Peirce's categories: what's the big deal?

apokrisis

I want to understand his categories better, but Peirce himself does not explain them terribly well. Any help here would be much appreciated. — Manuel

Manuel asks what's the story. I'll start a thread as others like @aletheist might give different answers.

Context

My take is that of someone who was involved in systems science and hierarchy theory – the tradition in science that aims to be be anti-reductionist or holist in its metaphysics, and so also winds up being triadic in terms of its categories, or logical structure.

Traditionally, systems science namechecks Aristotle - his hylomorphism and four causes. But in the 1990s, enough of Peirce's work was being discussed to see how he did a solid unified job on answering the question of what is the basic causal logic of nature.

So in a broad-brush fashion, it is like asking the question of how to shape your mind in the way you might shape your hand so as to reach out and grasp the generalised wholeness of Being. Reality is always encountered as some complex entirety - a blooming, buzzing confusion. And we want to see it in its metaphysical simplicity. We want to get down to the general way that all stuff hangs together so as to be what it is. We want to expose the logical structure of Nature.

Aristotle did that with his categories - the search for the ultimate essence. He came up with the triadic formula of hylomorphism. Substantial being (the world we encounter in its complex entirety) can be understood as a dyadic interaction between formal and material causation. Behind every individuated thing - a mountain, a table, a walnut - there is a top-down cause, the shape or purpose that in-forms its being. And then there is the bottom-up material cause of the matter, energy or whatever notion of a unformed material potential is required as the counterpart to formal cause.

So we can derive a simple threeness of categories to sum up the wholeness of hierarchical relation. You have to have a pair of dichotomous opposites - a categorical division such as local vs global, individuated vs general, matter vs form, bottom-up vs top-down - and then the third thing which is their interaction or mixing.

Actuality thus becomes the intersection between the two other things of potentiality and necessity.

The world for us is always some concrete and individuated state of affairs. But that reality is the systemic product of the intersecting causes of pure material possibility and globally constraining form or order.

If we are to understand the world in a holistic fashion, we need to treat as real all three categories. You have a triad of potential, actual and necessary as apparently three states of being. But we need to avoid falling into the trap of seeing these as three kinds of realms - the way Cartesian dualism divided nature into the two realms of matter and mind. The Aristotelian, Peircean and Systems Science approach is about a unified view of Nature based on the simplest possible categorically-divided relationship.

It is a process-based ontology. It is a universalised theory of the growth or development of logical structure, and hence of the basic logic of concrete existence itself. You break things into three as the simplest way to get at the self-organising structure of Being.

Peirce's categories

So quickly, that is how Peirce did break it down.

Firstness is the notion of a vague material potential. The unformed stuff that was just a kind of everythingness of random or spontaneous fluctuation. What Anaximander called the Apeiron, and Aristotle called prime matter. What science might now call the quantum vacuum.

Peirce also called it Tychism - his principle that reality was at root based on chance rather than necessity. Existence was probabilistic at base and so statistical in its actuality. Laws and regularity have to develop to give concrete shape to what is fundamentally indeterminate.

We can see the key confusion creeping in here. Firstness is somehow first - the unformed ground of being. But holism is also going to demand that Firstness can never actually exist on its own in an uncontexted way. It is always going to be just a facet of the final structural outcome - the potentiality that the fact of a concrete and in-formed development reveals.

So then there is Secondness - the bare fact of a dyadic interaction. If we have two things, then they can react. And this will be a very concrete and individuated fact. It will be an actuality. A possibility realised. A bit of history made.

Then comes Thirdness - what you get when there is a lot of secondness about and a statistical regularity begins to arise. If something can happen once, it can happen again. Perhaps in a different way. There is thus an interaction of interactions and some kind of global regularity - an averaging across all possibilities - becomes the habit of the system, the law of the world. You get emergent structure - the formal necessity of a mathematical pattern.

Where Firstness also stands for Tychism - or absolute spontaneity - Thirdness stands for Synechism, or absolute continuity. That is, one generates the events that compose the system, the other speaks to the global closure that makes the system a system. A collection of events eventually becomes a weight of history that acts as a generalised constraint on all events. Only events which now fit the world can continue to happen and so continue to (re)build that world.

So again it is easy to get confused because the triadic logic seems to both be a series of steps, and a sandwich of interaction.

In terms of the development of a structured world, we start with Firstness - meaningless fluctuation - and that gives rise to chance, but concrete, Secondness - fluctuations that produced the new thing of a definite action~reaction dyad. Then after that comes Thirdness as whatever set of global habits could bring emergent stabilising regularity to a mere confusion of interactions. Reactions become their own force for a Darwinian selection. What evolves is whatever final systems organisation does the best job of imposing a contextual regularity on all the Secondness so that we in fact wind up with a Cosmos with the general habit we call existing - which is to say, a capacity to persist as an open-ended cosmic process of growth.

