[peirce-l] Re: What "fundamental psychological laws" is Peirce referring to?
Bill Bailey earthlink.net> writes: Sept 29: ��Levi-Strauss argues that there is no real difference in terms of complexity between "primitive" and scientific thought; he found the primitive's categories and structurings in botany, for example, to be as complex as any western textbook might offer. The difference he found was that the primitive botany was based upon use--what plants were good for���.��� ��I still think Levi-Strauss erred in being driven by the concerns of his day, possibly responding to developmentalists like Heinz Werner, and was out to prove "primitives" were not "simple." But what he ended up describing as the primitive mind is the everyday mind of socialized people everywhere--habits of willful tenacity and authority���.��� ���I don't accept the notion of "man in a state of nature." What few studies/examples of feral children and social isolates there are suggest, unless rescued before puberty, they do not achieve normal human development. I don't know what "laws" there are governing the human mind, but whatever they are, they're largely social. To be socialized means to be locked into belief systems based upon tenacity and authority, initially those you are born into. These two social requisites of belief are perfectly capable of the most radical kinds of error and monstrosity. They have historically supported all sorts of superstition, tyranny, genocide--you name it--along with the heights of human achievement.��� end Bailey quotation Dear Bill, You describe Levi-Strauss���s claim that ���primitive��� can often match ���scientific��� knowledge in areas such as botany, though ���primitive��� is not disinterested. And how sometime later you acknowledged how scientists ���too are filling needs, have uses for their systems.��� So far I���m with you. One might even state it differently: scientific naturalists can tend to be focalized exclusively on a research question, whereas hunter-gatherers can tend to view a particular question as an aspect of ecological mind. Jared Diamond gives a great example of ornithological field work in New Guinea where his focus on identifying a particular rare bird limited him from seeing it ecologically: his aboriginal guide had to show him how one version of the bird is found low in branches, the other in higher branches. Diamond was only looking at the bird itself, isolate. The question I would pose is: who was more scientific, the aboriginal or the focused Diamond? But your idea that ���man in a state of nature��� is feral, if I understand you, seems to me to be a basic misreading of the life of hunter- gathering through which we became human, as is your idea that the ���primitive mind is the everyday mind of socialized people everywhere.��� I���m not a fan of Levi-Strauss���s way of boiling people down to his structural conception of mind. But the anthropological record reveals hunter-gatherer peoples typically to be highly sophisticated naturalists. Consider Paul Shepard���s words, from his book, Nature and Madness: ���Beneath the veneer of civilization, in the trite phrase of humanism, lies not the barbarian and the animal, but the human in us who knows what is right and necessary for becoming fully human: birth in gentle surroundings, a rich nonhuman environment, juvenile tasks with simple tools, the discipline of natural history, play at being animals, the expressive arts of receiving food as a spiritual gift rather than as a product, the cultivation of metaphorical significance of natural phenomena of all kinds, clan membership and small group life, and the profound claims and liberation of ritual initiation and subsequent stages of adult mentorship. There is a secret person undamaged in each of us, aware of the validity of these conditions, sensitive to their right moments in our lives. All of them are assimilated in perverted forms in modern society: our profound love of animals twisted into pets, zoos, decorations, and entertainment; our search for poetic wholeness subverted by the model of the machine instead of the body; the moment of pubertal idealism shunted into nationalism or otherworldly religion instead of an ecosophical cosmology.��� ���We have not lost, and cannot lose, the genuine impulse. It awaits only an authentic expression. The task is not to start by recapturing the theme of a reconciliation with the earth in all of its metaphysical subtlety, but with something much more direct and simple that will yield its own healing metaphysics.��� Paul Shepard, from Nature and Madness You also claim that, ���To be socialized means to be locked into belief systems based upon tenacity and authority, initially those you are born into...��� Yet this seems to me not a depiction of socialization, but of what Dennis Wrong called ���the oversocialized conception of man.��� Healthy socialization brings forth individuals capable of spontan
[peirce-l] Re: Death of Arnold Shepperson
I am very sorry to hear of Arnold's death and send my condolences. He will be missed. Gene Halton --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: What "fundamental psychological laws" is Peirce referring to?
