Colapietro, Vincent M. 1985. Inwardness and Autonomy: A Neglected Aspect of Peirce's Approach to Mind. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21(4): 485-512.
I well remember when I was a boy, and my brother Herbert ... was scarce more than a child, one day, as the whole family were at table, some spirit from a 'blazer,' or 'chafingdish,' dropped on the muslin dress of one of the ladies and was kindled; and hew instantly he jumped up, and did the right thing, and how skillfully each motion was adapted to the purpose. I asked him afterward about it; and he told me that since Mrs. Longfellow's death, it was that he had often run over in imagination all the details of what ought to be done in such an emergency. It was a striking example of a real habit produced by exercises in the imagination. (5.487; footnote 10) (Colapietro 1985: 485)
This is fairly well known in sport psychology, for example. It is also quite important, as this is a means for improving ones techniques of the body. Exercises in the imagination lead to improved exercises in reality.
The view which Peirce rejects may be called subjectivism. It is based on a seemingly faithful interpretation of familiar facts regarding conscious agents. There are countless examples of mental phenomena (such as dreams, toothaches, unexpressed hopes, secret wishes) whose character would be described by virtually everyone as "private" or "inward." We ordinarily speak of these phenomena as residing only in the mind, thereby implying a contrast between inward, mental phenomena and outward, physical phenomena. One of the most persistent problems in Western philosophy has been, How are we to understand that which has its locus in the mind? (Colapietro 1985: 486)
Again, the mind/body problem. Here the outhor is toching upon a subject which I have met in Frege or Wittgenstein: the matter of subjective/private dreams/imaginations.
Another aspect of this view of consciousness as absolute inwardness or complete insularity concerns the relationship between consciousness and language. According to the subjectivist viewpoint, consciousness infuses signs with meaning in much the same way that God infuses matter with life; indeed, words and signs in general are, apart from consciousness, lifeless (cf. 2.222). Thus, meaning is something consciousness confers upon the signs which it uses, rather than something which these signs intrinsically possess (Nation, III, p. 290). Accordingly, thought must be seen as independent of and prior to the symbols in which it clothes itself (cf. 5.250). Moreover, there is a radical discontinuity between my mental activities and my social interactions: thinking is one thing, discourse another. Signs are needed to express my thoughts to others but they are not necessarily needed to think these thoughts; they are means of communication but not necessarily instruments of thoughts (cf. MS 675, p. 17). (Colapietro 1985: 487)
This is extremely useful for my purposes, specifically for arguing against the notion that language is the primary or even only means of thinking.
In construing the essential activities of human consciousness to be something other than (and independent of) the use of intersubjective signs, this view makes these activities of a given mind completely inaccessible to all other minds. This, we can never know, in any real sense, the thoughts and feelings of anyone other than ourselves: we are, in effect, imprisoned within the sphere of our own subjectivity. The only things which are open to the inspection of others are the signs which a mind chooses to use to express its feelings and thoughts; in contrast, the feelings and thoughts themselves remain forever hidden. (Colapietro 1985: 487-488)
This is very similar to Powys's contention that in the "ultimate situation" every human being is completely alone.
In opposition to this view, Peirce formulated an approach to personal consciousness which stressed its moorings in the objective world and its accessibility to other minds. In this approach, the private is linked, truly as well as linguistically, with the private or lacking: the private is that which is deprived of a status in the public world. By public or external, Peirce understood that which, in principle, is accessible to an infinite number of conscious beings. Whether or not something is truly external in this sense is open to objective tests (5.334). (Colapietro 1985: 488)
This simple definition might come in handy when discussing "nonverbal ethics" or the issue of "intrusion" when reading another person's bodily signs.
Peirce understood pragmaticism to be "a method of ascertaining the meanings, not of all ideas, but only of what I call 'intellectual concepts,' that is to say, of those upon the structure of which, arguments concerning facts may hinge" (5.467). Concepts in this sense are those signs essential to the communication or discovery of knowledge. (Colapietro 1985: 494)
It has been noted that semiotics deals less with real issues than with concepts and definitions. In this sense semiotics is heavily involved with "the communication or discovery of logic," or, in Hjelmsevian/Batesonian terms, generating differences that make a difference.
The third crucial moment in Peirce's investigation of mind was the significance he came to see in the fact that humans can, in addition to exerting a direct influence over the movements of their limbs, exert an indirect influence over the formation of their habits (MS 612, p. 7). (Colapietro 1985: 495)
I wonder what else Peirce had to say about movements of the limbs.