So the diachronic account sees the triad evolving in stages to reach its fully actualised reality. But the synchronic view sees all three levels of being in their hierarchy of interaction. Firstness and Thirdness now become the divided extremes of being - the opposing dichotomy of Tychism, or pure possibility vs Synechism, or pure formal necessity. Secondness, as the actuality of a world of individuated substances or particularised events, is now the meat in that causal sandwich. Secondness is what gets hylomorphically formed when top-down law and bottom-up degrees of freedom intersect to make something happen in the world.

In general, the systems view of reality demands that we see existence both as a historical process and as the complex structure it is right now. It has to develop the definiteness of its triadic organisation, and yet it can only exist if "already" triadic in its organisation.

Peirce can be hard to follow if you don't see that his three categories embody both the diachronic and synchronic view.

Firstness, for example, has to both stand alone in its own right as "the ground of being", and yet it also can only exist as such from the retrospective view offered by Secondness and Thirdness. Its existence is revealed by the fact it could become negated, or at least reduced towards a limit (in the way quantum uncertainty is both fundamental, yet also almost completely eliminated to arrive at the classical physical world which is our everyday actuality).

Thirdness both arises from the other two categories, and yet fully incorporates the other two.

Everything divides, and yet it is never really divided.

Manuel

↪apokrisis

:clap:

Thanks for that very detailed post. I'll be sure to read it several times to make better sense of it. It covers a lot of ground.

Just as a general reply, I'll use the most simple example that comes to mind, which is Peirce's correspondence with Lady Webly, explaining the categories to her. He says that:

"Firstness is that mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else."

"Secondness is that mode of being of that which is such as it is, with respect to a second but regardless of any third."

Thirdness is is that mode of being of that which is such as it is, in bringing a second and third into relation with each other"

He says that "typical idea of firstness are qualities of feeling, or mere appearances. That scarlet... the quality itself ..." he also speaks about the idea of "hardness" being an example of firstness.

With secondness he speaks of "effort" as when one experience forces itself on you.

Thirdness is like tying together firstness and secondness. In a triadic relation, he says, "brute action is secondness, mentality is thirdness."

This is of course a gross generalization and simplification.

You appear to apply these categories as widely as possible, which was likely his intent.

I've always thought using an empirical example would be extremely helpful, as in, speaking about a red ball in a game of dodgeball so I can better visualize the categories:

For instance seeing the red of a ball is an instance of firstness, me reacting to someone throwing the ball at me and felling the rubber of the ball would be secodness and me thinking about whom to hit in this game would be thirdness.

And then I'd expand these categories to everything. Something like that.

Is that possible or is this situation too artificial to use as an example?

aletheist

I'll start a thread as others like aletheist might give different answers. — apokrisis

Thanks for the shout-out!

My take is that of someone who sticks pretty closely to Peirce's own writings and terminology. Strictly speaking, his categories are phenomenological rather than metaphysical, the irreducible elements of whatever is or could be present to any mind in any way. As such, they primarily correspond to quality, reaction, and mediation. In mathematics, they correspond to monadic, dyadic, and triadic relations. In normative science, they correspond to feeling, action, and thought. In metaphysics, they correspond to possibility, actuality, and conditional necessity. In cosmology, the constitution of being is a continuum (3ns) of indefinite possibilities (1ns), some of which are actualized (2ns). Time flows from the irrevocable past (2ns) through the nascent present (1ns) toward the indeterminate future (3ns).

For instance seeing the red of a ball is an instance of firstness ... — Manuel

This is a good example of why Peirce's categories can be difficult to grasp without a lot of careful study. Seeing the red of a ball is an instance of 2ns, not 1ns, because the redness is embodied in the ball. The redness in itself, as a qualitative possibility apart from any physical instantiation and without comparison to anything else, is the closest we can get to an idea of pure 1ns.

... me reacting to someone throwing the ball at me and felling the rubber of the ball would be secodness ... — Manuel

Even just the brute impact of the ball on you is 2ns, independent of your sensation of it, although that is also 2ns. Here the quality of the feeling of the rubber is 1ns.

... and me thinking about whom to hit in this game would be thirdness. — Manuel

Sure, anything cognitive is basically 3ns. However, an important principle to keep in mind is that the categories are never really isolated from each other in our experience, only as artifacts of analysis that result from a kind of abstraction. We prescind 2ns from 3ns, and we prescind 1ns from both 2ns and 3ns.

Hope that helps!

Manuel

↪aletheist

Yes, it does help quite a bit.

My doubt would be with 1sts then. If I "do away" with firsts, it would be a ball lacking colour "only"?

It's difficult to imagine 1sts without concrete instantiations of a quale, as in, I don't know if such things could exist: a quale or phenomenal properties without concrete instantiation.

Even just the brute impact of the ball on you is 2ns, independent of your sensation of it — aletheist

How can I register an impact without a sensation?

I think I get 2nds and 3rds better, but I'm having trouble with 1sts.

apokrisis

"Firstness is that mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else."

"Secondness is that mode of being of that which is such as it is, with respect to a second but regardless of any third."