Kirsti Mtt��nen saunalahti.fi> writes: > > Dear Eugene, > > Thanks for an inspiring mail. The idea of a progressively broadening > social conception I find a very fruitful one, enriching the idea of a > logical ordering. This, together with your exhilarating > thought-experiment with an evolutionary-historical progression, > definitely made some thoughts I was not quite in the clear with, more > clear. > > But I cannot see that the social should be excluded from the method of > tenacity in the way you state: > > > ��A tenaciously held belief is still social, as any habit is. Yet the > > social is excluded from the method of tenacity. What you believe by > > tenacity may also be social and learned, or perhaps social and > > instinctive, but believed in because you simply continue to believe in > > it, regardless of others' beliefs. > > Take for example the way things are nowadays in scientific communities, > which is no way really furthering finding out truth. It's arranged > according to the belief that maximal competition (between individuals) > ensures that the 'best ones' win. Well, 'the best ones' in that view > may win, but the truth certainly is not a winner. - Anyway, the method > of tenacity is bound in this context to become one individuals with > some success are pressed to resort to. Because if anything fundamental > to the work of that individual is convincingly questioned, and so > threatened, the whole career may be at stake. It does not make any > difference, whether the person in question has primarily the truth as a > personal motivating aim, or the just the aim of a fine career, winning > others presents itself either as the means, or as the aim. > > In "Economy of Reseach" (or thus titled in CP) Peirce sees the only way > of really furthering the finding out of the truth in the practice of > just funding generously a lot of people. With a rational HOPE, but > nothing more sure, that some of them, but some ones which cannot be > identified in advance, will produce something worth funding the whole > lot. > > Well, it's a long time since I read that piece. But I've had the > opportunity for a good many years to be a part of a (quite small) > research institute with absolutely no problems with funds. Within a > short time it became internationally acknowledged as the leading > institute in the field, as well as highly appreciated outside the > special field. Then various things happened, and with them the 'normal' > scarcity of funding started. Within a VERY short time followed a deep > decay in level of research. > > I also had the opportunity to discuss with one of the persons in charge > of the so called 'golden coller' department in the Finnish company > Nokia, which some you may know, before the stupendous success the > company later achieved. The principles were the same, except somewhat > less rational. They acted on a principle based on spending money on > individuals, based on decisions made in upper departments in the > hierachy. So they were just sloshing around money, irrationally. At the > institute I was a member, all decisions were discussed. But there was > no pressure to make them look like reasonable to the outside. > > One of my favorite quotes from that particular piece used to be the > metaphor by Peirce: Burning diamonds instead of coal to produce heat. > > Thanks again, > > Kirsti > > Kirsti Mtt��nen > saunalahti.fi> > Dear Kirsti, If I understand your criticism that the social should not be excluded from the method of tenacity, you are saying that much research today goes on under Darwin-like survival of the fittest rules: research by tenacity in a competitive social milieu, individuals forced by the game to stick to their prior thought which gave them their success. It seems to me somewhat similar to the description of Isolato tenacity I gave. Are you saying that through the competitive social milieu, in pushing individuals into tenacity, the social is thereby ingredient in the method of tenacity? Or that methodically tenacious individuals, in aiming for competitive social success, thereby reveal the social within the method of tenacity? I'm not sure. It seems to me such individuals can be characterized as aiming for power through whatever means, and would fit the method of authority. I characterized it in my previus post as: "2 You believe what you are forced by social power to believe or can force on others to believe." By force here I would include social legitimation, the power politics of cliques, "peer reviews," etc., and not only police. Or maybe I should soften what I said in previous post to viewing the social as only indirectly involved in the method of tenacity? Tenacity seems to me to be about imposing one's way on experience. I am also familiar with the funding approach you describe, through some encounters with the MacArthur Foundation way back. I spent one eveni
[peirce-l] Re: What "fundamental psychological laws" is Peirce referring to?
