Charles Sanders Peirce and the Mind-Body-World Relation

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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
Page 1 and 2: Università degli Studi di Modena e
Page 3 and 4: merely as a result of those words w
Page 5 and 6: “The question is what the phenome
Page 7 and 8: somewhat equivalent to the seven or
Page 9 and 10: and in doing so, dampen the effects
Page 11 and 12: tumbleweeds will not generally be a
Page 13: organised, evaluated, elaborated an
Page 17 and 18: development of modern IA (Intellige
Page 19 and 20: norms regarding communication, acti
Page 21 and 22: dissipative systems, chaotic change
Page 23 and 24: ThirdnessIOSecondnessMindWorld/ Rea
Page 25 and 26: ReferencesAamodt, Anders & Komorows
Page 27 and 28: Feibleman, James K.1946 An Introduc
Page 29 and 30: Rodda, M. & Grove, C.1987 Language,

Charles Sanders Peirce and the Mind-Body-World Relation

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?