The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Key Terms
Processes
Process Philosophy
Events
Objects
Dynamics
Flux
Alfred North Whitehead
Henri Bergson
Interconnectedness
The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
Source: The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
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Process Physics, Process Philosophy
LAW OF DEPENDENT ORIGINATION
Indra’s Net: On Interconnectedness
On Synchronicity
Relational Consciousness: Subjectivity and Otherness
From Individual to Collective Intentionality
Individual Self, Relational Self, and Collective Self
Individual, Relational, and Collective Reflexivity
Self and Other: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity
Intersubjectivity in Buddhism
Charles Sanders Peirce’s Continuum
The Great Chain of Being
On Holons and Holarchy
Networks and Hierarchies
Boundaries and Networks
Boundaries and Relational Sociology
Key Sources of Research
The water falls but the waterfall does not fall: New perspectives on objects, processes and events
January 2009
Applied Ontology 4(2):71-107 DOI:10.3233/AO-2009-0067 SourceDBLP Authors: Antony Galton University of Exeter Riichiro Mizoguchi Japan Advanced Institute of Science and T
Abstract: We challenge the widespread presumption that matter and objects are ontologically prior to processes and events, and also the less widespread but increasingly popular view that processes and events are ontologically prior to matter and objects. Instead we advance a third view according to which each of these pairs of categories is ontologically dependent on the other. In particular, taking a cue from an ontology of devices, we identify the object as an interface between those processes which are internal to it and those which are external to it and which it may be said to enact, thereby linking objects intrinsically to the processes in which they are involved as well as providing a more powerful determinant of object identity than more traditional, non-dynamic criteria based on demarcation from the environment. The internal processes are themselves external processes in relation to the components of the object which enact them, leading to a potentially open-ended recursive decomposition of both objects and processes in a complex web of mutual interdependency. We also discuss how matter is related to objects, and processes to events, bringing the four categories together in a diagram which clarifies the relations between them – often considered problematic – and establishes a framework for a highly general top-level ontology.
Process thought is the foundation for studies in many areas of contemporary philosophy, theology, political theory, educational theory, and the religion-science dialogue. It is derived from Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, known as process theology, which lays a groundwork for integrating evolutionary biology, physics, philosophy of mind, theology, environmental ethics, religious pluralism, education, economics, and more.
In Process-Relational Philosophy, C. Robert Mesle breaks down Whitehead’s complex writings, providing a simple but accurate introduction to the vision that underlies much of contemporary process philosophy and theology. In doing so, he points to a “way beyond both reductive materialism and the traps of Cartesian dualism by showing reality as a relational process in which minds arise from bodies, in which freedom and creativity are foundational to process, in which the relational power of persuasion is more basic than the unilateral power of coercion.”
Because process-relational philosophy addresses the deep intuitions of a relational world basic to environmental and global thinking, it is being incorporated into undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy, educational theory and practice, environmental ethics, and science and values, among others. Process-Relational Philosophy: A Basic Introduction makes Whitehead’s creative vision accessible to all students and general readers.
Western metaphysics has been overwhelmingly defined by the task of uncovering, at the most basic level, the fundamental elements of existence—be it fire or water, Forms or souls, or atoms, quarks, or bosons. Usually the answer was taken to be some kind of substance, which remains the same and endures even during outward change. But what if the conventional view is a mistake? What if static entities or substances aren’t the bases for dynamic processes of action and change, but rather the result? What if change is more basic than persistence? What if being is essentially becoming?
In this course, we’ll explore what amounts to a shadow tradition within Western philosophy, sometimes called Process Philosophy, that precisely rejects the substance ontology first codified by Plato and which persists through most medieval, modern, and contemporary philosophy. For Process Philosophers—whose most exemplary representatives are Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead—reality is continuously in flux, a standpoint that forces a rethinking not only of conventional metaphysics, but also, meta-philosophically, of philosophizing itself. Why, for process philosophers, is dynamism a better, more productive, philosophical paradigm than the conventional static view of reality? What follows from Process ontology—for epistemology, for the bifurcation of mind and body, for normativity, for science, for religion? After looking into the lapidary and enigmatic fragments of the Pre-Socratic Heraclitus (“the only thing that is constant is change”), we will explore the philosophies of two of the most explicit and important process philosophers: Bergson and Whitehead. We’ll delve into some of Bergson’s key texts such as Time and Free Will and “An Introduction to Metaphysics”, and tackle Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality. And throughout, we will ask: what does it mean for being to be essentially becoming?
Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind
Edited by Michel Weber & Anderson Weekes
Subjects: Process Philosophy, Noetics/consciousness Studies, Philosophy Of Psychology, American Philosophy, Cognitive Psychology Series: SUNY series in Philosophy Paperback : 9781438429403, 484 pages, January 2011 Hardcover : 9781438429410, 484 pages, November 2009
Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy
SUNY Series in Philosophy Author Nicholas Rescher Edition illustrated Publisher State University of New York Press, 1996 ISBN 0791428184, 9780791428184
Process philosophy
Griffin, David Ray DOI 10.4324/9780415249126-N085-1
In the broad sense, the term ‘process philosophy’ refers to all worldviews holding that process or becoming is more fundamental than unchanging being. For example, an anthology titled Philosophers of Process(1965) includes selections from Samuel Alexander, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, William James, Lloyd Morgan, Charles Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, with an introduction by Charles HARTSHORNE. Some lists include Hegel and Heraclitus. The term has widely come to refer in particular, however, to the movement inaugurated by Whitehead and extended by Hartshorne. Here, process philosophy is treated in this narrower sense.
Philosophy’s central task, process philosophers hold, is to develop a metaphysical cosmology that is self-consistent and adequate to all experienced facts. To be adequate, it cannot be based solely on the natural sciences, but must give equal weight to aesthetic, ethical and religious intuitions. Philosophy’s chief importance, in fact, derives from its integration of science and religion into a rational scheme of thought. This integration is impossible, however, unless exaggerations on both sides are overcome. On the side of science, the main exaggerations involve ‘scientific materialism’ and the ‘sensationalist’ doctrine of perception. On the side of religion, the chief exaggeration has been the idea of divine omnipotence. Process philosophy replaces these ideas with a ‘panexperientialist’ ontology, a doctrine of perception in which nonsensory ‘prehension’ is fundamental, and a doctrine of divine power as persuasive rather than coercive.
Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya : The Spiritual Significance of Vedanta
Key Terms
Subjectivity
I – Consciousness
Layers of Subjectivity
Phenomenology
Transcendental Phenomenology
Consciousness
Meaning
Subjectivity as Process
Transcendental Consciousness
Subject as Freedom
Layers of Consciousness
Transcendental Subjectivity
Contents of Consciousness
Subject Object Dichotomy
Researchers
Daya Krishna
K C Bhattacharyya
Balslev, Anindita Niyogi
Elise Coquereau-Saouma
Jay Garfield
Nalini Bhushan
Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Source: Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Source: Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Source: Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Source: Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Source: Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Source: Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Source: Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Source: Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Source: Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Source: Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Source: Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Source: Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Source: Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Source: Krishnachandra Bhattacharya : The Spiritual Significance ofVedanta
Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya
Source: CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY I
Source: CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY I
Source: CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY I
Source: CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY I
Source: CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY I
Source: CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY I
Source: CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY I
Source: CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY I
Source: CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY I
Source: CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY I
Source: CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY I
Source: CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY I
My Related Posts
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Layers of Subjectivity
The Concept of the Absolute and Its Alternative Forms
Brahman: Absolute Consciousness in Advait (Non Dual) Vedanta Philosophy
Transcendental Self in Kant and Shankara
Ether in Kant and Akasa in Prasastapada: Philosophy in comparative perspective
God, Space and Nature
Purush – The Cosmic Man
The Transcendental Self
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness: Integral Theory of Ken Wilber
The Aesthetics of Charles Sanders Peirce
Third and Higher Order Cybernetics
The Good, the True, and the Beautiful
Cyber-Semiotics: Why Information is not enough
Meta Integral Theories: Integral Theory, Critical Realism, and Complex Thought
From Individual to Collective Intentionality
Individual Self, Relational Self, and Collective Self
Individual, Relational, and Collective Reflexivity
Phenomenology and Symbolic Interactionism
Self and Other: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity
Semiotics and Systems
Process Physics, Process Philosophy
Intersubjectivity in Buddhism
Lifeworld, System, and Intersubjectivity: Jurgen Habermas’ Communication Theory of Society
Levels of Human Psychological Development in Integral Spiral Dynamics
Phenomenological Sociology
Charles Sanders Peirce’s Continuum
The Great Chain of Being
On Holons and Holarchy
Networks and Hierarchies
Boundaries and Networks
Boundaries and Relational Sociology
Key Sources of Research
The Problem of Meaning and K.C. Bhattacharyya.pdf
Sharma, K. (1981).
Indian Philosophical Quarterly 8 (4):457.
Original Description:
This document discusses K.C. Bhattacharyya’s views on the problem of meaning and how they compare to analytical philosophers like Strawson and Russell. It summarizes that for Bhattacharyya, the subject cannot be meant by words like “I” as it has no objective content and varies between speakers, while objects are meant entities referred to by general terms. Strawson argues expressions only have reference in context of utterance, with “I” uniquely referring to the speaker, but for Bhattacharyya “I” expresses rather than refers to the subject. Overall, the document examines Bhattacharyya and analytical philosophers’ differing views on reference and meaning regarding subjective and objective contents.
Self and Subjectivity in Colonial India: AC Mukerji and KC Bhattcharyya
The Concept of Freedom and Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya *
D.P. Chattopadhyaya Book The Making of Contemporary Indian Philosophy Edition 1st Edition First Published 2023 Imprint Routledge Pages 26 eBook ISBN 9781003153320
D.P. Chattopadhyaya’s (DPC’s) chapter aims to cover the concept of freedom in K.C. Bhattacharyya (KCB). “Unlike most of the contemporary approaches to freedom”, DPC suggests, “KCB’s approach is not mainly social, ethical or aesthetic. … His concept of freedom is basically ontological or metaphysical. Its dimensions range from the physical via the somatological and the psychological to the psychical and the spiritual. … [H]e describes the disclosive process of freedom in the world, in our relation to the world of objects, within the contexts of psychological and psychical subjectivity, and beyond them”. DPC identifies a conversation in KCB’s writings between three approaches or systems of freedom: the Vedāntic, Kantian and phenomenological approaches. He discusses these three trajectories and their amalgamation in KCB. DPC further depicts KCB’s phenomenological process of inwardization toward the subject as freedom. He touches on the role of the body in this process, and explains that “our body-feeling starts getting resolved into psychic feeling. This is a sort of anti-projective or regressive ‘withdrawal’ of consciousness within a deeper layer of itself. The feeling of detachment or disengagement from the object, in this case from the body, provides us the ‘first’ or an inarticulate taste of freedom”.
OVERVIEW The Fundamentals of K.C. Bhattacharyyas Philosophy is the only exhaustive exposition of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyyas seminal philosophical ideas. Kalidas Bhattacharyya, son of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya, had the opportunity of a prolonged critical exposure to this unique tradition. This monograph deals with Krishnachandra Bhattacharyyas epistemic and metaphysical line of thought from the definite to the indefinite, from the objective level to the higher levels of subjectivity, and from association to dissociation or freedom leading to an alternation between knowledge and freedom. Both definiteness and indefiniteness have been identified. The two, however, do not have a coordinate status. There is an alternation between them. One and the same situation could be alternatively understood as definite or as indefinite. This leads to Krishnachandra Bhattacharyyas well-known philosophical position of Alternative Standpoints. The indefinite has to be made definite through layers of transcendental knowledge. The absolute-as-transcendental-knowledge is related to the understanding of the absolute-as-transcendental-will. The predatory outlook of the scientific intellect has been referred to and insightful correctives have been offered. Krishnachandra Bhattacharyyas style of writing is commensurate with the rigour and subtlety of his philosophy. The uninitiated requires a roadmap. This need is amply fulfilled by the present work. The monograph focuses on epistemology and metaphysics. The insights gained through this faithful commentary will help advanced readers to develop their own philosophical pursuits and the beginner will receive a good grounding.
CONTENTS Editors Note Preface Introduction by Shefali Moitra
The Definite and the Indefinite
The Indefinite as Subjective
Subjectivity as Freedom
Truth Freedom and Value as Alternative Absolutes Index
Feeling for Freedom: K. C. Bhattacharyya on Rasa.
Lopes, Dominic McIver (2019).
British Journal of Aesthetics 59 (4):465-477.
“Second Persons and the Constitution of the First Person”
The Making of Contemporary Indian Philosophy: Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya
Routledge Hindu Studies Series Editors Daniel Raveh, Elise Coquereau-Saouma Edition illustrated Publisher Taylor & Francis, 2023 ISBN 1000802752, 9781000802757 Length 278 pages
Daniel Raveh is Professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University, Israel. His publications include Exploring the Yogasūtra (2012), Sūtras, Stories and Yoga Philosophy (Routledge 2016), and Daya Krishna and Twentieth-Century Indian Philosophy (2020).
Elise Coquereau-Saouma is a research affiliate at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, and Erwin Schrödinger Post-Doctoral Fellow (Austrian Science Fund). Her books Intercultural Dialogues: Conceptions, Divergences and the Limits and Creativity of Knowledge and Intercultural Dialogues: Thinking with Daya Krishna are forthcoming with Routledge.
A Review of “The Making of Contemporary Indian Philosophy: Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya”.
The reviewed book, titled “The Making of Contemporary Indian Philosophy Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya” (Raveh, D., & Coquereau-Saouma, E. (Eds.). 2023) (the/this book hereafter), edited by Daniel Raveh and Elise Coquereau-Saouma, is part of the Routledge Hindu Studies Series in collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. This series aims to foster dialogue between Hindu traditions and modern research trends. The editors deserve commendation for adding value to the series and contributing significantly to debates in Indian philosophy, particularly regarding Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya’s philosophy (KCB thereafter). This book brings together scholars who have carefully looked at KCB’s big ideas, giving us clear and deep insights into his philosophy. This review carefully examines each chapter, simplifying the book’s content and ensuring that no significant details are overlooked. Our aim is to motivate readers to delve into KCB’s broader body of work and, more specifically, this book, which greatly enriches our understanding of his worldview. In harmony with the book’s flow, we delve into the current trends in Indian philosophy, giving special attention to situating KCB’s philosophy within this context, as discussed by the contributors. Additionally, we seek to clarify any misunderstandings surrounding this field, aiding aspiring researchers in tackling the intricate intellectual challenges within modern Indian philosophy—an endeavor certainly worth pursuing.
References
Bhushan, N., & Garfield, J. L. (Eds.). (2011). Indian philosophy in english: From renaissance to independence. New York: OUP.
Bhushan, Nalini, & Garfield, Jay L. (Eds.). (2017). Minds without fear: Philosophy in the Indian renaissance. New York: OUP.
Bilimoria, P., Prabhu, J., & Sharma, R. (Eds.). (2007). Indian ethics: Classical traditions and contemporary challenges (Vol. I, 1st ed.). London: U.K: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315252445
Chatterjee, M. (Ed.). (1998). Contemporary Indian philosophy. Motilal Banarsidass: New-Delhi, India.
Gupta, B., & Mohanty, J. N. (Eds.). (1999). Philosophical questions: East and west. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Mahadevan, T. M. P., & Saroja, G. V. (1983). Contemporary Indian Philosophy. New-Delhi, India: Sterling.
Mohanty, J. N. (2002). J. N. Mohanty essays on Indian Philosophy traditional and modern, edited with introduction by Purushottama Bilimoria. New York: Oxford University Press (Global Paperback).
Radhakrishnan, S., & Muirhead, J. H. (Eds.). (1936). Revival: Contemporary Indian Philosophy (1936) (1st ed.). London, U.K: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315122960
Raghuramaraju, A. (2006). Debates in Indian philosophy: classical, colonial, and contemporary. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ranganathan, S. (2007). Ethics and the history of Indian philosophy. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.Google Scholar
Raveh, D., & Coquereau-Saouma, E. (Eds.). (2023). The making of contemporary Indian philosophy: Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya. New York, NY: Routledge, p 278. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003153320
“The Problem of Philosophical Reconception in the Thought of K. C. Bhattacharyya.”
The present volumes comprise the following tracts: –
Vol. I
1. Studies in Vedantism (Published in 1907) 2. Sankara’s doctrine of Maya ( ,, 1925) 3. The Advaita and its spiritual significance ( ,, 1936) 4. Studies in Samkhya Philosophy (Unpublished) 5. Studies in Yoga Philosophy ( ,) 6. The Jaina theory of Anekanta (Published in 1925) 7. The Concept of Rasa (Unpublished)
Vol. II
1. The Subject as Freedom (Published in 1930) 2. The Concept of Philosophy ( , 1936) 3. The Concept of the Absolute and its alternative forms ( ,, 1934) 4. Studies in Kant (Unpublished) 5. Some aspects of negation (Published in 1914) 6. The place of the indefinite in Logic (,, 1916) 7. Definition of ‘Relation’ as a category of existence (Unpublished) 8. Fact and thought of fact (Published in 1931) 9. Knowledge and Truth (,, 1928) 10. Correction of error as a logical process (1931) 11. The false and the subjective (1932) 12. The objective interpretation of percept and image (1936) 13. The Concept of Value (1934) 14. The Reality of the Future (Unpublished)
Each of the above tracts is preceded by an Analysis. The first one was made by the author himself and the others have been done by the editor. Of the footnotes those marked in numerals are by the editor.
‘Chapter Four Sri Aurobindo and Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya: Relation between Science and Spiritualism’,
The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedanta: A Comparative Study in Religion and Reason
Hermeneutics Series Hermeneutics: Studies in the History of Religions Series Author Arvind Sharma Publisher Penn State Press, 2008 ISBN 0271039469, 9780271039466
This chapter shows the kind of difficulties philosophers face while ascertaining the meaning and the referent of the word ‘I’. While a general overview is presented of the linguistic analysis of the word ‘I’ both from Indian and Western philosophical sources, focus is made on the view of K.C. Bhattacharya, on his remarkable analysis of the various layers of subjectivity while he explores the meaning of the pronoun in first person singular number.
‘The Vanishing Subject: The Many Faces of Subjectivity’,
Rorty, AmÉlie Oksenberg,
in Joao Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman (eds), Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (Oakland, CA, 2007; online edn, California Scholarship Online, 24 May 2012), https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520247925.003.0002, accessed 5 May 2024.
“We-Subjectivity”: Husserl on Community and Communal Constitution
Ronald McIntyre / California State University, Northridge
From Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl, ed. by Christel Fricke and Dagfinn Føllesdal, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2012, pp. 61-92.
SENSE, NONSENSE, and SUBJECTIVITY
MARKUS GABRIEL
Culture, tools, and subjectivity: The (re)construction of self.
Haste, H. (2014).
In T. Magioglou, Culture and political psychology: A societal perspective (pp. 27–48). IAP Information Age Publishing.
Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity
Cambridge University Press Online publication date: June 2012 Print publication year: 1990 Online ISBN: 9780511624827 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511624827
This is the first book in English to elucidate the central issues in the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), a figure crucial to the movement of philosophy from Kant to German idealism. The book explains Fichte’s notion of subjectivity and how his particular view developed out of Kant’s accounts of theoretical and practical reason. Fichte argued that the subject has a self-positing structure which distinguishes it from a thing or an object. Thus, the subject must be understood as an activity rather than a thing and is self-constituting in a way that an object is not. In the final chapter, Professor Neuhouser considers how this doctrine of the self-positing subject enables us to understand the possibility of the self’s autonomy, or self-determination.
Higher-order theories are theories of phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is the property of there being something that it is like for one to have an experience. Something that it is like from the point of view of the organism. According to the higher-order approach, an organism is phenomenally conscious just in case it has an appropriate kind of inner awareness of itself as being in some mental state or other. So, when one consciously believes that Kentucky is south New York one is aware of oneself as believing that Kentucky is south of New York. Similarly, when one consciously sees red, or experiences fear, one is aware of oneself as seeing red or being afraid.
The relevant kind of inner awareness is what distinguishes the various kinds of higher-order theories. One might think that the right kind of inner awareness would be a kind of inner perception. Yet contemporary psychology and neuroscience do not seem to support the idea of a kind of inner sense. We do, in addition, become aware of things by thinking about them as being present. This has inspired the higher-order thought theory of consciousness, which was first explicitly developed in the 1990s.
There are many different kinds of higher-order thought theories. One version, the Relational Model, claims that the first-order state is transformed into a phenomenally conscious state when one becomes aware of that very state via having a higher-order thought. In addition, there are Joint-Determination Models which hold that the higher-order content and first-order content are part of the same mental state. These come in at least two varieties: the Same-Order Model and the Split-Level Model. These are distinguished by how they respond to worries about misrepresentation. In addition, there are Non-relational models which hold that the relevant higher-order state determines what it is like for one to have a conscious experience. Finally, there are non-standard higher-order theories that appeal to acquaintance or mental quotation.
This document discusses K.C. Bhattacharyya’s views on the problem of meaning and how they compare to analytical philosophers like Strawson and Russell. It summarizes that for Bhattacharyya, the subject cannot be meant by words like “I” as it has no objective content and varies between speakers, while objects are meant entities referred to by general terms. Strawson argues expressions only have reference in context of utterance, with “I” uniquely referring to the speaker, but for Bhattacharyya “I” expresses rather than refers to the subject. Overall, the document examines Bhattacharyya and analytical philosophers’ differing views on reference and meaning regarding subjective and objective contents.
Self and Subjectivity in Colonial India: AC Mukerji and KC Bhattcharyya
The Concept of Freedom and Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya *
D.P. Chattopadhyaya Book The Making of Contemporary Indian Philosophy Edition 1st Edition First Published 2023 Imprint Routledge Pages 26 eBook ISBN 9781003153320
D.P. Chattopadhyaya’s (DPC’s) chapter aims to cover the concept of freedom in K.C. Bhattacharyya (KCB). “Unlike most of the contemporary approaches to freedom”, DPC suggests, “KCB’s approach is not mainly social, ethical or aesthetic. … His concept of freedom is basically ontological or metaphysical. Its dimensions range from the physical via the somatological and the psychological to the psychical and the spiritual. … [H]e describes the disclosive process of freedom in the world, in our relation to the world of objects, within the contexts of psychological and psychical subjectivity, and beyond them”. DPC identifies a conversation in KCB’s writings between three approaches or systems of freedom: the Vedāntic, Kantian and phenomenological approaches. He discusses these three trajectories and their amalgamation in KCB. DPC further depicts KCB’s phenomenological process of inwardization toward the subject as freedom. He touches on the role of the body in this process, and explains that “our body-feeling starts getting resolved into psychic feeling. This is a sort of anti-projective or regressive ‘withdrawal’ of consciousness within a deeper layer of itself. The feeling of detachment or disengagement from the object, in this case from the body, provides us the ‘first’ or an inarticulate taste of freedom”.
OVERVIEW The Fundamentals of K.C. Bhattacharyyas Philosophy is the only exhaustive exposition of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyyas seminal philosophical ideas. Kalidas Bhattacharyya, son of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya, had the opportunity of a prolonged critical exposure to this unique tradition. This monograph deals with Krishnachandra Bhattacharyyas epistemic and metaphysical line of thought from the definite to the indefinite, from the objective level to the higher levels of subjectivity, and from association to dissociation or freedom leading to an alternation between knowledge and freedom. Both definiteness and indefiniteness have been identified. The two, however, do not have a coordinate status. There is an alternation between them. One and the same situation could be alternatively understood as definite or as indefinite. This leads to Krishnachandra Bhattacharyyas well-known philosophical position of Alternative Standpoints. The indefinite has to be made definite through layers of transcendental knowledge. The absolute-as-transcendental-knowledge is related to the understanding of the absolute-as-transcendental-will. The predatory outlook of the scientific intellect has been referred to and insightful correctives have been offered. Krishnachandra Bhattacharyyas style of writing is commensurate with the rigour and subtlety of his philosophy. The uninitiated requires a roadmap. This need is amply fulfilled by the present work. The monograph focuses on epistemology and metaphysics. The insights gained through this faithful commentary will help advanced readers to develop their own philosophical pursuits and the beginner will receive a good grounding.
CONTENTS Editors Note Preface Introduction by Shefali Moitra
The Definite and the Indefinite
The Indefinite as Subjective
Subjectivity as Freedom
Truth Freedom and Value as Alternative Absolutes Index
Feeling for Freedom: K. C. Bhattacharyya on Rasa.
Lopes, Dominic McIver (2019).
British Journal of Aesthetics 59 (4):465-477.
“Second Persons and the Constitution of the First Person”
Subject As Freedom (1930) is correctly regarded as Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya’s magnum opus. But this text relies on a set of ideas and develops from a set of concerns that KCB develops more explicitly in essays written both before and after that text, which might be regarded as its intellectual bookends. These ideas are important and fascinating in their own right. They also illuminate KCB’s engagement with Kant and with the Vedānta tradition as well as his understanding of freedom itself, including its soteriological dimension. These two essays are” Sankara’s Doctrine of Māyā”(1930) and” The Advaita and Its Spiritual Significance”(1936). We explore KCB’s conception of philosophy and its relation to spiritual practice through a close reading of these two essays.
The Concept of the Absolute and Its Alternative Forms
Key Terms
Absolute
Brahman
Maya
Truth, Value and Freedom
K. C. Bhattacharyya
Three Absolutes
Four Negations
Mobius Strip
Trefoil Knot
Researchers
Kalidas Bhattacharyya
Gopinath Bhattacharyya
Bina Gupta
Stephen Kaplan
George Burch
Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya (KC Bhattacharyya)
Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Abstract
Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya, one of the preeminent Indian philosophers of the 20th century, proposed that the absolute appears in three alternative forms – truth, freedom and value. Each of these forms are for Bhattacharyya absolute, ultimate, not penultimate. Each is different from the other, yet they cannot be said to be one or many. He contends that these absolutes are incompatible with each other and that an articulation of the relation between the three absolutes is not feasible. This paper will review Bhattacharyya’s presentation of the absolute in its alternative forms and will place these abstractions within the context of three specific religious traditions that he sees illustrating his point. Then, using a model based upon holography, I will illuminate with ‘concrete images’ that which Bhattacharyya could deductively formulate but could not logically integrate. Holography, the process by which three‐dimensional images are produced from an imageless film – a film in which each part can reproduce the whole – will be used as a heuristic device to illuminate the simultaneous and mutually interpenetrating existence of the absolute in three forms. This model will illumine how these three forms can be conceived of as not the same yet not other and how these forms can be incompatible as absolutes, but metaphysically inseparable.