Thirdness is is that mode of being of that which is such as it is, in bringing a second and third into relation with each other" — Manuel

This emphasises the triad as a series of relations of expanding dimensionality. It is a reductionist version in the spirit of Euclidean geometry or Newton's laws of motion.

Take a 0D point, let it trace a 1D line, then expand that to a 2D plane, etc. Or take the zeroeth derivative of motion, move on to the second and third...fourth, fifth, and as many more as you like.

So misses the point in my view. The holistic argument starts from the unlimitedness of an infinity of dimensionality and finds that the fewest dimensions that describe a reality is three.

Firstness as vagueness is an everythingness that can only become the kind of firstness described here - the bare particular of some spontaneous and contextless action - when retrospectively seen as such from a Thirdness that finds this Firstness in its betrayal as a Secondness.

It's a hard point to get across, but - as in a particle detector - you only know that there is a bare particular, an atomic fact, when an interaction has been able to happen within a suitable arranged environmental context. So this description - even by Peirce - gets you off on quite the wrong foot in my opinion.

He says that "typical idea of firstness are qualities of feeling, or mere appearances. That scarlet... the quality itself ..." he also speaks about the idea of "hardness" being an example of firstness. — Manuel

It gets worse. :grin:

Sure, Peirce tried to take this phenomenological tack. And I like Peirce because he argues from the psychology and epistemology to the cosmology and ontology. This builds in the bridge between mind and world while the mind builds its model of that world.

But that smart approach leads eventually to the logical generality of semiosis - the sign relation, or pansemiotic modelling relation, by which even the Comos can self-organise itself into being. That's the big idea that Peirce gets to.

However talking about qualia is another misstep. It is like talking about other atomic facts such as geometric points or physical events. It starts things off in a standard reductionist fashion where something is already determinate, or concretely in stable existence. Then everything else becomes an upward act of construction - one thing added on top of the last thing.

You appear to apply these categories as widely as possible, which was likely his intent. — Manuel

This is true. Semiosis is a logic of everything. In Nature, everything is a system - a form of dissipative structure. So it doesn't matter whether you are talking physics or neurology or economics. Everything that can develop and persist in the world, does so because it expresses the same general triadic structure.

I've always thought using an empirical example would be extremely helpful, as in, speaking about a red ball in a game of dodgeball so I can better visualize the categories:

For instance seeing the red of a ball is an instance of firstness, me reacting to someone throwing the ball at me and felling the rubber of the ball would be secodness and me thinking about whom to hit in this game would be thirdness. — Manuel

But in this game, what does the redness matter? What could it be a sign of? Why mention it?

Maybe the rule of the game is that only being hit by a red ball counts.

So this is an example of semiosis in the minds of some group who have constructed a Thirdness that is the habits that define the game. The interpretant. And the fact that you got hit by the red ball is the Firstness of the object. Then the Secondness of accepting that this mean you are "out" - the fact you curse and step away from the game - is the sign standing for the relation between the Third and the First.

Now it might be clearer. The game is the context that makes it possible for the event of being hit by a red ball to count as some particular event. It is not a random and meaningless accident. It is the game's most meaningful fact. The game needs to exist to define it as a fact. And - pragmatically - you have to show you share the interpretation of the event in the same fashion by leaving the game.

But all this is an example of semiosis as epistemology - a theory of meaning within a system of communication, or better yet, of a communal modelling of the world.

As psychology, it is already a brilliant analysis.

But where Peirce really wins is in generalising semiosis to the degree it is mathematically general enough to lay a formal foundation for logic, and also ... perhaps, to a degree ... act as a general story on ontology. It can ground an account of the Universe as a self-organised rational structure as well.

apokrisis

Strictly speaking, his categories are phenomenological rather than metaphysical, the irreducible elements of whatever is or could be present to any mind in any way. — aletheist

Surely they have to transcend the phenomenal to avoid a mere reduction to idealism. This is where the pragmatism comes in. Experience can be organised in ways that move beyond “concrete” qualities. We can imagine the world in mathematical/logical terms and thus measure it in terms of numbers.

That surely is the point of the pragmatic method. Moving past the givenness of the “phenomenal”.

Manuel

↪apokrisis

Ah, well once it gets off into mathematics I get lost.

Which is why looking for an epistemic-metaphical example suits my needs. If I can grasp that, the I can proceed to apply it to other areas, perhaps. But if I can't apply it to "ordinary experience", that is, lived everyday manifest reality, I can't work with it well. I think I begin to see a logic based on what you and aletheist are saying, though there are divergences.

You're saying that getting hit by a red ball is a firstness, aletheist says it's a 2ndness. Firstness for him, as I understand him in this example, would be the sensation of rubber I feel from the ball, but me getting hit would be a second.

Yours is broader, as I see it.

