Charles Sanders Peirce and the Mind-Body-World Relation

Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio EmiliaSemiotics and the body:C.S. Peirce on the Mind-Body-World relationPatrick John CoppockUniversity of Modena and Reggio EmiliaR 03-4 March 2003RESEARCHREPORTDipartimento di Scienze Sociali, Cognitive e QuantitativeVia G. Giglioli Valle, 942100 Reggio EmiliaTel.: +39 0522 522511Fax : +39 0522 522512Internet: http://www.cei.unimore.itDepositato ai sensi dell’articolo 1 del DLL 31/08/1945 n.660

Patrick John CoppockSemiotics and the body: C.S. Peirce on the Mind-Body-Worldrelation1. Peirce, personality and the tongueThe American philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce, generally consideredone of the founding fathers of the philosophy of pragmatism and of contemporarysemiotics, once wrote in his indomitable, almost tongue-in-cheek, philosophical style:“It is true, for instance, that men are selfish, that is, that they are really deluded into supposingthemselves to have some isolated existence; and in so far, they have it. To deny the reality ofpersonality is not anti-spiritualistic; it is only anti-nominalistic. It is true that there are certainphenomena, really quite slight and insignificant, but exaggerated, because they are connectedwith the tongue, which may be described as personality. The agility of the tongue is shown inits insisting that the world depends upon it. The phenomena of personality consist mainly inability to hold the tongue. This is what the tongue brags so about.” [CP 8.82]Later in the same piece he goes on to quip that:“Meantime, physicians are highly privileged in that they can ask to see people's tongues; forthis is inspecting the very organ of personality.” [CP 8.85]So what may Peirce have been trying to get at here? Well, one possible reading of thefirst of the two citations above could be as follows: Man is a essentially social being,born into a community of others, and though he may (selfishly and deludedly inPeirce’s view) believe himself to have “some isolated existence” from these others, henonetheless is irremediably destined to remain a part of a wider interpretativecommunity. However, as long as he continues to believe that he does exist in somekind of isolation from the others, his communicative behaviour, metaphorically (andphysically) represented by the enunciation (or not) of linguistic signs by his tongue,makes it appear so, at least in a limited sense, to both himself and others who mayhave been fooled by the “agility” of his tongue in its “insisting that the world dependsupon it.” This agility of the tongue gives rise to certain phenomena, which although“really quite slight and insignificant, but exaggerated”, work together with the abilityof the enunciator to exercise at least some degree of self-control over this agility,contributing in doing so to the creation of something we may come to conceive of asan autonomous “personality”.Peirce scholars generally read the two rather well known text segments above as partof a series of light-hearted pokes by Peirce at his perennial straw-man nemesis ofnominalism, the philosophical doctrine which claims (amongst other things) thatabstract scientific laws - “generals”, as Peirce often referred to them - and themethods of inquiry by which these laws are derived, cannot be claimed to have anymore existential reality than the actual words (or terms) used to denominate and speakof them. Peirce’s argumentational strategy in the texts above is then, to try andundermine a thought perspective attributed to a model nominalist author-enunciatorby ridiculing anyone (or anything) who would try to force-feed us the erroneous ideathat the world/ reality - Peirce often spoke of “the Real” in this context - exists for us

merely as a result of those words we have made up and elected to utter (or not) inorder to speak and/or write about it.Framed in this way, we can perhaps more easily understand Peirce’s seemingly rathercryptic claim at the beginning of the first text cited above that “To deny the reality ofpersonality is not anti-spiritualistic; it is only anti-nominalistic.”Within a consistently argued “nominalist” perspective - alive and kicking today inmore relativistic forms of “post-modern” thought, and certain areas of philosophy oflanguage and cognitive science - we find asserted, and attempted justified the opinionthat scientific concepts, and the abstract laws that can be expressed in terms of theseconcepts, are no more than social constructs, based on opinions couched in aconsensual view of truth.From Peirce’s point of view, this way of framing reality seriously neglects thecomplex issue of what kinds of relations may possibly exist between sensible,interpretable phenomena, or signs, as Peirce terms them, which we actually, or mighton some future occasion come to encounter as elements of our ongoing personalphenomenal experience. Adopting a nominalistic ontological stance in relation to theproblem of understanding reality implies, in Peirce’s view, a grove oversimplificationof the fundamental relational complexity of phenomenological experience, andaccordingly too, of the continuous relationship 1 he believes exists between mind,body and world. A nominalistic approach presupposes, insists Peirce, an ontologicalframework which does not allow us to benefit from the important lessons we mightlearn if we take our embodied sensible experience seriously, study it systematicallyusing a scientifically valid experimental method, and considering the results of theseexperiments in relation to the broad train of naturally, historically and sociallymediated semiotic processes that precede and frame current experience, as well aspossible future experience, and the new sign relation complexes, or “would be’s”,involved in this experience.Science, says Peirce, builds on what has already been discovered, and on furtherprocesses of systematic inquiry and experimentation. An essential component of anywell functioning experimental process is being genuinely surprised in our experienceof the world. As he puts it:“The majority of discoveries […] have been the result of experimentation. Now, no manmakes an experiment without being more or less inclined to think that an interesting resultwill ensue; for experiments are much too costly of psychical and physical energy to beundertaken at random and aimlessly. And naturally, nothing can be possibly learned from anexperiment that turns out exactly as was anticipated. It is by surprises that experience teachesall she deigns to teach us.” [MSS 305, 306] 21 Peirce ties the notion of continuity of relation to his concept of Synechism, which he in turn sees as related to hisconcept of agapastic evolution, whereby “advance takes place by virtue of a positive sympathy among the createdspringing from the continuity of mind” [CP 6.303], quoted by Kelly A. Parker in his book The Continuity ofPeirce’s Thought (1998: 16). The following quote from Peirce is also relevant in this context : “Almost everybodywill now agree that the ultimate good lies in the evolutionary process in some way. If so, it is not in individualreactions in their segregation, but in something general or continuous. Synechism is founded on the notion that thecoalescence, the becoming continuous, the becoming governed by laws, the becoming instinct with general ideas,are but phases of one and the same process of the growth of concrete reasonableness.” [CP 5.4], quoted in Parker1998: 16. See also Coppock 1997c.2 This passage is from a draft version (Part B: On Phenomenology (Draft 2) ) of a lecture given by Peirce atHarvard University on the second of April 1903. The lecture was one of a series of six on the advertised topic ofPragmatism as a Principle and a Right Method of Thinking. See Turrisi 1997: 37-57 (Commentary) and 159-160(cited text) for further details.