Notes
Correspondence to: Stephen Kaplan, Department of Religious Studies, Manhattan College, Manhattan College Parkway, Riverdale, New York 10471, USA. Email: stephen.kaplan@manhattan.edu; Tel: +1‐718‐862‐7113.
There appears to be some discrepancy in the presentation of his last name. The two volumes edited by his son, Gopinath Bhattacharyya, use a double ‘y’ while other texts use a single ‘y’. In what follows, I will use the double ‘y’ but will also follow the format of authors who use a single ‘y’ when quoting from such texts.
In the foreword to Burch (Citation1972), Clarke makes the following point about the logic of Burch’s proposal, which is essentially indebted to and an expansion of Bhattacharyya’s proposal. About the proposal in general Clarke says: ‘The thesis proposed by the book is a truly radical one, so radical, in fact, that one experiences a kind of intellectual vertigo as he slowly awakens to what the author is really saying. The thesis … the Absolute is not one but many …’ (CitationClarke, 1972, p. 1). And Clarke adds: ‘This, of course, does not prove it is not true in some domain unreachable in my logic, but only that I cannot see any way of affirming it as intelligible, not because I see it as mystery but as contrary to intelligibility.’ (CitationClarke, 1972, p. 4). Kadankavil (Citation1972), pp. 181 ff. also finds difficulty with K.C.B.’s logic of alteration understood as a logic of exclusive disjunction.
This paper will draw primarily from two works – ‘The Concept of the Absolute and its Alternative Forms’ and ‘The Concept of Philosophy’, approximately written at the same time, 1934–1936. One should also see ‘The Concept of Value’ and ch. 7, ‘The Nature of Yoga’, in ‘Studies in Yoga Philosophy’, found in Vol. I of his collected works (Bhattacharyya, Citation1956). The nature of the absolute and its alternative form is also related to a number of other topics such as his theory of negation and the notion of the indefinite.
Before proceeding any further, I should note that the holographic model is drawn from my new book, Different Paths, Different Summits: A Model for Religious Pluralism (CitationKaplan, 2002). First, I would like to express my appreciation to Rowman and Littlefield for the use of certain passages. Second, I must admit that when I wrote this book, I had not read Bhattacharyya’s articles on this topic. I had studied a number of other pieces by K.C.B. and had used his theory of fourfold negation in the formulation of my model. Likewise, I had not read the work of Burch who has written some of the clearest expositions on K.C.B. and who has also developed the notion of the absolute and its alternative forms in his own writings. These oversights in my research have ruined any claims that I might make to originality of thought, but, on the other hand, they have produced intellectual allies. Third, I must thank Professor Raimundo Panikkar whose personal correspondence about my book led me to reexamine Bhattacharyya’s writings and to discover his notion of the absolute and its alternative forms (April 2002). Finally, I would like to thank Richard Goldman (Ithaca, NY) for his assistance in wrestling with K.C.B. and the nuances of his thought.
It should be noted that here, as in the other two modes of consciousness, Bhattacharyya distinguishes a realistic view and an idealistic view. While a full discussion of this distinction is beyond the scope of this paper, it may be noted that in the case of willing, K.C.B. says: ‘That we objectively act to be subjectively free, that the good will and nothing but the good will is the value for which we will an act – the view, in fact, of Kant – may be called the idealistic view in this connexion. The realistic view here then would be that we act for an objective end and not for the subjective end of being free; and an extreme form of the view may be conceived that we objectively act in order that we objectively act for everymore’ (CitationBhattacharyya, 1958, p. 137).
‘Holographic film typically has a resolution of 2500 to 5000 lines per millimeter (10−3m), in contrast to standard photographic film, which has about 200 lines per millimeter. The higher resolution is achieved by using smaller grains of the photosensitive silver in the emulsion. The smaller grains are less sensitive to light and decrease the “speed” of the film substantially’ (CitationIovine, 1990, p. 1).
A laser is a single frequency light source that is in phase – in other words, the light waves are in step with each other. (Light from an ordinary light bulb is neither in phase nor single frequency.) The hologram records not only the varying intensities of the light as it reflects off the object, as does a photograph, but it also records the phase relations of the light reflecting off the object.
The use of these terms is indebted to David Bohm, the renowned physicist. Bohm developed a very different holographic model with a different understanding of the relation between the two domains. His model is a scientific model and it is also a model for the ultimacy of undivided wholeness. In spite of the significant debt that my project owes to Professor Bohm, my project aims at resolving problems in religious thought, not physics. This project also imagines a plurality of ultimate answers, corresponding to Bhattacharyya’s threefold formulation of the absolute, not just one absolute.
For an extended analysis of these three traditions, one is referred to Kaplan (Citation2002, ch. 5).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stephen Kaplan
Correspondence to: Stephen Kaplan, Department of Religious Studies, Manhattan College, Manhattan College Parkway, Riverdale, New York 10471, USA. Email: stephen.kaplan@manhattan.edu; Tel: +1‐718‐862‐7113.
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Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Source: Revisiting K. C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the absolute and its alternative forms: a holographic model for simultaneous illumination
“The Concept of the Absolute and Its Alternative Forms”
Source: “The Concept of the Absolute and Its Alternative Forms”
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Key Sources of Research
Revisiting K.C. Bhattacharyya’s concept of the Absolute and its alternative forms: A holographic model for simultaneous illumination
Authors: Stephen Kaplan
July 2004
Asian Philosophy 14(2):99-115 DOI:10.1080/0955236042000237354
“The Concept of the Absolute and Its Alternative Forms”.
Bhattacharyya, K.C..
Search for the Absolute in Neo-Vedanta, edited by George Bosworth Burch, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1976, pp. 175-196. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824887025-006
This book engages in a dialogue with Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya (K.C. Bhattacharyya, KCB, 1875–1949) and opens a vista to contemporary Indian philosophy.
KCB is one of the founding fathers of contemporary Indian philosophy, a distinct genre of philosophy that draws both on classical Indian philosophical sources and on Western materials, old and new. His work offers both a new and different reading of classical Indian texts, and a unique commentary of Kant and Hegel. The book (re)introduces KCB’s philosophy, identifies the novelty of his thinking, and highlights different dimensions of his oeuvre, with special emphasis on freedom as a concept and striving, extending from the metaphysical to the political or the postcolonial. Our contributors aim to decipher KCB’s distinct vocabulary (demand, feeling, alternation). They revisit his discussion of Rasa aesthetics, spotlight the place of the body in his phenomenological inquiry toward “the subject as freedom”, situate him between classics (Abhinavagupta) and thinkers inspired by his thought (Daya Krishna), and discuss his lectures on Sāṃkhya and Yoga rather than projecting KCB as usual solely as a Vedānta scholar. Finally, the contributors seek to clarify if and how KCB’s philosophical work is relevant to the discourse today, from the problem of other minds to freedoms in the social and political spheres.
This book will be of interest to academics studying Indian and comparative philosophy, philosophy of language and mind, phenomenology without borders, and political and postcolonial philosophy.
An Introduction to Indian Philosophy: Perspectives on Reality, Knowledge, and Freedom
By Bina Gupta
Thinkers of the Indian Renaissance
By S A Abbasi
The Fundamentals of K.C. Bhattacharyya’s Philosophy
PUBLISHER: INDIAN COUNCIL OF PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCH (ICPR), D. K. PRINTWORLD PVT. LTD. AUTHOR: KALIDAS BHATTACHARYYA LANGUAGE: ENGLISH EDITION: 2016 ISBN: 9788124608418 PAGES: 220
Three Absolutes and Four Types of Negation Integrating Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya’s Insights?
By Stephen Kaplan Chapter in Book The Making of Contemporary Indian Philosophy Edition 1st Edition First Published 2023 Imprint Routledge Pages 14 eBook ISBN 9781003153320
This title of this chapter ends with a question mark. Did Bhattacharyya elucidate the relationship between his theories of the absolute in three alternatives and his theory that all philosophical thinking is rooted in different types of negation, specifically four types of negation? This chapter examines the key points in Bhattacharyya’s exposition of the four different types of negation. Each type of negation, understood in terms of removing illusion, leads to a different type of philosophy; hence understanding the different forms of negation provides insight into the fundamental differences in philosophical schools. The next challenge is illuminating Bhattacharyya’s formulation of three absolutes – the absolutes related to knowing, willing, and feeling – namely, truth, freedom, and value. Bhattacharyya declares that these absolutes are incompatible with each other, and he does not hide their incompatibility behind a facade of penultimacy. One might assume that his fourfold schema of negations would map onto his three absolutes since he sees each as fundamental to philosophical thinking. But how? How does the three map onto the four and the four map onto the three? That is the challenge this chapter engages, and the answer will be multivalent.
“Contemporary Vedanta Philosophy, I.”
Burch, George.
The Review of Metaphysics 9, no. 3 (1956): 485–504.
Daya Krishna’s essay ‘K.C. Bhattacharyya: A Philosophical Overview’ is a compilation of a few paragraphs written by him on K.C. Bhattacharyya (KCB) in two chapters on contemporary Indian philosophy in his books Indian Philosophy: A New Approach (1997) and Developments in Indian Philosophy from Eighteenth Century Onwards (2002). Daya Krishna revisits KCB’s three absolutes and their alternation, and the subject–object relationship at the heart of KCB’s formulation. Original as ever, Daya Krishna depicts KCB’s philosophical project as based on an ‘inverted Hegelian dialectic’, which ‘moves through what may be called a process of identification and de-identification, where each step of de-identification reveals the earlier identification to have been both voluntary and mistaken’. This dialectic, he adds, is rooted in Sāṃkhya philosophy, ‘but it has been given a new turn by K.C. Bhattacharyya’. Daya Krishna does not merely explain this ‘new turn’, but moreover, takes issue with KCB. First, he reminds KCB that even according to his own premises, identification is as free an action as de-identification. Hence, just like KCB’s prescribed de-identification, it conveys a sense of freedom. Second, Daya Krishna appeals for re-identification after de-identification, as he puts it, revealing his own conviction that freedom is found in the back and forth of engagement and disengagement, namely both in engagement and in disengagement at one’s will.
K.C. Bhattacharyya and Spontaneous Liberation in Sāṃkhya *
ByDimitry Shevchenko Book The Making of Contemporary Indian Philosophy Edition 1st Edition First Published 2023 Imprint Routledge Pages 16 eBook ISBN 9781003153320
‘Chapter Four Sri Aurobindo and Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya: Relation between Science and Spiritualism’,
These Studies in Phi1osoplr represents all the published and only a few unpublished writings of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya. These published writings date back 1908, but his characteristic philosophical position assumes definite shape in the writings during the years 1928-36. The publications of the period outnumber and far our weigh those that fall during the previous twenty years Of the twenty- one tracts published first in two separate Volumes, which in this edition appear as bound together in one, fourteen belong to this period, the others covering the previous years.
Prof Bhattacharyya had a deep study of an dent Indian philosophy, particularly of Advaita Vedanta, Sankhya, Yoga and Jam Philosophies. Vol 1, contains Prof. Bhattacharyya’s constructive interpretation of these systems. He was also well-versed in classical German Philosophy, particularly that of Kant. Hi vast and deep study provided the intellectual background in the light of which his profoundly original mind could go on with the work of construction. He constructed a new system of his own which however is not easy to comprehend. VOL II contains all the basic writings in which Prof. Bhattacharyya’s philosophy has been formulated. In the Introduction to this Volume the Editor has usefully analysed the Author’s philosophical position in some detail.
Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya was born on 12th May, 1875. He graduated with triple Honours in 1896 and was awarded the P.R.S. of the Calcutta University in 1901. His academic record during the School and College periods was uniformly excellent.
Bhattacharyya joined the Education Department of Government of Bengal as a lecturer in Philosophy in 1898 and after serving with great distinction as a teacher of Philosophy in about all the Government Colleges of Bengal, he retired in 1930. He joined the Indian Institute of Philosophy at Amalner as its Director and remained there from 1933 to 1935. He was the George V Professor of Mental & Moral Philosophy at the Calcutta University from 1935 to 1937. He died on 11th December, 1940.
Prof. Bhattacharyya possessed a profoundly original mind and an acute analytical intellect. He will always be held in high esteem by the successive generations of thinkers for his significant contribution to Philosophy. Editor’s Preface to Vol. I
These ‘Studies in Philosophy’ represent all the published and only a few of the unpublished philosophical writings of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya. There remains over an immense mass of manuscripts which will, perhaps, remain unpublished for all time to come.
The present volumes comprise the following tracts: –
Vol. I
1. Studies in Vedantism (Published in 1907) 2. 2. Sankara’s doctrine of Maya ( ,, 1925) 3. The Advaita and its spiritual significance ( ,, 1936) 4. Studies in Samkhya Philosophy (Unpublished) 5. Studies in Yoga Philosophy ( ,, ) 6. The Jaina theory of Anekanta (Published in 1925) 7. The Concept of Rasa (Unpublished)
Vol. II
1. The Subject as Freedom (Published in 1930) 2. The Concept of Philosophy ( ,, 1936) 3. The Concept of the Absolute and its alternative forms ( ,, 1934) 4. Studies in Kant (Unpublished) 5. Some aspects of negation (Published in 1914) 6. The place of the indefinite in Logic ( ,, 1916) 7. Definition of ‘Relation’ as a category of existence (Unpublished) 8. Fact and thought of fact (Published in 1931) 9. Knowledge and Truth ( ,, 1928) 10. Correction of error as a logical process ( ,, 1931) 11. The false and the subjective ( ,, 1932) 12. The objective interpretation of percept and image ( ,, 1936) 13. The Concept of Value ( ,, 1934) 14. The reality of the future (Unpublished)
Each of the above tracts is preceded by an Analysis. The first one was made by the author himself and the others have been done by the editor. Of the foot notes those marked in numerals are by the editor.
In presenting these studies the editor is happy to offer his most grateful thanks to the enterprising publisher. Sree Sushil Kumar Basu, the proprietor of Messrs. Progressive Publishers. It was he who very generously volunteered to undertake the publication of the book and see it through the press.
My warm thanks are also due to Professor G. R. Malkani. the Director of the Indian Institute of Philosophy, Amalner (Bombay) for his ready permission to reprint ‘The Subject as Freedom’ which was originally published by the Institute; to Dr. S. Radhakrishnan and Messrs. George Allen & Unwin Ltd. for their kind permission to reprint from their- ‘Contemporary Indian Philosophy’ the essay ‘‘[he Concept of Philosophy’; and to the R. K. Mission for their permission to reprint ‘The Advaita and its spiritual significance’ which first appeared in their ‘Cultural Heritage of India’. The editor is also obliged to a pupil of his and to his daughter for their assistance in preparing the copy for the press.
It is very much regretted that a number of typographical errors have crept in spite of earnest endeavours to avoid them. In the ‘Errata’ at the end of the volume, only the major errors have been listed and corrected. Editor’s Preface to Vol. II
The second volume of Studies in Philosophy is now presented after about twenty months since the issue of the first volume. For this inordinate delay the Editor alone is responsible. The Publisher tried his level best to expedite the publication, but owing to a number of circumstances which were beyond the control of the Editor, it was not found possible to bring it out at an earlier date.
This volume contains the fourteen tracts mentioned in the Preface to Vol. I, but in a slightly varied order. As in the case of the other volume, the order is not a chronological one.
In (I) The Subject as Freedom, the author works out his conception of Spiritual Psychology and the theory of the subject as freedom, and attempts to trace out the progressive stages of cognitional freedom. In (2) The Concept of Philosophy we have an analysis of the nature of philosophy and the conception of Philosophy as symbolic thinking not amounting to knowledge. (3) The Concept of the A absolute and its Alternative Forms elaborates the doctrine of the trinal absolute. (4) In Knowledge and Truth, we have an analysis of the distinctive level of consciousness occupied by theory of knowledge and of the theory of the mutual implication of knowledge and truth. (5) Fact and Thought of Fact attempts to give a definition of fact without assuming any fact and seeks to establish the position that fact does not admit of an impersonal definition. (6) In Correction of Error as a Logical Process, the author develops the Advaita theory of illusion and emphasises that correction is an epistemic function without any unitary logical content and that falsity has no reference to the time- position of cognition. In (7) The False and the Subjective, the author elaborates the thesis that the false and the subjective imply one another. In (8) Some Aspects of Negation, the author presents a nonsubjectivistic interpretation of the position that ‘truth is manifold’ and tries to establish that there are radically different types of logic based on incommensurable views of negation. (9) Place of the bide finite in Logic lays down the thesis that the indefinite is not merely a subjective entity and that logic should find a place for the absolute indefinite.
(10) In Definition of Relation as a Category of Existence, an attempt has been made to formulate a definition of ‘relation’ in purely objective terms as against the subjectivistic interpretation of Green and others. In (II) Objective Interpretation of the Percept and Image, an attempt has been made to translate the subjective terms ‘perceived’ and ‘un-perceived’ into objective terms. (12) In Reality of the Future the author develops the thesis that the reality of the future expected on a known ground cannot be said to be an object of knowledge and that the future is real only to will and to faith. (13) The Concept of Value gives an analysis of the concept of value in its different forms, and establishes the position that value is absolute and that speak ability of value as information is a necessary illusion. (l4) The Studies in Kant gives us a speculative interpretation of a number of Kantian themes. As with the other constructive interpretations contained in Vol. I, we have here also quite a large number of improvisations.
In the Introduction to this volume, the Editor has made an attempt to analyse the major philosophical doctrines of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya. The analysis has been done, as far as possible, in the author’s own words. This is for two reasons: first, the Editor was not sure that he had got at the exact logic of Krishnachandra’s writings in a large number of places; secondly, and this is to some extent connected with the first, he felt that his own language was far less effective and elegant than that of the author, even when the latter’s manner of presentation was quite thoroughly severe.
The Editor regrets that he has not been able to capture the inspiration or the insight that saturates almost all the writings of his father. It is because of this that he has all along felt that it was presumptuousness on his part to have undertaken this editorial work.
The Editor feels that he would be failing in gratitude if he did not emphasis that all the credit for this publication belongs to his friend, Sri Sushil Kumar Basu of Progressive Publishers. The under- taking would never have been completed but for his unfailing generosity, constant encouragement and spirit of dedication.
Contents
Volume I
Preface to the Second Edition
v
Abbreviations
xvi
Editor’s Introduction to vols. I & II
xvii
1. Studies in Vedantism
Introduction
1
Analysis
7
Text: Ch. I. An Approach Through Psychology
11
Ch. II. Vedantic Metaphysics
31
Ch. III. Vedantic Logic
69
2. Sankara’s Doctrine of Maya
Analysis
93
Text
95
3. The Advaita and Its Spiritual Significance
Analysis
109
Text
113
4. Studies in Sankhya Philosophy
Preface
127
Analysis
129
Text: Ch. I. Pain as Evil
135
Ch. II. Reflection as a Spiritual Function
143
Ch. III. The Body of the Self
151
Ch. IV. Causal and Non-Causal Manifestation
158
Ch. V. Time, Space and Causality
165
Ch. VI. The Objective Tattvas
173
Ch. VII. The Objective Tattvas (Contd.)
181
Ch. VIII. The Self or Purusa
190
Ch. IX. Prakrti
198
Ch. X. Relation of the Gunas
207
5. Studies in Yoga Philosophy
Analysis
215
Text: Ch. I. Sankhya and Yoga
221
Ch. II. ,, ,, (Contd.)
231
Ch. III. ,, ,, (Contd.)
240
Ch. IV. Buddhi-Vrtti
251
Ch. V. ,, ,, (Contd.)
262
Ch. VI. Five Levels of Buddhi
273
Ch. VII. The Nature of Yoga
283
Ch. III. The Kinds of Yoga
293
Ch. IX. The Procedure of Yoga
305
Ch. X. The Notion of Isvara
317
6. The Jaina Theory of Anekanta
Analysis
329
Text
331
7. The Concept of Rasa
Analysis
347
Text
349
Vol. II
1. The Subject as Freedom
Analysis
367
Text: Ch. I. The Notion of Subjectivity
381
Ch. II. Psychic Fact
396
Ch. III. Bodily Subjectivity (The Body as Perceived and Felt)
412
Ch. IV. Bodily Subjectivity (Contd.) (Knowledge of Absence as a Present Fat)
417
Ch. V. Psychic Subjectivity (The Image)
424
Ch. VI. Psychic Subjectivity (Contd.) (Thought)
431
Ch. VII. Spiritual Subjectivity (Contd.) (Feeling)
435
Ch. VIII. Spiritual Subjectivity (Contd.) (Introspection)
442
Ch. IX. Spiritual Subjectivity (Contd.) (Beyond Introspection)
446
Ch. X. The Subject as Freedom
450
2. The Concept of Philosophy
Analysis
457
Text
462
3. The Concept of the Absolute and its alternative forms
Analysis
483
Text
447
4. Knowledge and Truth
Analysis
509
Text
513
5. Fact and Thought of Fact
Analysis
529
Text
531
6. Correction of Error as a logical process
Analysis
543
Text
545
7. The false and the subjective
Analysis
55
Text
557
8. Some Aspects of Negation
Analysis
567
Text
569
9. Place of the Indefinite in Logic
Analysis
583
Text
587
10. The Definition of relation as a category of existence
“Know thyself,” advised the oracle at Delphi. “Show thyself,” is the motto of today. The prevalence of selfies, sexting, Facebook pics and stories, tweets and Twitters, and new apps, all demonstrate the transition from a personal and private self to a public, even pubic, self.
This cult of the self may have emerged remotely from Delphi and Socrates but accelerated in the late 19th and 20th centuries with many philosophers, psychologists, and social psychologists, some of whom are mentioned here. These are now left behind by activists and the identity politics of gender, sexual orientation, gender orientation, and color. The front-page news in The New York Times recently (22 May) was the latest battle in the culture wars: bathrooms! We can fight about anything! — and everything, and we do.
Who are you? What are you? What is your self? Most people, in my limited research on this topic, tend to identify in three principal ways: their familial roles, or their occupational roles or the defining characteristics of their personality (warm, strong, a survivor, romantic, adventurer, nurturing were common responses). (Thomas Kuhn’s Twenty Statements Test is more scientific.) And if you really don’t know who and what you are, the are plenty of personality tests to tell you, and perhaps some frenemies to explain precisely what is wrong with you.
Some adopt a more existential vision. One respondent identified herself as “a butterfly” and as “a river. I have to keep moving or I’d die.” Active, but hopefully not all downhill. Performers are particularly demonstrative on the self. The Beatles: “I am the walrus” (A very strange self-concept, drawn from Lewis Carroll. “I am the emu” sounds much better). Michael Jackson: “I’m a lover, not a fighter.” Paul Simon: “I am a rock. I am an island.” (John Donne disagreed: “No man is an island.”) And Nietzsche: “I am… the Anti-Christ.” (1992:72.)
All sorts of different self-definitions and identities. All sorts of different people and types of people. What is also fascinating is how many people have tried to define this self, without too much agreement. It is elusive not least because it is constantly changing as we age, and enjoy or suffer different experiences: marriage, parenthood, promotion, job-change, sickness, disability, conversion, discrimination, lotto-winner, etc. Indeed the self is so mobile that Peg O’Connor described the self as a “unicorn” — “there is no authentic self. Identity is always a work in progress” (2014:50). One does have an identity, but it is fluid. You are not going to France or Indonesia in your gap year to “find yourself.” You are taking your self with you! Others believe it is a chameleon, for similar reasons. So this search for this unicorn-chameleon, albeit brief, looks useful, even fun.
1. Sigmund Freud: Self as Iceberg.
Influenced by Charcot’s work on hypnotism and especially post-hypnotic suggestion, Freud came to understand that there are two types of mental processes, conscious and unconscious. And the unconscious is not easily accessed, but it is possible in therapy through dreams (in The Interpretation of Dreams) and the analysis of symbolism, and through parapraxes (in The Psycho-Pathology of Everyday Life), which we now know as Freudian slips (verbal slips, slips of the pen or of the body, mislaying, misreading, forgetting, and errors generally). He gives numerous examples of these giveaways. These parapraxes are thought of as expressions of repressed psychic material. Also conversion: how psychic concerns can affect the physical self: a union, or communion, of mind and body. One friend said that whenever her husband was unfaithful, she got sick. They say that 90% of an iceberg is underwater. Freud suggested that much of the self is below consciousness, and that it was important to bring it to the conscious. Perhaps how much is below varies with degrees of repression.
Freud theorized the self far beyond the iceberg/unconscious to include the stages of psychosexual development (oral, anal, and phallic) and the stages of id, ego, and super-ego to include the many mechanisms of adaptation including fixation, regression, projection, repression, displacement, sublimation, transference, resistance (defense mechanisms), and more. While some of his contributions to self-understanding and to psychiatry have been contested, others have led to his being labeled among the top 10 intellectuals of the 20th century by Time magazine.
2. William James: Self as Multiple.
“A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.” But social selves may be contradictory, depending on the individuals. Your spouse will not have the same view of you as your ex-spouse. I think we can agree on that. And co-workers will not have the same image of him or her as the children do. But that is their concept of you, not your image of your self. So James does imply the possibility of contradictory, conflicting and multiple selves in the minds of others. Walt Whitman expressed this well: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then I contradict myself. / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” As did American best-selling novelist Karin Slaughter. Here the protagonist, a rookie cop, debates shooting a villain:
The fifth Kate reared her ugly head. This Kate wanted darkness…Then the other Kates took over. She wasn’t sure which ones. The daughter? The widow? The cop? The whore? The real Kate, she wanted to think…The real Kate was a good person (2014:392).
So that makes six Kates in one; a double trinity, multiple personalities, and even conflicted and contradictory. Some of these images may be negative. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W.E.B. Du Bois pondered the question: “How does it feel to be a problem?” He explained that “being a problem is a strange experience – peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in boyhood and in Europe.” He added, “I remember well when the shadow swept across me. “ When as a “little thing” in school, a girl refused to accept his play visiting card. “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others…shut out from their world by a vast veil.” Self as problem to self, and to others who create the problem.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. “One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (ch. 1).