Dear Joe, The ordering of the methods seems to me to be based on a progressively broadening social conception: 1 You believe what you believe. 2 You believe what you are forced by social power to believe or can force on others to believe. 3 You believe what you take to be intrinsically believable to believe in. 4 You believe what self-correcting conduct informed by observation and experience leads you to believe in. A tenaciously held belief is still social, as any habit is. Yet the social is excluded from the method of tenacity. What you believe by tenacity may also be social and learned, or perhaps social and instinctive, but believed in because you simply continue to believe in it, regardless of others' beliefs. Authority is a social method for compelling belief. Peirce also describes the movement from authority to a priori as the opening of a broader social outlook, which becomes yet broader in the scientific method. Surely Peirce is not implying a historical progression, a kind of a modified, more social version of Hobbes, of humans capable of tenacious belief, who become capable of believing others' beliefs only through imposed authority? I agree with Kirsti that the goodness of the method is what determines order, not historical development. Still, one could argue that the development of modern philosophy involved the replacement of scholastic authority as method with a priori, in turn displaced by method of science. But who then would the pre-medieval tenacious be? Or one could take Peirce's 5.564 statement introduced here by Joe as developmental, but would it be an individual's development or that of history? Let me try this for fun. If one did attempt to look at these methods as evolutionary-historical development, which, again, I don't take to be Peirce's point, one could reverse the order completely and see it regressively as: 1 the wild human mind emerging alive in its landscape in omnivorous observation and learning, in participation-art-science, until, 2 fascinated by its own products, it holds them/itself as its own mirror, domesticating itself, and 3 invents and imposes an authority structure made in its human mind-image abstraction, personified by a king, written by scribes, and executed by institutionalized warriors, and...eventually, 4 the modern era introduces Isolatoism, as Melville called it in Moby Dick, the tenacious Ahabian self, severed from the common continent of humanity and nature, whose tenacity results ultimately in diabolic unmediated fusion with its object, tethered to it by the line of its monomaniacal thought: The ghost in the rational-mechanical megamachine that is modern nominalized consciousness, tenaciously opening and reopening Pandora's Box whatever it might bring, idealizing it as science and civilization. Ishmael survives in Moby Dick, because he is able to re-grasp 1 through Queeqeg, the wild human mind. Peirce's philosophy does something similar, harpooning the Leviathan of modern consciousness in the process. Sorry if this seems too metaphoric and obscure. Cheerily, Gene At 01:07 AM 9/23/2006, you wrote: Subject: What "fundamenal psychological laws" is Peirce referring to? From: Joseph Ransdell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006 16:21:17 -0700 (PDT) In "The Fixation of Belief" Peirce says that "a man may go through life, systematically keeping out of view all that might cause a change n his opinions, and if he only succeeds -- basing his method, as he does, on two fundamental psychologicl laws -- I do not see what can be said against his doing so". This is in Part V, where he is explaining the method of tenacity, where he then goes on to say that "the social impulse" will nevertheless somehow cause him, at times, to face up to some contradiction which impels recourse to adopting the second method, which is the method of authority. His explanation of this is very unsatisfactory, far too sketchy to be very informative, and I wonder if anyone has run across any place where he says anything that might flesh that out or, regardless of that, whether anyone has any plausible explanation themselves of exactly what accounts for the transition from the first to the second method. One might wonder, too,whether Peirce might not have the order wrong: might it not be argued that method #1 should be authority and method #2 tenacity? I wonder if anyone has ever tried to justify his ordering of the methods in the way he does? I don't recall anyone ever trying to do that, but then I don't trust my memory on this since it has not always been a topic in which I had much interest until fairly recently. That he has somehow got hold of something right in distinguishing the methods can be argued, I believe, but can the ordering really be argued for as plausible? Joe Ransdell In a manuscript c. 1906 which was printed in the Collected Papers at 5.564, Peirce describes "The Fixa
[peirce-l] Re: Entelechy