...autonomy of self-control (the capacity of a person to regulate his or her conduct in light of norms and ultimately ideas). (Colapietro 1985: 495)
Valuable. Concursivity might be advanced in this light: that we derive some of the norms and ideas that form our conduct from literature and practical texts.Each one of us is a system of signs - in short, a language. (Colapietro 1985: 498)This idea has many articulations: man is sign (Peirce), the individual is a unique selection of socially available codes and languages (Lotman), the list could go on...
...there is no element of man's consciousness which has not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason is obvious. It is that the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. ... Thus my language is the sum total of myself... (5.314)However, what becomes pronounced in Peirce's matuce thought is that my language is not simply something to which I conform myself; it is something by which R transform myself. In other words, some systems of signs reach a level of complexity such that their development is determined partially, as it were, from within (MS 290; pp. 58-63). Human persons are such semiotic systems. (Colapietro 1985: 498)
Score for semiospheric/semiophrenic appreach to individuality.
Some undisciplined young persons may have come to think of aquired human habits chiefly as constraints; and undoubtedly they are so in a measure. But good habits are in much higher measure powers than they are limitations; and the greater the number even of aquired habits are good, like almost all those that can properly be called natural. (MS 930, p. 31)
(Colapietro 1985: 500)
This is a veritable link between behavioural repertory (aquired ... habits of action), behavioural capital and power.
According to Peirce, the bulk of our habits do not result from the activity of the mind. Most of them come from either the innate constitution of our bodies or the actual course of our experience. Nonetheless, an important, althought small, portion of our habits comes from what Peirce calls "inward actions," "actions which do not take place, but which somehow influence habits" (6.286).(Colapietro 1985: 501)
I would add the cultural aspect: that we aquire some of our habits from cultural texts, social media, prestigious imitation, etc.
Inwardness involves the capacity to withdraw from the public world (i.e., the world of publicly accessible signs) and to enter into a private world (a secret world of private signs). This capacity to withdraw from the public world is, at bottom, the capacity to refrain from outward action. If we take this connection, then we see how Peirce's view that inward reflection is the indispensable instrument of human rationality hangs together with his view that voluntary inhibition is the chief characteristic of human beings (5.448n). According to him, "self-control of any kind is purely inhibitory. It originates nothing" (5.194). Self-control operates by inhibiting us from acting in an outward, physical way; it thereby creates the possibility of acting in an inward, "fanciful" manner. In short, the inhibition of physical behavior creates the possibility of inward action. (Colapietro 1985: 503)
Very interesting.
the ability to draw this distinction is indicative of our sanity and crucial to our rationality. Peirce claims that: "Every sane person lives in a double world, the outer and the inner world, the world of percepts and the world of fancies" (5.487).These [two worlds] are directly distinguishable by their different appearances. But the greatest difference between them, by far, is that one of these nwo worlds, the Inner World, exerts a comparatively slight compulsion upon us ... while the other world, the Outer World, is full of irresistible compulsions for us, and we cannot modify it in the least, except by one peculiar kind of effort, muscular effort, and but very slightly even in that way. (5.475)
(Colapietro 1985: 504)
Recollect Berger & Luckmann's distinction between the everyday reality and the dream reality.
[note] 17. Of course, so general a theme as self-control could not have been overlooked by expositors on Peirce. See, for example, Richard Bernstein, "Action, Conduct, and Self-Control" in Perspectives on Peirce (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1965), edited by Bernstein, pp 66-91. However, the connection between outonomy and inwardness has not received due recognition or adequate expression. (Colapietro 1985: 510)
Worthwhile reference.
[note] 29. Stephen Toulmin, "The Genealogy of 'Consciousness" in Explaining Social Behavior: Consciousness, Human Action, and Social Structure (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1982), edited by P. F. Secord, p. 70. (Colapietro 1985: 512)
So, Secord edited a collection titled after his own book written with R. Harre, and it includes a one-page article by Toulmin...
Pape, Helmut 1984. Laws of Nature, Rules of Conduct and their Analogy in Peirce's Semiotics. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 20(3): 209-239.
For what is philosophy good for, if it does not help us to understand those basic general connections between man, the zoon symbolicon, and matter? (Pape 1984: 209)
I'm not sure, but this seems like a variation of
homo symbolicum.
The main element of habit is the tendency to repeat any action which has been performed before. (MS 875, "On Natural Laws and Chance," pp. 23)
(Pape 1984: 219)
Invaluable.
We may formulate Peirce's semantico-semiotical contrast of symbol and index in the following fashion:(i) While the sign-function of the symbol is based on an assumption about the behavior of all possible interpreters, i.e., that all the objects of the tokens will be understood by all the interpreters in much the same way as the utterer understands them;
(ii) the sign-function of an index assumes that the behavior of the person uttering a token thereby tries to call attontion of the interpreter to something present, i.e., that the utterer directs the possible interpreter to identify the object the sentence is about.