3. C.H. Cooley: Self as Looking-Glass
His couplet:
Each to each a looking-glass,
Reflects the other that doth pass.
The couplet reflects not only how poetic sociologists may be (don’t you love the “doth?”), but also their insight. Our idea of our selves is deeply influenced by what other people think of us or, strictly, what we think other people think of us. (True, the looking-glass is a flawed metaphor since it does not judge, unlike people.) This is especially true for our primary groups of intimate personal relations, the families of birth and our closest friendships. Significant others mirror us back to our selves, ranging from invective (crooked Hillary, crazy Bernie) to labelling (he’s a sexist, racist, fascist) to positive reinforcement (you’re the best) and high self-esteem to narcissism (I’m the best!). But there are many mirrors, all with different reflections, so figuring out who or what the self is would be tricky; indeed this self too would be multiple and contradictory.
Cooley perhaps under-estimated the degree to which we can refuse to internalize and can resist these looking-glass reflections which may problematize us, as Du Bois made clear. Distorting mirrors reflect us, badly. And much as mirrors may influence us, they do not determine us. One can fight back, resist the reflection, smash the mirror, as Frederick Douglass showed. Reflecting on his victory over an overseer when he was a slave, Douglass wrote: “The battle with Mr. Covey… was the turning point in my “life as a slave.”… I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before — I was a man now” (1962:143). A new self. Dramatic identity change.
4. G. H. Mead: Self as Structure
“The self, as that which can be an object to itself, is essentially a social structure and it arises in social experience” (1967: 140). Mead reflects both James and Cooley, but perhaps goes beyond them in his emphasis that the self is not only a reflection but is essentially a product, and reflexive. One can think about other people’s ideas about oneself, and react against them, like Douglass, (the boomerang effect,) or double-down and reinforce them, (the self-fulfilling prophecy). Yet Mead distinguishes between the core, the “me”, as object, developed out of past experiences and understandings, and the “I,” the sometimes impulsive subject, generating new ideas and new selves. So the self is both both solid and fluid.
5. Abraham Maslow: Self as Flower
Maslow is well known for moving psychology away from Freud to Humanistic Psychology: “It is as if Freud supplied us with the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.” (Not a very generous verdict!) He is also well-known for his “hierarchy of needs” which should be satisfied for optimal psychic health. The self in this view is like a flower, potentially growing into full bloom. The seven needs are: 1) physiological: warmth, food, etc. for the baby; 2) safety needs; 3) psychological needs: love, belonging; 4) esteem needs: self-satisfaction; 5) cognitive needs: education, skills; 6) aesthetic needs: harmony, order; 7) self-actualization: maturity, joy, creativity. The process is not automatic, like an elevator, but it can be linked to changes in the life cycle as discussed by Eric Erikson, Daniel Levinson, George Vaillant, and Gail Sheehy.
6. Jean-Paul Sartre: Self as Self-Creative
“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” (1957:15). Rejecting any traditional, essentialist idea of human nature, Sartre adds: “In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom” (p.23). To clarify: “You are nothing less than your life” (p.33) combining all your projects, actions, and choices. We are who and what we make our selves to be. We create our selves. If we persistently cheat, we become cheats. The meaning of our lives is the meaning we give it. Again: “Man makes himself” (p.43). There is a choice of ethics, and a freedom to choose, whether we want it or not. Hence his idea that “man is condemned to be free” (p.23). He insists that “life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning…” (p.43). The self, in his view, is not an iceberg, nor a passive reflection, nor a flower that may grow; it is what we make it. But it is somewhat atomistic.
Two dissenting opinions are worth noting. Schopenhauer insists on luck as the prevailing wind. That would include the luck of parents, genetics, country of birth, status, war, plague, etc.: pure chance, no freedom there.
A man’s life is like the voyage of a ship, where luck…acts the part of the wind, and speeds the vessel on its way or drives it far out of its course. All that a man can do for himself is of little avail; like the rudder, which if worked hard and continuously, may help in the navigation of the ship; and yet all may be lost again by a sudden squall (n.d.:169)
He was a bit of a pessimist: “We are like lambs in a field, disporting ourselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.” (n.d. 382)
The second opinion, of a physicist, is also deterministic, not luck but neurons, but less pessimistic:
We have 100 billion neurons in our brains, as many as there are stars in a galaxy, with an even more astronomical number of links and potential combinations through which they can interact… “We” are the process formed by this entire intricacy, not just by the little bit of it of which we are conscious (in Lapham, 2016:17).
7. Self as Onion
We might think of others, or ourselves, as like onions, layer upon layer, level upon level, or as a many-sided diamond, or like those Russian dolls, the matryoshka, one inside another, inside another. Someone might say: “I’ve never seen this side of you before!” (self as polygon). The novelist Dick Francis described this layering:
I was amazed by his compassion and felt I should have recognised earlier how many unexpected layers there were to Tremayne below the loud executive exterior: not just his love of horses, not just his need to be recorded, not even his disguised delight in Gareth [his son], but other, secret, unrevealed privacies…(1990:50).
But the funniest has to be Shrek. Ogres are like onions, not layer-cakes.
This model is indicated by the phrase “hidden depths” (wherein monsters may lurk) and reflects the notion that one may not really know someone, just the Goffmanesque presentations of the different selves acting in different roles and circumstances, which may be camouflage and masks. But the better one gets to know someone under very different circumstances, the more clearly one can see different selves emerging — or not. The self may be remarkably opaque, not only to the self, as Freud indicated, but also to others.
Two classic examples are Kim Philby and Bernie Madoff. They were not who they seemed to be. Shakespeare got it, as Julius Caesar mused: “One may smile and smile and be a villain.” And as Lady Macbeth instructed her husband: “Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.” It took years before investigators “uncovered” who Philby and Madoff were — and their double lives, double selves. “Uncovering” indicates the utility of this onion/layer metaphor.
In a less lethal application, spouses may take years to realize (and hopefully appreciate more and more) who and what their beloved “really” is. (Not as in the comic phrase: “deep down you’re shallow”). Onions do not have cores as dates and avocados do, so the metaphor is somewhat inadequate, but it does capture the layering.
Winston Churchill expressed this well speaking of Russia: “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” (Much like their nesting dolls.) Banyan in the Economist just applied exactly the same phrase to China (2 July 2016:36). The journalist Kim Barker wrote something similar about India: “India was a series of challenges wrapped up in a mystical blanket covered in an existential quandary” (2016:82-3). It seems that we do not know each other very well.
8. Self as Identity
Our self-concept is our identity, but identities are socially constructed according to cultural norms, which are not universal. Consider Barack Obama, widely described as the first black President of the USA, in accord with American norms, specifically in the tradition of the “one-drop” rule. But his mother was white. In accord with another possible rule, “one drop of white blood,” he would be considered white. He is really a shade of brown, anyway, and would be described as such in many other cultures, more sensitive to shades of color.
James McBride offers a classic example. His father was black, his mother white. He remarks about his 11 siblings: “We were all clearly black, of various shades of brown, some light brown, some medium brown, some very light-skinned, and all of us had curly hair” (1997:22). The usual confusion of chromatic and social color. The terms “black” and “white” are symbolic, cultural, and political. Malcolm X noted: “…when he says he’s white, he means he’s boss. That’s right. That’s what white means in this language.” (1966:163).
Then again, Rachel Dolezal exemplifies the issue of who defines us. The daughter of white parents, she identified as black, darkened her hair and her skin and passed as black for years, and worked for the NAACP; but when her parentage became known, her self-defined identity was largely rejected by others as a lie and a fraud. She defended herself insisting that her identity was not biological, but presumably political or psychological. Color identity is seemingly problematic.
Consider too how gender identities have suddenly been spotlighted, most publicly by Caitlin Jenner. We used to recognize two genders, biologically defined and immutable; now we recognize that they are psychologically defined and are mutable. India, however, recognizes three on visa applications. Other cultures also recognize three. As do some individuals who refuse to be labeled male or female. If even such apparently basic identities as color and gender are culturally constructed, not to mention age, beauty, and more, then so, clearly, are ideas of the self. Identity is slippery.
9 & 10. Self as Unicorn and Chameleon
In sum, the self is both unicorn and chameleon. From the fog or flashlight brilliance of identity, theorists we might conclude that the self is a unicorn since it is partly unknown, even unknowable because it is so below consciousness and “in progress”; and a chameleon because it is multiple, mutable, adaptable, and selective in presentation. These selves may be complementary, contradictory, or conflicted.
So while the self is constantly presented to numerous “friends,” it is itself both one and many: unicorn and chameleon, iceberg and onion, a mask and camouflage, a flower and what you create, a looking-glass and a distorting mirror, fluid, a work in progress, a polygon with hidden depths and many layers. Given all these ideas and models, I suspect that there are not many selves who are an “open book.” If nothing else, the self and other selves are: “Surprise!” “Know thyself” is hard enough. Know someone else… really?
Yet surely all this fixation with the self is a trifle unhealthy — me! me! me! — since it may vitiate against community, and concern with and for others: a cultural narcissism.
References
Barker, Kim 2016. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot. New York: Anchor.
Douglass, Frederick. 1962 [1892]. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. London: Collier-Macmillan.
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1995 [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Signet.
Francis, Dick 1990. Long Shot. London: Michael Joseph.
Lapham, Lewis H. 2016 “Dame Fortune” Lapham’s Quarterly Summer 13-19.
McBride, James 1997. The Color of Water. A Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother. New York: Riverhead Books.
Mead, G.H. 1967 [1934]. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich 1992 [1888]. Ecce Homo. Penguin Classics.
O’Connor, Peg 2014. “Searching for the Self, and Other Unicorns.” Psychology Today Nov/Dec 50-1.
Sartre, J-P. 1957. Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York: The Wisdom Library.
Schopenhauer, Arthur n.d. Essays. New York: Burt.
Slaughter, Karin 2014. Cop Town. New York: Delacorte.
X, Malcolm 1966. Malcolm X Speaks. New York: Grove Press.
Theories of Individual Social Development
Source: Ch 5: Theories of Individual Social Development
Freud’s Theory of the Id, Ego & Superego
Jean Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development
Carol Gilligan’s Theory of Moral Development
George Herbert Mead: The Self, ”Me” & ”I”
Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development: Theory & Examples
Freud’s Structure of Personality
Let’s talk about the id, the ego and the superego, the three parts of the structure of personality and a theory that was developed by Sigmund Freud. He’s probably someone you’ve heard of; he’s a pretty famous psychologist from the late 19th early 20th centuries. While his theory of personalities is outdated, it was monumental in influencing how we think about personality today.
When you think of Freud, you might think about going into therapy and lying down on a couch, telling your therapist about your problems. But if someone goes into therapy today, the therapist isn’t going to say ‘Oh, of course! Aha! It’s the id, the ego and the superego. They’re just not talking to each other right. Nevertheless, these three personality parts have entered the mainstream understanding of how we think about internal conflict.
Let’s think about an average person who’s pushed and pulled in lots of directions by different drives, like sex and food, but also ethics and a wish to maintain a healthy body. These drives are pushing them and pulling them in different directions, and maybe they’re not even aware.
This is the idea of internal conflict. It’s the conflict between basic desires (the id), morality and being a good person (the superego) and consciousness (the ego.)
The Id
So first let’s start with the id. This is an unconscious part of your personality. It is basically the childish and impulsive part of you that just does what it wants, and it wants things really intensely and doesn’t really think about the consequences. Freud describes this as operating on a pleasure principle, which essentially means what it sounds like, which is that it’s always seeking to try to increase pleasure and decrease pain.
Now, as an example of this, let’s say you come home and you find to your delight that your roommate has baked a cake. Your id would think ‘Oh! I want that cake right now! That looks delicious!’ You know your roommate’s not going to be happy if you eat it, so first, you eat a little piece of the corner, and then you have to cut yourself a slice so it doesn’t look disgusting, and then soon enough you’ve eaten the whole thing; it’s gone.
How did you manage to eat the whole cake? Blame your id for taking over. That’s what your id aims to do in life. It wants you to eat whole cakes because it wants you to increase pleasure. Cakes are going to make you feel good – why not eat the whole thing? Now, what it also wants to do is decrease pain. So let’s say you wake up the next morning and you think, ‘Oh no, I just ate a whole cake. That’s really bad, maybe I’ll get some exercise.’ You think to yourself about how you will go hiking in the mountains all day, and you tell yourself, ‘Alright, let’s get some exercise!’ No, your id says, ‘That’s not gonna happen; that’s gonna hurt. We don’t want to do that.’ So if you’re totally id driven, you’d basically eat the whole cake and then you would not go hiking the next day to burn off the calories. That’s the pleasure principle.
The Superego
Now, we usually don’t eat whole cakes and lay on the couch all day every day. What helps to control the rampaging id? There is another part of your personality that’s mainly unconscious, and it’s the superego. The superego is the part of you that’s super judgmental and moralizing and is always trying to get you to behave in a socially appropriate way. Now let’s see what the superego would do if you come home and you find the cake.
If the superego is in charge, you wouldn’t eat the cake at all. You’d still think it looks delicious and want to eat it, but the superego would say, ‘No, it’s my roommate’s cake. I’m not gonna eat this cake!’ Remember, the superego wants you to behave morally and appropriately, and it’s not that socially appropriate to eat other people’s baked goods.
But, let’s imagine that your id takes over, so you do eat the cake. The same thing happens: you eat a little bit, you eat a little bit more, and somehow you end up eating it all. But now your superego jumps back into action. What happens now that you already ate the cake? Guilt is what’s going to happen. Your superego makes you feel really guilty when you do things that are not socially appropriate.
What do you do now? If your superego is in control again, you would certainly go jogging, but you would also apologize to your roommate and bake them a new cake, maybe an even better one than before. The superego controls our sense of right and wrong. We feel bad when we do things that are wrong, and we feel good when we do things that are right, and that’s what the superego controls.
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
Introduction
Mark, a two-year-old, and Ally, an eight-year-old, are sitting at the table waiting for a snack. Their mom presents them each with a cup of juice, the same amount in each cup. Mark begins to cry and point, saying ‘You gave her more.’ Mark’s mom tries to reason with the young child, explaining that the same amount of juice is in each cup, but he is insistent that he is being treated unfairly. What is happening in this situation? In this lesson, we will learn about the stages of cognitive development while watching Mark proceed through infancy to adolescence.
Jean Piaget proposed stages of cognitive development through which children and adolescents proceed based on maturation and experience. They are: sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operations and formal operations.
Sensorimotor Intelligence and Preoperational Thinking
The first two sequential stages deal with the cognitive development of infants and young children. They are sensorimotor intelligence and preoperational (prelogical) intelligence.
The sensorimotor intelligence stage occurs from birth to approximately 1-2 years. In the child’s first year, the processes of intelligence are both presymbolic and preverbal. For the infant, the meaning of an object involves what can be done with it. These actions include pushing, opening, pulling, closing and so forth. In the second year of life, the young child develops the identity of his or her own body and others in time and space. The infant develops action schemes, such as reaching for an object or grasping something or pulling it towards them. At this stage of development, Mark can pull a string to reach the object at the end of it. He can pull a blanket to get an out-of-reach toy and so on. Another example is Mark putting objects into his mouth to determine the shape and structure. This is something that many infants and young toddlers do.
Our next stage is preoperational thinking. This occurs from around 2-3 years to approximately 7 years of age. Partially logical thinking or thought begins during these years. For example, the child recognizes that water poured from one container to another is the same water. However, the child reasons only from one specific item of information to another and makes decisions based on perceptual cues. Preoperational thinking can and usually is illogical. For example, Mark, based on his perceptions, thought that the taller, slender glass had more juice in it than the shorter, wider glass that he received. In other words, perceptual cues, such as the height of the juice in the glass, dominate the child’s judgment. Also, children in this stage have difficulty accepting another person’s perspective or point of view. Piaget referred to this as egocentrism.
Concrete Operational and Formal Operational Thinking
The basic units of logical thinking are particular kinds of cognitive activity that Piaget referred to as operations. The two levels of logical thinking identified by Piaget are concrete operational and formal operational thinking.
The concrete operational stage occurs from around 7-8 years of age to 12-14 or older. Concrete operational thinking is linked to the direct manipulation of objects. It involves situations that require an understanding of simultaneous changes in multiple characteristics of objects. An example is flattening a ball of clay into a hot dog shape – as the shape becomes longer, it also becomes thinner.
The child at the level of concrete operational thinking can demonstrate the following:
A transformation in one feature or characteristic of a situation is exactly balanced by a transformation in another characteristic.
The essential nature of the object or data remains consistent.
The transformation in the object can be returned to the original form by an opposite or inverse action.
Let’s discuss these more specifically and put some terms in. The capability of recognizing the unchanging characteristic of an object is referred to as conservation. The child can demonstrate conservation by returning the object to its original form or organization. For example, Mark has a ball of clay. It’s first in a ball shape. He can flatten it out. He understands now that the same amount of clay exists whether it’s in the ball form or the flat form. This is conservation.
Moral Decision
At some point in your life, you’ve probably been faced with a moral dilemma. Consider this example: a father tells his daughter, Lauren, that she can have a bike if she saves enough money from her weekly allowance to pay for half of it. Finally, when Lauren tells her father she’s saved up all the money, her father gives her the other half and tells her to buy her bike. Lauren goes to the store to buy her bike and sees the one she’s been saving up for is on sale, so she will have money left over. She deliberates if she should return the extra money to her father or keep it and not tell him. They both kept their end of the agreement, so the extra money is a bonus surprise, but if she doesn’t tell him, it feels like she’s deceiving him.
Lawrence Kohlberg: Stages of Moral Development
Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg was especially interested in how children develop their ability to make moral decisions like this one. He came up with several stages of moral development, which, though not without criticism from other psychologists, form a good starting point to think about these questions. It is important to remember that not everyone, even adults, necessarily make it into all of the higher stages.
Pre-Conventional Level
People first pass through two stages known collectively as the pre-conventional level. In the first stage, people are motivated by trying to avoid punishment; their actions are bad if they get punished and good if they don’t. In this stage, Lauren would give her father the money because she doesn’t want him to punish her.
At the second stage, people are motivated purely by self-interest. Lauren at this stage would likely keep the money, thinking that, even if she has the bike, she can’t use it unless she can buy a helmet.
Conventional Level
The next level of moral development, the conventional, also contains two stages. Adolescents typically operate at this level, as do some adults. In stage three, people make moral decisions based on getting people to like them. Lauren might decide to give her father the money because this will improve her relationship with him; but if her mother is upset that her father spent money they needed for bills, she might decide to give the money to her mother in order to be a ‘good girl’ in her eyes. Her decision would be based on whichever social relationship seemed most important.
In stage four, moral reasoning centers around maintaining a functioning society by recognizing that laws are more important than individual needs. In this stage, Lauren probably would give her father the extra money because not doing so, in her eyes, equates to stealing from her family.
Carol Gilligan: Moral Development
A community of moles gives shelter to a homeless porcupine. The moles, however, are constantly stabbed by the porcupine’s quills. What should they do?
This scenario was used to aid in the development of a theory that argued women and men may have differing paths to moral development. This lesson will introduce and apply that theory, developed by Carol Gilligan.
The field of moral development encompasses prosocial behavior, such as altruism, caring and helping, along with traits such as honesty, fairness, and respect. Many theories of moral development have been proposed, but this lesson will focus on the specific theory proposed by Psychologist Carol Gilligan.
Gilligan was a student of Developmental Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, who introduced the theory of stages of moral development. Gilligan, however, felt as though her mentor’s theory did not adequately address the gender differences of moral development due to the fact that participants in Kohlberg’s study were predominately male and because his theory did not include the caring perspective.
Gilligan argued that males and females are often socialized differently, and females are more apt than males to stress interpersonal relationships and take responsibility for the well-being of others. Gilligan suggested this difference is due to the child’s relationship with the mother and that females are traditionally taught a moral perspective that focuses on community and caring about personal relationships.
Care-Based Morality & Justice-Based Morality
Gilligan proposed the Stages of the Ethics of Care theory, which addresses what makes actions ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Gilligan’s theory focused on both care-based morality and justice-based morality.
Care-based morality is based on the following principles:
Emphasizes interconnectedness and universality.
Acting justly means avoiding violence and helping those in need.
Care-based morality is thought to be more common in girls because of their connections to their mothers.
Because girls remain connected to their mothers, they are less inclined to worry about issues of fairness.
Justice-based morality is based on the following principles:
Views the world as being composed of autonomous individuals who interact with another.
Acting justly means avoiding inequality.
Is thought to be more common in boys because of their need to differentiate between themselves and their mothers.
Because they are separated from their mothers, boys become more concerned with the concept of inequality.
Returning to our mole/porcupine scenario, researchers found individuals approached the problem with two perspectives: justice-based morality or care-based morality. Gender differences were also evident.
Individuals with a justice-based perspective tend to see any dilemma as a conflict between different claims. The moles want one thing; the porcupine wants something incompatible. They can’t both have a valid claim on the burrow, so only one of them can be right. A solution to the dilemma is not a resolution of the conflict; it’s a verdict, in which one side gets everything and the other side gets nothing.
The care-based perspective approaches the problem differently. Rather than seeing all the parties as separate individuals with their own valid or invalid claims, it sees them as already in a difficult situation together. If there is a conflict between them, that is part of the problem. The point is not to decide the conflict one way or the other but to find a way to get around it or remove it. This perspective starts from the particular case and the actual people within it and hopes to find a solution that will not damage anyone. It will be ready to embrace compromise and creative solutions.
Researchers have found a tendency for males to adopt the justice perspective and for females to be more likely than males to adopt the caring perspective.
Stages of Ethics of Care
George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Self
In sociological conceptions of the Self, the development of the Self is examined in the context of social phenomena like socialization. George Herbert Mead, an American sociologist, pioneered an essential theory in sociology. The mentality is viewed by George Herbert Mead’s theory as an individual’s incorporation of the collective. Mead used a social process to describe the person and the mind. A person’s body takes in gestures and the collective sentiments of others and responds accordingly with other structured mindsets that are also absorbed by the human organism.
Mead’s theory of self refers to this as the “I” and the “me” phase. The “I” is the answer to the “me,” which is the interpersonal Self. Put another way, “I” is a person’s reaction to other people’s emotions, whereas “me” is the ordered set of those perceptions that one acquires. How one assumes one’s organization sees oneself is what one refers to as the “me,” which is the total of the “generalized other“. The “I” stands for a person’s feelings and instincts. Self-as-subject and self-as-object are synonymous in the “I.” The “I” is the one who knows, and the “me” is the one who is being understood. “I” and “me” are constantly interacting, and this interaction is what we refer to as the “stream of thought.” The human cognition concept is based on these processes, which go beyond the idea of selfhood in a restricted sense. Mead sees the internal debate between “I” and “me” as the thinking process.
Mead’s “I” and “me,” when viewed as a synthesis of the “I” and the “me,” reveal a profoundly social nature. In Mead’s view, a person’s place in a community is more important than individuality. Being aware of one’s self-consciousness can only come about when one has actively participated in various social roles.
According to Mead and Charles Cooley, the Self is determined by people’s social interactions. How one appears to others determines one’s social identity, or looking-glass self (a term coined by Cooley). In other words, the stage is attached to the concept of developing self. Cooley’s assertions about the social development of children formed the basis of this initial theory. People get the most direct feedback about themselves from the responses of others to their actions. This idea means that solitary activities cannot contribute to the development of the Self as it requires external interactions.
As per Cooley and Mead, self-identity is formed in three phases. First, people perceive how they look in the eyes of others. Additionally, individuals imagine how others judge them by relying on looks and how they display themselves. Finally, individuals perceive how others feel about them due to the moral judgments they create.
However, Heinz Kohut, a psychologist from the United States, proposed a bipolar self, which he claimed was composed of two processes of narcissistic brilliance, one of which contained goals and the other constituted ideals. The narcissistic Self, according to Kohut, seems to be the pinnacle of aspiration. He referred to the idealized parental image as the pole of standards. According to Kohut, the two poles of Self portray the regular advancement of a child’s psychic life.
On the other hand, according to Jungian theory, the Self is one of several archetypes. It’s a metaphor for a person’s entire mind, including their subconscious and conscious thoughts, defined by Jung as the procedure of combining one’s personality that leads to the Self.
What is the Role of Self in the Socialization Process?
In both Cooley and Mead’s view, a person’s identity is formed through self-socialization. For anyone to develop a precise self-image, self-socialization provides an opportunity to reflect and contend with themselves.
Developing an image of oneself predicated on how one thinks or appears to others is known as the “looking-glass self”. Through one’s reactions to a behavior, other people serve as a reflector, referring to others the image they project. In Mead’s view, the first step is to see oneself as others do.
Sociological theories of Self attempt to describe how social processes like socialization impact the growth of the Self. It is common to use the concept of “self-concept” to describe how an individual views, assesses and interprets their own identity. To have a notion of oneself is to be self-aware.
Mead believed that the Self is formed through the child’s interactions with those around them. The newborn child’s needs, including clothes and food, are pressing and must be met. The mother meets these needs, and the baby develops a strong emotional attachment to her and grows to rely heavily on her.
According to Mead’s theory, as the child grows older, they separate from their mother and must learn to submit to the mother’s authority over them. The child then repeats this for their dad. They distinguish the father from the mother before assimilating him into society. In this sense, the child’s number of significant others grows, and the child integrates the role of such others in their development. Using his own words, the child responds to them and behaves according to what they mean to the other individual.
Mead’s Theory of Self: Development of Self
Mead held the notion that humans form their self-images via connections with others. He contended that the Self results from society’s experience, which would be the part of a person’s personality that includes self-awareness or self-image. Mead laid out three concepts on how one’s Self grows:
Language
Symbols are exchanged in social interactions. According to Mead, language and other symbolic representations are uniquely human in how they carry sense. Therefore, the best way to understand others is to imagine the scenario from their point of view first. He formulated the term “taking the other’s role” to describe the way people perceive themselves concerning others. When children are in this phase, they begin to mimic their surroundings. Because of this, parents usually avoid using foul language in front of their children.
Play
At this stage, children assume and break the rules of structured games such as sports or freeze tag. Playing along with whatever rules they create throughout the game will be much more convenient than enforcing guidelines on them. Here, children pretend that they are the ones they love. As a result, they attempt to be their mothers and fathers when they role-play.
Forming Psychological Identities / Erik Erikson
What are Erikson’s stages of development? Learn about Erikson life stages, psychosocial development theory, and the history and contributions to the theory.
