Charles Sanders Peirce and the Mind-Body-World Relation

Now of course we all know that experiments that do turn out exactly as expected cansometimes be useful for science and society in the shorter term. Indeed, experimentsthat turn out “right” are frequently eagerly sought after for economic, political orother reasons, in order to provide further evidence that might justify decision-makingprocesses, by verifying that that which we already have come to believe to be true onthe basis of previous experience, is still valid, at least for the present. But experimentsof this kind are essentially “conservative”, in the sense that they can not provide anyreal impetus for further research by pushing us to rethink our basic presuppositionsand start looking elsewhere for new explanatory hypotheses. If science (andphilosophy, which is Peirces’ main concern here) is to continually keep moving aheadand breaking new ground, then Peirce’s standpoint is that we need to conceive oftypes of experiments that might produce precisely such experiences that surprise us.Put simply: we can learn much more from being open to, and having a capacity for,being genuinely surprised by, and learning continually and systematically fromexperience than we will if we do not. He continues:“In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read, – and they have been many, big and heavy, – Idon’t remember that anyone has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostlycruel. That however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience. She says,Open your mouth and shut your eyesAnd I’ll give you something to make you wise;and thereupon she keeps her promise, and seems to take her pay in the fun of tormenting us.”[MSS 305, 306] 3Interestingly, the passage which follows on from the one above in the same lectureturns out to have particular pertinence in our present context, for Peirce continues:“The phenomenon of surprise is highly instructive in reference to this category 4 because ofthe emphasis it puts upon a mode of consciousness which can be detected in all perception,namely, a double consciousness at once of an ego and a non-ego, directly acting upon oneanother.” [MSS 305, 306]This can be seen as referring to Peirce’s well-known dictum that all thought is insigns, and his associated conceptualisation of thought as dialogical:“All thinking is dialogic in form. Your self of one instant appeals to your deeper self for hisassent. Consequently, all thinking is conducted in signs that are mainly of the same generalstructure as words” [CP 6.338]In the case of the draft version of Peirce’s Harvard Pragmatism lecture referred topreviously above, however, we can see that the dialogue he is thinking of here is notan “internal” one between the “self of one instant” and a “deeper self”, but rather alively and rather unpredictable encounter with an “other” (anti-Ego) coming from“outside” our self-mind-body complex, and which impinges unexpectedly upon it.This “other” represents some hitherto unexpected aspect of the Real (nature, theworld, life in general) that surprises us and upsets our present reasonably stable andwell-habituated sense of having arrived at some kind of coherent understanding of thepersonal and experiential world-reality niche we inhabit. Peirce goes on to write in thesame Harvard lecture draft that :3 Also cited and discussed in a wider historical context in Turrisi 1997: 1604 Peirce is referring here to his phenomenological category of Secondness.