May 13, 2005 Dear Kirsti, Thanks. Glad to hear you enjoyed those early articles. Re truth giving to beauty, see below. Dear Jeff, You ask how a poem can be an argument in Peirces sense, related to the context of him describing the universe as an argument that is necessarily a great poem. Perhaps Peirce means this in the same way as when he distinguished between an argument and argumentation in his A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God essay. Remember there, as Nathan Houser points out in his introduction to EP2, that Peirce distinguished an argument as, any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief from argumentation as an argument proceeding upon definitely formulated premisses. An argument, as Houser points out, does not have to be self-controlled, as argumentation is. Hence The universe as an argument is necessarily a great work of art, a great poem as Peirce put it in the quotation I cited, is allowing the universe to be cosmic poeisis, self-creating perfection of being, whose ultimate entelechy, as I imagine it, is the intrinsically admirable being we call Beauty. Truth gives itself to Beauty in this sense, where the end of inquiry coalesces into the intrinsically admirable. Gene --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Entelechy
Kirsti M: The entelechy or perfection of being Peirce here refers to is something never attained to full, but strived at, again and again. Just as with science and scientific knowledge. It's about striving to approach, better and better, The Truth. If there ever would be an end, the absolute perfection of knowledge, that would mean an end, which would be in contradiction with life and living. Life and living IS striving - with some kind of an end. Never the last possible I have to disagree, Kirsti. Life is more than science and scientific knowledge, and more than striving to approach, better and better, The Truth. And I mean this in a Peircean sense. Stated differently, science is part of life, not the determinant of it. By my lights life is participant in the entelechy of being, not a spectator looking at a scoreboard it can never reach. The perfection of being manifests all the time in realized aesthetic moments. Entelechy has Firstness, here and now, does it not? Perhaps something like this aesthetic perspective is what William Blake had in mind when he wrote: If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern. [T]he living intelligence which is the creator of all intelligible reality , as Peirce put it in the earlier quotation you comment on, means that ongoing creation involves more than chaos or chance, it involves a reasonableness energizing in the world, as Peirce put it elsewhere. If logic, as self-controlled thought, is a species of ethics, as self-controlled conduct, and ethics is itself a species of aesthetics, as the intrinsically admirable, then The Truth ultimately gives itself to Beauty, as the ultimate of entelechy, as I understand Peirce. And if so, as I see it, the perfection of being involves genesis, as well as development. Perfecting habits of conduct and even the laws of the universe itself, means the perfection of ongoing creation, not the overcoming of it in some Hegelian straitjacket. From this perspective the final entelechy of all being is itself such a moment, poem, painting, banquet, music, or better, mousike, rhythm-rhyme-dance-musicking, at least in the sense in which Peirce claimed that: The Universe as an argument is necessarily a great work of art, a great poem -- for every fine argument is a poem and a symphony -- just as every true poem is a sound argument. But let us compare it rather with a painting -- with an impressionist seashore piece -- then every Quality in a Premiss is one of the elementary colored particles of the Painting; they are all meant to go together to make up the intended Quality that belongs to the whole as whole. That total effect is beyond our ken; but we can appreciate in some measure the resultant Quality of parts of the whole -- which Qualities result from the combinations of elementary Qualities that belong to the premisses. CP 5.119 Gene --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: evolving universe
Dear Gary and il-young son, Yes, I agree that Peirce saw Darwinian natural selection as corresponding to tychism, that is, as one modality of evolution, to which Peirce added two others, corresponding to his three categories and comprising a tri-modal model of evolution. As he said in "Evolutionary Love" (his unblushing title for evolutionary Thirdness), which is available on the Arisbe website: "Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. We may term them tychastic evolution, or tychasm, anancastic evolution, or anancasm, and agapastic evolution, or agapasm. The doctrines which represent these as severally of principal importance we may term tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism. On the other hand the mere propositions that absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love are severally operative in the cosmos may receive the names of tychism, anancism, and agapism." 