Charles Sanders Peirce and the Mind-Body-World Relation

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