[Inquiry] Re: Examples Of Inquiry -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o

EOI.  Discussion Note 13

o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o

AB = Auke van Breemen
JA = Jon Awbrey

Re: EOI.DIS 11.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001767.html
In: EOI.DIS.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1707

[NB.  I use links like the above to avoid long quotations of previous discussions.]

JA: I confess that I've never quite understood this talk of
    externalist versus internalist perspectives, much less
    its application to Peirce.  Maybe this is my chance to
    try again.  Could you lay out your reasoning here
    in more detail for me?

AB: With  regard to application it may be wise to apply Peirce to the
    internal-external perspectives instead of the other way around.

I think I can agree with that.

AB: I saw myself confronted with neural epistemic while trying
    to decide whether a detailed analysis of a sign must take
    care of the processes that occur in the brain or whether
    we can do without it.  This is part of an exchange of
    thought with Francis about sign processes.  So I am
    not primarily interested in the opposition between
    internal and external itself.

This may sound like an overly free association,
but have you read Freud's 1895 'Project'?
Here are some excerpts from the last time
that I happened to return to it:

PSY.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2003-February/thread.html#1633
PSY.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2003-February/thread.html#1661
PSY.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2003-March/thread.html#1720

AB: At bottom it seems that the distinction arises as a consequences of
    making an opposition between subject and world.  Probably your remark
    about individuals being made, not born is relevant here.

AB: (The pages refer to Sleutels work.  I do not give his position
     but some remarks concerning his picture of the opposition.
     The language is definitely not Peircean.)

AB: [Sleutels, p. 205]
    Internalist thinking:  "Mental symbols served a clear purpose.
    They were needed to go proxy for states of affairs in the external
    world:  the world as such is inaccessible to the subject, but its
    mental symbols are immediately present to consciousness, affording
    to the subject mediate (inferential access to the world)."

AB: Externalist thinking:  "the primary relation is not between subject
    and symbol, but between subject and world.  Hence it would seem that
    the world is immediately 'given' to the subject.  Therefore mental
    representations are no longer needed:  they do not ass [?] to our
    understanding of cognition."

I guess I consider that a false dilemma,
the very sort of aporia that the theory
of 3-adic sign relations is designed to
bypass.  A very similar sort of thing
happens with the animadversions of
coherentists versus objectivists.

AB: Sleutels wants to have best of both worlds.  (p. 204).
    The present externalist account takes the exact opposite stance
    [regarding the superfluous character of mental representations]:
    its project is to understand internal computational structure from
    differences in content, defined in terms of the subject's different
    relations to external states of events.

AB: Much more can be said of course.  But in regard to your diagrams.
    The mental 'thought of rain' vs the object state 'before rain'
    differ in that the former is more easily appropriated by
    internalist thinking, than the object state.

AB: Of course we know this problematic from the Questions series,
    from later dealings with the perceptual judgement and lots of
    other occasions.  In my opinion Sleutels in taking the best
    of both is approaching a Peircean perspective, but falls for
    interesting reasons short.  I will not dwell on that now.

AB: A relevance of that dispute for peircean philosophy
    might be the help by thinking about details.
 
AB: In the Question series Peirce hit upon the unknowable rock of pure,
    atomic individuality in the stimulation of a single nerve cell.
    The unknowable that runs in a continuous stream through our
    lives, as he called it.

But our knowledge of neurons,
like our knowledge of egos,
is inferential and mediated,
is it not?

AB: Later he reworks this in ideas about the percept and perceptual
    judgement.  The over all picture is that in an out of our control
    process by the stimulation of nerves a percept is generated [all
    individual receptor excitations being indexicaly connected with
    the object], the perceptual judgement takes a bundle of them as
    iconical related with a dynamical object (recognizes it as such
    through the abductive reduction of the manifold to unity and
    transforming the resulting iconical rhematic percept into
    a proposition by recognizing, as it were, the indexical
    relation of the constituent qualia with the dynmical object).
    Thus a perceptual fact is made.  It is tempting to look at the
    relation between percept and perceptual fact as the relation
    between token and type or replica sinsign and legisign.

This looks a bit too much like
Quine's concoction to mix well
with Peirce's solution.

AB: I hope this will do as a first answer.
    I am working on an exposition of this
    matter in sign diagrams.  Comment is
    welcome.

Many thanks for the explanations,

Jon Awbrey

o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o