Charles Sanders Peirce and the Mind-Body-World Relation

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