(Pape 1984: 231)
and figure out nonverbal correlates to the these.
Kessler, Gary E. 1978. Pragmatic Bodies Versus Transcendental Egos. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 14(2): 101-119.
If reality is our warrant for calling a feeling cognitive, then what is our justification for calling something real? The only justification, [Willam] James replies, is the "faith of the present critic or inquirer." (Kessler 1978: 102)
This is very similar to my own justification for semiophrenia: that semioticians often invoke an intellectual licence to spew hypertheoretical discourse.
James explicitly singles out the body as the condition for practical action. It is bodies which act, point, gesture, speak - which, in short, affect my world. (Kessler 1978: 104)
A valid truism: everything you do, you do with your body.
By pointing to the role of the body, James is suggesting that knowledge is not an abstract and purely epistemological relation; it reflects the purposes, interests, and desires of the human organism in seeking certain practical ends. In short, knowledge becomes instrumental, and if instrumental, valuable for certain specific ends and goals. (Kessler 1978: 104)
Self-interest.
In the Principles James takes a further step in the direction of the phenomenological notion of intentionality. In the chapter on "Conception" James develops what he calls "The principle of constancy in the mind's meanings." This principle recognizes that our sense of "sameness" is the "keel and backbone" of our thinking. It expresses the essence of conception as "the mind can always intend, and know when it intends, to think of the same." In the Principles, the term "conception" is James's word for intentionality. Intentionality is regarded as primarily a matter of meaning. This is also the central point of Husserl's analysis. (Kessler 1978: 106)
For some reason I found this interesting.
Its appropriations are therefore less to itself than to the most intimately folt part of its present Object, the body, and the central adjustments, which accompany the act of thinking, in the head. These are the real nucleus of our personal identity, and it is their actual existence, realized as a solid present fact, which makes us say "as sure as I exist, those past acts were part of myself."
This recourse to the notion of the body as part of the central experience of our sense of personal identity marks the key idea of James's philosophy. It is of central importance to the whole of his view of experience precisely because it is what he offers in place of the traditional notions of self as a soul-substance and the philosophical recourse to the notions of a transcendental ego. (Kessler 1978: 110)
James's contention here seems commonsensical, but perhaps because I have long forsaken the idea of soul-substance.
The individualized self, which I believe to be the only thing properly called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced. The world experienced (otherwise called the 'field of consciousness') comes at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision, centre of action, centre of interest. Where the body is is 'here'; when the body acts is 'now'; what the body touches is 'this'; all other things are 'there' and 'then' and 'that.' These words of emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference to a focus of action and interest which lies in the body; and the systematization is now so instinctive (was it ever not so?) that no developed or active experience exists for us at all except in that ordered form. So far as 'thoughts' and 'feelings' can be active, their activity terminates in the activity of the body, and only through first arousing its activities can they begin to change those of the rest of the world. The body is the storm centre, the origin of co-ordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience-train. Everything circles around it, and is felt from its point of view. The word 'I,' then, is primarily a noun of position, just like 'this' and 'here.' Activities attached to 'this' position have prerogative emphasis, and, if activities have feelings, must be felt in a peculiar way. The word 'my' designates this kind of emphasis.
I have quoted at lenght because this passage clearly shows that the positional nature of the body plays a vital role not only in constructing our sense of the unity of ou experiences, but also in constructing the very meaning we attribute to them. (Kessler 1978: 110-111)
James is right on the money.
Man is not a disembodied ego or will who creates his world by either his logical categories or wishful hopes. Rather he is an organism immersed in the world. His interests, desires, needs, as well as his power of selectivity, are grounded precisely in the limitations and possibilities this immersion in the world implies. That he is both subject to his environment, and a creative force in transforming it, arises out of this situation. The meaning of the world is grounded in the body. But the body itself is immersed in a world of pure experience. (Kessler 1978: 112)
I wrote something similar in the working definitions (of body and text) section in my first article. Though the bold statement, that "the meaning of the world is grounded in the body," can be developed in interesting directions, perhaps an Uexküllian landscape semiotics or something to that effect.
[note] 8. H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A critical History of Pragmatism. (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill C., 1968, p. 419. (Kessler 1978: 117)
I do hope I'll get to read these books some day. If they have survived from the 60s, hopefully they'll survive another decade or two.
Short, T. L. 1981. Semeiosis and Intentionality. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 17(3): 197-223.