How do we develop an identity, or a sense of self? Psychologists have many theories. One, named Erik Erikson, believed that we work on constructing psychosocial identities throughout our whole lives. By ‘psychosocial,’ he meant an interplay between our inner, emotional lives (psycho), and our outer, social circumstances (social).
Erikson believed that as we grow and age, we pass through eight stages of development. He thought that each stage was defined by a specific conflict between a pair of opposing impulses or behaviors. The resolution (or inability to resolve) these conflicts affects our personalities and identities.
Erikson defines four childhood stages and three adult stages, bridged together by one stage of adolescence. We’ll go through each stage and define it by its central conflict, as well we give some examples of behaviors and patterns of thinking characteristic of the stage.
Oral-Sensory Stage
The first is the oral-sensory stage, encompassing the first year of life and defined by a conflict between trust and mistrust. Infants during this time learn to trust their parents if they’re reliably cared for and fed; if not, if they’re neglected or abused, they’ll develop mistrust instead. Infants at this stage either learn that they can trust others to fulfill their needs, or that they can’t, that the world is a dangerous and unreliable place.
Muscular-Anal Stage
The second stage is called muscular-anal and defined by the conflict between autonomy and shame and doubt. Parents who allow their toddlers, between the ages of about 1-3, to explore their surroundings and develop interests of their own help to foster a sense of autonomy. But parents who are too restrictive or cautious with their children can instead leave them with doubt about their abilities. Like learning mistrust instead of trust, this can have longstanding consequences.
Locomotor Stage
A related conflict between initiative and guilt defines the next stage, the locomotor stage. Children in this stage, between the ages of three and six, need to develop initiative, or independent decision-making, about planning and doing various activities. If they are not encouraged to do this, or if their efforts are dismissed, they may learn to feel guilt instead about their desire for independence.
Latency
The last childhood stage is called latency and is defined by a conflict between industry and inferiority. Children in this stage are between the ages of six and twelve, and during this time are starting to gain real adult skills like reading, writing and logic. If they’re encouraged, they’ll develop industry, or motivation to keep learning and practicing; they’ll start to want to be productive instead of just wanting to play. Children who aren’t encouraged to work hard at learning new skills will instead feel inferior and unmotivated.
Adolescence
Variations on the self
Source: A pattern theory of self
Source: A pattern theory of self
Source: A pattern theory of self
Source: A pattern theory of self
Source: A pattern theory of self
Source: A pattern theory of self
Source: A pattern theory of self
My Related Posts
You can search for these posts using Search Posts feature in the right sidebar.
Geometry of Consciousness
From Individual to Collective Intentionality
Individual Self, Relational Self, and Collective Self
Individual, Relational, and Collective Reflexivity
Semiotic Self and Dialogic Self
Dialogs and Dialectics
Narrative Psychology: Language, Meaning, and Self
Levels of Human Psychological Development in Integral Spiral Dynamics
The Great Chain of Being
Cyber-Semiotics: Why Information is not enough
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness: Integral Theory of Ken Wilber
Self and Other: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity
Summary: Carol Dweck and others have Identified two implicit theories of intelligence. Those learners who have an “entity” theory view intelligence as being an unchangeable, fixed internal characteristic. Those who have an “incremental” theory believe that their intelligence is malleable and can be increased through effort.
Originators: Carol Dweck, based on over 30 years of research on belief systems, and their role in motivation and achievement.
Key Terms: entity theory, incremental theory
Self-Theories (Dweck)
Carol Dweck (currently at Indiana University) describes a series of empirically-based studies that investigate how people develop beliefs about themselves (i.e., self-theories) and how these self-theories create their psychological worlds, shaping thoughts, feelings and behaviors[1]. The theories reveal why some students are motivated to work harder, and why others fall into patterns of helplessness and are self-defeating. Dweck’s conclusions explore the implications for the concept of self-esteem, suggesting a rethinking of its role in motivation, and the conditions that foster it. She demonstrated empirically that students who hold an entity theory of intelligence are less likely to attempt challenging tasks and are at risk for academic underachievement[1][2].
Students carry two types of views on ability/intelligence:
Entity View – This view (those who are called “Entity theorists”) treats intelligence as fixed and stable. These students have a high desire to prove themselves to others; to be seen as smart and avoid looking unintelligent.
Incremental View – This view treats intelligence as malleable, fluid, and changeable. These students see satisfaction coming from the process of learning and often see opportunities to get better. They do not focus on what the outcome will say about them, but what they can attain from taking part in the venture.
Entity theorists are susceptible to learned helplessness because they may feel that circumstances are outside their control (i.e. there’s nothing that could have been done to make things better), thus they may give up easily. As a result, they may simply avoid situations or activities that they perceive to be challenging (perhaps through procrastination, absenteeism, etc.). Alternatively, they may purposely choose extremely difficult tasks so that they have an excuse for failure. Ultimately, they may stop trying altogether. Because success (or failure) is often linked to what is perceived as a fixed amount of intelligence rather than effort (e.g., the belief that “I did poorly because I’m not a smart person”), students may think that failure implies a natural lack of intelligence. Dweck found that students with a long history of success may be the most vulnerable for developing learned helplessness because they may buy into the entity view of intelligence more readily than those with less frequent success[1].
Those with an incremental view (“Incremental theorists”) when faced with failure, react differently: these students desire to master challenges, and therefore adopt a mastery-oriented pattern. They immediately began to consider various ways that they could approach the task differently, and they increase their efforts. Unlike Entity theorists, Incremental theorists believe that effort, through increased learning and strategy development, will actually increase their intelligence.
Carol Dweck’s book: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Dweck explains how to achieve success — and how approaching problems with a fixed vs. growth mindset makes a big difference. Praising intelligence and ability doesn’t foster self-esteem and lead to accomplishment, but may actually jeopardize success. This book is an excllent read for helping people motivate their children and reach one’s one personal and professional goals.
References
Dweck, C. S. (2000). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development. Psychology Press.
Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.
The Oxford Handbook of the Self is an interdisciplinary collection of articles that address questions across a number of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, psychopathology, and neuroscience. Research on the topic of self has increased significantly in recent years in all of these areas. In philosophy and some areas of cognitive science, the emphasis on embodied cognition has fostered a renewed interest in rethinking personal identity, mind-body dualism, and overly Cartesian conceptions of self. Poststructuralist deconstructions of traditional metaphysical conceptions of subjectivity have led to debates about whether there are any grounds (moral if not metaphysical) for reconstructing the notion of self. Questions about whether selves actually exist or have an illusory status have been raised from perspectives as diverse as neuroscience, Buddhism, and narrative theory. With respect to self-agency, similar questions arise in experimental psychology. In addition, advances in developmental psychology have pushed to the forefront questions about the ontogenetic origin of self-experience, while studies of psychopathology suggest that concepts like self and agency are central to explaining important aspects of pathological experience. These and other issues motivate questions about how we understand, not only the self, but also how we understand ourselves in social and cultural contexts.
This article examines the historical conception of the words self and person in philosophical theory. It discusses John Locke’s definition of the self as the conscious thinking thing and the person as a thinking intelligent being. It describes the Platonist view of the self as spiritual substance and Aristotelian belief that the self is a hylomorphic substance. It also explores the relevant topics of Epicureanism atomism, Cartesian dualism, and the developmental and social origin of self-concepts.
“A Contrast of Individualistic and Social Theories of the Self”,
George Herbert Mead.
Section 29 in Mind Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Edited by Charles W. Morris). Chicago: University of Chicago (1934): 222-226 .
Understand the difference between psychological and sociological theories of self-development
Explain the process of moral development
When we are born, we have a genetic makeup and biological traits. However, who we are as human beings develops through social interaction. Many scholars, both in the fields of psychology and in sociology, have described the process of self-development as a precursor to understanding how that “self” becomes socialized.
Psychological Perspectives on Self-Development
Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was one of the most influential modern scientists to put forth a theory about how people develop a sense of self. He believed that personality and sexual development were closely linked, and he divided the maturation process into psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. He posited that people’s self-development is closely linked to early stages of development, like breastfeeding, toilet training, and sexual awareness (Freud 1905).
According to Freud, failure to properly engage in or disengage from a specific stage results in emotional and psychological consequences throughout adulthood. An adult with an oral fixation may indulge in overeating or binge drinking. An anal fixation may produce a neat freak (hence the term “anal retentive”), while a person stuck in the phallic stage may be promiscuous or emotionally immature. Although no solid empirical evidence supports Freud’s theory, his ideas continue to contribute to the work of scholars in a variety of disciplines.
Sociology or Psychology: What’s the Difference?
You might be wondering: if sociologists and psychologists are both interested in people and their behavior, how are these two disciplines different? What do they agree on, and where do their ideas diverge? The answers are complicated, but the distinction is important to scholars in both fields.
As a general difference, we might say that while both disciplines are interested in human behavior, psychologists are focused on how the mind influences that behavior, while sociologists study the role of society in shaping behavior. Psychologists are interested in people’s mental development and how their minds process their world. Sociologists are more likely to focus on how different aspects of society contribute to an individual’s relationship with his world. Another way to think of the difference is that psychologists tend to look inward (mental health, emotional processes), while sociologists tend to look outward (social institutions, cultural norms, interactions with others) to understand human behavior.
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) was the first to make this distinction in research, when he attributed differences in suicide rates among people to social causes (religious differences) rather than to psychological causes (like their mental wellbeing) (Durkheim 1897). Today, we see this same distinction. For example, a sociologist studying how a couple gets to the point of their first kiss on a date might focus her research on cultural norms for dating, social patterns of sexual activity over time, or how this process is different for seniors than for teens. A psychologist would more likely be interested in the person’s earliest sexual awareness or the mental processing of sexual desire.
Sometimes sociologists and psychologists have collaborated to increase knowledge. In recent decades, however, their fields have become more clearly separated as sociologists increasingly focus on large societal issues and patterns, while psychologists remain honed in on the human mind. Both disciplines make valuable contributions through different approaches that provide us with different types of useful insights.
Psychologist Erik Erikson (1902–1994) created a theory of personality development based, in part, on the work of Freud. However, Erikson believed the personality continued to change over time and was never truly finished. His theory includes eight stages of development, beginning with birth and ending with death. According to Erikson, people move through these stages throughout their lives. In contrast to Freud’s focus on psychosexual stages and basic human urges, Erikson’s view of self-development gave credit to more social aspects, like the way we negotiate between our own base desires and what is socially accepted (Erikson 1982).
Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a psychologist who specialized in child development who focused specifically on the role of social interactions in their development. He recognized that the development of self evolved through a negotiation between the world as it exists in one’s mind and the world that exists as it is experienced socially (Piaget 1954). All three of these thinkers have contributed to our modern understanding of self-development.
Sociological Theories of Self-Development
One of the pioneering contributors to sociological perspectives was Charles Cooley (1864–1929). He asserted that people’s self understanding is constructed, in part, by their perception of how others view them—a process termed “the looking glass self” (Cooley 1902).
Later, George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) studied the self, a person’s distinct identity that is developed through social interaction. In order to engage in this process of “self,” an individual has to be able to view him or herself through the eyes of others. That’s not an ability that we are born with (Mead 1934). Through socialization we learn to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and look at the world through their perspective. This assists us in becoming self-aware, as we look at ourselves from the perspective of the “other.” The case of Danielle, for example, illustrates what happens when social interaction is absent from early experience: Danielle had no ability to see herself as others would see her. From Mead’s point of view, she had no “self.”
How do we go from being newborns to being humans with “selves?” Mead believed that there is a specific path of development that all people go through. During the preparatory stage, children are only capable of imitation: they have no ability to imagine how others see things. They copy the actions of people with whom they regularly interact, such as their caregivers. This is followed by the play stage, during which children begin to take on the role that one other person might have. Thus, children might try on a parent’s point of view by acting out “grownup” behavior, like playing “dress up” and acting out the “mom” role, or talking on a toy telephone the way they see their father do.
During the game stage, children learn to consider several roles at the same time and how those roles interact with each other. They learn to understand interactions involving different people with a variety of purposes. For example, a child at this stage is likely to be aware of the different responsibilities of people in a restaurant who together make for a smooth dining experience (someone seats you, another takes your order, someone else cooks the food, while yet another clears away dirty dishes).
Finally, children develop, understand, and learn the idea of the generalized other, the common behavioral expectations of general society. By this stage of development, an individual is able to imagine how he or she is viewed by one or many others—and thus, from a sociological perspective, to have a “self” (Mead 1934; Mead 1964).
Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development
Moral development is an important part of the socialization process. The term refers to the way people learn what society considered to be “good” and “bad,” which is important for a smoothly functioning society. Moral development prevents people from acting on unchecked urges, instead considering what is right for society and good for others. Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) was interested in how people learn to decide what is right and what is wrong. To understand this topic, he developed a theory of moral development that includes three levels: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional.
In the preconventional stage, young children, who lack a higher level of cognitive ability, experience the world around them only through their senses. It isn’t until the teen years that the conventional theory develops, when youngsters become increasingly aware of others’ feelings and take those into consideration when determining what’s “good” and “bad.” The final stage, called postconventional, is when people begin to think of morality in abstract terms, such as Americans believing that everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. At this stage, people also recognize that legality and morality do not always match up evenly (Kohlberg 1981). When hundreds of thousands of Egyptians turned out in 2011 to protest government corruption, they were using postconventional morality. They understood that although their government was legal, it was not morally correct.
Gilligan’s Theory of Moral Development and Gender
Another sociologist, Carol Gilligan (1936–), recognized that Kohlberg’s theory might show gender bias since his research was only conducted on male subjects. Would females study subjects have responded differently? Would a female social scientist notice different patterns when analyzing the research? To answer the first question, she set out to study differences between how boys and girls developed morality. Gilligan’s research suggested that boys and girls do have different understandings of morality. Boys appeared to have a justice perspective, by placing emphasis on rules and laws. Girls, on the other hand, seem to have a care and responsibility perspective; they consider people’s reasons behind behavior that seems morally wrong.
While Gilligan is correct that Kohlberg’s research should have included both male and female subjects, her study has been scientifically discredited due to its small sample size. The results Gilligan noted in this study also have not been replicated by subsequent researchers. The differences Gilligan observed were not an issue of the development of morality, but an issue of socialization. Differences in behavior between males and females is the result of gender socialization that teaches boys and girls societal norms and behaviors expected of them based on their sex (see “What a Pretty Little Lady”).
Gilligan also recognized that Kohlberg’s theory rested on the assumption that the justice perspective was the right, or better, perspective. Gilligan, in contrast, theorized that neither perspective was “better”: the two norms of justice served different purposes. Ultimately, she explained that boys are socialized for a work environment where rules make operations run smoothly, while girls are socialized for a home environment where flexibility allows for harmony in caretaking and nurturing (Gilligan 1982; Gilligan 1990).
What a Pretty Little Lady!
“What a cute dress!” “I like the ribbons in your hair.” “Wow, you look so pretty today.”
According to Lisa Bloom, author of Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed Down World, most of us use pleasantries like these when we first meet little girls. “So what?” you might ask.
Bloom asserts that we are too focused on the appearance of young girls, and as a result, our society is socializing them to believe that how they look is of vital importance. And Bloom may be on to something. How often do you tell a little boy how attractive his outfit is, how nice looking his shoes are, or how handsome he looks today? To support her assertions, Bloom cites, as one example, that about 50 percent of girls ages three to six worry about being fat (Bloom 2011). We’re talking about kindergarteners who are concerned about their body image. Sociologists are acutely interested in of this type of gender socialization, by which societal expectations of how boys and girls should be—how they should behave, what toys and colors they should like, and how important their attire is—are reinforced.
One solution to this type of gender socialization is being experimented with at the Egalia preschool in Sweden, where children develop in a genderless environment. All the children at Egalia are referred to with neutral terms like “friend” instead of “he” or “she.” Play areas and toys are consciously set up to eliminate any reinforcement of gender expectations (Haney 2011). Egalia strives to eliminate all societal gender norms from these children’s preschool world.
Extreme? Perhaps. So what is the middle ground? Bloom suggests that we start with simple steps: when introduced to a young girl, ask about her favorite book or what she likes. In short, engage with her mind … not her outward appearance (Bloom 2011).
Summary
Psychological theories of self-development have been broadened by sociologists who explicitly study the role of society and social interaction in self-development. Charles Cooley and George Mead both contributed significantly to the sociological understanding of the development of self. Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan developed their ideas further and researched how our sense of morality develops. Gilligan added the dimension of gender differences to Kohlberg’s theory.
Section Quiz
Socialization, as a sociological term, describes:
how people interact during social situations
how people learn societal norms, beliefs, and values
a person’s internal mental state when in a group setting
the difference between introverts and extroverts
Answer
B
The Harlows’ study on rhesus monkeys showed that:
rhesus monkeys raised by other primate species are poorly socialized
monkeys can be adequately socialized by imitating humans
food is more important than social comfort
social comfort is more important than food
Answer
D
What occurs in Lawrence Kohlberg’s conventional level?
Children develop the ability to have abstract thoughts.
Morality is developed by pain and pleasure.
Children begin to consider what society considers moral and immoral.
Parental beliefs have no influence on children’s morality.
Answer
C
What did Carol Gilligan believe earlier researchers into morality had overlooked?
The justice perspective
Sympathetic reactions to moral situations
The perspective of females
How social environment affects how morality develops
Answer
C
What is one way to distinguish between psychology and sociology?
Psychology focuses on the mind, while sociology focuses on society.
Psychologists are interested in mental health, while sociologists are interested in societal functions.
Psychologists look inward to understand behavior while sociologists look outward.
All of the above
Answer
D
How did nearly complete isolation as a child affect Danielle’s verbal abilities?
She could not communicate at all.
She never learned words, but she did learn signs.
She could not understand much, but she could use gestures.
She could understand and use basic language like “yes” and “no.”
Answer
A
Short Answer
Think of a current issue or pattern that a sociologist might study. What types of questions would the sociologist ask, and what research methods might he employ? Now consider the questions and methods a psychologist might use to study the same issue. Comment on their different approaches.
Explain why it’s important to conduct research using both male and female participants. What sociological topics might show gender differences? Provide some examples to illustrate your ideas.
Further Research
Lawrence Kohlberg was most famous for his research using moral dilemmas. He presented dilemmas to boys and asked them how they would judge the situations. Visit http://openstax.org/l/Dilemma to read about Kohlberg’s most famous moral dilemma, known as the Heinz dilemma.
References
Cooley, Charles Horton. 1902. “The Looking Glass Self.” Pp. 179–185 in Human Nature and Social Order. New York: Scribner’s.
This dissertation is about the concept of self, specifically I seek to answer the question of what constitutes the self. To deal conceptually and theoretically with the concept of self is to consider what the nature of self is, how the self develops, and under what conditions. I explore the dialectical relationship between self and society at three levels, the complexity of social structure and its influence upon the formation of the self, the relationship between the self and the “generalized other,” and the relationship between the “I” and the “me.” The goal of the dissertation is a synthesis of theories of self which includes both a micro and a macro perspective. The model of self is based on Markus and Katayama’s (1994) Enculturation Model, modified extensively to include macro components. The model has four levels, moving from the social structure to the individual: collective reality, socio-psychological processes, local worlds, and habitual psychological tendencies. Part one and part two review symbolic interactionist theorists and structural Marxist theorists, respectively. Part three elaborates the model of self by plugging into the four levels each theorist, where appropriate. Marx’s base/superstructure conceptualization of social structure, Althusser’s materialist dialectic, and Mead’s conceptualization of mind are used to deal with collective reality. Althusser’s concept of “interpellation” is used to link the core ideologies associated with collective reality to socio-psychological practices occurring in the institutions of social structure. Stryker’s identity theory is used to connect social structure to the interaction networks in the local world, out of which individuals construct and identity and self. Lastly, all the theorists are brought together and their theories synthesized in the section dealing with habitual psychological tendencies.
How people define themselves in relation to others greatly influences how they think, feel, and behave, and is ultimately related to the construct of identity. Self-development is a continuous process throughout the lifespan; one’s sense of self may change, at least somewhat, throughout one’s life. Self-representation has important implications for socio-emotional functioning throughout the lifespan.
Philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910) was one of the first to postulate a theory of the self in The Principles of Psychology. James described two aspects of the self that he termed the “I Self” and “Me Self.” The I Self reflects what people see or perceive themselves doing in the physical world (e.g., recognizing that one is walking, eating, writing), whereas the Me Self is a more subjective and psychological phenomenon, referring to individuals’reflections about themselves (e.g. characterizing oneself as athletic, smart, cooperative). Other terms such as self-view, self-image, self-schema, and self-concept are also used to describe the self-referent thoughts characteristic of the Me Self. James further distinguished three components of the Me Self. These include: (1) the material self (e.g., tangible objects or possessions we collect for ourselves); (2) the social self (e.g., how we interact and portray ourselves within different groups, situations, or persons); and (3) the spiritual self (e.g., internal dispositions).
In the late twentieth century, researchers began to argue that the self is a cognitive and social construction. Cognitive perspectives suggest that one’s self-representation affects how one thinks about and gives meaning to experiences. Like James, psychologist Ulric Neisser distinguished between one’s self-representation connected to directly perceived experiences and that resulting from reflection on one’s experiences. The “ecological self,”connections of oneself to experiences in the physical environment, and the “interpersonal self,” connections of oneself to others through verbal or nonverbal communication, comprise direct perception of experience. Neisser proposed that these two types of self-representation develop early in infancy. Regarding reflections on one’s experiences, Neisser identified three types of self-representation that emerge in later infancy and childhood with cognitive and social maturation. The temporally “extended self”is based on memories of one’s past experiences and expectations for the future. The “private self”emerges with the understanding that one’s experiences are not directly perceived by others, but rather must be communicated to be shared. The “conceptual self,” one’s overarching theory or schema about oneself based on one’s reflection on experiences within social and cultural context, parallels terms such as self-concept and self-schema. In a 1977 article, psychologist Hazel Markus showed that one’s self-representation or self-schema guides information processing and influences one’s behavior.
As psychologist Roy Baumeister pointed out in Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self, because self-representation develops through one’s experience of the world, cultural and social factors are important in who we are and what we think about ourselves. Philosopher George Herbert Mead (in Mind, Self, and Society ) postulated that acquisition of self-representation emerges from socialization practices. Mead argued that individuals are socialized to adopt the values, standards, and norms of society through their ability to perceive what others and society would like them to be. Psychologists Tory Higgins, Ruth Klein, and Timothy Strauman further suggested that self-representation includes ideas about who we are (actual self), who we potentially could be (ideal self), and who we should be (ought self), both from one’s own perspective and from one’s perception of valued others’ perspectives. Discrepancies between the actual self and the ideal self or ought self may result in depression or anxiety, respectively.
Attachment theory likewise demonstrates how the self is socially constructed and, in turn, affects how people evaluate themselves (i.e., their self-esteem). Thus, relationships with others play an important role in people’s self-representation and self-esteem. Psychologist John Bowlby focused on caregiver-child relationships. Securely attached children feel safe in the environment and are able to actively explore their surroundings. Through experiencing secure attachment to a consistent caregiver, children develop a belief that they are good and worthy of love. This forms the basis of self-esteem. In contrast, an insecure attachment, in which the child does not feel confident in the caregiver’s protection, may result in feeling unworthy of love, anxious and distressed, and relatively low self-esteem.
The beginnings of self-representation emerge early in infancy, with the recognition that one is a separate physical being from others. Self-representation development continues throughout adulthood. Because self-representation involves social and cognitive constructions, changes in self-representation occur with individuals’ cognitive and social development. Psychologist Susan Harter has conducted highly influential research on the developmental course of self-representation. Excerpts from Harter’s summary of self-representation development from early childhood through adolescence (Harter, 1988) are presented in the Table 1.
In addition to cognitive and social maturation, changes in one’s social context may be equally important influences on self-representation. For example, Susan Cross (in “Self-construals, Coping, and Stress in Cross-cultural Adaptation”) notes that cultural values influence self-development. As an individual moves from one cultural context (e.g., Eastern culture) to another (e.g., Western culture), changes in self-representation may emerge. Individuals can learn to adopt a self-representation that embraces multiple cultures.
SEE ALSOAttachment Theory; Bowlby, John; Child Development; Developmental Psychology; James, William; Mead, George Herbert; Mental Health;Psychology; Self-Awareness Theory; Self-Consciousness, Private vs. Public; Self-Guides; Self-Perception Theory; Self-Schemata; Social Psychology; Stages of Development
Table 1
Early childhood
Middle childhood
Adolescence
Content
specific examples of observable physical characteristics, behaviors, preferences, etc.
trait labels, focusing on abilities, interpersonal characteristics, and emotional attributes
abstractions about the self involving psychological constructs, focusing on different relationships and roles
Organization
little coherence, due to inability to logically organize single self-descriptors
logically organized, integrated within domains that are differentiated from one another
ability to construct a formal theory of the self in which all attributes across and within role domains are integrated and should be internally consistent
Stability over time
not stable over time
recognition of and interest in continuity of self-attributes over time
Intrapsychic conflict and confusion over contradictions and instability within the self, concern with creation of an integrated identity
Basis
fantasies and wishes dominate descriptions of behaviors and abilities
use of social comparison due to ability to simultaneously observe and evaluate the self in relation to others
intense focus on the opinions that significant others hold about the self, especially peers and close friends
Baumeister, Roy F. 1986. Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bowlby, John. 1969. Attachment and Loss. New York: Basic Books.
Cross, Susan. 1995. Self-construals, Coping, and Stress in Cross-cultural Adaptation. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 26 (6): 673–697.
Harter, Susan. 1988. Developmental Processes in the Construction of the Self. In Integrative Processes and Socialization: Early to Middle Childhood, eds. Thomas D. Yawkey and James E. Johnson, 45–78. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Harter, Susan. 1999. The Construction of the Self: A Developmental Perspective. New York: Guilford.
Higgins, Tory, Ruth Klein, and Timothy Strauman. 1985. Self-concept Discrepancy Theory: A Psychological Model for Distinguishing Among Different Aspects of Depression and Anxiety. Social Cognition 3: 51–76.
James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt.
Kanagawa, Chie, Susan Cross, and Hazel Rose Markus. 2001. Who Am I?: The Cultural Psychology of the Conceptual Self. Personality and Social PsychologyBulletin 27 (1): 90–103.