Now of course we all know that experiments that do turn out exactly as expected cansometimes be useful for science and society in the shorter term. Indeed, experimentsthat turn out “right” are frequently eagerly sought after for economic, political orother reasons, in order to provide further evidence that might justify decision-makingprocesses, by verifying that that which we already have come to believe to be true onthe basis of previous experience, is still valid, at least for the present. But experimentsof this kind are essentially “conservative”, in the sense that they can not provide anyreal impetus for further research by pushing us to rethink our basic presuppositionsand start looking elsewhere for new explanatory hypotheses. If science (andphilosophy, which is Peirces’ main concern here) is to continually keep moving aheadand breaking new ground, then Peirce’s standpoint is that we need to conceive oftypes of experiments that might produce precisely such experiences that surprise us.Put simply: we can learn much more from being open to, and having a capacity for,being genuinely surprised by, and learning continually and systematically fromexperience than we will if we do not. He continues:“In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read, – and they have been many, big and heavy, – Idon’t remember that anyone has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostlycruel. That however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience. She says,Open your mouth and shut your eyesAnd I’ll give you something to make you wise;and thereupon she keeps her promise, and seems to take her pay in the fun of tormenting us.”[MSS 305, 306] 3Interestingly, the passage which follows on from the one above in the same lectureturns out to have particular pertinence in our present context, for Peirce continues:“The phenomenon of surprise is highly instructive in reference to this category 4 because ofthe emphasis it puts upon a mode of consciousness which can be detected in all perception,namely, a double consciousness at once of an ego and a non-ego, directly acting upon oneanother.” [MSS 305, 306]This can be seen as referring to Peirce’s well-known dictum that all thought is insigns, and his associated conceptualisation of thought as dialogical:“All thinking is dialogic in form. Your self of one instant appeals to your deeper self for hisassent. Consequently, all thinking is conducted in signs that are mainly of the same generalstructure as words” [CP 6.338]In the case of the draft version of Peirce’s Harvard Pragmatism lecture referred topreviously above, however, we can see that the dialogue he is thinking of here is notan “internal” one between the “self of one instant” and a “deeper self”, but rather alively and rather unpredictable encounter with an “other” (anti-Ego) coming from“outside” our self-mind-body complex, and which impinges unexpectedly upon it.This “other” represents some hitherto unexpected aspect of the Real (nature, theworld, life in general) that surprises us and upsets our present reasonably stable andwell-habituated sense of having arrived at some kind of coherent understanding of thepersonal and experiential world-reality niche we inhabit. Peirce goes on to write in thesame Harvard lecture draft that :3 Also cited and discussed in a wider historical context in Turrisi 1997: 1604 Peirce is referring here to his phenomenological category of Secondness.

“The question is what the phenomenon is. We make no vain pretense of going beneathphenomena. We merely ask, What is the content of the Percept? Everybody should becompetent to answer that of himself. Examine the Percept in the particularly marked casewhen it comes as a surprise. Your mind is filled [with] an imaginary object that was expected.At the moment when it was expected the vividness of the representation is exalted, andsuddenly when it should come something quite different comes instead. I ask you whether atthat instant of surprise there is not a double consciousness, on the one hand of an Ego, whichis simply the expected idea suddenly broken off, on the other hand, of the Non-Ego which isthe Strange intruder, in his abrupt entrance.” [MSS 305, 306]Seen in this particular light, certain kinds of everyday perception involved in thegeneration of a continuing flow of potentially meaning-creating signs relative to thephysical and social environment in which we live become a zone of action, whereemotional and cognitive conflicts initiate dynamic dialogical processes. The “Strangeintruder”, i.e. our “Percept in the particularly marked case” challenges seriously, andmakes us begin to doubt, our previously held pre-conceptions or beliefs regarding theorganisation and functioning of our current personal world-view. This “non-ordinary”experience 5 , forces us, like it or not, to try and re-assert our sense of coherence of selfby embarking on a new process of inquiry, entering into a specific form of dialoguewith the “Strange intruder” with the “cheerful hope” 6 of managing by doing so, todevelop new habits of thought and action better adapted to cope with and integrate thepresumed law, or habit-governed novelty represented by the surprising phenomenon,into our general scheme of things, and in thus doing, take part in a community-based,long-term search for clearer understandings regarding truth and reality.Thus, the intensive inquiry and learning process initiated by our close encounter withthe “Strange Intruder” is a potentially creative one, since it offers us a chance todevelop new ways of conceiving and comprehending the significance of thesurprising event in a way that relates meaningfully to what we already knew, orbelieved we knew, before we experienced it.2.Material mindSo let us return again for a moment to the brief citation I introduced at the beginningof this article in which Peirce refers to “certain phenomena, really quite slight andinsignificant, but exaggerated, because they are connected with the tongue, whichmay be described as personality.”A more “materialist” reading of this piece of text might go something like this:The pervasive form of interpersonal and intersubjective behaviour we know aslanguage is a dynamic, complex semiotic system for meaning-making. It comprisesand combines semantic, syntactic, phonological and other kinds of grammatical and5 See Patrizia Violi’s article “A Semiotics of Non-Ordinary Experience” in Rambelli & Violi (Eds.) 1999: 244-280, where non-ordinary experience is defined as follows: “[…] a quite open set of various forms of experienceranging from mystical enlightenment, and contemplative states, to aesthetic epiphanies”, ibid.: 244.6 “[…] all the followers of science are animated by a cheerful hope that the processes of investigation, if onlypushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they apply it. […] This great HOPE isembodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all whoinvestigate, is what we mean by truth, and the object represented in that opinion is the real. That is how I wouldexplain reality.” [CP 5.407]

structural relations in functional terms, as a kind of “technology of mind” 7 . Languageis able to facilitate an opportune and steady generation, enunciation and interpretationof linguistic (and other) signs in any kind of social or cultural context. Linguisticsigns contribute, in the context of a wider communicative community (whetherspeakers or users of the language acknowledge the importance of the role of thiscommunity or not) the self-organisation of a sense of “self”, or “personality”, bothfrom the user’s own, and other’s point of view. However, in the final analysis, this“personality” is corporeally context-dependent, in the sense that it must be continuallymanifested, developed and maintained by the physiologically determined agility ofthe articulatory apparatus – of which the tongue is the most obvious organ (ormodule).Now it is clear that there are other aspects to language and language use than speech –a considerable part of our everyday interpersonal communication depends veryheavily indeed on the unhindered exchange and interpretation of various kinds of nonverbalmessages, as the study of kinesics, proxemics, facial expression, gaze, eyemovements and gesture have clearly shown. The technology of writing represents thelanguages we use in another medium, and with a type of grammatical organisationthat is different in a number for ways from that of spoken language (see Halliday1995).In a longer time-scale, our general behaviour in relation to other people and the worldin general, when seen in relation to what we say and do not say, also “counts” inmeaning-making terms. We tend to construe and evaluate other people’s“personalities” from moment to moment and from situation to situation on the basis ofall of these things. So in this sense, merely considering the activity of the tongue asthe seat of the “personality” is not enough. Speech, talk, dialogue or conversation is initself a multimodal 8 form of a much broader “genre” of communicative activity, oftenreferred to as communicative action 9 , and in this wider picture of things there aremany, many externally visible aspects of the more general “articulatory system” tiedto language production and use that count at least as much as what our tongue isdoing, in order for successful communication to occur, and consequently too, for theconstruction of “personality”.And indeed, it is also the case that there are languages where the activity of the tongueis of subsidiary importance, and where the whole articulatory apparatus of language is“externalised”, and where all the “internal” motions of this apparatus are consequentlyvisible to interlocutors and others. Here I am thinking quite specifically of the signlanguages of deaf people, where phonological, morphological, syntactic and semanticproduction processes take place in what is generally known by sign language linguistsas “signing space”: a three-dimensional zone in front of the body largely defined bythe specific range of motions which are possible for any given signer’s head, arms andhands.As can be seen in Figure 1 below, signing space also includes a certain well-definednumber of articulation points or zones on the front of the body of the signer,7 The designation “technology of mind” was, as far as I am aware, coined by anthropologist Jack Goody inconnection with his considerations of individual and socio-cultural functional aspects of writing. See for exampleGoody 1987.8 The notion of multimodality has been delineated in different ways, According to Australian linguist Martin(2001), multimodality in communication involves verbiage, image(ry), sound and action. Social linguistics, heclaims, needs models of multimodality, coupled with those of multilinguality (encompassing language, dialect,register and code) and multifunctionality (encompassing ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning in languageand text) to meet what he refers to as “the challenge of hybridity – the multi-voicing of our post-colonial world”(Martin 2001: 311). See also Martin 2000.9 See for example the Theory of Communicative Action of sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1997)