That which would jutify a certain type of interpretation of a sign is sometimes referred to by Peirce as a ground (e.g., in 2.228), though he usually refers to it simply as the relation of sign to object. The ground is of course not the only relation of a lign to its object. For a sign also signifies its object, and that is a different relation albeit grounded in the other. It is in terms of the ground of significance that Peirce makes his most famous division of signs, into icons, indices, and symbols. An icon is related to its object by resemblance or, if the object is a mere quality or type, by embodying or exemplifying it. This, if a piece of cloth is used as a color sample, then use is being made of it in its character as a sign of the color it embodies. An index is related to its object existentially, e.g., by being an effect of it, as smoke is an effect of fire and therefore signifies the existence of a fire at the place from whence it arises. A symbol is related to its object by a rule to the effect that it is to be interpreted as signifying that object. The obvious examples of symbols are the conventionally meaningful parts of human speech.
The ground of a symbol is intrinsically semeiotical but those of icons and indices are not. In either case we have to distinguish between the significance the ground determines and the ground itself. Significance is justified interpretability, while the ground is what justifies or determines this interpretability. (Short 1981: 200)
The peircean triadic sign-division revisited, and the definition of ground.
Something is a sign only if there is something real or unreal that it signifies. But signifying is an odd sort of relation (if it is a relation at all), just because what is signified need not be real. Physical relations obtain only when all of their relata exist; a brick cannot break a window nor a boy stand on a bridge unless brick and window, boy and bridge are real. But a sign can signify what does not exist. Brentano called phenomena of this sort "intentional". Anything possessing intentionality has an object (is intentionally "related" to an object) that need not be real. It would seem, then, that intentionality cannot be reduced to any purely physical relations. Brentano himself held that intentionality was a characteristic unique to consciousness, and, beyond saying that, he offered no analysis of intentionality. Bit if signs, including natural signs, do possess intentionality, then it is questionable whether intentionality always involves consciousness. And ,in any case, we confront the problem of accounting for the intentionality of signs; in virtue of what cane something be said to signify somethhing, when what it signifies is not? (Short 1981: 202-203)
E.g. signs can lie, or "signify only vicariously".
We turn, now, to the generalization of our analysis. As we will see in Section IV, Peirce admits interpretants of three types: energetic interpretants or actions, emotional interpretants or feelings, and logical interprenatns, which are overtly verbal or are either thoughts or habits of action. (Short 1981: 210)
I am only interested in the first two types of interpretants.
Consider, for example, the signs exchanged in a process of flirtation. A silly conversation kept going, glances, body posture invite certain actions, and those actions, if performed, interpret those glances, etc. as invitations to so behave. But these actions are performed (often, not always) for their own sake. So they appear to be energetic interpretants that are not the means to any further end (which is not to deny that they often have rather predictable consequences). However, why did these actions, performed for their own sake, need to be invited first? The answer is that the action performed would not have the desired quality if it was not welcomed by the other person. (Short 1981: 209-210)
Hmm... Short posits that courthship behaviour is in some measure merely instrumental. Scheflen's quasi-courtship would support this, but I'm not sure how feel about it, or what to do with it.
The dynamic object, by contrast, is that "which, from the nature of things, the Sign cannot ekpress, which it can only indicate and leave the interpreter to find out by collateral experience" (8.314). The sign "indicates" its dynamic object by directing the interpreter toward that sort of experience which would count as observation of that object. (Short 1981: 215)
I still imagine the dynamic object to be emotion and the immediate object to be facial expression. This may be fallible interpretation.
Meyers, Robert G. 1992. Peirce's New Way of Signs. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28(3): 505-521.
The meaning of a sign is given by its interpretants but there is no guarantee that two users of the sign will share the same range of interpretants and hence no reason to think they take it in exactly the same sense. Nor is it necessary that they have the same interpretants in mind. Communication requires only that they agree on enough of them. Agreement in meaning is thus a matter of degree and not a question of having exactly the same ideas in mind, as Locke held. (Meyers 1992: 513)
Even more so in nonverbal communicatian, because speech can be heard and text read just the same by different people (as long as it is audible or visible), but because body motion is non-linear, it gives different impressions when observed from different distances or angles. Just think of the sides of the face: A looking at B from B's left may see a sociable and happy person, while C looking at B from B's right at the same time may see dread, boredom, frustration, etc.
Fictional entities such as Shakespeare's character Polonius, to use Peirce's example, are indeterminate. It is neither true nor false of Polonius that he had a haircut just before his death. Since Shakespeare does not tell us whether he did or not, there is no fact of the matter whether he did; hence, he is not a determinate entity. (Note, however that Shakespeare is determinate since he is not a figment of someone's mind). (Meyers 1992: 513)
May or may not prove useful for concursivity.