6.302 And no, I was not shooting from the hip in my characterization of mainstream science as unwilling to confront the implications of Peirce's claim for the irreducible reality of Thirdness. I'm not sure what you mean, il-young son, about comparing Peirce's Thirdness with maps to landscape metaphor. And I think it is incorrect to say that it applies to philosophizing but not science itself. Peirce surely meant it to apply to the sciences and to the universe the sciences study. Help me out: what mainstream science considers that matter derives from mind? Or can take seriously Peirce's claim "that all matter is really mind..." Or that brain is an adaptation to mind? Or that Darwin and Aristotle are like a lion together with a lamb, destined to devour it. Only Peirce considered Aristotle the lion, destined, through further inquiry, to devour and incorporate Darwin into a broadened evolutionary outlook, inclusive of a scientific conception of entelechy as a reality of the universe. When final causality was evicted from nature in the seventeenth century, Thirdness was, in effect, thrown out with the bathwater. Peirce shows a way of reconciling entelechy with modern science, but his baby requires new bathwater, in my opinion, which is nothing less than a new scientific and civilizational framework, one that will displace our current nominalistic civilization. Peirce launched his three universes before Einstein's great breakthroughs a hundred years ago, but where Einstein's ideas have been absorbed and mainstreamed, Peirce's claim that the real universe involves general habit-taking, or mind-like properties, such that, as he put it elsewhere, matter is mind, "hidebound with habit," remains revolutionary today. It opens an escape hatch from the tick-tock universe. Smolin's piece is an example of the mainstream scientist, to whom it would not occur that Peirce would have serious objections to Darwin, or that evolution of physical laws could also bespeak a "reasonableness energizing into being." Why is it so easy for us to consider the possibility of life as a reality of the universe, and to actively research it, and yet to consider mind as a reality of the universe as "unscientific?" (Raise the issue and you are likely to get stereotyped as a religious zealot). As I understand Peirce, it is because we have been so thoroughly programmed into the matrix of modern nominalism, in which things are real and generals not. That is the basis of the inversion of the term "realism" in modern, nominalistically determined science and thought. Peirce rejects "scientific realism" as it is usually understood, as materialism, in favor of a scientific semeiotic realism. And to il-young son, thanks for the suggestion about epigenetics and adaptive mutation. I'll look into them. Cheers, Gene --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: evolving universe
Dear Gary, Thanks for the link to Lee Smolin's piece. I enjoyed reading it. Then, stepping away from it, it occurred to me that comparing Darwin and Einstein, while taking from Peirce the idea that laws of nature are results of natural selection, represents no "dangerous ideas" at all, only a nice juxtaposition of accepted ideas. Smolin assumes Peirce assumed natural laws evolved by Darwinian natural selection alone, which seems to me a false assumption. He remains unaware of Peirce's truly dangerous idea, that there is "a reasonableness, energizing in the universe." Mainstream science at the "Edge" remains unwilling to confront the possibility that Thirdness is irreducibly real. Gene --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Heathening
Dear Joe, I realize you didn't want to go further in this discussion, but I just want to comment on something. Thanks for the definition of heathen, which, with its connection of religious beliefs to locale and landscape, actually could be taken as complimentary, just as the term civilization can be taken as derogatory. You wrote: "...Does praying for rain tend to result in rain? People regularly pray for rain here in West Texas -- indeed, "heathens" in tribal dress are sometimes invited for the purpose in order to make sure that all bases are touched..." This is causal reasoning, which misses the point of native American "prayer." I once attended a Pueblo Corn Dance with Alfonso Ortiz, himself a Pueblo and an anthropologist of the Pueblo. He told me, "White people think we pray to make it rain, but that's not it. The rain does its part, and we must do ours." This is prayer as participation, not praying to make it rain, not a beg-a-thon. Think of it perhaps as more like ancient Greek mousike, though even there the rhythming dance-music-verse world already had moved toward spectator consciousness and anthropocentrism. It is something like ritual musement, or Blake's Poetic Imagination. Gene --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
