Charles Sanders Peirce and the Mind-Body-World Relation

perspectivising influence on the on-going flux of phenomenological experience. Thisgeneral way of thinking about things strikes me also as rather similar to the notion ofhow attractors function to exert a pull on certain processes in conceptual, or othertypes of phase space, as suggested by Peter Bøgh Anderson recently in relation to hissemiotic theory for modelling genres as dynamic self-organizing systems (see BøghAndersen 2000)At the same time, the body-mind complex remains open for future re-organisations ofits habituated (and habituating) configurations of categorising relations at any giventime. According to this view, relational reorganisations result from semiotic processesinstigated by certain types of (surprising) experiences, allowing for the developmentof innovative configurations of perspectival filterings related to, but not isometricwith. other self-organizing semiotic processes in the natural environment external tothe more “local” (both subjective and intersubjective) perspectivising environmentthat each mind-body nexus offers through its own currently habituated ways oforganizing and categorizing signs in terms of meanings.We have seen that in a living, breathing world it is not, seen from Peirce’s point ofview, sufficient to operate with dichotomised distinctions between pairs of “entities”such as mind and body, or body and world. Mind, body and world are seen by Peirceas living and moving together in a creative dialogue with one another, interwoven insemiotic processes that generate and respectively modify the cognitive, physiologicaland material regularities (habits) which self-organize, through their ongoing orderingsand reorderings inherent in their own “embodiedness”, the unique interrelationshipsthat develop and change over time in a continuity of interactions of mind, body andreality. As human beings, we are locally situated in the developing complexity of amaterial, conceptual and interactional world, our minds are locally situated inmaterial, conceptual and interactional bodies, and these three semiotic “loci” of world,mind and body interact continually with one another in the further “sympathetic”development of one another.Peirce sometimes referred to man as a sign 27 , and using this metaphor, we might tryand conceptualise a general model of semiosis which enunciates dynamically theMind-Body-World/Reality relationship in the following terms:Let us envision Mind as standing for the Third, or Interpretant aspect of the sign,Body as standing for the First, or Representamen aspect of the sign, and “external”World/Reality, be it natural, cultural or social, within which each mind-body complexis situated, as standing for the Second, or Object aspect of the sign.27 “Without fatiguing the reader by stretching this parallelism too far, it is sufficient to say that there is no elementwhatever of man's consciousness which has not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason isobvious. It is that the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign,taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought isan external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, inthe same sense in which the words homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; forthe man is the thought.It is hard for man to understand this, because he persists in identifying himself with his will, his power over theanimal organism, with brute force. Now the organism is only an instrument of thought. But the identity of a manconsists in the consistency of what he does and thinks, and consistency is the intellectual character of a thing; thatis, is its expressing something.” [CP 5.314 – 5.315]