Joas, Hans 1990. The Creativity of Action and the Intersubjectivity of Reason: Mead's Pragmatism and Social Theory. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 26(2): 165-194.
...Mead made certain positive contributions to sociology's theoretical arsenal... [...] It is well known that he elaborated the basic outline of an anthropological theory of communication and of a theory of the development of the self. (Joas 1990: 166)
This is also why I appreciate Mead: his efforts lay thegroundwork for uniting self and communication in self-communication, although his immediate followers (like H. Blumer) prefered to call it self-indication.
Today, "action" is a central concept of philosophy and of almost all the sciences that concern themselves with human beings. However, by no means has an integration of the action theories of the different disciplines been achieved. In order to understand the sociological theory of action, it is necessary to see it in its derivative from the guiding model of the economic theory of rational action. (Joas 1990: 173)
This is why I'm often weary or suspect of sociological theories of action: they tend te veer off into economics and adamsmithism.
Mead,s early thought operated in the fierld of intellectual tension generated by the poles of a naturalized Hegelianism and functionalist psychology. Even before he had unequivocally assigned himself to the school of pragmatism, the problem of the relationship between action and consciousness was a central cencern for Mead; the interpretation of consciousness as a phase of action that is functional for the successful continuation of the action made it possible for him to link his ideas to Darwin's insights and also to entertain the hope of transcending the Cartesian dualism. It was not the relationship between utility-oriented or moral individual action and social order, but rather the relation between action and consciousness, that moved Mead's thought forwards. The terminology of a natiralistic psychology used in his early work might well hide the fact that Mead is attempting here to formulate the idea of creative subjectivity. (Joas 1990: 177)
I have similar concerns but it is the relationship of bodily behaviour and semiosis that drives me forward.
The theory of the individual's sociality that is elaborated in Mead's theory of the self, of communication, and of self-reflection, shows then that the interrelation among individual human beings does not consist only of interconnections of their utility-oriented actions or in a normative consensus. From the standpoint of the theory of action, the conditions oof the autonomy of rational actors are thereby illuminated. Beyond that, Mead's theory of the constitution of the body-image, of the physical object, and of subjective temporality provide clarification of the conditions for the givenness of the body for the actor, while his theories of the physical and of creativity show the conditions of goal-directed action are. (Joas 1990: 180)
It is probable that the note on "body-image" is a reference to the looking-glass-self aspect of Mead's work.
Deledalle, Gérard 1992. Peirce's "Sign": Its Concept and Its Use. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28(2): 289-301.
Peirce's theory of signs rests on a phenomenology or, to use Peirce's term: a phaneroscopy, the categories of which are ordinal. There are three phaneroscopical categories. 1, 2 and 3, which are not cardinall but ordinal numbers. That is to say that 3 does not mean the single number 3, but a "Third," which presupposes a "Second," which "presupposes" a "First." Peirce's phaneroscopy is hierarchical. (Deledalle 1992: 291)
This is well known intuitively, but "ordinal" enables one to describe this state of affairs.
If I were permitted to give some advice to the readers of Peirce, I would say: if you want to understand Peirce's theory of signs, never read "sign" when you see the word, but translate it either by "representamen" or by "semiosis." And leave the word "sign" to Saussure's semiology. (Deledalle 1992: 300)
Sounds like sound advice, but I digress, there are many theories of signs, Peirce's and Saussure's being merely the most pronounced.
Tejera, V. 1993. Peirce's Semeiotic, and the Aesthetics of Literature. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 29(3): 427-455.
The control of action, practics or antethics, is the "mid-normative" science between the other two normative sciences of aestetics and logic: it is "the theory of the conformity of action to an ideal." But ethics is more than practics "because ethics involves the theory of the ideas itself, the nature of the summum bonum." Peirce then notes that so far as "ethics" has [only] studied the conformity of conduct to an ideal, it has always been limited to a particular idealwhich ... is in fact nothing but a sort of composite photograph of the conscience of the members of the community. ...it is nothing but a traditional standard accepted... wisely without radical criticism, but with a silly pretense of critical examination. (1.573)
As antethics, "the science of morality, virtuous conduct, right living," then, cannot claim to be a heuristic, or discovering, science. Distinguishing between a motive - that by which any action is preceded - and an ideal of conduct, Peirce then says,If conduct is to be thoroughly deliberate, the ideal must be a habit of feeling which has grown up under the influence of a course of self-criticism and hetero-criticisms; and the theory of the deliberate formation of such habits of feeling is what ought to be meant by esthetics. (1.574)
(Tejera 1993: 428)
My jargon sense is tingling. This is my first aquaintance with
practics. Too bad conduct is never thoroughly deliberate, except perhaps in literary texts wherein the writer fully determines the conduct of his or her characters.
