[Inquiry] Re: Examples Of Inquiry -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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EOI.  Discussion Note 16

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AB = Auke van Breemen
JA = Jon Awbrey
KM = Kirsti Maattanen

Re: EOI.DIS 13.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/001784.html
In: EOI.DIS.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-November/thread.html#1707

Dear Kirsti,

I took a Master's in Psych in 1989, for which I read
a lot of behaviorist, clinical, cognitive, neuropsych,
quantitative/stats, and systems/cybernetic literature.
Aside from teaching math, my grad asst jobs were mostly
as a comp/data/stat asst in biosci/med school settings,
so I kept up with the literature enough to have a feel
for the datasets that I had to work with in those areas.

I put Peirce and Freud in comparison as keen observers of
persistent psychological phenomena, with the speculative
power to anticipate explanatory mechanisms of a complexity
that many of our more reductionist thinkers hardly match
to the present day.  It may be that Ockham's razor will
always shave as close to the spinal cord as possible,
but there are treasures yet to be explored in both
of these prescient but not pre-scientific lights.

Many Regards,

Jon Awbrey

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KM: Just some comments on your latest discussion on "neural epistemic": 

KM: I was left wondering on the interest on what Peirce,
    as well as Freud in his 'Project', wrote on neurons
    and the brain.  Surely that has only historical
    relevance, serving mainly critical purposes.
    (There is a wealth of empirical findings
    nowadays, although I don't find the
    approaches in main-stream brain
    research reconcilable with
    a Peircean approach).

KM: I personally do not find what Peirce -- very tentatively -- wrote on
    neurons etc something to rely on, nor do I think Peirce meant it to
    be taken.  Still, I do not recognize the overall picture you, Auke,
    gave in the following -- if I understood correctly -- as Peirce's
    view.  Do you really mean that this is what Peirce had in mind?
    (I have underlined the sentences I find most problematic) 

AB: In the Question series Peirce hit upon the unknowable
    rock of pure, atomic individuality in the stimulation
    of a single nerve cell.  [...] 

JA: 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. 

KM: I haven't been following the discussions in the list
    for quite some time, and catching up with the huge
    amount of mails has been somewhat overwhelming.
    So, my apologies in probable failings to take
    into account earlier relevant messages. 

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