somewhat equivalent to the seven or so articulation points in the mouth, (the lips,teeth, palate, uvula etc.) touched, or approached, by various parts the tongue duringspeech (see Figure 2).Figure 1: Signing Space 10Figure 2: Articulation space 11But to return to Peirce again: in the piece cited above regarding the “physicality” oflanguage, which introduces the idea of the constitution of “personality” by means ofthe physical agility of the tongue during enunciation, he also underlines theimportance of various forms of self-control exerted on the part of the speaker withrespect to activities of the various components of his or her articulatory apparatus. Itis not enough, implies Peirce, to merely consider the constitution of personality in asocial context in terms of the enunciation of linguistic and other signs of positive10 Figure from Rodda & Grove 1987. Downloaded from the following web page:http://www.ehi.ee/ehi/oppetool/lopetajad/merilin/sign.html11 Figure adapted from Wells and Coulson 1971. Downloaded from the following web page:http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/chimp/101/phonetics/places.htm

valence, we must also consider the possible effects of signs of negative valence – i.e.in situations where there is some kind of silence, or an lack of enunciation: perhaps an“explicit” not mentioning of something or other that might otherwise have beenmentioned - as partially constitutive of individual “personality”. Indeed, he hints, themaintenance of strategic (or other) silences about certain matters in certain situationsis perhaps one of the most potent tools we possess for the public development of aninfluential personality or “self-image”. As he puts it (my italics): “The phenomena ofpersonality consist mainly in ability to hold the tongue. This is what the tongue bragsso about.”The importance Peirce by implication attributes here to what we often find referred totoday by rhetoricians, discourse analysts and sociolinguists as “strategic”, or“manipulative silences” 12 – or “holding the tongue” in peircean terms – for theconstitution of a certain kind of public image can easily shown to have contemporaryrelevance if we consider a few visible and easily examinable public silences referredto in some recent (December 2002-January 2003) news headlines and stories.Let us take as examples the following four news media quotes:“[The omissions are] big enough to drive a tank through” 13“Buffet shines despite paradox on governance: The Sage of Omaha’s own company remainssecretive.” 14“Jailed for her silence, McDougal speaks out” 15“With a scandal chipping away at his government, Ariel Sharon has changed the subject toIraq and found his country eager to listen” 16Example 1 is a quote in Newsweek from an unnamed US official commenting on the12000 page report complied by Iraq in the Fall of 2002 on its national weaponsprogram, subsequently discounted as false by the United States. In Example 2 theBuffet referred to in the headline is American multimillionaire investor WarrenBuffet, who has a well-established international reputation for maintaining deepstrategic silences in relation to multifarious global investment projects. TheMcDougal referred to in Example 3 is Susan Mc Dougal, a Clinton family friend fromLittle Rock, Arkansas who refused to witness in 1996 against (then) President Bill andHilary Clinton during the Whitewater political corruption investigation led by USIndependent Counsel Kenneth Starr. Mc Dougal was subsequently jailed for contemptof court and fraud in return for maintaining this particular silence. Example 4 is anInternational Herald Tribune headline which refers to speculations in the internationalmass-media that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who at a certain point aroundNew Year 2003 had abruptly ceased to address publicly various issues related to someserious legal accusations of internal corruption in his governing Likud party, wasattempting to shift focus instead to potential dangers to Israel in the case of a war withIraq merely in order to silence further open discussion of the corruption investigation,12 See for example Huckin (2001: 231-252), who postulates five semi-discreet categories of textual silence:speech-act silences, which must be noticed by interlocutors in order to function, presuppositional silences, whichavoid stating the obvious and thus serve communicational efficiency, discreet silences, which avoidinterpersonally and ethically sensitive information, conventional silences, which relate to genre conventions, andmanipulative silences designed to conceal relevant information from interlocutors.13 Newsweek, December 23, 200214 The Financial Times, 28-29 December 2002. Title of an article by Adrian Michaels.15 The International Herald Tribune, December 31, 2002 - January 1, 2003. Title of an article by Jennifer Frey.16 The International Herald Tribune, December 30, 2002. Excerpt from an article by Dexter Fillins entitled“Sharon shifts the focus to specter of Iraqi war: Remarks help halt slide of Likud Party”.

and in doing so, dampen the effects of this investigation on public opinion ahead ofcoming elections in the country.Now, quite apart from any wider inferences we might want to draw regarding possiblepractical and political future consequences of any of the four different scenariosevoked by the above headlines, it is quite easy to for anyone with a minimum ofbackground knowledge in international affairs to begin to develop some workinghypotheses regarding Saddam Hussein, Warren Buffet, Susan Mc Dougal and ArielSharon’s actual states of mind and personal attitudes in the situations referred toabove, or more generally speaking, their “personalities”, on the basis of the variousenunciation strategies attributed to these actors in these press quotes. Indeed, we alldo this kind of differentiating out and attribution of meanings regarding our folkunderstandingsof the “personalities” of public (and private) figures all the time, so itis quite clear that Peirce was onto something quite fundamental here. Strategicallymaintained, and other kinds of public silences definitely do count. And indeed, incertain social and cultural settings, specific kinds of public silence have been heavilyinstitutionalised. We might also consider for instance, just what kinds of “futurepractical effects” might possibly result from possible responses (or not) to such awell-worn public proposition heard in wedding ceremonies all over the world as:“If anyone can show just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together, let them speaknow, or else hereafter forever hold their peace”Another, even more perturbing example of socialized or institutionalized silence is thewell-known system of social norms tied to the conspiratory, solidaritory forms ofsilence known as the “omtertà”, traditionally operative among members of the ItalianSicilian Mafia community, where transgressions against this particular unwrittencommunicative norm system can, and indeed often do, lead to an unpleasant demiseon the part of transgressors.3. Action, Motion and ExperienceAt this point, I want to try and make a couple of rather speculative commentsregarding a possible relationship between the triad of notions: ‘action’, ‘motion’ and‘experience’. More generally speaking, we might start off by making the hypotheticalassertion that the meanings of ‘action’ and ‘motion’ are somewhat similar to oneanother, while they are by no means semantically isomorphic concepts, whereas‘experience’ is obviously a rather more difficult concept to define than the other twoin any kind of simple way, and it can probably be seen, too, as the most general andthus cognitively complex (though vague), of the three concepts now underconsideration. Perhaps too, experience can be seen as both presupposing the existenceof the other two concepts, while at the same time being potentially capable ofencompassing or incorporating phenomenal aspects related to both the other twoconcepts in the triad.If we attempt to develop a simple pragmatic 17 analysis of possible meaning relationsbetween the three above mentioned concepts, we find that there can be at least threepotential practical consequences of the above conjuncture being correct, which, when17 One of Peirce’s more well known formulations of his Pragmatic Maxim is as follows:“Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings we conceive the object of our conception tohave; then our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object” [C.P. 5.18]

expressed in terms of possible relations of interdependency between the three terms,might perhaps be drawn and written out in the following ways:GeneralitySpecificity[ experience < [ motion < [ action ] ]Figure 3: Experience, Motion and Action seen in terms of Generality and SpecificityThis would give us something like:1. Specific forms of action lead to, or determine, more general, but structuredforms of motion2. Structured forms of motion lead to (or become part of) the more generalsequential flow of phenomenal experience3. Experience in general may be translated by means of bodily contingentsemiosis into specific forms of (planned) action, thus determining moregeneral forms of motion which can lead to new experience, and so on.So here the basic postulate is that experience is more general than motion, which is inturn more general than action, which is specific, since it is planned and leads to astructuring of more diffuse forms of motion in some more or less well-defined way oranother, in relation to some goal or other. There is, then, a sequential, causal, orpresuppositional relationship via forms of action to types of motion to varieties of(perceptual) experience, and there is also some kind of local feedback link which goesfrom embodied experience via bodily semiosis, to specific forms of action.How might we try to qualify this postulate in possible practical terms? Well, first ofall, it seems fairly clear at the outset that the notion of ‘action’, as it is sketched outabove, requires or presupposes some kind of human (or other form of) embodiedintentionality or directedness in a very different way than the notion of ‘motion’ does.After all, a pine tree, a blade of grass or a tumbleweed can all come to move in oneway or another in a stiff breeze in different ways, without any form of intentionalityneeding to be attributed to them.We would not say that in moving in some way or other they “act”. What is happeninghere is merely a form of transitivity, where one specific type of motion, in this casethe motion of the molecules of gas and other particles comprising a current of airwhich is flowing in some direction or other due to a meteorological pressure gradient,is being “passed on” to those molecules comprising the tree, grass or tumbleweed,each of which translates or interprets this passed on motion into its own “personal”variant of it, depending on its general physical characteristics and the way in which itis anchored, or not, to the surrounding natural environment.Now it is certainly also true to say that human beings do sometimes move around incars, buses, bicycles, skis and skates, or other forms of transportation in ways whichdemonstrate types of motion and action on the part of the driver, passenger, cyclist,skier or skater that are not genuinely intentional and planned. But on the other handsuch non-intentional motion on the part of human beings will generally be associatedwith accidents or other non-ordinary types of event, while trees, blades of grass or

