Charles Sanders Peirce and the Mind-Body-World Relation

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