Markus, Hazel. 1977. Self-schemata and Processing Information about the Self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35 (2): 63–78.
Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Neisser, Ulric. 1988. Five Kinds of Self Knowledge. Philosophical Psychology 1 (1): 35–59.
The popularity of such books as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, and Kathryn Harrison’s controversial The Kiss, has led columnists to call ours “the age of memoir.” And while some critics have derided the explosion of memoir as exhibitionistic and self-aggrandizing, literary theorists are now beginning to look seriously at this profusion of autobiographical literature. Informed by literary, scientific, and experiential concerns, How Our Lives Become Stories enhances knowledge of the complex forces that shape identity, and confronts the equally complex problems that arise when we write about who we think we are.
Using life writings as examples—including works by Christa Wolf, Art Spiegelman, Oliver Sacks, Henry Louis Gates, Melanie Thernstrom, and Philip Roth—Paul John Eakin draws on the latest research in neurology, cognitive science, memory studies, developmental psychology, and related fields to rethink the very nature of self-representation. After showing how the experience of living in one’s body shapes one’s identity, he explores relational and narrative modes of being, emphasizing social sources of identity, and demonstrating that the self and the story of the self are constantly evolving in relation to others. Eakin concludes by engaging the ethical issues raised by the conflict between the authorial impulse to life writing and a traditional, privacy-based ethics that such writings often violate.
Author / Editor information
Eakin Paul John :
Paul John Eakin is Ruth N. Halls Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University. He is the author of How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves; The New England Girl: Cultural Ideals in Hawthorne, Stowe, Howells, and James; Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention; and Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. He is the editor of The Ethics of Life Writing, also from Cornell; On Autobiography by Philippe Lejeune, and American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect.
Reviews
“In How Our Lives Become Stories, Paul John Eakin explains why he prefers ‘to think of self less as an entity and more as a kind of awareness in process.’… Eakin makes the ethics of reading integral to his project…. Eakin attends to those who are repelled by the ‘urge to confess’ and he talks about telling all as a cultural imperative that may, for example, be costly to the families of memoirists despite the therapeutic value such confessions might have. The ethics of privacy, the fact of relational lives, and the moral strictures that shadow autobiographical tellings bring Eakin to ask, ‘What is right and fair?’.”
“In this intriguing book, Paul John Eakin problematizes the notion of autobiography as ‘the story of the self’ and argues that in the act of narration one is engaged in a process of making a self…. How Our Lives Become Stories is a concise and engaging synopsis of the state of the art for anyone interested in the subject.”
Nancy K. Miller, author of Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death:
“Paul John Eakin has accomplished here what many preach and few practice: a genuinely cross- disciplinary study. How Our Lives Become Stories is a fascinating account of the creation of an autobiographical self seen from the multiple vantage points of literature, philosophy, neurology, and psychology. Eakin shows the infinitely complex ways in which we become and remember who we are in our bodies and our brains. Equally important in this pioneering study is Eakin’s penetrating analysis of how as a culture we negotiate the changing boundaries of private and public life. How Our Lives Become Stories offers a subtle and intelligent guide to the ethical dilemmas of disclosure and confession, memory and narrative, that pervade contemporary American life. A book for our times.”
“This fascinating new book… offers an engaging introduction to identity and narrative…. This is a well-written, timely, and progressive book—a surprisingly rare mix.”
H. Porter Abbott, University of California, Santa Barbara:
“Paul John Eakin has always been a few steps ahead of the rest of us. Now, with How Our Lives Become Stories, he has contributed another indispensable reassessment of the field of autobiography, this time keyed to the disturbingly fluid sense of the self that has emerged from recent research throughout the cognitive sciences.”
Susanna Egan, University of British Columbia:
“Rethinking what he calls ‘registers of self and self-experience,’ Paul John Eakin once again offers new and necessary work in autobiography studies. A most accessible and engaging book, How Our Lives Become Stories draws on recent scholarship in neurology, cognitive sciences, memory studies, developmental psychology, cultural narratives, and ethics in order to demonstrate that ‘there are many stories of self to tell, and more than one self to tell them.’.”
“When we write about our lives, the complex work of constructing the story is intertwined with all that constitutes the process of identity formation. In this book, Eakin expertly guides us through the thorny terrain of research in neurology, developmental psychology, and memory theory and revisits philosophy and literary theory. By the end of the journey, we have a far richer understanding of how individuals construct their lives and how they tell the story of that construction, as well as a sense of the dynamic interplay between the two processes.”
The reflexive self and culture: a critique
Matthew Adams
Identity in Question
edited by Anthony Elliott, Paul du Gay
Self and Identity: Personal, Social, and Symbolic
edited by Yoshihisa Kashima, Margaret Foddy, Michael Platow
Narrative Psychology, Trauma and the Study of Self/Identity.
This paper aims to provide an overview of a narrative psychological approach towards the study of self and identity. The narrative psychological approach can be classified as broadly social constructionist insofar as it attempts to examine the cultural structuration of individual experience. However, building on recent criticism of certain social constructionist approaches (such as discourse analysis), it is argued that these approaches tend to lose touch with the phenomenological and experiential realities of everyday, practical life. Accordingly, they overplay the disorderly, chaotic, variable and flux-like nature of self-experience. Drawing on recent research on traumatizing experiences such as living with serious illness, this paper argues that the disruption and fragmentation manifest in such experiences serves as a useful means of highlighting the sense of unity, meaning and coherence (the `narrative configuration’) more commonly experienced on an everyday level. Moreover, when disorder and incoherence prevail, as in the case of trauma, narratives are used to rebuild the individual’s shattered sense of identity and meaning.
Self and social identity.
Brewer, M. B., & Hewstone, M. (Eds.). (2004).
Blackwell Publishing.
Handbook of Dialogical Self Theory
edited by Hubert J. M. Hermans, Thorsten Gieser
Subjectivity: Theories of the self from Freud to Haraway
What am I referring to when I say ‘I’? This little word is so easy to use in daily life, yet it has become the focus of intense theoretical debate. Where does my sense of self come from? Does it arise spontaneously or is it created by the media or society? Do I really know myself?
This concern with the self, with our subjectivity, is now our main point of reference in Western societies. How has it come to be so important? What are the different ways in which we can approach subjectivity?
Nick Mansfield explores how our understanding of our subjectivity has developed over the past century. He looks at the work of key modern and postmodern theorists, including Freud, Foucault, Nietzsche, Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, and he shows how subjectivity is central to debates in contemporary culture, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, postmodernism and technology.
I am who? No topic is more crucial to contemporary cultural theory than subjectivity, and Nick Mansfield has written what has long been lacking-a lucid, smart introduction to work in the field.
Professor Simon During, University of Melbourne
Effortlessly and with humour, passion and panache, Mansfield offers the reader a telling, trenchantly articulate d account of the complex enigma of the self, without resorting to reductively simple critical cliches.This book, in its graceful movements between disciplines, ideas, and areas of interest, deserves to become a benchmark for all such student introductions for some time to come.
Julian Wolfreys, University of Florida
Nick Mansfield is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. He is co-author of Cultural Studies and the New Humanities (Oxford 1997) and author of Masochism: The art of power (Praeger 1997).
Aspects of identity: From the inner-outer metaphor to a tetrapartite model of the self
Nathan N. Cheeka § and Jonathan M. Cheekb aDepartment of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA; bDepartment of Psychology, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA
Self and Identity · July 2018 DOI: 10.1080/15298868.2017.1412347
The broad concept of the self is fundamental to psychology, serving as an anchor by which we perceive and make sense of the world as well as how we relate to and think about others. This book develops creative points of view of the self which have not previously been reviewed, creating a web of interconnected concepts under the umbrella of the self.
The various contributions to this book discuss these concepts, such as self-regulation, self-concept, self-esteem, self-awareness, social comparison, and self-reference. All of them are related to the self, and all would justify a review of their own, yet none of them have up to this point. As a whole, the book develops these new, creative points of view of the self—the integral (primary) component of our experience as social beings.
Offering numerous perspectives on various aspects of the self which can foster new thinking and research, this timely and important book makes suggestions for future research that will spur additional lines of work by readers. This book was originally published as a special issue of Self and Identity.
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In Social Theory Now edited by Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause and Isaac Ariail Reed, 201-226. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226475318-008
The article inquires into the uneasiness of sociological systems theory about culture. Culture alternatively is called the solution to the problem of double contingency (Parsons) and removed from this solution (Luhmann). It is shown that meaning is the more basic term whose description reveals a form rule of social systems which is only patterned, yet not understood by culture. Culture is a memory and control device of society. It may be conceived of as providing the distinction of correct versus incorrect behaviour. But who decides on the correctness or incorrectness of this distinction? Sociological thinking takes off where the cultural and the social are distinguished
System-autopoiesis-form: an introduction to Luhmann’s ‘Introduction to Systems Theory’ / Peter Gilgin — Editor’s preface to the German edition — I. Sociology and systems theory. The functionalism of system maintenance ; Parsons — II. General systems theory. The theory of open systems ; System as difference (formal analysis) ; Operational closure ; Self-organization, autopoiesis ; Structural coupling ; Observing ; Re-entry ; Complexity ; The idea of rationality — III. Time — IV. Meaning — V. Psychic and social systems. Problems of “action theory” ; Two modes of operation of autopoiesis — VI. Communication as a self-observing operation — VII. Double contingency, structure, conflict.
Description
Niklas Luhmann ranks as one of the most important sociologists and social theorists of the twentieth century. Through his many books he developed a highly original form of systems theory that has been hugely influential in a wide variety of disciplines. In Introduction to Systems Theory, Luhmann explains the key ideas of general and sociological systems theory and supplies a wealth of examples to illustrate his approach. The book offers a wide range of concepts and theorems that can be applied to politics and the economy, religion and science, art and education, organization and the family. Moreover, Luhmann’s ideas address important contemporary issues in such diverse fields as cognitive science, ecology, and the study of social movements. This book provides all the necessary resources for readers to work through the foundations of systems theory–no other work by Luhmann is as clear and accessible as this. There is also much here that will be of great interest to more advanced scholars and practitioners in sociology and the social sciences.
Niklas Luhmann (1927 – 1998) por Dirk Baecker
Dirk Baecker, Universidad de Witten/Herdecke, Alemania
Complexity and Recursivity in Brain, Mind, and Culture
Dirk Baecker
Between Niklas Luhmann and Heinz von Foerster there has been a certain dispute about whether it would be better to start theoretical work based on the notion of complexity or on the notion of recursivity. An interest in complexity, for Heinz von Foerster, means that books get longer and longer, whereas an interest in recursivity could mean to help sociology to help people get out of perhaps pathological eigen-values of their behavior. That would open venues for a different kind of social therapy in conflicts, for instance. Luhmann answered that an understanding of social systems evidently consisting of recursive processes cannot do without the question of what distinctions enable those systems to reduce and enhance the complexity of their environment in the first place. The presentation proposes to switch to a mathematical understanding of complexity as the pairing of variables, which are as related as irreducible to each other (Diophantus). We are looking for a kind of a calculus that describes the co-evolution of complexity in brain, mind, and culture as the result and precondition of their recursive reproduction. And we propose to add the systems references of the mental and the social to the current interest in cognitive sciences in the systems references of the brain and the machine in order to be able to understand the recursive complexity of the cognitive phenomena we are currently dealing with.
Self-Reference and (Non-)Trivialization. The Social Impact of Cybernetic Concepts
Dirk Baecker (Friedrichshafen), Wolfgang Coy (Berlin), Jan Müggenburg (Lüneburg), Claus Pias (Lüneburg)
Cybernetic Research in the 1960s faced a dilemma: On the one hand there was a growing awareness that the human being shares specific organizational principles with other biological and even technological systems and that the boundaries between them had started to blur. On the other hand cyberneticians such as Heinz von Foerster and the members of his Biological Computer Laboratory worried about a future society in which automated technologies could threaten individual liberty and constrain human creativity. As von Foerster famously put it: »If we don‘t act ourselves, we shall be acted upon«. Cybernetic Concepts of ›self-organziation‹ and ›non-trivial machines‹ can thus be read as a strategy to retain the humanistic idea of an autonomous subject within cybernetic research and theory. The Panel wants to discuss the original cybernetic concepts of ›self-organization‹ and ›non-trivialization‹ and examine their impact on other theories and debates outside the cybernetic core group during the 1960s and beyond.
Observers Amongst Themselves / Beobachter unter sich
The philosophers of German Idealism – Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel – each developed concepts that may be regarded as prolegomena to a theory of the observer. These culminated, especially in the case of Fichte, in the notion of the self as empty and therefore in need of an external world.
In this world, theoretical knowledge and practical action are never in perfect alignment, which means that the very process of observation and the observer himself can only be conceived in terms of difference and complexity. This is fortunate for cultural theory, which depends precisely on placing the observer in relation not only to other observers but also that which he observes.
Drawing on George Spencer-Brown’s formal calculus, Dirk Baecker shows that this provides a solid basis for the formulation of a theory of the observer. Building upon an original re-reading of the history of philosophy and theory, Baecker argues that it is possible to understand culture as the recognition of the position of an observer from the perspective of that position’s contingency. This book is nothing less than an impressive, formal foundation for a sociological theory of culture.
This paper presents a sociological and constructivist model of the organization of a firm. It presents five suggestions, and one problem, on which the theory of the firm may be based. These are history, business, culture, management, systems references and context respectively. It goes on to introduce George Spencer Brown’s notion of form as an appropriate device with which to handle the problem. Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems is considered to be an important step in developing a theory of differentiation that combines closure with structure, or self-referentiality with coupling, in showing how dependent communication emerges from independent contingency. The model then focuses on the idea of a contingent co-variation of the variables product, technology, organization, economy, society and individuals. It is developed with respect to five levels of re-entry: work, business, corporate culture, communication and philosophy. The idea of the paper is that models of this kind may be able to contribute to an analytical understanding of the synthesis of a firm by enabling an observer, who may be an employee, a manager, an investor, a client, a partner, an analyst or a consultant, to interact selectively with that firm and thereby take part in its reproduction and variation.
In: Niels Overgaard Lehmann, Lars Qvortrup, Bo Kampmann Walter (eds.), The Concept of the Network Society: Post-Ontological Reflections. Copenhagen: Samsfundslitteratur Press, 2007, pp. 95-112
A note on Max Weber’s unfinished theory of economy and society,
Baecker, Dirk (2007) :
economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter, ISSN 1871-3351, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), Cologne, Vol. 8, Iss. 2, pp. 27-30
The Intelligence of Ignorance in Self-Referential Systems
Dirk Baecker
in: Robert Trappl (ed.), Cybernetics and Systems ’94. Proceedings of the Twelfth European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research, Vienna, Austria, 5-8 April 1994, vol. II, Singapore: World Scientific, 1994, S. 1555-1562
WHAT IS HOLDING SOCIETIES TOGETHER? ON CULTURE FORMS, WORLD MODELS, AND CONCEPTS OF TIME
Dirk Baecker Translated by Stan Jones and Anja Welle
Journée d’étude avec Harrison C. White, “Social Embeddedness of Economic Transactions”, Maison Suger, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, June 10, 1997
A sociological reading of George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form consists in reading it as a theory of the observer. The paper looks at the “cross” established by the calculus of indications as a universal operator of general, or reflective, negation, presents second-order observation as a means to introduce indeterminacy as a precondition to communication and reads Spencer-Brown’s primary arithmetic and primary algebra as steps towards an understanding of the (socio-)logical space comprehending any arrangement and re-arrangement of indications and distinctions. A short overview of the history of the notion of “form,” or “idea,” as developed by Plato, disclaimed by Kant and Hegel, and employed by Marx, Simmel, and Cassirer shows that this notion from the beginning hides, and passes on, problems of self-reference, even if disguised as transcendental subjectivity. A way to deal with these problems may be shown by Spencer-Brown’s introduction of imaginary states within equations of the second degree. Imaginary states, or values, allow time, society, nature, and technology to be introduced as references accounting for, exploring, and exploiting the indeterminacy created by them. v5
Keywords: calculus of indications, form, nature, time, society, sociology
April 2008, updated July 15, 2008 “Systemdynamik und Systemethik – Gibt es eine Verantwortung für Soziale Systeme? Tagung für Walter L. Bühl”, Universität München, April 25-26, 2008
G. Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form is summarized and the philosophical implications examined. Laws of Form is a mathematical system which deals with the emergence of anything out of the void. It traces how a single distinction in a void leads to the creation of space, where space is considered at its most primitive, without dimension. This in turn leads to two seemingly self-evident “laws”. With those laws taken as axioms, first an arithmetic is developed, then an algebra based on the arithmetic. The algebra is formally equivalent to Boolean algebra, though it satisfies all 2-valued systems. By following the implications of the algebra to its logical conclusions, self-reference emerges within the system in the guise of re-entry into the system. Spencer-Brown interprets this re-entry as creating time in much the same way in which distinction created space. Finally the paper considers the question of self-reference as seen in Francisco Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy, which extended Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form to a 3-valued system.
Organization and Decision
Authors NIklas Luhmann, Dirk Baecker Editor Dirk Baecker Translated by Rhodes Barrett Edition illustrated Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2018 ISBN 1108472079, 9781108472074 Length 418 pages
Wozu Systeme?
Author Dirk Baecker
Publisher Kulturverl. Kadmos, 2002
ISBN 3931659232, 9783931659233
Length 189 pages
Observing Networks: A Note on Asymmetrical Social Forms
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Lifeworld, System, and Intersubjectivity: Jurgen Habermas’ Communication Theory of Society
Key Terms
John Dewey
George Herbert Mead
Theory of communicative Action
Social Interaction
Symbolic Interactionism
Action theory
Lifeworld phenomenology
Hermeneutic analysis
Conversational analysis
Ethnomethodology
Social constructivism
Dialogism
Discourse theory
Recognition theory
Objects relations theory
Communication
Language
Dialogical Intersubjectivity
Lifeworld vs System
Jürgen Habermas
Social theory
System
Lifeworld
Communication theory of society
Niklas Luhmann
Political power
Civil society
Dialogs
Dialectics
Self Culture Nature
Self Ritual Reality
Culture, Society, and Personality
First Person, Second Person, Third Person
AQAL Model of Ken wilber’s Integral Theory
Source: Intersubjectivity/ encyclopedia.com
Intersubjectivity
In its most general sense of that which occurs between or exists among conscious human actors, intersubjectivity is little more than a synonym for “the social.” As used by social scientists, however, intersubjectivity usually denotes some set of relations, meanings, structures, practices, experiences, or phenomena evident in human life that cannot be reduced to or comprehended entirely in terms of either subjectivity (concerning psychological states of individual actors) or objectivity (concerning brute empirical facts about the objective world). In this sense, the concept is usually intended to overcome an unproductive oscillation between methodological subjectivism and objectivism. The concept is especially predominant in social theories and theories of the self.
Although German idealist philosophers Johann Fichte (1762–1814) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) stressed the importance of intersubjectivity, the concept became influential in the twentieth century through the work of American social psychologist George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). Mead claimed that the development of cognitive, moral, and emotional capacities in human individuals is only possible to the extent that they take part in symbolically mediated interactions with other persons. For Mead, then, ontogenesis is essentially and irreducibly intersubjective. He also put forward a social theory explaining how social norms, shared meanings, and systems of morality arise from and concretize the general structures of reciprocal perspective-taking required for symbolic interaction. In short, he argued that intersubjectivity—understood specifically in terms of linguistically mediated, reflexively grasped social action—furnishes the key to understanding mind, self, and society.
Although the work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Ludwig Wittgenstein(1889–1951) was often more directly inspirational, Mead’s bold claim that self and society are irreducibly intersubjective has been rearticulated and supported by many distinct subsequent inter-subjectivist approaches. Action theory, symbolic interactionism, lifeworld phenomenology, hermeneutic analysis, conversational analysis, ethnomethodology, social constructivism, dialogism, discourse theory, recognition theory, and objects relations theory all take inter-subjectivity as central and irreducible. For example, Erving Goffman(1922–1982) insisted that we need a microanalysis of face-to-face interactions in order to properly understand the interpersonal interpretation, negotiation, and improvisation that constitute a society’s interaction order. While macro-and mesostructural phenomena may be important in setting the basic terms of interaction, social order according to Goffman is inexplicable without central reference to agents’ interpretations and strategies in actively developing their own action performances in everyday, interpersonal contexts. Harold Garfinkel and other ethnomethodologists likewise insist that social order is only possible because of the strongly normative character of a society’s particular everyday interaction patterns and norms.
Widely diverse social theorists influenced by phenomenology also center their analyses in intersubjective phenomena and structures. Most prominently, Alfred Schutz (1899–1959) sought to show how the lifeworld of persons—the mostly taken-for-granted knowledge, knowhow, competences, norms, and behavioral patterns that are shared throughout a society—delimits and makes possible individual action and interaction. In particular, he sought to analyze the way in which the constitutive structures of any lifeworld shape social meanings and personal experiences, by attending to the lifeworld’s spatiotemporal, intentional, semantic, and role typifying and systematizing dimensions. Other theories analyze different aspects of the lifeworld: how experience and knowledge is embodied (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), the intersubjective construction of both social and natural reality (Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann), the social construction of mind and mental concepts (Jeff Coulter), and the social power and inequalities involved in symbolic capital (Pierre Bourdieu). Finally, Jürgen Habermas emphasizes the linguistic basis of the lifeworld, constructing a theory of society in terms of the variety of types of communicative interaction, the pragmatic presuppositions of using language in order to achieve shared understandings and action coordinations with others, and the role of communicative interaction for integrating society. While acknowledging that some types of social integration function independently of communicative action—paradig-matically economic and bureaucratic systems—Habermas claims that intersubjective communication is fundamental in, and irreplaceable for, human social life.
Diverse prominent theories of the self are united in supporting Mead’s claim that the self is developed and structured intersubjectively. Martin Buber’s (1878–1965) distinction between the different interpersonal attitudes involved in the I-Thou stance and the I-It stance leads to the insight that the development and maintenance of an integral sense of personal identity is fundamentally bound up with the capacity to interact with others from a performative attitude, rather than an objectivating one. Mead’s claim is also developed in diverse theories of the self: Habermas’s account of interactive competence and rational accountability, Axel Honneth’s and Charles Taylor’s theories of interpersonal recognition and identity development, Daniel Stern’s elucidation of the interpersonal world of infants, and psychoanalytic object-relations theories stressing the dependence of the ego on affective interpersonal bonds between self and significant others.
SEE ALSOBourdieu, Pierre; Goffman, Erving; Habermas, Jürgen; Mead, George Herbert; Other, The
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Schutz, Alfred. 1962. The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson. Vol. 1 of Collected Papers. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.
Schutz, Alfred. 1962. Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. I. Schutz. Vol. 3 of Collected Papers. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.
Schutz, Alfred. 1962. Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen. Vol. 2 of Collected Papers. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.
Stern, Daniel N. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Winnicott, Donald Woods. 1964. The Child, the Family, and the Outside World.Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.
Christopher F. Zurn
Source: JÜRGEN HABERMAS / SEP
Habermas distinguishes the “system” as those predefined situations, or modes of coordination, in which the demands of communicative action are relaxed in this way, within legally specified limits. The prime examples of systemic coordination are markets and bureaucracies. In these systemically structured contexts, nonlinguistic media take up the slack in coordinating actions, which proceeds on the basis of money and institutional power—these media do the talking, as it were, thus relieving actors of the demands of strongly communicative action. The term “lifeworld,” by contrast, refers to domains of action in which consensual modes of action coordination predominate. In fact, the distinction between lifeworld and system is better understood as an analytic one that identifies different aspects of social interaction and cooperation (1991b). “Lifeworld” then refers to the background resources, contexts, and dimensions of social action that enable actors to cooperate on the basis of mutual understanding: shared cultural systems of meaning, institutional orders that stabilize patterns of action, and personality structures acquired in family, church, neighborhood, and school (TCA 1: chap. 6; 1998b, chap. 4).
Habermas’s system-lifeworld distinction has been criticized from a number of perspectives. Some have argued that the distinction oversimplifies the interpenetrating dynamics of social institutions (e.g., McCarthy 1991, 152–80). Others attacked the distinction as covertly ideological, concealing forms of patriarchal and economic domination (e.g., Fraser 1985). Habermas’s attempt to clarify the analytic character of the distinction only goes partway toward answering these criticisms (1991b).
Source: COMMUNICATIVE ACTION THEORY. A SYSTEM – LIFEWORLD COMPATIBILITY OR INCOMPATIBILITY?
3.5. System and Lifeworld
An important subtitle of Habermas’s theory is the concept of “lifeworld”. He used this concept inspired by Husserl (Brand, 1973, p. 143), who first used it in his work “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”, and then by Schütz, who brought a new interpretation to the concept. For Husserl, the world of life is a space that exists before theory / science (Schutz, 1962, p.120), includes all entities, arranged in space-time dimensions, and and is the “soil” for all socail human experience (Husserl, 1970; Schutz, 1970, s. 116).
Habermas, on the other hand, thinks that the interactions between people in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) do not take place in the consciousness of individuals (Husserl 1969: 12), but in a common space. The lifeworld (Habermas, 1971). According to him, one of the places where the negative effects of rationalization underlying modernity, such as cultural transformation, are seen most intensely is the lifeworld, which is an area of interpersonal interaction. Habermas, who attaches great importance to this sphere as the area where social rationalization takes place through language, argues that this area is occupied by the system and its subsystems such as power and money (Habermas, 1984d, Vol II: 318) and shows that this space is not rationalized sufficiently in a communicative sense (Habermas, 1984e Vol. II: 119, 173).
Husserl explains the reason behind his development of the concept of the “lifeworld” as an effort to find a solution to the separation of the objective- scientific field from the subjective lifeworld as the cause of an increasing crisis of meaning in the field of European science.
Habermas, on the other hand, states that he developed the concept of the “lifeworld” against the possible invasion of the private sphere, where agreement- oriented communicative action is carried out, from the system and its subsystems such as power and economy, which operate with reason for success. Because the system and its subsystems has the possibility to occupy private space in conflict situations that prevent his success (Habermas, 1984f II,: 318-331).
This means that, with the concepts of System and Life world, Habermas tries to explain how a two-level social structure can coexist. This effort is in fact the duality such as individual-society, subject-object, theory-practice, nomothetic-idiographic, natural sciences, social sciences and structure-subject, which both philosophy and sociology have worked on and tried to overcome. These oppositions appear, for example, as the opposition of science and social sciences in the Enlightenment, as the opposition of the nation-state, individual- society in the French revolution, and as the product of human development in the technological field in the industrial revolution, the opposition of the acting and transforming subject and the object connected to it.