tumbleweeds will not generally be attributed intentionality, and consequently neitherany kind of moral, ethical or other responsibility for the initiation, execution orcompletion of any motion on their part. Indeed, the motion of, for instance,tumbleweeds would not either, apart from in some kind of non-usual, either scientific,or literary context, such as the exquisite Charles Schulz strip below (Figure 4) wellillustrates, be considered as having any kind of further saleincy or interest in real lifecontexts.Figure 4However, at this point it has to be said that a possible exception to the penultimateassertion above regarding intentionality might conceivably arise if we begin toconsider issues related to botanical growth phenomena, and the topological orgeographical types of motion inherent in the slow spread of plant or tree populationsover time, and which can perhaps (imaginatively) be interpreted as “intentional” andeven “ethical” in some kind of way, since they are (presumably) specifically geared tothe general survival, and hence “common good” of the population of organisms inquestion.But we shall have to leave this issue until later, since it can probably be seen as moreor less implicit in some of my further discussions of body-mind-world relations,where all matter, living and non-living, can in some sense be considered in terms ofembodied, or as Peirce put it, “effete” mind:“The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effetemind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. But before this can be accepted it must showitself capable of explaining the tridimensionality of space, the laws of motion, and the generalcharacteristics of the universe, with mathematical clearness and precision; for no less shouldbe demanded of every Philosophy” [CP 6.7-34]So when it comes to other living entities, such as animals, insects, bacteria, microbesand single cellular organisms etc., it is clear that they all move about in their nativeenvironments, whether this is considered by us as intentional or not, but can weattribute forms of action to these kinds of organism? Do dogs, wasps, coli bacteria andamoeba “act”, or do they just move about in more or less random kinds of ways tosatisfy their basic needs, within certain types of internally and externally determinedbiological and other parameters which serve as some kind of self-organizingregulators or limits for their behaviour? Well, as long as we restrict our definition ofaction to something like the my following (provisional) formulation:“Structured and externally and internally regulated forms of motion limited to, anddirected in relation to, the fulfilling of some specific need, or goal, essential in someway or other for the continuing survival of the organism in question”

then we can, and indeed probably ought to, consider including bacteria, microbes andsingle cellular organisms as members of the set of organisms “capable” of certainforms of “intentional action”.But when we go on to consider more specifically human forms of behaviour, as wellas that of those other higher mammals which are relatively close to us human beingsin the evolutionary chain, such as chimpanzees and other large apes, we can see thatall these species possess some kind of heightened communicative potential, withadvanced symbol-processing capabilities, which allows for the development ofcomplex shared forms of planning and coordination of individual and joint actions,use of tools and technologies etc.. This, I believe, forces us to attribute at least somekind of evolutionary developed capability for “higher” forms of action, i.e. forms ofaction that are more complex in both quantitative and qualitative terms, on the part ofthese organisms.And when this has been said, in human organisms, their own particular brand ofheightened communicative preparedness or potential has an additional abstractionaland creative side (whether this is fully realised in practice or not). This is due largelyto the fact that human societies and cultures have evolved and developed spoken (orsigned) languages, and other forms of augmentative and communicationaltechnologies such as writing, art, sculpture, architecture, music, theatre, cinema andcomputing, all of which facilitate in different, and complementary ways, the creation,organisation, storage, retrieval, communication and recycling of types of individualand collective experience and/or “memory” over time. The resources of language andother forms of human expression allow too, for reflective metadiscourses ofphilosophy, science and art to be developed to speculate about the possiblefunctioning and organization of these selfsame semiotic system. Languages of variouskinds may be used to talk about and propose models for scientifically basedunderstandings of these same, or other systems of language, for example. Imagery inwritten text, and still and moving images embedded in multimodal texts andhypertexts are used to “comment” on, and evoke some common emotional and ethicomoralground for the evaluation of, past or current events as they are reported indocumentary and literary texts, and in modern mass-media – see for instance Martin(2000, 2001) for some further discussion of these points.The potential for the development and maintenance of such a rich and complex set ofaugmentative tools, and the intellectual, material and cultural resources of the typesmentioned above is somewhat more problematic to attribute, except in fairly simpleforms (there is after all, ethological and other research today that speaks of animalculture; complex forms of social organization in ant colonies, etc.), to even our closestrelatives among the larger mammals such as chimpanzees, gorillas and other greatapes, but this of course does not diminish the continuing need to better understand thenature of the dynamic, eco-systemic interdependency relationship we have with all theother living organisms that share this planet.Regarding experience, the jury is in a sense “still out”, but I assume that mostprofessional scientists and lay persons today would probably agree that trees, bladesof grass and tumbleweeds do not possess any kind of conscious experience regardingtheir own situation - apart from, that is. the kind of “experiential data” of geneticallycoded information which has been evolutionarily and biologically embodied in theirbasic physical structures. Human beings and animals, on the other hand, all do seemto have different forms of conscious experience. They are able to learn from thisexperience and share it with others of their own species, and they can also act (andthus move) in different ways on the basis of their embodied - and thus semiotically

organised, evaluated, elaborated and integrated into some kind of larger world-view -individual and collective experiences.But why might a postulated causal, or presuppositional sequencing of theinterrelationships between action, motion and experience possibly be useful? In orderto investigate further aspects regarding this issue, I shall now turn to a slightlydifferent, but closely related perspective on experience, this time from the point ofview of general semantics and semiotics.Patrizia Violi in her recent book Meaning and Experience asserts (Violi 2001: 44-46)that in order to be fully adequate, any semantic theory must be a “global” one, able toencompass and describe three main dimensions that come into play in the semioticrelation of signification. These three dimensions are:1. the intralinguistic dimension: relations between terms within the languagesystem,2. the cognitive-inferential dimension: relations between lexical structure andconceptual organization, which includes the configuration of ourcomprehension processes, as well as the internal organization of our generalworld knowledge, or encyclopaedia as defined by semiotician colleagueUmberto Eco, and3. the extralinguistic dimension: the relationship between language and world, ormore precisely the non-linguistic universe, which Violi defines as “theexperiential content to which language refers”, and which constitutes, shecontinues “a reality that is neither necessarily nor prevalently linguistic”It is only by investigating and describing the intimate relationship between thelinguistic and non-linguistic spheres of experience, says Violi, that semantics willmanage to approach a more complete understanding of how it is possible for us to uselanguage to talk about the world, for us to perform actions in the world, and to interactin a functionally adequate manner with our environment. If the non-linguisticdimension is neglected, she claims, it will not be possible for semantics to account forphenomena related to understanding or use, nor for the signifying capacity ofexpressions. The non-linguistic, experiential nature of what linguistic signs refer toreveals, she continues, “an ostensive dimension to language which, together with theinferential one [associated with the cognitive, encyclopaedic dimension – my notePJC], ensures the capacity to both signify and to communicate,” and she goes on toassert controversially, but quite legitimately and reasonably in my view, that “alllanguage is intrinsically indexical, referring to the extralinguistic dimension of ourexperience.” For Violi, the language-world relationship is mediated by experience,particularly perceptual experience, where proprioceptively, or otherwise constituted“internal” experience, plays an important role. As she explains:“In the approach I am arguing for, we have an intentional and subjective act which refers toan experiential content; the language-world relation here is the interaction between languageand our experience of the world, a complex experience which involves both internal andexternal states. From this perspective, there is no difference between the construction of themeaning of a concrete term like cat and an abstract one like stop or restart. Both expressionsrelate to experiential content which for different reasons is sufficiently salient to have beenlexicalized in our language (and in many others). Lexical meaning can be seen as the sitewhere salient points of experience are manifested, and, because of their importance, areexpressed in language. In this respect, lexicalization is never arbitrary, but is motivated by thesaliency of certain experiences compared to others.” (Violi 2001:46)