That such clarification is necessary and that it needs to be quite detailed will be gathered from the fact that Critic, or logic, may not be applied to the literary and other arts because logical analysis of the media of these orts will necessarily be reductive or denaturing of the verbal, acoustic, plastic, or kinetic texture of their expressive media. Logic in the sense of Critic will only apply legitimately to assertions or arguments about works of art, but not the works themselves. (Tejera 1993: 431)
Extremely important. Thus far my nonverbalism project has takes the same path: it studies not nonverbal communication but discourse on nonverbal communication (especially theories, notions and passing remarks in unrelated subjects).
In relation to the ordinary reader's interpretations of the work, the critic's discourse will be anaplastic: that is, it may reshape, redirect, clarify or intensify the reader's appreciation of the work. But it would have to be a second-rate, or else merely formulaic, work before a critic's discursive surgery could be said to "improve" it artistically. On the other hand, criticism that is not irrelevant cannot avoid being anaphytic of the work: it must take its rise in, and be an offshoot of the work. A critical discourse that uses the work only to get started, may properly be said to be epiphytic: namely, not dependent upon the work in the sense of getting nourishment from it, but therefore irrelevant to it as criticism - much as an orchid, and what we like or dislike about, is irrelevant to the tree or branch that it attaches to. When such criticism is also spoilative of the integrity of the work in its references to or use of it, we should rather call it anapletoric, on the grounds that it is defacing the work or inflicting wounds upon it. (Tejera 1993: 446)
A text may may properly be said to be jargoaded [
žargodeeritud] when it is overloaded with jargon, especially with terms that feel as if they have been constructed on the spot.
Colapietro, Vincent 1995. Notes for a Sketch of a Peircean Theory of the Unconscious. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 31(3): 482-506.
In one of its principal manifestations, consciousness is, in the etymological sense, a dis-ease engendered by dysfunction. It is in effect just this manifestation of consciousness on which Peirce himself focused in his early pragmatic essays (most obviously, "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear") and also in his later pragmatist pieces. This dis-ease, experienced by the agent in doubt, is taken as a signal that something is amiss. The interpretation of this and countless other clues, somatic as well as environmental, by the human organism is required if that organism is to maintain its foothold in an ineluctably precarious world. This means that human well-being and human sign-use are inseparately linked, but only because human existence and human semiosis are of a piece. (Colapietro 1995: 487)
Neat. Must reconsider this when dealing with ageing.
Even so, the other text just quoted - the one in which Peirce offers the metaphor for human consciousness of a bottomless lake - continues in a manner that points in a different direction; for he elaborates his trope by suggesting that, in the waters of this lake, "there are countless objects at different depths; and certain influences will five certain kinds of those objects an upward impulse which may be intense enough and continue long enough to bring them into the upper visible layer" (7.547). On the one thand, there is a ubiquitous downward force exerted on all mental objects, forcing them to sink toward oblivion (7.553). On the other, there is a selective upward force exerted on some objects, pushing (and, in some cases, pehraps luring) objects toward the sulface of consiousness. (Colapietro 1995: 490-491)
I like this lake metaphor very much. Psilocybin, in this sense, pushes every object one can notice in that lake upwards with such great force that it rises from the depths and pops out of the lake, hovers above the water for you to gander for the lenght of the trip and then smashes and splashes back from whence it came.
With the appearance of each one of us and, presumably, also of organisms similar to us, it is as though an evolving world burst upon the scene out of "a chaos of unpersonalized feeling" - and did so in just the fashion Peirce described at the conclusion of "The Architecture of Theories" (6.33) - only to confront a world already in place (albeit also an evolving world). (Colapietro 1995: 494)
Yet again this article seems psychedelic.
- Brent, Joseph 1993. Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
- Colapietro, Vincent 1989. Peirce's Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
- Colapietro, Vincent 1992. "Purpose, Power, and Agency." The Monist (October), volume 75, number 4: 423-444.
- Dewey, John 1922. Human Nature and Conduct. NY: Henry Holt & Co.
- McDermott, John J. 1976. The Culture of Experience. NY: NYU Press.
- Sheriff, John K. 1989. The Fate of Meaning: Charles Peirce, Structuralism, and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Short, T. L. 1988. "The Growth of Symbols." Cruzeiro Semiotio, numero 8 (janeiro): 81-87.
Petry, Edward S., Jr. 1992. The Origin and Development of Peirce's Concept of Self-Control. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 28(4): 667-690.