Wayfarer

↪apokrisis

:clap:

Of course it is a metaphysic, and idealist to boot. Pierce’s works were written before Russell and Moore and the whole 20th C ‘revolt against idealism’. I’ve noticed before that if you go looking for references on ‘objective idealism’ that Pierce comes up at the top of the rankings. (He endorses Berkeley but rejects Berkeley’s nominalism.)

aletheist

If I "do away" with firsts, it would be a ball lacking colour "only"? — Manuel

No, it would be pure matter lacking all qualities whatsoever.

It's difficult to imagine 1sts without concrete instantiations of a quale, as in, I don't know if such things could exist: a quale or phenomenal properties without concrete instantiation. — Manuel

Indeed, 1ns does not exist apart from its concrete instantiations, but it is a real possibility. Peirce carefully distinguishes existence as reaction with other like things in the environment from reality as being such as it is regardless of what anyone thinks about it.

How can I register an impact without a sensation? — Manuel

You can't, but the impact itself is 2ns regardless of whether you "register" it. The sensation as you actually experience it is 2ns, while the quality of that sensation is 1ns. We can only apprehend that quality in itself by prescinding it from the experience.

Surely they have to transcend the phenomenal to avoid a mere reduction to idealism. — apokrisis

That depends on what you mean by "transcend the phenomenal" and "reduction to ideaism." After all, Peirce considered phenomenology to the the first positive science, on which all the others depend for principles, and explicitly affirmed (objective) idealism in the sense that the psychical law is primoridal while the physical law is derived and special, such that matter is a peculiar sort of mind--mere specialized and partially deadened mind.

You're saying that getting hit by a red ball is a firstness, aletheist says it's a 2ndness. — Manuel

No, we are both saying that the redness of the ball is 1ns, while getting hit by it is 2ns.

Firstness for him, as I understand him in this example, would be the sensation of rubber I feel from the ball, but me getting hit would be a second. — Manuel

No, again, the sensation itself is 2ns, but its prescinded quality is 1ns.

I’ve noticed before that if you go looking for references on ‘objective idealism’ that Pierce comes up at the top of the rankings. (He endorses Berkeley but rejects Berkeley’s nominalism.) — Wayfarer

Peirce distinguishes his Schelling-fashioned objective idealism from Berkeley's subjective idealism, as well as Kant's transcendental idealism and Hegel's absolute idealism.

Manuel

↪aletheist

:up:

Thanks for the clarification. I think I can start thinking about other cases now and find out how useful it could be to me.

apokrisis

Of course it is a metaphysic, and idealist to boot. — Wayfarer

So the categories are an attempt to complete the statement: Everything is …

How do you get from “Eveything is mind”, to “Everything is semiosis”?

apokrisis

After all, Peirce considered phenomenology to the the first positive science, on which all the others depend for principles, and explicitly affirmed (objective) idealism in the sense that the psychical law is primoridal while the physical law is derived and special, such that matter is a peculiar sort of mind--mere specialized and partially deadened mind. — aletheist

It makes sense to start with an analysis of the structure of experience as an epistemic necessity. Kant shows that. It becomes nonsense to then claim mind is ontologically primordial.

Peirce certainly makes idealist sounding statements. Yet he is, in the end, the pragmatist and so all about the epistemology of how we mentally model the ontic structure of the world.

We have to then find ourselves in this world as real creatures. So in the end, the purely logical category - everything is semiosis - has to be able to transcend other metaphysical statements like everything is matter, or everything is mind.

apokrisis

Sure, anything cognitive is basically 3ns. However, an important principle to keep in mind is that the categories are never really isolated from each other in our experience, only as artifacts of analysis that result from a kind of abstraction. We prescind 2ns from 3ns, and we prescind 1ns from both 2ns and 3ns. — aletheist

That treats the categories as an accurate model of human perception. The brain models it’s world by imposing cognitive structure top down. Even to see that an object stands still, we have to have eyes that dance and impose “our” motion on the scene.

So as a model of epistemology, this is right. And it is also anti-phenomenology in method. Bare qualities exist for us only within cognitive frames. Thus they don’t actually “exist”. Psychologically, it is signs all the way down for our minds.

But there is a reason why a logic of vagueness was a great ambition of Peirce. There is a reason why tychism was ontically fundamental. Firstness is primordial - the start of “thingness” - when it comes to his ontology.

aletheist

How do you get from “Eveything is mind”, to “Everything is semiosis”? — apokrisis

All thought is in signs, so all mind is semiosis.

Peirce certainly makes idealist sounding statements. Yet he is, in the end, the pragmatist and so all about the epistemology of how we mentally model the ontic structure of the world. — apokrisis

According to Peirce's own testimony, he is above all else a synechist. That is what leads him to be not only a pragmatist, but also an extreme scholastic realist, a tychist, and an objective idealist, which is why he eventually seeks to differentiate his "pragmaticism" from the pragmatism of James and others.

Bare qualities exist for us only within cognitive frames. Thus they don’t actually “exist”. — apokrisis

Like I said, qualities in themselves do not exist, but they are nevertheless real--they are as they are regardless of what anyone thinks about them.

