Charles Sanders Peirce and the Mind-Body-World Relation

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