Since all perceptual experience regarding external states of the world is embodied, orif you like, bodily mediated experience, so too, is perceptual experience of our owninternal states generated by biochemical and biophysical characteristics of our bodies.This means that the relative saliency of, and thus the meanings of, linguistic terms forspecific types of actions like ‘running fast’, ‘walking slowly’, ‘jumping up and down’etc. can only be described by reference to non-linguistic dimensions of perceptualexperience associated with the bodily mediation of our performance of each of theseactions in the various contexts in which they are carried out. Moving up one level ofgenerality, it is also clear the more general meanings associated with linguistic termsfor types of motion structured in certain configurations which constitute the broadergrained “fingerprints” or identifying characteristics of each of the specific forms ofaction mentioned above (for example ‘rapid, fluid forward motion of the bodyinvolving the iterative use of both legs’, in the case of ‘running fast’, are associatedwith other non-linguistic dimensions of these same perceptual experiences.In support of the above thesis, it is also relevant to mention in this connection acomprehensive series of work on movement, embodiment, experience and the originsof language and meaning by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. In her book: The Primacy ofMovement (1999) and other works, she forcefully argues for the need to developbetter understandings of what she refers to as “thinking in movement”, claiming thatall human thought and language is rooted in “corporeal matters of fact”, constantlypresent in “tactile-kinesthetic experience”. In her own words:“The generative sources of fundamental human (hominid) concepts are data -- that is,corporeal matters of fact – that are sensuously present in tactile-kinesthetic experience. Hencethe issue is not "abstract" concepts […] or modality dominance; it is a question of conceptsconcretely grounded in everyday human (hominid) experience.” 18In The Primacy of Movement, she analyses the experience of thinking in movement inimprovisational dance in terms of how both thinking and movement are aspects ofkinetic bodily logos attuned to an evolving dynamic situation. Thinking in movement,she claims, “involves no symbolic counters, but is tied to an on-going qualitativelyexperienced dynamic in which movement possibilities arise and dissolve.” Thiscorresponds well, she continues elsewhere in the same volume, with psychologicalstudies which show that the first concepts of infants are tied to dynamic events, orkinetic happenings. Prior to children’s ingression into the world of language, theconceptions of the world are grounded in their experiences of their own body inmovement, and the movement of other bodies in the surrounding environment. Childpsychologist Jerome Bruner’s (1990) work on children’s development, she notes, alsoaffirms a similar thesis, namely that the principal interest of infants centres onagentivity and action, while the work of infant psychologist and psychiatrist DanielStern (1981) has confirmed that certain kinds of non-verbal behaviours (gaze, headorientation, spatial positioning, posture and distance assumption) function from thevery beginning of life as biologically contingent presuppositions for communication.Such non-verbal behaviours are not transformed, or transformable into language, butcontinue to operate in tandem with it in meaning-making, communicational activities.18 From an online discussion on the Psycoloquy mailing list, September 1994:http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/archives/Psycoloquy/1994.V5/0082.htmlSee also Sheets-Johnstone 1990, 1994, 1999.

4. Mind in nature and nature in mindSo having made that brief excursion into the realms of motion, action and experience,let us now go back, and on, to look at yet another possibly relevant quote from Peirce:“To begin with the psychologists have not yet made it clear what Mind is. I do not mean itssubstratum; but they have not even made it clear what a psychical phenomenon is. [...] But Ido not believe that psychology can be set to rights until the importance of Hartmann'sargument is acknowledged, and it is seen that feeling is nothing but the inward aspect ofthings, while mind on the contrary is essentially an external phenomenon. The error is verymuch like that which was so long prevalent that an electrical current moved through themetallic wire; while it is now known that that is just the only place from which it is cut off,being wholly external to the wire.” [CP 7. 364]Here Peirce is certainly referring initially to Eduard von Hartmann’s (1842-1906),notion that “observable” phenomena such as “instinct” or “impulse” in animals couldbe scientifically interpreted as evidence that nature possesses “will”. At the time whenPeirce wrote the piece above, von Hartmann’s ideas represented a contemporaryinterpretation of Schopenhauer’s (1788-1860) earlier metaphysical system ofvoluntarism, where unconscious will is seen as the main active principle in nature,and as that which “enables” or “activates” human intelligence, which is seen as a sortof by-product of the “natural organization” of the brain (c.f. Baldwin, 1913).But one of the main points Peirce seems to have wanted to make here is that themoment-to-moment flow of immediate sense impressions (for which he makes use ofhere, as he often does elsewhere, the term “feeling”), and the way in which our minds“organise” this flow of sense impressions into complex sign relations that areembodied through semiosis – which we generally seek to understand today in terms ofgeneral perception processes and systems of knowledge and/or belief organisation 19 –depend, when all comes to all, on more general dynamic, self-organizing relationalprinciples to which the entire sensible and non-sensible “external” reality in which welive is also subject. Viewed from this perspective, mind is, as Peirce puts it,“essentially an external phenomenon”, since, from his point of view, mind is just asmuch present in the relational complexities of the self-organizing sign processes innature and culture which give life, growth of diversity and materiality to our“external” environment, as it is in the complex systems of sign relations which reflect“private”, perspectivised aspects of this environment as “embodied” in each of ourindividual mind-body complexes.The creative metaphor Peirce uses to evoke this idea in the text fragment cited aboveis taken from physical science, namely that of and electrical current flowing “in” awire. In doing so, he reconceptualizes the energy gradient we popularly refer to as“current”, as merely “localised” or “focussed” within a certain type of bounded“hereness and nowness” represented by the wire. The current we conceive of as“moved through the wire” has in his view merely been “cut off” from a widercontinuity of potential (energy) which is in constant flux and “wholly external” to the“embodied” (or embodying) actuality of the wire in question. This particularmetaphor is rather useful since it challenges us to actively consider whether or not thecontinuity of sensory processes (or flows of signs, if we accept Peirce’s dictum that“all thought is in signs”) in the phenomenal experience we often call “mind”, may insome way or other be continuous with similar semiosic processes occurrent in nature.19 For discussion of some semiotic models of knowledge organization, see for example Thellefsen, 2002