Firstness is primordial - the start of “thingness” - when it comes to his ontology. — apokrisis

No, on my reading of Peirce, 3ns is primordial. In his cosmological diagram, the starting point is a clean blackboard (3ns), then come the aggregated white chalk marks of a Platonic world (1ns), out of one of which our existing universe is actualized as a discontinuous mark (2ns).

apokrisis

All thought is in signs, so all mind is semiosis. — aletheist

Yes. But then so is all matter ... in the pansemiotic view.

That is, if we want the ultimate category that underpins reality, it is a logic of relations. A logic that is triadic and can thus account for its own rationalising existence, its own universality.

That was a big trick to pull off.

Merely affirming traditional idealist concepts of spirit and mind would have been no achievement at all. There would be nothing new worth discussing.

According to Peirce's own testimony, he is above all else a synechist. — aletheist

He proclaimed himself "above all" all kinds of things. Above all, a Spinozian. Above all, an anti-Hegelian. In his scattered writings in which he explored his own twists and turns of thought, there are any number of hostages to fortune for those who want to quote mine.

I am not concerned with the "true Peirce". He is allowed his uncertainties and contradictions. I take the systems thinking perspective and point to where his thought reaches mathematical-strength conception, and so says something robust and useful.

Synechism and tychism are a dichotomy that are joined at the hip as each other's "other". So to defend either, you must bring along both.

My OP spelt out the confusion that can then arise - the confusion of the triadic category which encapsulates both the diachronic and synchonic view of things.

From a developmental perspective, Firstness or Vagueness must be the starting point - the blooming, buzzing, confusion of Tychism. But then - pace Aristotle and Hegel - Synechism is the finality that draws possibility into its actuality by dint of necessity. So Synechism is just as primary once you take the full holistic view. It is just "present" in terms of its marked absence at the beginning.

Wayfarer

How do you get from “Everything is mind”, to “Everything is semiosis”? — apokrisis

Peirce held that science suggests that the universe has evolved from a condition of maximum freedom and spontaneity into its present condition, in which it has taken on a number of habits, sometimes more entrenched habits and sometimes less entrenched ones. With pure freedom and spontaneity Peirce tended to associate mind, and with firmly entrenched habits he tended to associate matter (or, more generally, the physical). Matter he tended to regard as “congealed” mind, and mind he tended to regard as “effete” matter. Thus he tended to see the universe as the end-product-so-far of a process in which mind has acquired habits and has “congealed” (this is the very word Peirce used) into matter.

This notion of all things as being evolved psycho-physical unities of some sort places Peirce well within the sphere of what might be called “the grand old-fashioned metaphysicians,” along with such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Whitehead, et al. Some contemporary philosophers might be inclined to reject Peirce out of hand upon discovering this fact. Others might find his notion of psycho-physical unities not so very offputting or indeed even attractive. What is crucial is that Peirce argued that mind pervades all of nature in varying degrees: it is not found merely in the most advanced animal species.

This pan-psychistic view, combined with his synechism, meant for Peirce that mind is extended in some sort of continuum throughout the universe. — SEP, Charles Sanders Pierce

('Some contemporary philosophers might be inclined to reject Peirce out of hand upon discovering this fact' - more than a few reading this, I would aver.)

Objective Idealism is the view that the world "out there" is in reality mind communicating with (I would say instantied in) our human minds. It postulates that there is only one perceiver, and that this perceiver is one with that which is perceived. It accepts common sense Realism (the view that independent material objects exist), but rejects Naturalism (the view that the mind and values have emerged from material things).

Plato is regarded as one of the earliest representatives of Objective Idealism (although it can be argued that Plato's worldview was actually dualistic and not truly Idealistic). The definitive formulation of the doctrine came from the German Idealist Friedrich Schelling, and later adapted by G. W. F. Hegel in his Absolute Idealism theory. More recent advocates have included C. S. Peirce and Josiah Royce. — Philosophy Basics, Objective Idealism

As I noted, when Pierce was active, idealism was still the dominant school in both Europe and America. What differentiates Pierce from his academic peers, were his long years as a working scientist which gave him his pragmatic approach.

As for semiosis, I still can't see how it applies outside the organic realm. Can't all of the relations between inorganic substances be fully described in terms of physics and chemistry alone? It's when life enters the picture that symbolic forms become central. Hence 'code biology'.

Merely affirming traditional idealist concepts of spirit and mind would have been no achievement at all. There would be nothing new worth discussing. — apokrisis

Those kinds of concepts can never be defined, and so they're not really concepts at all, but figures of speech. The Cartesian 'concept' of res cogitans is nothing but an abstraction, something like an economic model. It's not an hypotheses as such. And idealism doesn't mean 'believing that all is mind' or anything of the sort. It is based on insight into the workings of the mind and how it constructs and projects what we take to be a separate reality. That takes a kind of meta-cognitive insight and it's a real thing, not some ossified academic philosophical school.

