawn between our ordinary commonsense (coenoscopic) physics -- our understanding of the purely physical aspect of the things we have to deal with in moving about and moving other things in the world, and then there os the special scientific (ideoscopic) understanding. Now, at one point Jeff quotes a passage from Peirce in which he claims that at the basis of the special sciences we in fact find coenoscopic conceptions which we think of as being idioscopic though they are not. ==quote Peirce= Now it is a circumstance most significant for the logic of science, that this science of dynamics, upon which all the physical sciences repose, when defined in the strict way in which its founders understood it, and not as embracing the law of the conservation of energy, neither is nor