The opposition Habermas tries to overcome or balance is the opposition of the system, which is the field of material production, and the life world, which is opposed to it and consists of the private and public sphere* where symbolic production is realized. Taking these two concepts together and explaining their contrasts will make the meaning of these concepts for communicative action theory more visible.
Habermas, in his two-strucrured social theory, explains the duality of symbolic and material reproduction of society through the “lifeworld” and “system” concepts.
“System and lifeworld are each evolutionarily and structurally differentiated social spheres, subsystems or even sovereign territories that are either systemically or socially integrated” (Habermas, 1981: 140).
For the structure of modern, differentiated societies, this means that the system and lifeworld exist in them as concretely separated systems of action and can be set in relation to one another (in the sense of: boundaries, primacy, superiority / subordination, mutual penetration interpenetration, mediatization, colonization.
The economy and the state administration are systemically integrated, formally organized sub-systems of purposeful rational action, which are driven by money and power as media of action release. They serve the material reproduction, disturbances of the same are to be understood as system crises or control crises. These systems are subject to the imperatives of increasing complexity. People have official roles and must seek certain goals, even if sometimes with ethical restraints.
The lifeworld on the other hand is the daily world that we share with others. This includes all facets of life, apart from organised or institution-driven ones. For example, family life, culture and informal social exchange. It is the sphere within which we lead much of our social and individual life (Habermas, 1984g, Vol. II: 126). It’s based on a implicit foundation of shared values and understandings. that give us the ability to perform actions that we know others will understand. Thus daily actions that we produce in the lifeworld are generally communicative in nature (Cooke, 1998).
If one follows the thesis of the colonization of the lifeworld, reifying effects only arise when systemically established obligations impose oneself into the lifeworld.
“It is not the uncoupling of media-steered subsystems and of their organizational forms from the lifeworld that leads to the one-sided rationalization or reification of everyday communicative practice, but only the penetration of forms of economic and administrative rationality into areas of action that resist being converted over to the media of money and power because they are specialized in cultural transmission, social integration, and child rearing, and remain dependent on mutual understanding as a mechanism for coordinating action” (Habermas, 1984h, Vol. II: 330).
Habermas’s goal with the rationalization of the lifeworld and the system is the rationalization of both in their own unique way. On the one hand, the structures of the system should become more complex by differentiating, on the other hand, the lifeworld should provide an environment for free and independent communication and ensure that the best arguments are accepted as a result of consensus. According to Habermas, this is a formulation that will ensure that the life-world and the system balance each other and will have a positive effect on their development.
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
My Related posts
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Semiotic Self and Dialogic Self
Phenomenological Sociology
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Drama Theory: Choices, Conflicts, and Dilemmas
Drama Theory: Acting Strategically
Drama Therapy: Self in Performance
Dialog and Dialectics
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Victor Turner’s Postmodern Theory of Social Drama
Understanding Metatheater
Society as Communication: Social Systems Theory of Niklas Luhmann
Cybernetics, Autopoiesis, and Social Systems Theory
Frames in Interaction
Key Sources of Research
On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action.
In his Theory of Communicative Action, Jürgen Habermas proposes a theory of “communicative action” and sets it within a concept of society he calls “lifeworld.” In both his Theory of Communicative Action and later in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas describes the “lifeworld” as the basic conception of society, to be amended or supplemented only for cause. In addition, Habermas argues that in the course of social evolution, systems of economic and political action arise whereby action is coordinated by the consequences of self-interested action, rather than consensual understanding. This chapter explores Habermas’s idea of such “systems” based on his reading of Talcott Parsons. It also examines how Habermas integrates the lifeworld and system concepts into his model of system/lifeworld interchange. It argues that the critical model developed by Habermas in Theory of Communicative Action is more functionalist than straightforwardly normative.
‘System, Lifeworld, and Habermas’s “Communication Theory of Society”’,
In his Theory of Communication Action, Jürgen Habermas talks about a “reconstructive social theory which employs a dual perspective”—the perspective of “system” and “lifeworld.” Habermas’s proposed theory “should explain how the reconstructed normative self-understanding of modern legal orders connects with the social reality of highly complex societies.” In developing the “communication theory of society” in which his “discourse theory of law” is to be situated, Habermas departs from his earlier understanding of the relation between system and lifeworld. This chapter explores Habermas’s concepts of system and lifeworld as well as his communication theory of society. It considers his “model of the circulation of political power”, which presents the idea of “civil society” as an elaboration of the lifeworld’s “private sphere.” It also discusses Habermas’s reference to the three “structural components” (culture, society, and personality) and argues that his notion of “system” and “lifeworld” is similar to the post-Parsons “autopoietic” systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Finally, the chapter rejects the concept of lifeworld as separate social sphere.
Intersubjectivity and critical consciousness: Remarks on Habermas’s theory of communicative action.
Wagner, Gerhard & Zipprian, Heinz (1991).
Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 34 (1):49 – 62.
This chapter describes Jürgen Habermas’ approach to intersubjectivism, presenting his theories of communicative action and discourse ethics as a response to his own earlier call for a form of rationality that is suited to critical social theory. Some implications that Habermas’ ideas hold for leadership are considered. A number of practical and conceptual challenges to Habermas’ conclusions, which have been offered by writers who broadly share his intersubjectivist commitment, are outlined. These challenges are used to augment the understanding of intersubjectivist leadership already presented. The chapter ends with some general reflections concerning moral philosophy and leadership, which have been garnered from the three chapters of Part II.
A Habermasian perspective on joint meaning making online : what does it offer and what are the difficulties?
Hammond, Michael. (2015)
International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 10 (3). pp. 223-237.
The basic categories of Habermas’s theory are, then, those of a broadly conceived sociological theory of action, which, however, also incorporates social historical and system-theoretical, as well as structuralist elements. Although he borrows some concepts from Talcott Parsons (Holmwood, 2009) and often mentions Niklas Luhmann, his conception is closer to those of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens (Outhwaite, 2015).
What Habermas (1987b: 553) stresses is that system theories and theories of action ‘isolate and overgeneralize’ aspects of modernity (system and lifeworld, respectively). When, here and elsewhere, he emphasizes the role of language, he does not intend to reduce “social action to the interpretive accomplishments of participants in communication … assimilating action to speech, interaction to conversation” (Habermas, 1987a: 143). This is rather the way in which action is ‘coordinated.’
Intersubjectivity and interculturality: a conceptual link
Author: Xiaodong Dai Date: Jan. 2010 From: China Media Research(Vol. 6, Issue 1) Publisher: Edmondson Intercultural Enterprises
Intersubjectivity reflects the condition of all human existence and constitutes the basis of social communication. Interculturality opens up new social space and constitutes the largest and most productive platform for intercultural dialogue. This paper attempts to define intersubjectivity and interculturality, interpret their implications and analyze how they interact with each other. Intersubjectivity refers to the interpersonal connection between individuals who are attuned to one another and construct social relations. The polysemic nature of intersubjectivity suggests that it not only embodies mutuality and consensuses but also disagreements and tensions. In like manner, interculturality refers to the complex connection between cultures whose members negotiate to reach agreements and achieve reciprocal interactions. It implies commonalities and similarities as well as differences, contrasts and conflicts. Intersubjectivity and interculturality share a similar structure, but have different operational mechanisms. The key difference lies in their frames of reference. With more exposure to other culture/cultures, communicators can broaden their horizons, reduce cultural distance and further transform intersubjectivity into interculturality. In establishing interculturality, they need to be open to other cultures and transcend monocultural ways of thinking. Key words: intersubjectivity, transformation, interculturality
Communication as analytical unit in Luhmann and Habermas
Sergio Pignuoli-Ocampo1
1Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas y Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. (CONICET-UBA-IIGG). spignuoli@conicet.gov.ar
Reconstructive Social Theory: Habermas, Bhaskar, and Caillé
16th November 2016
This is a guest blog post by Professor Frederic Vandenberghe of Sociology in the Institute of Social and Political Studies at the State University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Frederic is a leading expert in the field of Critical Realism. He has been working on CR and the social sciences since 1994 when he completed his doctorate in Sociology from Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales. His work operates at the intersection of philosophy and sociology with a special interest in hermeneutics, phenomenology, and critical realism. He recently published a series of essays in a book titled, “What’s Critical about Critical Realism? Essays in Reconstructive Social Theory”.
Husserl and transcendental intersubjectivity: A response to the linguistic-pragmatic critique
Zahavi, D. (2001a).
(E. A. Behnke, Trans.). Athens, OH: Ohio UP.
Phenomenology and the problems of intersubjectivity.
Zahavi, D. (2001b).
In S. Crowell, L. Embree, & S. J. Julian (Eds.), The Reach of Reflection: Issues for Phenomenology’s Second Century. Purchased and downloaded at: http://www.electronpress.com
Individuation through socialization: George Herbert Mead‟s theory of subjectivity.
Habermas, J. (1995).
In J. Habermas (ed.), Postmetapysical Thinking. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 149-204.
Some further clarifications of the concept of communicative rationality.
Habermas, J. (1996).
In J. Habermas (ed.), On the Pragmatics of Communication. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. pp. 307-342.
Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy.
Habermas, J. (1997).
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Introduction: Realism after the Linguistic Turn.
Habermas, J. (2003).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (2008), Truth and Justification. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. pp. 1-51.
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Goffman, E. (1971).
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Reflections on the linguistic foundation of sociology: The Christian Gauss lecture.
Habermas, J. (1971).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (2001), On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 3-103.
Wahrheitstheorien.
Habermas, J. (1972).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (1984), Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. pp. 27-183.
Reflections on communicative pathology.
Habermas, J. (1974a).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (2001), On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 131-170.
Können komplexe Gesellschaften eine vernünftige Identität ausbilden?,
Habermas, J.(1974b).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (1976), Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. pp. 92-126.
Introduction: Some difficulties in the attempt to link theory and praxis.
Habermas, J. (1974c).
In J. Habermas (ed.), Theory and Practice. London: Heinemann. pp. 1-40. Forchtner Page |36
Towards a reconstruction of historical materialism.
Habermas, J. (1975).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (1979), Communication and the Evolution of Society. Heinemann: London. pp. 130- 177.
Habermas, J. (1976a). Überlegungen zum evolutionären Stellenwert des Rechts. In J. Habermas (ed.), Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. pp. 260-267.
What is Universal Pragmatics?
Habermas, J. (1976b).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (1979), Communication and the Evolution of Society. London: Heinemann. pp. 1-68.
A reply to my critics.
Habermas, J. (1982).
In J.B. Thompson and D. Held (eds.), Habermas: Critical Debates.
London/Basingstoke: MacMillan Press. pp. 219-283.
The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society.
Habermas, J. (1984).
London: Heinemann.
The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II: Lifeworld and System.
Habermas, J. (1987).
Cambridge: Polity Press.
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures.
Habermas, J. (1990).
Cambridge: Polity Press.
The Gulf War: Catalyst for a new German normalcy.
Habermas, J. (1993).
In M. Pensky (ed.), The Past as Future. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 5-31.
Kollektive Lernprozesse: Studien zur Grundlegung einer Soziologischen Lerntheorie.
Adequate accounts of intersubjectivity must recognise that it is a social, cognitive, and affective phenomenon. I draw on Jürgen Habermas’ formal-pragmatic theory of meaning and of the lifeworld as an alternative to phenomenological approaches. However, his conception of the lifeworld reflects a cognitivist bias. Intersubjectivity cannot be adequately conceptualised merely in terms of our mutual accountability and exchange or reasons; the affective dimension of our social interactions must also be recognised. I propose to redress this shortcoming by taking account of empirical research on intersubjectivity, joint attention, and attachment. This leads me to suggest supplementing the three Habermasian validity claims to truth, normative rightness, and sincerity with a fourth, a claim to attachment, which fits with understanding the earliest infant interactions in terms of altercentric participation. Since an adequate account of the social nature of linguistic communication must do justice not only to the lifeworld as a shared background of intelligibility, but also as a background against which differences in point of view are articulated, I conclude with a brief look at the ontogeny of perspective. Keywords: lifeworld; intersubjectivity; validity claims; attachment; cognition; affect; perspective; J. Habermas; M. Merleau-Ponty
The close relationship between motion (bodily movement) and emotion (feelings) is not an etymological coincidence. While moving ourselves, we move others; in observing others move – we are moved ourselves. The fundamentally interpersonal nature of mind and language has recently received due attention, but the key role of (e)motion in this context has remained something of a blind spot. The present book rectifies this gap by gathering contributions from leading philosophers, psychologists and linguists working in the area. Framed by an introducing prologue and a summarizing epilogue (written by Colwyn Trevarthen, who brought the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity to a wider audience some 30 years ago) the volume elaborates a dynamical, active view of emotion, along with an affect-laden view of motion – and explores their significance for consciousness, intersubjectivity, and language. As such, it contributes to the emerging interdisciplinary field of mind science, transcending hitherto dominant computationalist and cognitivist approaches.
COMMUNICATIVE ACTION THEORY.
A SYSTEM – LIFEWORLD COMPATIBILITY OR INCOMPATIBILITY?
A Calculus for Self Reference, Autopoiesis, and Indications
Source: FIVE TYPES OF SYSTEMS PHILOSOPHY
Bunge’s three types of systems philosophies are expanded to five:
atomism (the world is an aggregate of elements, without wholes; to be understood by analysis),
holism (ultimate reality is a whole without parts, except as illusory manifestations; apprehended intuitively),
emergentism (parts exist together and their relations, connections, and organized interaction constitute wholes that continue to depend upon them for their existence and nature; understood first analytically and then synthetically),
structuralism (the universe is a whole within which all systems and their processes exist as depending parts; understanding can be aided by creative deduction),
and organicism (every existing system has both parts and whole, and is part of a larger whole, etc.; understanding the nature of whole-part polarities is a clue to understanding the nature of systems.
How these five types correlated with theories of conceptual systems and methodologies is also sketched.
Any indication implies duality, we cannot produce a thing without coproducing what it is not, and every duality implies triplicity: what the thing is, what it isn’t, and the boundary between them. Thus you cannot indicate anything without defining two states, and you cannot define two states without creating three elements. None of these exists in reality, or separately from the others.
George Spencer Brown Laws of Form Cognizer Co. 1994Limited Edition
Preface to the 1994 Limited Edition page VII
A generation has grown up since Laws of Form was first published in English. Human awareness has changed in the meantime, and what could not be said then it can be said now. In particular, I can now refer to the falseness of current scientific doctrine, what I call scientific duplicity: that appearance and reality are somehow different.
Since there is no means, other than appearance, for studying reality, they are definitely the same.
But the scientist not only supposes they are different, and that he is „gradually finding out“ the one by means of the other; he supposes also that awareness (which he mistakenly confuses with consciousness) of the reality-apperance is something that is different again; and that the universe might have „existed“ for „billions of years“ amid total unawareness of what was going on.
This I shall have two call scientific triplicity. Again by definition, there can be no appearance that is not an awareness of appearance, and, of course, no awareness that is not an appearance of awareness. And since the scale of real-unreal cannot apply to appearance in general (as it can distinguish, for example, between real and toy soldiers), whatever appears, as appearance, must be equally real and unreal.
Reversing the false distinctions, we arrive at what I call the triple identity, notably the definitional identity of reality, appearance, and awareness. It is remarkable how all the „building blocks“ of existence appear as triunions. (Compare the so-called „divine trinity“ of Christianity, which is merely a summary of our perception of how to construct the formation of any thing whatever.) It ist he triunion that apparently provides the magic inflatory principle that makes it all seem like it’s really there.
The word „there“ supplies the trick. There exists and reality in no „where“ fort he „there“ to be. Nor is there any „when“. All these are constructions of imagination, inventions of apparently stable formations for the apparent appearances. Hence another expression of the triple identity: the identity of imaginability, possibility, and actuality.
The universe is simply what would appear if it could.
Its laws are the laws of the possible, called by Sakyamuni the links of conditioned coproduction, called by me the calculus of indications. Each teaches exactly the same teaching, how what cannot possibly be anything comes to appear as if it were something. Since there is only one way this can happen, the teaching is always the same. Unfortunately, human beings have a childish propensity to turn what ever they learn into religions, and when this happens the original teaching is corrupted.
A thing is not possible unless it is imaginable, and we could never confirm that it was possible unless it appeared in actuality. Thus what is possible will always be found to exist, and its actual existence (for exemple helium, carbon 60) will be discovered soon after its possibility has been imagined. What exists is formally constructed by postulating the imagination of a hypothetical being that is supposed to perceive it, and different beings will bring about the construction of different existences. (Not only physical existence, but all creation is subject to the same law.) A totally different being will construct a completely different existence: „The world of the happy is altogether different from the world of the unhappy“. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 1922
„We“ make an existence by taking apart the elements of a triple identity. The existence ceases when we put them together again.
Sakyamuni, the only other author who evidently discovered these laws, remarked in this context, „Existence is duality: nonexistence is non-duality. (The more a being cultivates consciousness at the expense of awareness, the stupider it becomes. Western civilisation has promoted consciousness and neglected awareness almost to the point of complete idiocy. I have had to spend the greater part of a lifetime undoing and reversing the destructive ravages of my one-sided education.)
Any indication implies duality, we cannot produce a thing without coproducing what it is not, and every duality implies triplicity: what the thing is, what it isn’t, and the boundary between them. Thus you cannot indicate anything without defining two states, and you cannot define two states without creating three elements. None of these exists in reality, or separately from the others.
In reality there never was, never could be, and never will be anything at all. There! You always knew with its. No other answer makes sense.
All I teach is the consequences of there being nothing. The perennial mistake of Western philosophers has been to suppose, with no justification whatever, that nothing cannot have any consequences. (The idea that the creation must be a consequence of „something“ is moronic. No thing can have any consequence whatever. If there were originally something, it would poison the whole creative process. Only nothing is unstable enough to give origin to endless concatenations of different appearances.) On the contrary: not only it can: it must. And one of the consequences of there being nothing is the inevitable appearance of „all this“. No problem!
Page XXIX: A Note on the Mathematical Approach
The theme of this book is that the universe comes into being when a space is severed to or taken apart. The skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside. So does the circumference of a circle in a plane. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin to reconstruct, with an accuracy and coverage that appear almost uncanny, the basic forms underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science, and can begin to see how familiar laws of our own experience follow inexorably from the original act of severance. The act is itself already remembered, even unconsciously, as our first attempt to distinguish different things in a world where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn any where we please. At this stage the universe cannot be distinguished from how we act upon it and the world may seem like shifting sand beneath our feet.
Although all forms, and thus all universities, are possible, and any particular form is mutable, it becomes evident that the laws relating such forms of the same in any universe. It is this sameness, the idea that we can find a reality which is independent of how the universe actually appears, that lends such fascination to the study of mathematics. That mathematics, in common with other art forms, can lead us beyond ordinary existence, and can show us something of the structure in which all creation hangs together, is no new idea but mathematical texts generally begin the story somewhere in the middle, leaving the reader to pick up the thread as best he can. Here the story is traced from the beginning.
An extension of the calculus of indications (of G. Spencer Brown) is presented to encompass all occurrences of self-referential situations. This is done through the introduction of a third state in the form of indication, a state seen to arise autonomously by self-indication. The new extended calculus is fully developed, and some of its consequences for systems, logic and epistemology are discussed.
A Calculus for Autopoiesis
Dirk Baecker
This paper looks once more at the understanding and definition of autopoiesis as developed by Humberto R. Maturana, Francisco J. Varela, and Ricardo Uribe (Varela/Maturana/Uribe 1974; Maturana 1981; Maturana/Varela 1980; Varela 1979a). We will not go into the philology of comparing the different versions of the understanding and definition of autopoiesis, into the different attempts to get its record straight, or into the question whether not only living but also social systems may be considered autopoietic by well-defined criteria (Zeleny 1981; Zeleny/Hufford 1992; Fleischaker 1992; Geyer 1992; Bourgine/Stewart 2004; Luisi 2003). We will instead focus on just one question: whether George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (2008) presents us with a possibility of translating Maturana’s definition into a kind of a calculus. Francisco J. Varela tried to do this, only to discover that he had to add a further autonomous state to the calculus of indications to make it fit for modeling self reference (Varela 1975, 1979b). We share criticism of this attempt that addresses the idea that the distinction itself, in the form identical to the observer (Spencer-Brown 2008: 63) is already the autonomous state Varela thought he needed to introduce (Kauffman 1978; Varga von Kibéd 1989).
Instead of going into this extended discussion at this point, we turn to another discussion on social systems as autopoietic systems that establish and unfold their own paradox into a play with their distinctions, frames, and values that equals their iterative reproduction (Luhmann 1990a, 1992; Hutter 1979: 194-200, 1989: 28-33, 1990). That is, we look again at Maturana’s emphasis on components, networks, and boundaries and try to figure out how thisemphasis can translate into an understanding of form that knows about self-reference, paradox, and play.
in: Dirk Baecker und Birger P. Priddat (eds.), Ökonomie der Werte: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Michael Hutter, Marburg: Metropolis, 2013, 249-267,
Volume 28, Issue 6 Special Issue: Autopoiesis, Systems Thinking and Systemic Practice: The Contribution of Francisco Varela November/December 2011 Pages 646-662
in: Dirk Baecker und Birger P. Priddat (eds.), Ökonomie der Werte: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Michael Hutter, Marburg: Metropolis, 2013, 249-267,
A Sociological Reading of George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form
Baecker, Dirk,
(January 4, 2021).
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1987. References. Communication Theory, pages 341-353.
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Speculative Grammar, Critical Logic, and Speculative Rhetoric
The Syllabus diagram
The Welby diagram
The Meaning of Meaning
Source: Semiosis and pragmatism: Toward a dynamic concept of meaning
Source: Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs: Essays in Comparative Semiotics / Gerard Deledalle
Source: The Biological Substrate of Icons, Indexes, and Symbols in Animal Communication: A Neurosemiotic Analysis of Vervet Monkey Alarm Calls
Source: The Biological Substrate of Icons, Indexes, and Symbols in Animal Communication: A Neurosemiotic Analysis of Vervet Monkey Alarm Calls
Categories
Firstness
Secondness
Thirdness
Source: A Visual Model of Peirce’s 66 Classes of Signs Unravels His Late Proposal of Enlarging Semiotic Theory
The Semiotic Triangle
Source: A SEMIOTIC THEORY OF INSTITUTIONALIZATION
The Semiotic Relationship
Source: The Biosemiotic Approach in Biology: Theoretical Bases and Applied Models
Trichotomies
S – Sign Itself
S-O – Sign and Object Relation
S-I – Sign and Interpretant Relation
Source: A Visual Model of Peirce’s 66 Classes of Signs Unravels His Late Proposal of Enlarging Semiotic Theory
10 Sign Trichotomies
Source: A Visual Model of Peirce’s 66 Classes of Signs Unravels His Late Proposal of Enlarging Semiotic Theory
Relations
Monadic
Dyadic
Triadic
10 Classes of Sign
Representamen: Qualisign, Sinsign, Legisign
Interpretant: Rheme, Dicent, Argument
Object: Icon, Index, Symbol
Source: Notes for a Dynamic Diagram of Charles Peirce’s Classifications of Signs
Source: Notes for a Dynamic Diagram of Charles Peirce’s Classifications of Signs
Source: Notes for a Dynamic Diagram of Charles Peirce’s Classifications of Signs
Source: Notes for a Dynamic Diagram of Charles Peirce’s Classifications of Signs
28 Classes of Sign
Source: On diagrams for Peirce’s 10, 28 and 66 classes of signs
66 Classes of Signs
Source: On diagrams for Peirce’s 10, 28 and 66 classes of signs
Source: Images, diagrams and metaphors: hypoicons in the context of Peirce’s 66- fold classification of signs
Source: A Foundational Mindset: Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness
Truth, Beauty and Goodness
Source: Peirce, Pragmatism, and The Right Way of Thinking
Source: Peirce, Pragmatism, and The Right Way of Thinking
Source: Peirce, Pragmatism, and The Right Way of Thinking
Source: From Signals to Knowledge and from Knowledge to Action: Peircean Semiotics and the Grounding of Cognition
Source: From Signals to Knowledge and from Knowledge to Action: Peircean Semiotics and the Grounding of Cognition
Source: From Signals to Knowledge and from Knowledge to Action: Peircean Semiotics and the Grounding of Cognition
Source: From Signals to Knowledge and from Knowledge to Action: Peircean Semiotics and the Grounding of Cognition
Source: From Signals to Knowledge and from Knowledge to Action: Peircean Semiotics and the Grounding of Cognition
Source: From Signals to Knowledge and from Knowledge to Action: Peircean Semiotics and the Grounding of Cognition
Source: From Signals to Knowledge and from Knowledge to Action: Peircean Semiotics and the Grounding of Cognition
Source: From Signals to Knowledge and from Knowledge to Action: Peircean Semiotics and the Grounding of Cognition
Source: From Signals to Knowledge and from Knowledge to Action: Peircean Semiotics and the Grounding of Cognition
Source: From Signals to Knowledge and from Knowledge to Action: Peircean Semiotics and the Grounding of Cognition
Source: From Signals to Knowledge and from Knowledge to Action: Peircean Semiotics and the Grounding of Cognition
Peirce’s universal categories:
A phenomenological take on gesture semiotics
Source: Peirce’s universal categories: On their potential for gesture theory and multimodal analysis
This section serves to lay out some of the main tenets concerning Peirce’s UCs that seem particularly pertinent for gesture theory and analysis. Due to limits of space, the following discussion will not be able to do justice to either the semiotic complexity of the phenomena at hand, or the extensive literature on the topic (e.g. Colapietro 2001 and Colapietro 2008; Farias and Queiroz 2006 and Farias and Queiroz 2017; Liszka 1996; Nöth 2016; Oehler 1987; Pape 1990 and Pape 2015; Sonesson 2013 and Sonesson 2016; Stjernfelt 2007 and Stjernfelt 2014; West and Anderson 2016). More specific aspects and illustrations of how the UCs and gestures may elucidate one another will be presented throughout the paper.