With pure freedom and spontaneity Peirce tended to associate mind, and with firmly entrenched habits he tended to associate matter (or, more generally, the physical). — SEP, Charles Sanders Pierce

compare with Vedic conception of Saṅkhāra.

Manuel

↪apokrisis

Alright but, which of his writings do you consider to be helpful when looking into the categories. He wrote about them quite frequently, but are there like, a few essays or notes in which he talks about them sensibly?

Putting aside what I posted, of course.

apokrisis

With pure freedom and spontaneity Peirce tended to associate mind, and with firmly entrenched habits he tended to associate matter — SEP, Charles Sanders Pierce

So was he speaking metaphorically or literally? Does "tended to associate" mean logically derived from first principles, or useful for introducing a broader canvas of thought that serves to undermine the cherished categories of Cartesian dualism?

Science was narrowing philosophical thought in two cultures fashion. I read Peirce as striving to undermine certainties about both matter and mind, and that way clear space for a uniting semiotic view of these divided categories.

As for semiosis, I still can't see how it applies outside the organic realm. — Wayfarer

Strictly speaking, it can't. That is what modern systems thinking realises in rooting semiosis in talk about codes, modelling relations and epistemic cuts.

Peirce didn't have biology and neurology figured out.

Can't all of the relations between inorganic substances be fully described in terms of physics and chemistry alone? — Wayfarer

Broadly speaking, you can still have a code-less pansemiotics. So you can relax that constraint and arrive at a more generalised metaphysics - and thus recover Peirce in that limit-taking move.

Physical description still requires global laws to regulate the local accidents. It all gets very mysterious when it comes to the holism of quantum theory and the need for wavefunction decoherence. So physics tries to describe reality by excluding any sense of an observer or interpretant. But it is still there in that the laws of nature "know" what is going on. Or that the Universe is made of information and so semiosis is happening "everywhere".

Life and mind are localised semiosis. Cosmology is generalised semiosis. One needs to have its own encoding machinery. The other just is an encoding machine - a dissipative structure collapsing its own wavefunction, expanding and cooling into its own heat sink .... whatever "physical" way you want to put it.

And idealism doesn't mean 'believing that all is mind' or anything of the sort. — Wayfarer

Erm....

IDEALISM - This is the view that the only reality is the ideal world. This would be the world of ideas. It is the view that there is no external reality composed of matter and energy. There are only ideas existing within minds.

https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/intro_text/Chapter%204%20Metaphysics/Idealism.htm

apokrisis

Alright but, which of his writings do you consider to be helpful when looking into the categories. — Manuel

He never set it out in a book or even completely finished figuring it out. The Peircean triad simply informs all his thought as the structure that guides his every effort to explore any possible philosophical question.

I'm not kidding. It is a mental habit to be learnt by practice, not just a formula of words you can parrot. You have to restructure the very patterns of your habits of reason in a way that escapes the usual narrow conventions of reductionism and "cause and effect" thinking.

So understanding is something that can only grow from repeat exposures to every possible angle. Eventually it becomes second nature. It is the lens and not merely just another passing image.

Manuel

↪apokrisis

It's not about parroting, it's to gain an elementary understanding and then build up from that. I think you and aletheist have helped in that.

The logic of his categories has to be convincing, otherwise someone else can ask "why don't you follow Whitehead or Heidegger?" or anyone else.

I think the outline given is interesting, no doubt that about that.

apokrisis

The logic of his categories has to be convincing, otherwise someone else can ask "why don't you follow Whitehead or Heidegger?" or anyone else. — Manuel

I was puzzled by the angle you are taking here. But a check of your bio and a quick skim of your P&M monism thesis hopefully explains.

Some like to see Peirce as some kind of panpsychist, or idealist, or neutral monist, but I look at that as a grave misunderstanding and something that will cloud any possibility of understanding his position.

However I am also of course partial. I come at Peirce via biology, neuroscience, complexity theory and systems science, so I had already rejected any variety of reduction to a monistic metaphysics, along with a rejection of any form of dualism.

The systems position boils down to seeing reality as triadic, and hence irreducibly complex. Some call that Peirce's Reduction Thesis.

So Peirce might achieve a "monistic" unity in saying everything is semiosis. But it is a unity that is like the classical unity of opposites - the unity of the dialectic. Except Peirce realises you have to add yet a third dimension to allow for an axis of development. So his is a unity of the triadic. It is the dichotomy plus the vagueness it divides.

As a view, this would make the considerable work you invested in your thesis quite redundant. P&M monism is already ruled out. You would have much to lose from seeing Peirce as I see him.

That might be an interesting situation for you, or it might not. I'm just indicating the degree of paradigm shifting that would be involved.

Coming from a systems science perspective myself, Peirce simply cements its triadic paradigm. I was working with a gang of theoretical biologists in early 2000s when they realised that Peircean semiotics crystallised their general worldview. Overnight, they renamed themselves biosemioticians. But they were already thinking in non-reductionist terms. They had that habit of mind developed to a mathematical degree. So the move came easy.