In terms of his categories, Peirce's final understanding of self-control encompassed all three categories. Self-control involves the Firstness of freedom and self-determination, the Secondness of struggle and resistance to change and the Thirdness of habit. During this second stage, however, emphasis was placed almost entirely on the Secondness of self-control. (Petry 1992: 668)
Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness have so many different manifestations.
Schiller described the state created by the "play impulse" as a state of "the utmost self-dependence and freedom" (Schiller, 69). In Peirce's words, "play" is "neither internally nor externally constrained" (W1:11). "Play" is therefore a type of freedom because the individual no longer abandons the self to be determined by the world nor is the world abandoned for an atemporal order, instead the world is drawn inside (Schiller, 69) and is ordered by our purposive thoughts and conduct. (Petry 1992: 671)
So much of this is loose or flating for me. Instead, I compared these notions with my current activity, which consists of reading and learning as a form of "play". I don't read these articles because I have to, I read them because I want to. Self-education is tinted with freedom. That is, I don't abandon my self, my interests and cares, previous knowledge and free associations for the sake of cathing whatever it might be that a tutor could catch from these texts. I'm deing this for me, and for fun.
If one is self-controlled, there is continuity between the present and the future and consequently, one need nott await the future in order to have a reasonable conception of it. This was the basis upon which Peirce differentiated his pragmaticism from the pragmatisms of others (5.414-5.427, 5.453 and 5.461). The pragmatism of James, Paini and F.C.S. Schiller for example, seem to make truth dependent on action (e.g., 8.254-256). But if one is self-controlled one can anticipate the thoughts and conduct that will follow from present thoughts. For this reason self-control places the individual in a position to consider and anticipate what conceivable practical effects would follow. (Petry 1992: 684)
This is reminiscent of Peirce's contention that thought operates in an "in and out" manner: that some idea that I have now might become important for me in the future. Generally, this goes to the rubric of synechism.
In 1884 Peirce and Joseph Jastrow published a paper titled "On Small Differences of Sensations" (5.21-35 and see also 7.36-48 and 7.63 ff.). The paper summarized the findings of experiments which showed that sensory stimuli too slight for us to be conscious of nevertheless influence our judgments. We draw inferences that are based in part on "sensations so faint that we are not fairly aware of having them" (7.35). Peirce believed that this might be the explanation for "the insight of females as well as certain 'telepathic' phenomena" (7.35). (Petry 1992: 685)
Relevant for my purposes, because much of nonverbal behaviour informs not only our judgments but directs our conduct, yet falls outside of the treshold of awareness.
- Bernstein, Richard J. 1964. "Peirce's Theory of Perception" in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, Second Series, edited by Edward C. Moore and Richard S. Robin, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 165-189.
- Bernstein, Richard J. 1965. "Action, Conduct, and Self-Control," in Perspectives on Peirce, edited by Richard J. Bernstein, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 66-91.
- Hausman, Cars R. 1974. "Eros and Agape in Creative Evolution: A Peircean Insight," Process Studies, 4, pp. 11-25.
- Murphey, Murray 1961. The Development of Peirce's Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Holmes, Larry 1966. Peirce on Self-Control. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 2: 113-130.
In cybernetic terminology, there is a corrective feedback, which tedns, as the action is considered and repeated, to reduce the oscillations - one's violent wayward impulses - and to birng the action closer to the ideals, until a stable one emerges; although Peirce appears to hold that in the over-all development of reason no norm is entirely stable, which indeed seems consistent with an evolutionary pragmatism applied to a developing organism. As Norbert Wiener says, "The stable state of a living organism is to be dead." (Holmes 1966: 117)
Of course, in mid 1960's, you'll meet Peirce and Wiener in the same paragraph.
There remain, I believe, two problems: to discern as best we can the meaning Peirce has given to the two components of the term "self-control," and thereby to shed some light on what kind of "self-controlled" being he considers the human to be.
Ambiguity in the term "self-control" may arise from either of the components. To take the easier one first, "control" can mean either governance or correction. If this division is still unclear, it can be refined into (1) "holding to a norm or ideas," "inhibiting change," or "keeping from straying" - circumlocutions designed to emphasize the conservative aspect of contros; or (2) correction, to mean the active process of returning to the norm if the control in sense (1) has permitted variation or deviation. The meaning that Peirce seems most often to have been using is the second one, as might be expected from the human situation, in which we seldom operate at the ideal, but are concerned rather to minimize the difference between ou conduct (whether rational or moral) and an ideal. (Holmes 1966: 120-121)
Very helpful, especially for the subject of self-censorship (
sensu Scheflen).