When this has been said, it is also interesting to note too, that Peirce does not by anymeans envision the semiosic flow as unidirectional, i.e. from a globally situated and“mindful”, physical environment of nature and culture “into” our locally situated,embodied minds. For immediately after the piece just cited and commented on abovehe continues:“Again, the psychologists undertake to locate various mental powers in the brain; and aboveall consider it as quite certain that the faculty of language resides in a certain lobe; but Ibelieve it comes decidedly nearer the truth (though not really true) that language resides in thetongue. In my opinion it is much more true that the thoughts of a living writer are in anyprinted copy of his book than that they are in his brain.” [CP 7. 364]So quite apart from forwarding the idea that our language (and thus our “personality”)resides metaphorically or not in the tongue, Peirce is also making a wider assertionthat our thoughts, and the multifarious forms of private and social action we engage infrom day to day on the basis of these thoughts – here he refers specifically to thewriting and publication of books – evoke over time the emergence of materialartefacts which act as empirical “traces” in the external environment of the semiosicprocesses going on in our embodied minds. Metaphorically speaking at least then,texts, technologies and other artefacts of human culture can then be considered in avery general sense as on a par to geological and other physical structures, biotopesand other natural phenomena emergent 20 on other semiosic processes in nature.Building on his observation on the “mind-embodying” function of books cited above,Peirce goes on, a bit further on in the same manuscript, to make reference to thethought- and discussion-facilitating role of the inkstand that holds the ink he uses forwriting:“A psychologist cuts out a lobe of my brain (nihil animale a me alienum puto) and then, whenI find I cannot express myself, he says, 'You see, your faculty of language was localized inthat lobe.' No doubt it was; and so, if he had filched my inkstand, I should not have been ableto continue my discussion until I had got another. Yea, the very thoughts would not come tome. So my faculty of discussion is equally localized in my inkstand.” [CP, 7.366]Philosopher of science and Peirce-scholar Peter Skagestad has interpreted the abovepassage as supporting the notion that the activity of writing, and the various materialobjects and technologies that have come to be associated with this activity over time,are necessary to stimulate, support and improve certain kinds of human thoughtprocesses 21 . This is, he maintains, the same kind of idea that motivated the later20 Discussing current understandings of the concept of ‘emergence’, Stephen Johnson profiles it in relation tocomplex adaptive systems in this way: “What features do all these systems share? In the simplest terms, they solveproblems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than on a single, intelligent “executivebranch.” They are bottom-up systems, not top-down. They get their smarts from below. In more technicallanguage, they are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behaviour. In these systems, agents residing onone scale start producing behaviour that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies, urbanites createneighborhoods, simple pattern-recognition software learns how to recommend new books. The movement fromlow-level rules to higher level sophistication is what we call emergence.” (Johnson, 2002: 18)21 This idea is by no means new, and was brought up quite some time ago, as Skagestad mentions above, byHavelock (1988) in connection with his discussion of Plato on writing, and also by British anthropologist JackGoody who frequently refers to writing as a “technology of the intellect, that is, enabling the human mind tooperate in ways that it would not otherwise be capable of doing” (Goody, 2001: 64). Goody mentions in thisconnection examples such as arithmetical and other tables, syllogisms, logical procedures and listing behaviours,all of which in one way or another, as he puts it elsewhere, show that the mechanism of writing “permits us tochange the format of our creative endeavours, the shape of our knowledge, our understanding of the world and ouractivities within it” (Goody 1987: 298). See also Goody 1997, on changing forms of representation in relation to

development of modern IA (Intelligence Augmentation) technologies such as thecomputer mouse, graphical user interfaces, word processing tools, hypermedia etc. AsSkagestad points out:“[…] Peirce is not making the trivial point that without ink he would not be able tocommunicate his thoughts. The point is, rather, that his thoughts come to him in and throughthe act of writing, so that having writing implements is a condition for having certain thoughts– especially those issuing from trains of thought that are too long to be entertained in a humanconsciousness. This is precisely the idea that, sixty years later, motivated Engelbart to devisenew technologies for writing so as to improve human thought processes, as well as the ideathat motivated Havelock’s interpretation of Plato” (Skagestad, 1996)In a later article Skagestad’s philosopher and Peirce-scholar colleague, JosephRansdell takes up this particular point and goes on to note that the use of newtechnologies in scientific inquiry in potentially fruitful ways for intelligenceaugmentation necessarily presupposes the development of specific habits of mindrelated to critical control practices in the scientific community. These practicesconform to specific communicational norms and are manifested as discursive skills onthe part of inquirers belonging to the community of science. He proposes that:“Since the discourse or communication in question is to be made more effectively intelligent,it seems reasonable to start out by working with communication as it occurs especially inprocesses of inquiry, where the function of the norms of critical control is to make inquirymore successful in the sort of results it specifically aims at. The ability to be successful inthis way is certainly an important part of what we regard as intelligence” (Randsell, 2002b)Ransdell is here referring to specialised communicational skills such as asserting,suggesting, questioning, critical response and counter response, objection andelaboration, which various research traditions have developed in tandem with systemsof communicational norms that tend to develop and sharpen such skills in scientificcommunities. He continues:“Such practice-embodied norms constitute the distinctive forms of life of the devotees of suchtraditions and they include the use of the material skills that establish, through observationand experimentation, the interaction of the inquirers with their subject-matter, which must beshared communicationally with other inquirers in the same field in order to affect the fielditself.” (Ransdell, 2002a) 22So, if we accept Ransdell’s point, which is well-argued, it would seem thattechnological and other thought- or intelligence-augmenting artefacts, themselvesconsidered as one special type of “embodied mind” forms, in their turn depend, inorder to function optimally, on the development of subsets of normative traditionsregarding communicative and other practices which over time become “embodied” inchanging trends in religion, ideology and culture in writing and images across the world during different historicalperiods.22 From a draft version of Ransdell’s article circulated on the Peirce-l discussion list Wed, 27 Nov 2002. A wwwversionis available at:http://members.door.net/ARISBE/menu/people/peirce-l/ia.htmSee also some further discussion of the draft version on the Peirce-l mailing-list here:http://members.door.net/ARISBE/menu/people/peirce-l/11-27-02.htmhttp://members.door.net/ARISBE/menu/people/peirce-l/11-28-02.htmhttp://members.door.net/ARISBE/menu/people/peirce-l/11-29-02.htmFor further discussion of the notion of sciences as communicational communities, see Ransdell, 1998

contexts of everyday use and application of artefacts in scientific enquiry andapplication, and also, of course, to some extent in educational settings in whichscience, mathematics, arts, economics, and psychological and other socio-culturalsubject matter are central actors. And most certainly, an efficacious and unhinderedcommunicational sharing and discussion of theoretical and field-based experimentalsubject matter with other inquirers involved in the same field is of quite fundamentalimportance in order for any area of science, pure or applied, as it is for education, toprogress and develop in a satisfactory way.It is important to consider that today there is an increasing flora of new tools andmedia for the (re)mediation (see Bolter & Grusin, 1999) and sharing of scientificsubject matter, all of which largely involve the use of new technologies forrepresentation and communication. We only need to think of the multifarious(re)presentational possibilities offered by fixed and mobile digital technologies of allkinds, ranging from fast distributed network computer systems, and the world wideweb to mobile telephones and increasingly small and more powerful portablecomputers with a potential for Internet and wireless-based peer-to-peer forms ofconnectivity. In addition to this, there is also an increasing degree of technologicalconvergence between traditional forms of media and newer media based on digitaltechnologies, and this hybridisation is also becoming evident in terms of the variousmeaning types and tokens that these converging media create, mediate andcommunicate, as well as the ways in which this creation, mediation andcommunication is carried on, where, when and by whom.These ongoing technological and associated sociocultural developments, togetherwith the opening up of traditional boundaries between pure and applied science andbetween science the rest of society and culture (also seen in local-global terms), meanthat conventional forms of life in the scientific communities and traditions Ransdell isreferring to above are becoming increasingly intermingled with emergent forms of lifein a complex dynamic relational space involving scientific research and application –for example in financial, business and cultural contexts and in various kinds ofeducational and vocational training environments – in complex interactions withartefacts of the “external mind” type in the guise of the various “species” of AI and IAtechnologies referred to by Skagestad above.It is reasonable to assume that many “first encounters” with these new aspects of thebroader “ecological niche” in the flow of cultural and social communicationtraditionally occupied by scientific communities (which are now being forced to openup their professional discourses in order to take account of other voices andperspectives, not all of which belong to active participants in scientific andtechnological development processes, but who are ever more concerned to evaluateand dispute publicly, their potential value, and their uses and disuses), will take theform of “surprising events”.For many different people in all areas of society, then, our day-to-day encounters withemergent technologies of mind, and the new, evolving forms of life that go togetherwith these technologies, and which these technologies suggest and support, will createtypes of non-ordinary experience that we can calculate will assume, at least for awhile, the role of Peirce’s “Strange Intruder”. Quite some time and effort on the partof each of us as individuals, as well as the wider communities that we belong to, willbe necessary in order to assimilate and integrate these experiences successfully intoour present forms of life, and in ways that can benefit us, and the rest of the organismswe share this planet with, in the longer run of things. In the course of this processthese new forms of life will come to embody new and highly dynamic genres of