Wayfarer

I read Peirce as striving to undermine certainties about both matter and mind, and that way clear space for a uniting semiotic view of these divided categories. — apokrisis

Wouldn't disagree. Perhaps something like Russell's neutral monism (although the phrase always reminds me of a drab-looking English civil servant type in a bowler hat.)

And idealism doesn't mean 'believing that all is mind' or anything of the sort.
— Wayfarer

Erm... — apokrisis

The problem with the typical understanding of idealism is that it 'objectifies the mind' - it treats it as some actual existent, 'out there somewhere'. And then you wonder what 'it' could be and how 'it' could operate, or how a non-material entity could cause physical things to occur. But this based on an abstraction and reification in the first place. In reality, mind is never an object of perception, it is always at the subjective pole of experience and existence, so all of those surmises miss the mark.

This is something that Husserl criticised about Descartes 'res cogitans'. He says first of all that Descartes recognition of the fundamental nature of consciousness was a stroke of genuine insight, but he criticizes the way he frames it as a 'res cogitans' - 'res' literally means 'thing' - which reduces it to an appendage, a 'little tag-end of the world', a ghost in a machine, literally a 'thinking thing'. This conception is what gives rise to 'post-Cartesian' metaphysics, where mind and matter are seen as separable things or substances. (If you look at this essay by Buddhologist Dan Lusthaus, there's a very useful summary of post-Cartesian idealism and materialism under the heading 'The Term "Idealism"' about halfway down the page.)

So, shift the perspective a bit. What I think idealism is saying is that perception itself, cognition itself, are the constituents of the world - the 'meaning-world' in which we live. We don't see anything outside of that, the 'act of seeing' is itself a mental act. The mind is constantly assigning meanings and comparing, and analysing the relationships between concepts, sythnthesising percepts according to that process. Which is basically Kantian. The mistake is to then say that we can stand outside the process and designate it as some existing thing, alongside the other kinds of things that we're seeking to analyse. We can't do that, because we can't get outside it. (Thomas Nagel has a chapter on 'thoughts you can't get outside of' in his book The Last Word.)

That is where understanding the idealist perspective requires something like a gestalt shift - an insight into how mind 'constructs' world. But it doesn't post 'mind' as being an objective 'thing' from which the world is made - it's that the very nature of cognition determines the world for us. Get the difference? (And speaking of "shifting paradigms"....) And I think that is something that you can find support for in Pierce.

Manuel

↪apokrisis

I didn't have in mind my own stuff, except in so far as I've been influenced by what I've studied. I don't mind "losing stuff" if I learn. ;)

I was not satisfied with how I phrased my conclusions, so a P and M monism is not something I'd likely use anymore. Either physical monism or natural monism, would be better.

Monism is very broad. I don't think reductionism gets you very far in understanding. I would have no problem with an essentially "triadic" reality, the monism I suscribe to simply says there is one fundamental kind of stuff. The natural is one kind of stuff and look at how many aspects is has.

What I was trying to point out is that if it requires so much effort to think this way, couldn't someone come along and say, no, 1sts 2nds and 3rds don't work? They could say "All you need is mind and reaction, mind takes care of 1sts and 2nds, reactions takes care of 3rds. 1stness is actually an unnecessary complication."

I don't believe what I just wrote above, just using it as an illustration.

apokrisis

Perhaps something like Russell's neutral monism — Wayfarer

This come back to a claim that everything is one kind of stuff, one kind of substance. Peirce is arguing everything comes back to the one kind of process, the one logical way of having a structure of relations.

So lightyears apart. Peirce is ontic structural realism. There is a Platonic strength maths at the heart of his claims. Reality is at root self-logical.

So, shift the perspective a bit. What I think idealism is saying is that perception itself, cognition itself, are the constituents of the world - the 'meaning-world' in which we live. — Wayfarer

You have shifted the perspective a bit. And in the right direction. :up:

But note that you still revert to talking about the "constituents" of the world. You are still thinking of the parts or elements that add up to construct the whole.

The way I would put it is that "cognition", or formal/final cause, act as constraints on possibility. So rather than a building up from nothing, it is about the evolution of limits on "everythingness" - a top-down suppression of variety or vagueness that leaves behind the well-formed whole.

So idealism in this sense is about the emergence of constraining structure that gives local shape to every possibility. The "mind" of the system lies in its historically-embodied collection of pragmatic habit - the laws or structural regularities that allow it to persist as the system that it is, now that it has evolved down that "material" path.

That is where understanding the idealist perspective requires something like a gestalt shift - an insight into how mind 'constructs' world. But it doesn't post 'mind' as being an objective 'thing' from which the world is made - it's that the very nature of cognition determines the world for us. Get the difference? — Wayfarer

Yes. But then that is no longer idealism as normally understood, defined, discussed. And it indeed shoots right past Peirce to become simply Kantian cognitivism. It puts you in a position where the image of reality is just an image, and never the reality.