The ambiguity of "self" is easy to state ,but very difficult to clear up, because it involves one's whole philosophy. When "self-" is used as a prefix with reflexive meaning, it can convey the meaning either of (1) designating a person or thing that is both the subject and the object of the action; or (2) designating something that performs certain operations without outside agency, i.e., automatically. The first meaning, when applied to our term, leads one te believe that there must be a self to control, and further to think that there must therefore be a self which controls; i.e., a self in the agent or substantive sense, or in dictionary definition "a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness" (Oxford Universal Dictionary, Third Edition). The second meaning contains no such implication: considering it as "auto-," as used in names of self-acting devices such as "automobile," with emphasis on the reflexive but with no commitment about anything there at which the reflexive is aimed, we can take self-control to mean not the control of a self (substantively), but simply auto-control, the control from within of whatever kind of organism the human being is found to be. (Holmes 1966: 121)
Again, extremely helpful. These are the unstated assumptions that desperately crave for explication in semiotics at large. E.g. Lotman's
auto-communication should be reviewed in these terms.
Bayley, James E. 1976. A Jamesian Theory of Self. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 12(2): 148-165.
More than half a century before Sartre claimed that human existence precedes human essence James argued that the self is a human creation whose nature can be uncovered only by examination of human action. The self is what is is known as, or found to be, in practice. What James finds is that the self is not anything of the nature of a postulate, a deduction, a pure soul, a transcendental entity or, indeed, any non-concrete, unitary entity at all. Rather, he finds that human beings in practice, in their actions, take the self as a collection or assemblage of things, a fourfold self. (Bayley 1976: 149)
In a similar manner I would define the self by what it does, e.g. the whole gamut of reflexive and relational activities (from self-control and self-communication to self-creation and self-mortification).
James derived his criterion by noting that if there is any one feature of the self about which everyone would agree it is that the self is that for which we have the greatest concern. Self preservation, the popular dictum has it, is the first law of nature. A self, not physical life (otherwise the concept of immortality would be vacuous), is that which each one seeks more than anything else to preserve. The criterion for selfhood, then, is that it be something which provokes from a human organism the most intense and enduring interest and, moreover, an interest observable in the conduct of life. By this criterion the sheet of paper in front of one is not a self since interest in it is weaks and transitory, whereas one's body obviously could be because of strong and enduring interest in it. Let us call this interest a "proprietary interest": the self, then, is whatever is an object of proprietary interest. (Bayley 1976: 149)
#self-preservation.
It is now eassy to see support for the view of the self as a collection or assemblage. If the self is whatever is an object of proprietary interest and if, as would have to be conceded, the body is paradigmatic of proprietary interest, then any object comparable to use the body in provoking interest is the self or part of the self. And if we observe human conduct we find diverse objects doing just this. The miser who exhibits as much concern for the security of his gold as one would normally have for the well-being of body or soul thereby includes the gold in his self. (Bayley 1976: 150)
This is reminiscent of Lotman's discussion of the limit or border of self/individual/person in Russian history. E.g., when a nobleman was to be destroyed, not only his own life, but the lives of his whole family and even his slaves were to be extinguished, even up to his fields of crop being burned to ashes. In my own work this idea of "proprietary interest" as constitutive of selfhood reaches or relates to the notion of behavioural capital. That is, I exhibit concern for "habits of action" or "energetic interpretants" and consider these, or the vague idea of nonverbal repertory or competence, to be contstitutive of selfhood.
What men call their "me" is what they have the strongest and most compelling urge to care for. (Bayley 1976: 151)
For me, this seems to be the collection of text files I have stored in a special folder titled "Sahtel" [
(desktop) drawer].
Hence the "I" is this nuclear self - which might, perhaps, more accurately be termed "selfing" rather than "self" - whose activity is that of an organism which enables it to respond to itself as an object distinct from other objects and to respond to other objects so as to maintain and perpetuate its own distinctive existence. "Selfing" is something an organism does, just as breathing and digesting. The self, for James, is a doing, not a being. (Bayley 1976: 154)
An interesting idea: #self as a process, not an essence.
The term "selfing" suggests itself for two reason. One, the activities to which the term refers are felt by us, according to James, as the "source of effort and attention," as the agent of decision and action, as the very core and center of the self. Two, these activities, which we feel as the very core and center of the self, are a process - a process, moreover, which determines what we shall perceive and what (i.e., what kind of matieral and social selves) we shall be. The term "selfing" aptly connotes the active, processional nature of what, at core, we are. (Bayley 1976: 154)
This contention could even be supplanted with the notion that every remembering is a re-rembering (or re-writing or re-contructing of that memory). That is,
selfing could label the activity of selfhood, the Ouspenskyan self-remembering, for example.