norms regarding communication, action and interaction across the borders of thecultural and social spheres of science, technology and education (Coppock, 1995(a,b),1996 (a,b,c), 1997 (a,b), 1998).5. Self-organization and self controlSo, in Peirce’s view, at least as I have represented it here, mind is – whether weconceive of it as self-organisational processes inherent in the whole of nature andculture, or as our individual, personalised, localising “cuts” (apropos Peirce’s wiremetaphor mentioned previously) of this greater reality which categorise sensible,empirical traces of “external” self-organizing processes in (for us) meaningful ways –“essentially an external phenomenon”. Mind is, then when all comes to all, not onlyemergent on, and thus embodied in, evolutionary, habit-forming semiosic processes inthe natural environment; it is also equally “omnipresent” in all material artefacts ofhuman (and other organisms’) communicational practices, and various other actionsinvolved in the invention, production, use and evaluation of these artefacts.“Mind” in this wider sense is all around us, and embodied both within us, as well as inthe practical ways in which we as individuals and communities express, organise,evaluate and (self-)control our various social life-forms. This must lead us to believethat all these different “aspects” of Mind, and thus, too, Mind seen as a complexsensible phenomenon, may then be taken as potential objects of scientific study. Andin fact, in Peirce’s view, the human mind, having evolved in nature, is quite wellequippedto do just that (just as long as we can put our trust in a wider, potentiallyinfinite, community of inquiry which can help us overcome our individual fallibilitiesin the course of time).He writes:“[…] the possibility of science depends on the fact that human thought necessarily partakes ofwhatever character is diffused through the whole universe, and that its natural modes havesome tendency to be the modes of action of the universe.” [CP: 1.350-351] 23And in fact today, a dynamic open systems view of mind and of the continuity of itsrelationship with nature is becoming shared by an increasing number of scientistsfrom a very wide range of disciplines and fields, not only the pure and appliedsciences, but right across the whole range of the social sciences and humanities. Forinstance, British-Australian linguist Michael Halliday, in a 1994 Nobel Symposiumdiscussion paper: On Language in Relation to the Development of HumanConsciousness, refers to some ground-breaking work by neuroscientist GeraldEdelman on modelling evolutionary processes in neuronal group selection in the1980’s and 1990’s, going on to assert that:“[…] we can no longer pretend that there is some mystical entity (or non-entity), “mind” orwhatever, that is sui generis beyond the reach of scientific enquiry” (Halliday 1995: 45)Edelman, who himself has proposed as a first step towards a broad, interdisciplinaryinvestigation of mind – or “consciousness”, as he generally refers to it – a movetowards a “biologically based epistemology”, grounded in a “qualified realism”,argues for this position in a recent publication together with neurobiologist colleagueGiulio Tononi, in the following way:23 Cited in Nubiola (2000: 5)

“Consciousness is a dynamic property of a special kind of morphology – the reentrantmeshwork of the thalmocortical system – as it interacts with the environment. Our knowledgeof the real world comes as a result of the physical, psychological, and social interactions ofour minds and bodies with that world. These interactions do not involve a direct transfer ofinformation, however, and we must therefore reject naïve realism, the position that theperception of those objects is direct and that the qualities we perceive are, in fact, those of theobjects that are perceived. Realism based on perception must be qualified by the bodily meanswe have available for perception. Most of those means, while enormously powerful, arenevertheless indirect and of limited range. They constrain how our brains develop theirconceptual systems, and we therefore conclude that our realism must be qualified, at least tosome extent.” (Edelman & Tononi, 2000: 216)Edelman and Tononi continue:“[A]s conscious persons capable of language develop and communicate in a culture, theirconceptual abilities become enormously enriched. The products of that enrichment, forexample, logic and mathematics, can transcend some of the phenotypic constraints on theembodied mind and remove some of the qualifications imposed on us by the limitations of ourphenotype. […] The important point that emerges from the work reviewed in this book is thata scientific investigation of consciousness is also consistent with the facts of humanindividuality and subjectivity.” (ibid.)Adopting a biologically based epistemology would, they add:“create a much broader base for thinking about thinking and feeling. Moreover, it would notlimit our descriptions to the boundary between the skin and the rest of the world. Mostimportant, it would open our inquiry to include feelings and emotions in terms of bodilymechanisms that go far beyond computation.” (ibid.: 217)So, on the basis of such perspectives, it is really quite easy to see that the manycomplex issues involved in the kind of investigations mentioned above cannotpossibly hope to be addressed or studied in depth by any one scientific or academiccommunity on its own, but only in the context of a much wider transdisciplinarycommunity of inquiry. Spanish philosopher and Peirce scholar, Jaime Nubiola makesa similar point in two recent articles Nubiola, 2000, 2001) in which he discusses howPeirce’s philosophy can clearly be seen as an early precursor of many of the currentlively discussions and empirical work at present being carried on within a broad fieldof enquiry known as Complexity Theory.American economist and philosopher James Wible, in a couple of recent articles(Wible, 2000a, 2000b) published in a research volume on complexity and the historyof economic thought (Colander 2000) makes some similar, as well as a number ofother important points regarding possible conceptual links and other types ofepistemological relationships that are to be found between Peirce’s philosophy andcurrent conceptions of Complexity Theory in Economics. Wible notes, for example,that Peirce in his evolutionary theory, which is most clearly outlined in his famousThe Monist article from 1893: Evolutionary Love, touched upon, perhaps using adifferent vocabulary, most of the main themes in current Complexity Theory, forinstance: spontaneity and chance in co-existence with lawfulness and determinacy,emergence and growth of order, the incompatibility of evolution with mechanicalforms of reproduction, sheer variety, the difference between conservative and

dissipative systems, chaotic change, non-and far from equilibrium states andpluralistic complexity.In the field of psychiatry and cognitive psychotherapy, too, complex system thinkinghas also been incorporated into ways of thinking about the notion of the “self”. Italianpsychiatrist and psychotherapist Vittorio Guidano, citing significant weaknesses in theempiricist-associationist paradigm, due to its too simplistic conception of therelationship beweeen man and world, and whereby the mind is simply seen as areceptor of a postulated outside order of the world, and consequently as by and largeentirely determined by it, speaks of the emergence of a new “epistemology ofcomplexity”, with its origins primarily in the natural sciences:“According to this perspective, the ordering of reality is an inherent principle of the dynamicsof life itself and therefore assumes growing forms of complexity as it proceeds along theevolutionary scale 24 . […] In this context, complexity does not mean “complication”, which isa limit to knowledge and understandability. This common meaning of the word is applicableonly if we take for granted that simplicity - that is, to regard a living organism as a passiverespondent to the environment - is the “normal” form of reality. On the contrary, to considerliving organism in terms of complexity means to emphasize from the very start their selfdeterminationand self-organization, as well as the openness and plasticity of theirevolutionary and developmental pathways. One hardly needs to point out that such anapproach to human behaviour is not a new theory or discipline, but rather a way of seeingthings - a paradigm or reference frame in which already available observational andexperimental data can be reconsidered in a more holistic and dynamic perspective.” (Guidano,1987: ‘Introduction’) 25One important aspect of research in this particular area is a growing awareness that ithas produced regarding the role of emotion in perception, interpretation andknowledge organization processes, and a general shift of perspective from regardingthe self as a kind of entity connecting experience and behaviour, to a more processualdevelopmental model where there is continuing plasticity and growth of a steadilymore complex selfhood over time during the course of our lives, and where there is,as Guidano puts it: a “concept of selfhood continuously modelling and restructuringitself […] as a process accounting for the central feature of human knowledge: itsreflexive nature” (ibid.)6. The Mind, Body, World/ Reality RelationIn the light of the above considerations, it seems reasonable to suggest that thesensible body-mind complex, when examined from within the kind of philosophicalperspective envisioned by Peirce, can be seen as functioning as a dynamic,“localising” or “focusing” semiotic space – a kind of natural “force-field” or“nexus” 26 , facilitating the self-organisation of a type of “habituated boundedness”,which in each individual organism, exerts a unique “subjective” kind of filtering and24 Guidano cites as sources here: Atlan, 1979, 1981; Gould, 1977, 1980; Jantsch & Waddington, 1976; Morin,1977; Prigogine, 1980; Weimer, 1982 (see bibliography)25 The Introduction chapter of Guidano’s book is available in English on the World Wide Web here:http://www.cetepo.com.ar/complexity_of_the_self.htm26 The term “nexus” is used as a philosophical technical term by the British mathematician and philosopher AlfredNorth Whitehead in the context of his process-oriented Philosophy of Organism. As Whitehead defines it, nexus(plural nexüs) is one of eight categories of experience, and corresponds to what he calls “Public Matters of Fact”(Whitehead 1978: 22). Elsewhere, Whitehead defines nexus as “Any particular fact of togetherness among actualentities” (ibid.: 20). See also Whitehead 1920, 1967.