Peirce is difficult to understand because he ties together both the ontic and the epistemic in the single process or relation of semiosis. So the way the mind knows the world is also the way the world "thinks" itself into existence.

That would be the pansemiotic thesis. All is a triadic logic of relations. What human minds do - using numbers and words - is what biology does, using genes and neurons. Then our best model of what physics and chemistry does is also going to be to view them as abiotic semiosis. A triadic relation.

And that is why the entropy/information duality has emerged as the new "objective" measure of reality. We apply a ruler that measures everything in terms of uncertainty vs certainty. Vagueness vs counterfactual definiteness. Disorder vs order. Material possibility vs formal necessity. And that is a view of reality that puts a formal basis under all of science from cosmology to neuroscience.

It is still just us modelling the world. But it becomes as near as we will likely ever get in terms of modelling the world with us in it.

_db

↪apokrisis

Thanks for the write up :100:

I have reading Peirce on my agenda, but I am reading Kant right now. I recall Peirce had a high regard for Kant and thought him as a "confused pragmatist". What are your thoughts on the value of reading Kant's philosophy today?

apokrisis

the monism I suscribe to simply says there is one fundamental kind of stuff. — Manuel

Yep. And my argument is against the notion of "stuff" itself. Stuff is just the actuality of in-formed substantial being - as Aristotle said, in his hylomorphic solution to the issue of categories.

So if there is a monism, it is the one-ness - or rather the unity - of a process, a logical relation. And the fewest number of categories to demonstrate a unity of relations is three. It is a mathematical theorem in network theory, as well as being Peirce's "reduction thesis".

What I was trying to point out is that if it requires so much effort to think this way, couldn't someone come along and say, no, 1sts 2nds and 3rds don't work? They could say "All you need is mind and reaction, mind takes care of 1sts and 2nds, reactions takes care of 3rds. 1stness is actually an unnecessary complication." — Manuel

Ah. Of course it is far simpler to think like a reductionist. And thus a dualist.

Holism is like multi-dimensional chess. Everything is in motion. Nothing is pinned down or moves forbidden. Who needs to make themselves dizzy with all that when simple tales of cause and effect can do the basic job of constructing the human world in the image of a machine - and then standing back to complain bitterly about how the mechanical model lacks any dimension of spirit and feeling.

Reductionism/dualism is a brilliant formula for an easy life. You get to have all the modern fruits of materialism and also look down on its inherent mediocracy at the same time. Win/win.

But for us sad folk doing neuroscience, ecology, climate change politics, quantum physics, or anything else that demands in engaging in actual holistic reasoning, reductionism no longer is useful. We have to bend our heads learning to think a different way.

Why is 1s needed? Well you have to be able to treat vagueness, indeterminacy, spontaneity, and all those good things, as elements of reality. You have to admit the existence of the uncertain and not just live in the world of claimed certainty.

apokrisis

↪_db

Personally, I don't bother reading Kant or even Hegel with any diligence. They are good thinkers, but really just historical stepping stones towards Peirce. In terms of my research purposes, they are not going to enlarge the picture because Peirce did a fine job incorporating them into his improved vision of metaphysics.

Manuel

↪apokrisis

Ok.

Thanks for making the OP, it helped.

Wayfarer

Physical description still requires global laws to regulate the local accidents. It all gets very mysterious when it comes to the holism of quantum theory and the need for wavefunction decoherence. So physics tries to describe reality by excluding any sense of an observer or interpretant. But it is still there in that the laws of nature "know" what is going on. Or that the Universe is made of information and so semiosis is happening "everywhere". — apokrisis

That's the weakest link in the explanatory chain, as far as physicalism is concerned.

The reason that physics set out to 'describe reality by excluding any sense of the observer' wasn't a matter of design so much as a simple consequence of Galileo's method which assigned primary qualities - mass, velocity and so on - only to the objects of physics. When that is teamed up with Descarte's model, you have the fundamental structure of modern physicalism - that what is real are the fundamental constituents of physics. But

Strictly speaking, the propositions of physics are senseless, like an unexecuted computer program, until as and when the propositions are used by an agent and thereby become grounded in the agent's perceptual apparatus in a bespoke fashion, at which point Locke's secondary qualities become temporarily welded to the physical concepts.

Classical physical concepts are therefore by design irreducible to mental concepts; something has been a central feature of physics rather than a bug, at least up until the discovery of special relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which show that even the Lockean primary qualities of objects are relative to perspective. — sime

So that undermines the whole premise of the mind-independence of nature. At some level, perspective is fundamental, but that is not given anywhere but in the observing intelligence.

Life and mind are localised semiosis. Cosmology is generalised semiosis. — apokrisis

I really can't understand that step. I think there's an ontological discontinuity there which is being obfuscated. Not that I have an alternative.

schopenhauer1

I really can't understand that step. I think there's an ontological discontinuity there which is being obfuscated. Not that I have an alternative. — Wayfarer

Computational connectionism

Peirce's categories: what's the big deal?

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