Among the three strands of philosophy Peirce devised, phenomenology (as the first) is especially relevant for the study of gestures. It “contemplates phenomena as they are, simply opens its eyes and describes what it sees … stating what it finds in all phenomena alike (5.37)” (Potter 1967: 10). Against this backdrop, Peirce’s three Universal Categories Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness are defined as one-place, two-place, and three-place (monadic, dyadic, and triadic) relations, and have the status of heuristic principles (e.g. CP; EP 1; EP 2; SS). All perceivable and imaginable phenomena may be described and discerned into different kinds with the help of the UCs; they are irreducible, omnipresent, and interdependent (Potter 1967: 14). The UCs “roughly correspond to three modes of being: possibility, actuality, and law (1.23)” (Potter 1967: 11), or, “three states of mind,” namely, feeling, acting, and thinking (EP 2: 4–5).
Firstness pertains to possibility, e.g. of meaning or behavior, mere qualities of being, feeling, and sensation. Taken by itself, it is positively what it is, e.g. a quality of “redness,” but not existent, as it needs to be instantiated in relation to a second (EP 2: 267–271). Secondness is the realm of actual existence, experience, action and reaction, facts, and forces (EP 2: 267–271). Thirdness is the domain of rules, general laws, symbols, regularities, and habits; it thus allows predictions of what may happen based on acquired knowledge and patterns of experience (EP 2: 267–271). It may govern, to some degree, Secondness, such as in ruling the actual use of signs. A sign can only act as a sign in Thirdness, that is, if all three correlates interact (CP 2.228): a representamen (e.g. the cupped hand in Figure 1), its object (e.g. the category main verbs), and its interpretant (e.g. the gesture’s meaning arising in the mind of the student).
The UCs underpin the three trichotomies pertaining to Peirce’s sign model as well as the corresponding classes of signs (e.g. Farias and Queiroz 2006 and Farias and Queiroz 2017; Sonesson 2013), the most prominent of which, presented in Table 1, will be addressed one by one in the ensuing sections.
Peirce’s UCs are vague and general in nature; both characteristics – especially the former – resonate with some of the properties of many gestures. The UCs’ vagueness derives, according to Colapietro (2008: 40), from their being “semeiotically or experientially indeterminate”: “A sign is objectively vague, in so far as, leaving its interpretation more or less indeterminate, it reserves for some other possible sign or experience the function of completing its determination (CP 5.505)” (2008: 40). This is to a certain extent true of many gestural signs which typically need other signs, namely, speech signs, other gestures, and additional facets of experience to assume their context-dependent function. Peirce (CP 1.355) introduced three metaphors to characterize the vagueness of the UCs which bring to the fore their very own Firstness. Being utterly sensorial, these metaphors strike a chord with multi-sensory perception and experience and, therefore, also with bodily semiotics: moods (affective experience), tones (auditory experience) and tints (visual experience). Gestures are, as will be shown below, susceptible to articulate such experiential qualities (Colapietro 2001: 205–207, 209; Mittelberg 2013a).
This strong emphasis on experience goes hand in hand with embodied, experiential accounts of cognition, language, and culture (e.g. Gallagher 2005; Gibbs 2006; Krois et al. 2007). In a similar vein, the present view highlights gestures’ potential to mediate between “outward experience” with the world (physical engagement), “inward experience” (imaginative involvement; Colapietro 2008: 41), aesthetic experience (Potter 1967), as well as intersubjective experience. Our bodies and their gestures naturally participate in our making sense of the manifold phenomena we constantly encounter and interpret (Merleau-Ponty 1962). By the same token, gestures genuinely participate in multimodal acts of situated meaning-making and make thus inner thoughts and affective states palpable (e.g. Mittelberg 2013a; Müller 2017).
Since Secondness is comparably easy to seize (not only) in bodily semiotics (e.g. Potter 1967: 12),3 my main intent is to illustrate how spontaneous gestures may not only embody Firstness in a particularly intuitive way, but also the Peircean idea of habit as a form of Thirdness, brought about by repeated, similar instantiations of Secondness (e.g. Sonesson 2016). Different kinds of habits, corresponding to the three states of mind mentioned above, play a central role in the present account of gesture semiotics: habits of feeling (Firstness), action (Secondness), and thought (Thirdness; Nöth 2016; see contributions in West and Anderson 2016 on Peirce’s notion of habit). A central aim of this undertaking is to provide further evidence that spontaneous gestures are more patterned and principled than it might seem at first sight (e.g. Müller et al. 2013 and Müller et al. 2014).
Source: Peirce’s universal categories: On their potential for gesture theory and multimodal analysis
Why Triadic?
Source: Why Triadic? Challenges to the Structure of Peirce’s Semiotic
This was written when I was first getting into the semiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce. Re-reading it going on fifteen years later, I notice one glaring misreading of Peirce: Firstness is more or less indeterminate or determinate, not more or less vague or precise; only with Peirce’s category of Thirdness can we speak of vagueness versus precision (and then there’s also vagueness versus generality). I’m not going to revise and correct: if you’re a logician, you can make the correction as you read, and it has no bearing on the validity of my argument; if you’re not a logician, I leave the distinction between indeterminateness and vagueness as “an exercise for the reader.”
Introduction
Man makes the word, and the word means nothing which the man has not made it mean, and that only to some man. But since man can think only by means of words or other external symbols, these might turn around and say: “You mean nothing which we have not taught you, and then only so far as you address some word as the interpretant of your thought.” In fact, therefore, men and words reciprocally educate each other; each increase of a man’s information involves and is involved by, a corresponding increase of a word’s information. …Thus my language is the sum total of myself.
–C.S.Peirce, “Man, a Sign,” 18681
With these words, American scientist and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) summarized his early views on the role of the sign in human existence. In the years that followed, Peirce’s interests were to range across fields as diverse as formal logic, mathematics, grammar and rhetoric, psychology, physics, chemistry, biology, geodetics, and philosophy. In not a few of these fields he made original contributions. But the unifying theme throughout remained for Peirce that of the role of signs. How can each of these areas– or any area– of human activity be seen as an example of human communities and the signs they use “reciprocally educating each other”? What if everything experienced– indeed, everything experienceable– be viewed as constituted by the interplay of ordered networks of signs? It was in grappling with such questions that Peirce gradually developed his “semeiotic,” and eventually became known as one of the founders of the present-day field of semiotics.
Yet to the first-time reader Peirce’s thought may seem almost impenetrable. T.L. Short has put it well: “Let us journey into darkest semeiotica… immense, obscure, crabbed with dense tangles, and never before traversed.”2 One reason for the obscurity of Peirce’s thought is that he spent most of his career in relative isolation in scientific and geodetic work, and so did not benefit from constant critical interaction with colleagues who might otherwise have pressed him to clarify his thought and terminology.3 Peirce’s voluminous writings, few of which ever saw print during his own lifetime, have been reduced to something like a state of order in his posthumous Collected Papers; but the result is still rambling, repetitious, and filled with obscurities and inconsistencies as a result of the revision and growth of Peirce’s thought over the years. Well might the reader be advised to bring pith helmet and machete to the study of Peirce’s semiotic!
Nonetheless, one aspect of Peirce’s semiotic stands out sharply even to the casual reader: the ubiquity of triadic structures. Three universal categories underlie Peircean semiotics; Peirce’s sign involves three elements; Peircean subdivisions and classifications are often threefold. Why triadic? What does Peirce accomplish that could not equally well be carried out via the simpler dyadic sign? And why should as few as three categories suffice to embrace all of human experience? Peirce himself was acutely aware that he was open to charges of “triadomany,” and defended himself on the pragmatic grounds that his method, flexibly applied, yielded fruitful insights into the world we dwell in.4
Criticism of Peircean semiotics on this fundamental point, and suggestions for either a tetradic or a dyadic revision of Peirce, have been not uncommon. In this paper I shall examine and respond to several of the arguments which have been put forth. In so doing, I hope to identify some of the key issues at stake. But to accomplish this requires that we first have some basic understanding of Peirce’s semiotic. So I begin with a brief sketch thereof.
An Overview of Some Aspects of Peircean Semiotics
Semiotics, under a Peircean view, may be understood as an attempt to see all knowledge and experience as a structured system of signs in dynamic interaction with one another. The most familiar example of such a system of signs is human language. But Peircean semiotics is not restricted to this narrow model. Language, thought, emotion, sense perception, formal logic, mathematics, physical action, and human existence itself are only a few of the processes which can be seen as special cases of the Peircean sign.
And this sign can be generalized even further: Peirce saw a sort of low-grade semiosis in action not only in all living organisms but even in the regularity of nature itself. In line with his tendency to see continuity wherever he looked, Peirce saw distinctions, but no absolute separation, between the processes of human existence and the processes of nature. To posit any such separation would to Peirce violate what he often called his cardinal rule of thought: “Thou shalt not block the path of inquiry.”5
Since Peirce’s sign is completely general, his semiotic purports to yield an ontology, under which the universe as a whole, and each thing which lies or could lie within it, is a sign. In particular, the human being is a sign.6
Yet Peirce’s semiotic can be trained on any phenomenon as a supple and subtle method of analysis to yield often surprisingly detailed and concrete insights. This “double-barrelled” combination of complete generality and concrete particularity arises out of the correspondingly “double-barrelled” nature of the three universal categories on which Peirce’s semiotic is built– categories which Peirce called Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.
A universal category is a factor which is found to be present in every phenomenon, “one [category] being perhaps more prominent in one aspect of that phenomenon than another but all of them belonging to every phenomenon.” (5.43) Thus, Peirce’s claim is that his categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, in one way or another and to one degree or another, appear in every phenomenon which one could possibly encounter.
The “double-barrelled” nature of the categories derives from the fact that each category can be described both from a formal, combinatoric, logical viewpoint, and from a material, descriptive, phenomenological perspective. These logical and phenomenological aspects can be taken as, so to speak, two sides of the same coin (1.417-421).
Firstness, in its logical aspect, is monadic. It is whatever is what it is by itself, without comparison or relationship to anything else; independent of any “there,” pure spontaneous, original, sui generis. Peirce correlates Firstness with the structure of abductive thought, and with the discernment of qualities in the logical structure of the act of perception. Phenomenologically, Firstness is any possible quality of feeling taken by itself, whether “the color of magenta, the odor of attar, the sound of a railway whistle, the taste of quinine, the quality of the emotion upon contemplating a fine mathematical demonstration, the quality of the feeling of love, etc.” (1.304; cf. 1.302-321, 1.422-426, 2.619-644, 5.41-44)
Imagine that state which sometimes comes over a person on the brink of sleep, when on the edge of consciousness a quality springs unbidden into the fading awareness and fills it without division or distinction: “nothing at all but a violet color,” or “an eternally sounding and unvarying” musical note. Such a quality– or rather, the possibility of such a quality– is a near approach to sheer Firstness (1.305). As embodied in experience, an instance of Firstness may be very broad and general– for example, the entire Gestalt, sensory and mental, which an entire landscape or story or historical period evokes in one– or it may be very particular– for example, that quality pertaining to that fifth rung on the bannister of the staircase, with the funny little horsehead-shaped chip out of the paint on one side of it.7
Secondness, in its logical aspect, is dyadic. It is a First as it stands over against a Second, regardless of any Third; being in relationship to an Other; the action of cause-and-effect, stimulus-and-response, action-and-reaction. Peirce also relates Secondness to inductive thought and its extrapolation from individual cases, and to the imputation of individual existence to substances in the structure of the act of perception. In its phenomenological aspect, Secondness presents itself as brute fact, as struggle and opposition, shock, surprise, effort and resistance. It is the hard, uncontrolled givenness which we encounter in experience. (Cf. 1.317, 1.441-470, 2.669-693, 5.45-58)
Peirce’s favorite example of Secondness is that of trying to open a door that is stuck:
Standing on the outside of a door that is slightly ajar, you put your hand upon the knob to open and enter it. You experience an unseen, silent resistance. You put your shoulder against the door and, gathering your forces, put forth a tremendous effort. (1.320) Or imagine the steady tone of a musical note, which is suddenly cut short: the tone is an instance of Firstness, as is the silence which follows. But the transition between them is a moment of Secondness (1.332). Secondness is the hard, here-and-now facticity which makes an object an actual individual and not just a bundle of potential qualities (1.436). A vision of the cosmos, à la nineteenth-century physics, as a mere collection of hard billiard ball atoms bouncing and colliding mechanically with one another, is a vision of a world of sheer Secondness.8 Thirdness, in its logical aspect, is triadic. It is a First bound together in relationship with a Second by the mediation of a Third: “The beginning is first, the end second, the middle third.” (1.357) It is combination, pattern, structure, mediation, continuity. A monad can form no combination with another; two dyads can join together only to form another dyad (think of two lengths of pipe screwed together); but triads can combine into arbitrarily complex structures (think of a tinkertoy set, or the colored plastic beads in a chemistry class which can snap together to form models of molecules).9 Thus, argues Peirce, there is from the logical side no need for a category of Fourthness.10 Peirce equates Thirdness with the structure of hypothetical or “abductive” thought, and with the conjunction into an organic unity in the act of perception of imputed individual entities and the qualities attributed to them. (Cf. 1.471-520, 1.551, 2.694-794, 5.171-174, 5.590-604)
In its phenomenological aspect, Thirdness is continuity, process, growth, and development; it manifests itself in law, regularity, generality. It is rationality, intelligibility, predictability; the formation, correction, and refinement of habit; most importantly, it is representation and signification: “A sign stands for something to the idea which it produces or modifies… That for which it stands is called its object; that which it conveys, its meaning (the sign itself); and the idea to which it gives rise, its interpretant.” (1.339) Each sign is such a semiotic triad, composed of object, sign (or “representamen”), and interpretant. (Cf. 1.337-353, 1.471-520, 5.59-119).
Each sign has to it the hypothetical, “if-then” status of Thirdness; Firstness is potential, Secondness actual, Thirdness conditional; Firstness can be, Secondness is, Thirdness would be (given appropriate conditions).11
A sign is a continuous, dynamic process, since the interpretant to which a sign interprets an object is ipso facto itself a further sign of the same object. Peirce spells this out precisely in a formal definition:
A Sign… is a First which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, as to be capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the triadic relation to its Object in which it stands itself to the same Object. (2.242) This formal definition, which embodies a logical structure known as direct recursion, implies that the semiotic process can be seen, in the ideal, as a mathematically continuous progression from a selected sign to a selected interpretant along a mediating temporal continuum.12 Peirce supplies his categories with several other twists important to an understanding of his semiotic. Among these is the approximativeness of the categories. Due both to the hypothetical nature of thought, and to the obstreperousness of reality, Peirce stresses that his three categories are to be seen as only an approximation to reality as experienced, a model subject to growth and revision, though, thought Peirce, a relatively good model as is (1.301).
Not unconnected with this approximativeness (cf. 1.528) are what Peirce calls the degenerate categories. In addition to genuine Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, Peircean semiotics works with a degenerate Secondness and two degrees of degenerate Thirdness. It must be confessed that Peirce is at his most obscure when discussing his degenerate categories: sometimes he describes them in terms of subcategories among his classes of signs, in places he defines them as the Firstness of Secondness and the Firstness and Secondness of Thirdness, at times he speaks of them in terms of combinatoric decomposition (Cf. 1.521-544, 2.265, 5.66-76). I believe we can give an interpretation, faithful to Peirce, which accommodates these diverse factors, as follows.
Degenerate Secondness is, logically speaking, a dyad more or less decomposed into a pair of monads, or instances of Firstness. From fully degenerate Secondness there runs an ordered sequence or “catena” of successively stronger levels of degenerate Secondness which in the limit converges to genuine Secondness. Phenomenologically speaking, one can think of the less than fully dynamic existence of one item relative to another– for example, consider the quality of red and the quality of scarlet simply juxtaposed to one another (1.462). A slightly stronger example would be the actual existence of two actual pennies distinct from one another (1.465).13
The first degree of degenerate Thirdness (“first-degenerate Thirdness”) is, logically speaking, a triad more or less fully decomposed into a congeries of dyads. This decomposition is in practice usually only approximate: most first-degenerate signs will fall somewhere on a graded continuum between the ideal endpoints of fully genuine Thirdness and fully first-degenerate Thirdness (Cf. 2.230-232, 8.376). Phenomenological examples, which can be made more precise under Peirce’s division of signs, vary as widely as an object which one has selected by pointing it out (2.248), a remark uttered without further explanation (2.251), or an individual instance of a sign (2.245). In the limit, a pure world of first-degenerate signs would approximate to, for example, a stream of consciousness composed of sheer events and brute facts: think of the rapid-fire barrage of sound bites, remarks, and incidents on the evening network news!
The second degree of degenerate Thirdness (“second-degenerate Thirdness”) is, logically speaking, a triad more or less fully decomposed into a congeries of monads. Again, this usually only approximate condition can be thought of as continuously variable between genuine Thirdness and full decomposition. Some phenomenological examples, again clarifiable under the division of signs, would be a photograph (2.247), the possibility of red as a warning of danger (2.244), or the general idea of geometric diagrams (2.250). In the extreme, a pure world of second-degenerate signs would approximate to, for example, a stream of consciousness made up of a montage of images, feelings, and sounds: imagine the experience of watching a rock video on MTV!
Note that first-degenerate Thirdness itself can undergo continuous partial decomposition into second-degeneracy; thus, a sign can embody a mixture of genuine Thirdness, first-degenerate Thirdness, and second-degenerate Thirdness in various proportions.14
We must also note the vagueness of Peirce’s categories. Firstness and Thirdness can be more or less vague; Secondness alone is always precise. (5.446-450)
Firstness can be vague as one can “pin down” a quality only more or less approximately in terms of Firstness alone (cf. 6.224). Given two flowers seen a minute apart, how close is the redness of the first flower to the redness of the second? One may be able to form a fairly good offhand judgment– but in terms of 1o alone it will not be altogether precise. Thus the redness of either flower has a penumbra of vagueness to it.
Likewise, Thirdness is more or less vague as meaning must be at least slightly indefinite in order to function at all (cf. 5.447, 6.326, 6.494-499). For example, the word “chair” is of the nature of a general law, instantiated in each object which is capable of being appropriately termed a “chair.” The word must have some free play in it– must be applicable to a more or less broad and fuzzy-boundaried class of entities– if it is to be meaningful. And the same holds true of any more complex sign, be it a statement, an argument, a ritual, a belief system, a human being, or the wide world itself.
Indeed, the more common or important a sign, the more vague it will tend to be. Thus, as Peirce often remarks (cf. 6.494), one’s deepest feelings, one’s deepest beliefs, one’s concept of God will all tend to be very vague indeed. This vagueness is not to be confused with the inchoate: for such signs to become more finely articulated by becoming richer in semiotic structure is one thing, but for them to become precise by the simple abolition of vagueness would be to empty them of meaning: language reduced to sheer Secondness!
The human being as a sign stripped of all vagueness would be, under a Peircean view, no longer a sign, but a mere algorithm: an object, a thing of mere Secondness, an “It.” For Secondness alone is never vague, its precision the precision of a world of billiard ball atoms in mechanical collision.15
Important to the interplay of Peirce’s categories is their varying intensity. The intensity of Firstness can vary since a quality of feeling may be experienced at varying levels of consciousness or attention– though of course one can compare such instances of Firstness and judge them of different intensities only through Secondness and Thirdness (1.310, 6.222). Likewise degenerate Secondness, as a congeries of monads, may vary in intensity (2.283). And the intensity of Thirdness may vary as the representamen has only one “degree of freedom” in its relationship to object and interpretant, and so is relatively a First (cf. 2.242).
Important here also is the hierarchical nature of the categories. Secondness may be conceived apart from explicit attention to Thirdness, and Firstness apart from conscious supposition of either Secondness or Thirdness, but Secondness only manifests itself through Thirdness, and Firstness only through Secondness and Thirdness (1.549-554). Thus, “though it is easy to distinguish the three categories from one another, it is extremely difficult accurately and sharply to distinguish each from other conceptions so as to hold it in its purity and yet in its full meaning.” (1.353)
Peirce applies his three categories to his sign to divide it into subcategories. His division of signs begins by considering which of the three categories predominates in the sign (representamen) itself; in the sign-object relationship; and in the sign-interpretant relationship.
According to the first trichotomy, if Firstness predominates in the representamen, we have a Qualisign, “a [potential] quality which is a Sign”; if Secondness, a Sinsign, “an actual existent thing or event which is a sign”; if Thirdness, a Legisign, “a law that is a sign,” whether conventional or natural, and that acts through individual instantiations (hence Sinsigns) called Replicas (2.243-246).
According to the second trichotomy, if Firstness is most prominent in the sign-object relationship, the sign is an Icon, which denotes by qualitative resemblance (2.274-282); if Secondness, the sign is an Index, which refers to its object by dynamic (genuine) or existential (degenerate) relationship between sign and object (2.283-291, 305-306); if Thirdness, the sign is a Symbol, which signifies its object according to a general convention or habit (2.292-302, 307-308).
According to the third trichotomy, a sign-interpretant relationship characterized chiefly by Firstness is a Rheme or Term; by Secondness, a Dicisign or Proposition; by Thirdness, an Argument (2.250-253; cf. 2.92, 5.470ff.)
Under each trichotomy, a sign may be of not just a single type, but of two or all three types in varying degree (2.230, 265). And Peirce combines his three trichotomies to yield ten classes of signs according to the following diagram (2.264; “The lightly printed designations are superfluous”):
The boundaries are, again, approximations (cf. 8.376). Peirce’s division yields ten instead of twenty-seven (=3x3x3) classes because a trichotomy involving Secondness makes the sign first-degenerate; one involving Firstness, second-degenerate; and a genuine triad can subdivide again in the same manner as before, while each dyad of a first-degenerate triad subdivides by catenation, and the monads of a second-degenerate triad can subdivide no further (1.543): subdivision can never make a partially degenerate sign less degenerate than it already is.16
In his later work, Peirce expanded his division of signs to ten trichotomies yielding sixty-six classes of signs; but seeds of this expansion were present in his earlier recognition of an asymmetry in his semiotic triad. Object, representamen, and interpretant are what they are only in the context of their sign relationship. But within this context (as the division of signs indicates) the representamen is what it is (of the three) most nearly independently of the other two– that is, functions most nearly as a First– while the interpretant is the most complex, most nearly determined as a Third by object and representamen; and the object is of intermediate complexity, occurring either itself as an instance of Secondness or determined dyadically by precisely one of the other two (2.235-242).17
This observation led Peirce to divide interpretant and object according to his categories. The interpretant subdivides into immediate, dynamical, and final interpretant; the object into immediate and dynamical object.
The immediate object is the qualitative object as immediately presented to interpretant by sign: the object “as it seems.” The dynamical object is the object as it offers dynamic resistance or constraint to present representation and interpretation of it. together, immediate and dynamical object constitute a positive and negative “feedback loop” in semiosis which lies at the heart of Peirce’s fallibilism (1.8-14; 5.238-243, 473).
The immediate interpretant is the potential interpretant as immediately presented by the sign; the dynamical interpretant, the interpretant as it actually “shakes down” in process to determine an effect or habit-change; the final interpretant, the interpretant as it would finally turn out in the community of interpretation in an infinite long-run. Peirce’s teleology grows out of this division of the interpretant (4.536, 4.572, 5.475ff.)18
Peirce’s Sign: Why Triadic?
It should now be very clear that triads and trichotomies form the warp and woof of Peirce’s approach to semiotics. The debate over this triadicity has taken two divergent and incompatible avenues: proposals for a category of Fourthness which question the sufficiency of Peirce’s semiotic, and proposals for a reduction to dyadicity which would render the semiotic triad unnecessary.
“One, Two, Three… But Where Is the Fourth?”
At least three proposals have been made for a Peircean category of Fourthness: those of Donald Mertz, of Herbert Schneider and Carl Hausman, and of Carl Vaught.