perspectivising influence on the on-going flux of phenomenological experience. Thisgeneral way of thinking about things strikes me also as rather similar to the notion ofhow attractors function to exert a pull on certain processes in conceptual, or othertypes of phase space, as suggested by Peter Bøgh Anderson recently in relation to hissemiotic theory for modelling genres as dynamic self-organizing systems (see BøghAndersen 2000)At the same time, the body-mind complex remains open for future re-organisations ofits habituated (and habituating) configurations of categorising relations at any giventime. According to this view, relational reorganisations result from semiotic processesinstigated by certain types of (surprising) experiences, allowing for the developmentof innovative configurations of perspectival filterings related to, but not isometricwith. other self-organizing semiotic processes in the natural environment external tothe more “local” (both subjective and intersubjective) perspectivising environmentthat each mind-body nexus offers through its own currently habituated ways oforganizing and categorizing signs in terms of meanings.We have seen that in a living, breathing world it is not, seen from Peirce’s point ofview, sufficient to operate with dichotomised distinctions between pairs of “entities”such as mind and body, or body and world. Mind, body and world are seen by Peirceas living and moving together in a creative dialogue with one another, interwoven insemiotic processes that generate and respectively modify the cognitive, physiologicaland material regularities (habits) which self-organize, through their ongoing orderingsand reorderings inherent in their own “embodiedness”, the unique interrelationshipsthat develop and change over time in a continuity of interactions of mind, body andreality. As human beings, we are locally situated in the developing complexity of amaterial, conceptual and interactional world, our minds are locally situated inmaterial, conceptual and interactional bodies, and these three semiotic “loci” of world,mind and body interact continually with one another in the further “sympathetic”development of one another.Peirce sometimes referred to man as a sign 27 , and using this metaphor, we might tryand conceptualise a general model of semiosis which enunciates dynamically theMind-Body-World/Reality relationship in the following terms:Let us envision Mind as standing for the Third, or Interpretant aspect of the sign,Body as standing for the First, or Representamen aspect of the sign, and “external”World/Reality, be it natural, cultural or social, within which each mind-body complexis situated, as standing for the Second, or Object aspect of the sign.27 “Without fatiguing the reader by stretching this parallelism too far, it is sufficient to say that there is no elementwhatever of man's consciousness which has not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason isobvious. It is that the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign,taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought isan external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, inthe same sense in which the words homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; forthe man is the thought.It is hard for man to understand this, because he persists in identifying himself with his will, his power over theanimal organism, with brute force. Now the organism is only an instrument of thought. But the identity of a manconsists in the consistency of what he does and thinks, and consistency is the intellectual character of a thing; thatis, is its expressing something.” [CP 5.314 – 5.315]

ThirdnessIOSecondnessMindWorld/ RealityBodyFirstnessRFigure 5: The Mind-Body-Word/Reality relation as semiosisIn the above configuration the Mind-Body relation can be construed metaphorically asa kind of dynamic locus where developing interpretants emerge constantly throughsign processes generated in phenomenological experience as a result of situated(inter)actions of a Mind-Body complex with, and within, its current interpersonal,social and ecological niche of the larger World-Reality “environment”. A mind-bodycomplex both situated in, and capable of motion through, and thus, too, of certainkinds of intentional action with, and in relation to, its own complex naturalenvironment, engages continually in dynamic interactions with this environment.These interactions contribute to changing both it and its environment, and thus too, inchanging the conditions for its own possible future experience, in large or small ways.The same kinds of considerations apply too, if it engages together with otherorganisms in more or less well planned forms of action, which may either be inconflict with, neutral with respect to, or co-operatively nurturing with respect to, themore fundamental (biological, emotional, psychological) growth (and survival)conditions necessary for itself, and for other organisms with which it shares the sameenvironment.Dialogical mind considered as an embodied Interpretant processually relates aRepresentamen Body to a Dynamic Object World/Reality and undergoes continualshifts and reconfigurations of potentially the whole range of its previously acquired orlearned configurations of meaning through the development and negotiation of newsigns and interpretants in new types of contexts, stimulated by its continuinginteractions and exchanges with the environment, and articulated in different forms ofmotion and action.In Peirce’s evolutionary epistemology (see Hausman 1993), the notion of the growthof Reason is a central one. As Peirce puts it at one point:“The very being of the General, of Reason, consists in its governing individual events. So,then, the essence of Reason is such that its being never can have been completely perfected. Italways must be in a state of incipiency, of growth […] This development of Reason consists,you will observe, in embodiment, that is, in manifestation. The creation of the universe, whichdid not take place during a certain busy week in the year 4004 B.C., but is going on today andnever will be done, is this very development of Reason.” [CP 1.615]One possible way of representing this general, and highly processual notiondiagramatically could be as suggested in Figure 5 below, where the Body asRepresentamen First acts as a Sign in order to mediate a series of increasinglycomplex Interpretant Thirds in embodied Mind, which are linked in an increasingly

complex lattice of dynamic meaning configurations which continue over time to theGrowth of Reason, in terms of (individual or collective) Mind’s generalunderstandings of a potentially infinite, but in some respect or other, determined,series of different aspects of the complex Object Second of the World/Realityenvironment:OR I 1 /R 1 I 2 /R 2 I 3 /R 3 &cIncreasing complexity of meanings (Growth of Embodied Reason)Figure 5: The Mind-Body-World relation as Growth of Embodied ReasonWhat is of special interest to investigate further, is the hows and the whys of ways inwhich the ontologically embodied growth of reason in individual, or communities oforganisms in the course of their relatively short lifetimes can be seen to participate inand interact triadically with the broader, much longer term developmental processescontingent in nature.In human terms this means to understand better how, and to what extent, thetechnologies and other artefacts that we create, which all embody in their various thegrowth of reasonableness in our individual minds, as well as in the practices and setsof norms for communication and action that we embody in our everyday use andinterpretation of these technologies and artefacts, serve to nurture and further realgrowth of reason in the world we live in, and how, and to what extent they do not.Since we are, as Peirce constantly reminds us, “fallible” in our “glassy essence”, bothas individuals and as “loosely connected persons”, we need to constantly be awake tothe need to understand better which forms and norms of communication and actionenrich and promote growth of reason in our local and global communities, and whichdo not. In Peirce’s own words:“The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error,so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only anegation. This is man,proud man,Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,His glassy essence.” [CP 5.264-317]

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