Mertz’s proposal is the most easily disposed of. He examines Peirce’s argument for the irreducibility of triads, as illustrated in “A Guess at the Riddle”:
…the fact that A presents B with gift C, is a triple relation, and as such cannot possibly be resolved into any combination of dual relations. Indeed, the very idea of a combination involves that of thirdness, for a combination is something which is what it is owing to the parts which it brings into mutual relationship. (1.363)19 Mertz grants Peirce this argument, but denies Peirce’s claim that “the quadruple fact that A sells C to B for the price of D” can be reduced to “a compound of two facts: first that A makes with C a certain transaction, which we may name E; and second, that this transaction E is a sale of B for the price D.”20 Mertz notes correctly that Peirce would express this symbolically as R(A,C,E).R'(E,B,D) = S(A,C,B,D), but then asserts that the second fact should be expressed dyadically as E = T(B,D) so that, by substitution, R(A,C,T(B,D)) = S(A,C,B,D), an irreducibly tetradic relation. From another angle, Mertz states that no two of the triadic relations “1) A sells C to B, 2) C is sold to B for D, and 3) A sells C to D” can be conjoined to arrive at the original tetradic relationship. (It is neither here nor there, but puzzling: why does Mertz omit “A sells to B for a price D”?) Mertz concludes that Peirce was blinded to such arguments by his fascination with logical diagrams which Peirce named “existential graphs.”21 Mertz’s argument may be convincing on its own terms, but Mertz is manipulating Peirce’s polyads in ways which bear little resemblance to any way in which Peirce ever worked with them. In his first argument, Mertz is attempting to join a dyad with a triad without identifying which of the elements in the dyad is being joined to the triad. His second argument involves joining two triads by joining two elements in one with two elements in another. The former procedure has no precedent in Peirce, and the latter under Peirce’s methods ought to yield a dyad, not a tetrad as Mertz thinks Peirce would have expected. Since Mertz gives us no clue as to how his procedures relate to those of Peirce, we have no way of judging whether Mertz is doing anything really entailed by Peirce’s project, or whether Mertz is simply arriving at different conclusions because he is working out of different assumptions.22
A more detailed proposal for Fourthness comes from Herbert Schneider. Schneider concedes three categories to be adequate for dealing with cognitive processes, but argues for “importance” as a category of Fourthness. He notes that, for Peirce, any purpose or good has meaning only in relation to a completely general summum bonum. “No Kantian idealist could have stated this conception of moral science more formally.”23
Schneider observes this scheme does not accommodate norms which might apply “even in the absence of a summum bonum,” itches that call to be scratched for their own sake. Such norms he proposes as a phenomenological aspect of Fourthness: logical import is Thirdness, vital importance Fourthness. Satisfaction may comprise either the Thirdness of achievement or the Fourthness of satiety or contentment. The moral self-control of Thirdness in pursuit of an abstract summum bonum is only an abstract “intellectual framework” until it is taken up into the “concrete universal” of the moral self-criticism of Fourthness. Fourthness supplies what depth psychology, but not the Kantian “moral law within,” acknowledges.24
In logical terms, Fourthness would constitute a temporal sequence, though one which is an absolutely discontinuous string of points superimposed on the triadic continuum. Triadic semiosis is “prospective and cumulative”; tetradic semiosis adds a fourth factor which is non-cumulative, but “retrospective” along the hierarchy of categories, giving “meaningful individuality” to instances of Firstness. Since Firstness and Secondness “look ‘forward'” to Thirdness while Fourthness “looks back” to Firstness, Thirdness in a sense “governs” Fourthness while Fourthness provides the steam to “drive” Thirdness.25
Carl Hausman provisionally adopts Schneider’s scheme, applied to both ethics and aesthetics with “importance” or “value” as a possible category of Fourthness. Hausman notes that Schneider’s suggestion rejects “Peirce’s own principle that a highest good makes specific goods intelligible,” but that, quite regardless of this, Schneider puts a finger both on the problematic status of value in Peirce’s semiotic and on an apparent “special connection” between value and Firstness.26
Hausman turns to Peirce’s categorial classification of the sciences to investigate the relations among value and the categories. Peirce categorially divided philosophy into phenomenology, normative science, and metaphysics, and normative science into aesthetics, ethics, and logic (1.186). Just as normative science rests on phenomenology and on the prior field of mathematics (within which two fields Peirce constructed his categories), so the categorial hierarchy is reflected in an order of dependence in which “ethics rest[s] on aesthetics, and logic on ethics,” all three but especially aesthetics dependent on phenomenology.27
All three sciences, according to Peirce, distinguish a kind of good and bad, “Logic in regard to representations of the truth, Ethics in regard to efforts of the will, and Esthetics in objects considered simply in their presentation,” with both logical and ethical goods presupposing esthetic good. Remarks Hausman: “This is why Peirce says that ethics must appeal to aesthetics for aid in determining the summum bonum.”28 Considered thus, value itself is not a fourth category. Rather, it seems related but not identical to the teleological thrust built into Peirce Thirdness, and bound up with the categorial hierarchy.29
Hausman notes that the categories can be related by what Peirce calls discrimination or distinction, prescission, and dissociation (1.353). We can prescind Firstness and Secondness from value, but neither value nor Thirdness from each other. Hausman speculates that value and Thirdness could be separated by “discrimination,” “so interdependent that they are co-present as mutual grounds for one another,” though this is difficult to determine since Peirce is none too clear as to what he meant by the term.30
I think that Schneider and Hausman are correct to point out the problematic place of value in Peirce’s thought. As Peirce himself was aware, as a natural scientist he devoted more attention to logic and less to ethics and aesthetics (2.120, 2.197).31 And I think the two are correct to note a connection between value and Firstness, though I consider Hausman’s attempt to bring value in tandem with Thirdness more economical than Schneider’s attempt at severing it altogether from Thirdness, and thus from a summum bonum. But I would concede Schneider’s point that Peirce’s account, as it stands, does justice better to the apollonian than to the dionysian side of human existence.
However Peirce, especially in his explorations of phenomenological Firstness (cf. 1.312-316) and his discussions of vagueness (cf. 6.494ff.), is far more sensitive to these issues than Schneider will grant. And a sequence of monads co-present with the semiotic “time line” which present themselves immediately and spontaneously in the interpretation of the sign ought to suggest a factor of the Peircean sign already familiar to us: the immediate interpretant.
Although Peirce is not explicit, the logical and phenomenological characteristics which Schneider attributes to Fourthness all fit well the spot the immediate interpretant occupies in Peirce’s semiotic. By its relation to dynamical and final interpretant, the immediate interpretant is certainly “related but not identical” to the teleological thrust of Thirdness. And energetic immediate interpretants would “give a meaningful individuality” to Firstness. Finally, if Hausman’s interpretation of “discrimination” is correct, then the immediate (unlike the dynamical or final) interpretant would indeed be related to the sign by discrimination.32
The most detailed proposal for Fourthness comes from Carl Vaught. Vaught points out that, phenomenologically, there is a similarity between things such as a left hand and a right hand which does not seem reducible to a combination of identity and difference. According to Peirce, most spatial relationships can be dealt with predominantly in terms of the Secondness of objects in dynamic interaction or relative location. Yet as Vaught notes, Peirce vacillated over whether right and left can be distinguished in terms of Secondness– for example, indexically (2.290)– or whether Thirdness must be invoked, as for example in what physicists call the “right-hand rule”:
Thus, your right hand is that hand which is toward the east, when you face north with your head toward the zenith. Three things, east, west, and up, are required to define the difference between right and left. (1.345)33 Vaught argues that not even Thirdness suffices to distinguish right from left, since the definitions of east, north, and zenith themselves presuppose a distinction between right and left. Right and left, Vaught concludes, embody a similarity irreducible to identity and difference.34 In a parallel manner, on the logical level, Peirce insisted that analogy is reducible to a combination of univocity and equivocity, and is not a mediating third between them (3.421, 3.483-485, 1.34). Thus, a four-term analogical relation would be reducible to a combination of simpler terms. But Vaught argues that just such irreducible analogical tetrads occur in Peircean semiosis.
For semiosis gives rise to a sequence of signs and interpretants, each at a slightly different moment in time, and as Peirce’s later distinction between immediate and dynamical object implies, the object itself is not static but constitutes a corresponding temporal sequence of objects in interaction with the sign/interpretant sequence. Within the vagueness inherent in Peircean semiosis then, says Vaught, lies precisely a similarity, irreducible to identity and difference, which embraces interpretant at t1, interpretant at t2, dynamical object at t1, and dynamical object at t2 in a tetradic analogical relationship which due to the vagueness is not precisely reducible to any combination of triads. As an example of this, consider a legisign which grows and develops over time: its form at any two instants can, under this proposed Fourthness, be seen as related by an irreducible analogical similarity. Likewise, the similarity between right and left can be seen only through a judgment of analogy.35
Vaught’s argument is both closely reasoned and richly textured, very much in the spirit of Peirce’s own approach. If similarity is not to be understood (as Peirce saw it) as reducible to some combination of univocity and equivocity, then Vaught’s argument is probably correct. But I think counter-arguments can be mounted on both logical and phenomenological fronts.
Logically, if the sequence of interpretants in Vaught’s argument on analogy are considered, not as a sequence of discrete frames in a movie film (as Vaught takes them), but rather as a genuinely continuous flow of interpretants (and likewise the flow of dynamical objects continuous), then the need for the four-term relationship vanishes and Thirdness suffices. The situation becomes logically similar to, and no more problematic than, an account of a continuous function in differential calculus.
On the phenomenological front, I note that mathematicians define the “orientation” or handedness of a space by dyadic and triadic arguments alone. The proof is rather technical, but it enables one to speak of left- or right-handedness in space (of three dimensions, or even more) without resort to any tetradic combinations and without any prior invocation of right or left.36
Greenlee’s Dyadic Revision of Peirce
Much of the controversy over a suggested dyadic reinterpretation of the Peircean sign revolves around Douglas Greenlee’s book, Peirce’s Concept of Sign. In a symposium on this book in the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Greenlee responds to criticisms by Joseph Ransdell, Jarrett Brock, and John Fitzgerald. In a later article Vincent Colapietro attempts an evaluation of an positive response to Greenlee’s project.
“What is it for something to be a sign?”37 This, says Greenlee, was one of the key questions with which Peirce was struggling in his semiotic. But Greenlee finds problematic an important aspect of Peirce’s sign:
Peirce thinks of the sign as something which always points away from itself to an object. I go along with the idea that a sign always points away from itself. But I think it is a mistake to suppose that the pointing must always be to something referred to… What the sign always points to is that which interprets it– what Peirce calls its ‘interpretant.’38 Thus, though Peirce calls signification “only one of the two chief functions of signs” (8.373; cf. 2.341, 431-434), the other being representation, Greenlee claims his analysis will show only the former essential to the functioning of a sign.39 Greenlee finds the problem with Peirce coming to light in Peirce’s use of such terms as “refers to,” “represents,” and “stands for.” According to Peirce’s own concept of abduction, semiotic is to be seen as a source of revisable hypotheses to be explored and tested in experience, and not an a priori construct.40 And here it is that we encounter difficulties. For what does mathematics refer to? What is the object of logical connectives such as the conjunction “and”? The object of verbal commands? Of questions? Of music?41
Problems just as serious arise if we try to find a generalized meaning of the term “representation.” If “‘stands for’ means stands in place of or as a substitute for something else,” we exclude both self-referential signs (cf. 5.71) and habitual signs that mediate between expectation and response. The latter is a class that includes much of everyday human behavior. If we try to say that “the meaning of a word is what it stands for,” this collides with the “pragmatic maxim,” bound up with the teleology of Peirce’s final interpretant, that meaning “lies in the future,”42 since it would imply that all propositions, even those “about the past, are really about the future.” These considerations eliminate the possible solutions that signs are “representative because substitutive,” or “because they possess meaning” (a function of the sign-interpretant relation under Peirce’s semiotic).43
What positive solutions can be suggested? Looking at Peirce’s application of signs to human thought, Greenlee observes that Peirce’s rejection of “mental-material dualism” suggests an equivalence between thought-signs and signs in general; that Peirce’s distinction between actual and habitual notions (cf. replica and legisign) implies that “a sign may be an object actually cognized or the capacity to cognize”; and that Peirce’s three categories extend such cognization not just to “intellectual ends” but to “‘every sort of modification of consciousness– Attention, Sensation, and Understanding.'” (5.298)44
What Greenlee finds in all these characteristics of thought as sign, regardless of whether representation obtains, is a process of abstraction, “requiring a point of view in terms of which an object is relevant to the significance of the sign.”45 This point of view is the sieve (the interpretive grid, might we say?) through which it is selected by convention or agreement what is to be included in the process of signification.
“Now the chief semiotical question I want to raise for Peircean semiotic is whether abstraction is present in all signification.” If so, we have found a general characterization of something very like a Peircean sign, but of which representation is not a necessary feature. For, argues Greenlee, Peirce’s immediate object can carry all the freight that a sign characterized by abstraction requires its object to bear. When the sign is representative, the dynamical object may obtain; when not, then rather than construing as dynamical object the context in which the immediate object was expected (8.314; cf. 4.536), we can dispense with the dynamical object altogether. In either case, the immediate object can be interpreted in terms of direct or indirect “past experience as relevant to the interpretation of the present sign.”46
We can see that under Greenlee’s proposal the immediate object becomes that content of signs temporally prior to the present sign, which is relevant to the present sign-interpretant relationship. The entire semiotic process is collapsed down into the temporal continuum of signs and interpretants. The sign process may be considered as polyadic if we include each previous sign relevant to the interpretation of the present sign, but fundamentally the sign is now dyadic:
Instead of insisting on triadicity, Peirce’s semiotic should have insisted (a) simply on a differentiation of the sign from the dyadic causal relationship and (b) on the continuity of interpretation.47 The difference between sign and mere causation Greenlee finds in the fact that the sign is cumulative whereas mere cause-and-effect is not necessarily so, an implication of the infinite regress of Peirce’s formal recursive definition of the sign (2.274). This same formal definition construes continuity as continuity of interpretation, since every interpretant of a sign calls for a further interpretation of itself. In the potential of such continuing interpretation for establishing habitual rules of interpretation Greenlee locates the meaning of his dyadic sign, though under such a revision the final interpretant must become “actual rather than ideal,” provisional and not “destinate.”48 Greenlee also extends his reinterpretation to Peirce’s division of signs by offering dyadic interpretations of the trichotomy Peirce defined in terms of sign-object relationship. The icon becomes a sign of “exhibitive import,” displaying to its interpretant qualities and properties familiar from experience.49 The index becomes a sign capable of “forcing” attention by modifying habit in the interpretant.50 The symbol is more intractable: difficult to preserve distinct from the legisign under Greenlee’s approach, the symbol ends up as the factor of conventionality co-present with every class of signs.51
The general consensus of the Greenlee symposium is that Greenlee’s project is of value in its own right, but is not addressing the same set of issues which Peirce was trying to address.52 Ransdell and Brock remark that, in restricting semiotics to the subject matter of Peircean speculative grammar– namely, the meaning of signs– Greenlee so skews the scope of his inquiry as to make his conclusions almost inevitable.53
“Greenlee contends that anything can have meaning (can be a sign), but he holds that not everything does have meaning.” This, says Ransdell, is a crucial departure from Peirce, for it would mean that the world can be divided into signs and non-signs; that not everything incorporates Thirdness; and thus that “it ought to be at least possible to encounter a meaningless thing, something which does not, in fact, incorporate the relational structure in question.” (Hence, I take it, Greenlee’s distinction between dyadic signs and mere dyadic causation.) “But,” continues Ransdell, “no such experience is possible, on Peirce’s view… Peirce’s semiotic is not about a class of objects. It is about what it is to be an object.” Thus, objectification, signification, and interpretation are only different aspects of every phenomenon it is possible to encounter.54
Since Greenlee rejects this, he gives the immediate object priority over the dynamical object. But, note Ransdell and Fitzgerald, for Peirce the dynamical object had priority as that over against which sign and interpretant stand; a closer logical analysis is necessary to bring out “something internal to the sign which relates it to the thing or circumstances”; and Peirce saw imaginative or fictive semiosis, in which the focus is upon the immediate object, “as logically more complex than (as ‘parasitical’ upon) semiosis involving a real object.”55
I would add that it is hard to see, from within Greenlee’s system, what rationale there is for retaining the dynamical object at all, even in the case of representative signs, except perhaps as a code for a convention which distinguishes “real” signs from “fictive” signs. I take it this is what Ransdell is hinting at when he calls Greenlee’s proposal “a semiotic of ‘absolute’ idealism.”56
We can better understand this priority of the dynamical object for Peirce if we see that what was central for Peirce in the sign was not merely meaning (as for Greenlee) but communication and inference. For Peirce, note Brock and Ransdell, all semiosis is dialogical, the original model for object-sign-interpretant being the utterer-utterance-interpreter structure of human communication. But since Peirce early rejected Cartesian intuition and Kantian synthetic a prioris, he abstracted (not generalized, as does Greenlee) features of this process to allow for the entry into the sign-interpretant continuum of quasi-dialogical factors neither derivable from nor reducible to sign-interpretant processes alone, hence irreducible Third. Thus in Peirce’s view, says Ransdell, “The ultimate utterer of all signs– all interpretive phenomena– is reality itself.” And thus the key Peircean questions, says Brock, are “How does it contribute to explaining the possibility of inference and communication? How do… signs function in the context of inference and communication? Learning and discovery? …No such questions and no such answers can be found in Professor Greenlee’s book.”57
Vincent Colapietro continues the response, conceding that it is an unfortunate choice of terminology to say that “a sign represents an object,” since “represent” has connotations which are often but not always appropriate to the Peircean sign. To this degree, Greenlee has a point. But Peirce’s definition of the sign/object relationship (like that of the triad itself) is purely formal. This relationship can be made more specific in terms of the (again purely formal) division of signs, division of object into immediate or dynamical object, etc.58
What Colapietro stresses here is, I think, implicit in the logical/phenomenological “double-barrelledness” of Peirce’s categories. As we have seen, Greenlee misses the logical or formal aspect since he does not deal with inference, and since his emphasis on meaning seems to lead him toward a sort of psychologism (witness his attempted distinction between significative and causative dyads).
Colapietro responds to specific objections by arguing that a word such as “and” can be seen as an index of relatively low intensity;59 music, as a sign of the composer’s “musical ideas,” which are qualities of feeling (5.475); an imperative, as a sign whose dynamical object is the will of the speaker and whose energetic interpretant is the intended response (5.473).60
More generally, we can see how Peircean fallibilism, formally considered, is a factor in all signs, hence how all signs in some sense require both immediate and dynamical object:
The fact that all signs have dynamic objects and, hence, external constraints makes semiosis a fallible process: any sign is open to the possibility of missing its mark… [but] it is only on the condition that there is a mark that there is a possibility of missing the mark… Commands and notes of music, no less than paradigmatic cases of representational semiosis, involve such a possibility, precisely because they could be constrained by something outside of themselves.61 Or as Peirce himself put it in “Man, a Sign,” we only began to be aware of ourselves as selves, of the world as world, “when we first corrected ourselves”; that is, when the world around us first corrected us: for as in speech so in all semiosis, “men and words reciprocally educate each other… [and] thus my language is the sum total of myself.” (5.311, 313-314)
Concluding Observations
We are now in a position to evaluate the proposals for a tetradic or dyadic revision of Peirce’s triadic sign.
Two themes recur in the Fourthness arguments. One revolves around the understanding of continuity as it appears in Thirdness; the other involves areas in which one could wish Peirce had written more fully, or more clearly.
Schneider’s Fourthness constitutes a discontinuous sequence riding “piggyback” on the continuity of Thirdness. Hausman manages to find a place for value as a factor in Thirdness, but this value remains an event-by-event, case-by-case affair. Vaught locates the analogical tetrad in the minute interstices of the flow of semiosis.
Although (as I have argued with Vaught) a proper understanding of continuity goes a long way toward clarifying matters Peircean, it seems that in each instance these writers are striving for a structure intermediate between pure continuity and total disconnection, a structure which exhibits features of both. But, as I have argued in my exposition of Peirce, we already have precisely such a structure in the interplay within the sign of genuine Thirdness and the two degrees of degenerate Thirdness.62
Hausman is correct that Peirce devotes relatively less attention to aesthetics and ethics than to logic. Vaught detects genuine vacillations and inconsistencies in Peirce’s thought on analogy and on the similarity of certain spatial structures. And Schneider points out correctly that Peirce skews his account somewhat away from the dark, mysterious, irrational forces of the psyche which twentieth-century psychologists have made us take into account.
I think all these are valid areas for further Peircean inquiry. And certainly there is no end to the tangled inconsistencies in Peirce! By the approximativeness of Peirce’s own semiotic, a category of Fourthness may well emerge, but we could find this out only through such further inquiry. I think I have answered the proposals so far put forth, though I find it suggestive that they all hint at some sort of coincidentio oppositorum in which incommensurables can be reconciled, and the two potentially vague categories can precipitate out concretely without sacrificing spontaneity or becoming locked into the precision of Secondness. In such a direction, if any, I would suggest future Fourthness-hunters look.63
At the same time, though, I would suggest a second look at Peirce’s remarks on his semiotic meditative practice of “musement” (6.458-490), which resembles closely the sort of process just described. Peirce may seldom have spoken of anything like Schneider’s “depth psychology,” but one cannot read much of Peirce without being struck starkly by uncanny bass resonances in his tone of thought, like peals of distant thunder. It is this trait that so confounds some Peirce scholars who find him talking one moment like a hard-headed empiricist and the next like a New England transcendentalist mystic.64 In his discussion of musement, Peirce essays (in terms of his three categories) an explanation of this process and a reconciliation of these coincident opposites.65
Of Greenlee’s dyadic project there is little to say that has not already been said. It is clear that between Greenlee and Peirce there lies the chasm of a fundamental philosophical option. It is the choice which Peirce summed up by contrasting his own stance of “realism” with the several shades of what he called “nominalism.” (1.15-41, 5.77-107)
Which is prior– the immediate object we construct, or the dynamical object which, like Peirce’s jammed door, sticks without warning? What is the scope of our semiotic– everything humanly understood and experienced (so that the world of real signs equals the sum total of the actual), or everything humanly understandable and experienceable (so that the world of actual signs instantiates a broader continuum of the real)? These are the kinds of fundamental options which may be fruitfully discussed, but which we more often bring to than derive from the conversation.
I think Colapietro puts it well when he says that what is at stake here is that, under the dyadic option,
it is we who initiate the process of semiosis by taking up some stance toward a complex. In contrast, an implication of [the triadic option] is that, at least in some cases, we are not the initiators of but the respondents to a world which is always already meaningful to some degree.66
Appendix: A Brief Peircean Semiotic Glossary (Note: I have striven here more for lucid brevity than for anything like precision. For precision please consult the body of the paper! Caveat lector!)
Argument: A sign which (as its name suggests) embodies a logical argument. Also called delome. Example: a syllogism.
Category: A factor present in some way, shape, or form in every conceivable phenomenon; in some phenomena, one of the categories may be predominant. See Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness.
Catena: The “chain” of degrees by which relative existence approaches closer and closer to actual individual existence. Each “link” is one type of degenerate Secondness.
Degenerate Secondness: A dyad partially decomposed into a pair of monads: mere existence of a First relative to a Second. Example: two pennies lying in a row.
Degenerate Thirdness, First Degree of: A sign more or less decomposed into a mere collection of dyads or brute facts. Example: any course of events where “it’s just one thing after another.”
Degenerate Thirdness, Second Degree of: A sign more or less decomposed into a mere montage of monads or qualities. Example: a rock video; some surrealist paintings.
Dicisign: A sign which conveys a statement or piece of information. Also called proposition, pheme.
Dynamical Interpretant: The interpretant “as it actually is”; as it impacts on other signs and interpretants. See Teleology.
Dynamical Object: The object “as it really is”; as it constrains or corrects interpretations of itself. See Fallibilism.
Emotional Interpretant: The interpretant as it takes the form of a quality of feeling.
Energetic Interpretant: The interpretant as it takes the form of an action or event.
Fallibilism: The contention that all knowledge is provisional and fallible, though some knowledge is very highly probable, and a process of inquiry can help sort the wheat from the chaff. Fallibilism is grounded in the “feedback loop” between immediate and dynamical object.
Final Interpretant: The Interpretant “as it would be known really to be” at the end of an infinite process of inquiry, or in the light of an ideal future summum bonum. See teleology.
Firstness: One of Peirce’s three categories. Firstness is monadic: whatever is what it is by itself without reference to any Second; any possible quality of feeling.
Icon: A sign which in some way resembles its object. Example: a portrait.
Immediate Interpretant: The interpretant “as it seems”; as presented by the sign as a possibility of interpretation. See Teleology.
Immediate Object: The object “as it seems,” whether really so or not; the object as presented by the sign to the interpretant. See Fallibilism.
Index: A sign which is related to its object by actual cause-and-effect, or by existence relative to one another. Example: a weathervane as sign of wind direction; a finger pointing toward an object.
Interpretant: One of the three elements of the sign. The interpretant interprets the sign(representamen) as representing its object. Not to be confused with “interpreter”! A human being is an “interpreter,” made up of a great many interpretants (thoughts, habits, actions, feelings, etc.).
Legisign: A sign which functions as a habit, custom, or law, whether conventional or natural.
Logical Interpretant: The interpretant as it takes the form of a general habit of law.
Object: One of the three elements of the sign. The object is represented by the sign(representamen) to its interpretant
Qualisign: A sign which can take the form of a quality of feeling. Example: red as a warning of danger.
Representamen: See Sign(b).
Rheme: A sign which conveys a single word, concept, or feeling. Also called. term, seme.
Secondness: One of Peirce’s three categories. Secondness is dyadic; whatever is what it is by standing over against a Second, without reference to any Third; causation, brute fact, actual existence.
Sign: (a) The triad composed of object, sign(representamen), and interpretant. For Peirce, every conceivable experience is mediated through signs. (b) One of the three elements of the Sign(a). The Sign(b) is sometimes called the representamen. The Sign(b) (= representamen) represents the object to its interpretant. It is very important not to confuse sign in sense (a) with sign in sense (b): they are not at all the same thing! The former is a triad of three elements; the latter is one of those three elements.
Sinsign: A sign which takes the form of a single action, instance, or event.
Symbol: A sign which is related to its object by some habit or law, whether conventional or natural. Example: a written word as a sign of a sequence of spoken sounds.
Teleology: Peirce’s contention that everything within the semiotic process has purpose by orientation toward an ideal future summum bonum, in light of which every sign would be knowable for all that it really signifies. Peirce’s teleology is laid out in the structure of his immediate, dynamical, and final interpretant.
Thirdness: One of Peirce’s three categories. Thirdness is triadic: whatever is what it is in relation to a Second by the mediation of a Third; structure, regularity, law, habit, continuity, holding under appropriate conditions. For Peirce, Thirdness is equivalent to the semiotic sign of object, sign(representamen), and interpretant.
Ultimate Interpretant: An interpretant which does not have to serve as a further sign of its object in order to be meaningful. Example: a jump, break, or transition in the flow of events or in one’s attention.
Bibliography
Brock, Jarrett E. “Draft of a Critique of Greenlee’s Peirce’s Concept of Sign.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society (TCSPS), 12:111-26.
Colapietro, Vincent. “Is Peirce’s Theory of Signs Truly General?” TCSPS 23:205-35.
Fitzgerald, John J. “Ambiguity in Peirce’s Theory of Signs.” TCSPS 12:127-34.
Greenlee, Douglas. Peirce’s Concept of Sign. The Hague: Mouton, 1973.
Hartshorne, Charles, and Weiss, Paul, Editors, Volumes 1-6; Burks, Arthur W., Editor, Volumes 7-8. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-36, 1957-58.
Hausman, Carl R. “Value and the Peircean Categories.” TCSPS 15:203-23.
Mertz, Donald W. “Peirce: Logic, Categories, and Triads.” TCSPS 15:158-75.
Ransdell, Joseph. “Another Interpretation of Peirce’s Semiotic.” TCSPS 12:97-110.
Schneider, Herbert W. “Fourthness.” Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, Wiener, Philip P., and Young, Frederic H., Editors. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952.
Vaught, Carl G. “Semiotics and the Problem of Analogy: A Critique of Peirce’s Theory of Categories.” TCSPS 22:311-26.
Footnotes
1 In “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols., ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (vol. 1-6), Arthur W. Burks (vols. 7-8) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-36, 1957-58), 5.313-314. My citations from the Collected Papers will, as is customary, indicate volume and paragraph number: for example, 5.314 signifies volume 5, paragraph 314.
2 T.L. Short, “Life Among the Legisigns,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society (TCSPS), 18:285.
3 Obviously, however, Peirce’s influence was substantial on many of those who knew him, such as Josiah Royce, William James, and John Dewey– as a result of which Peirce is known as one of the founders of American pragmatism, an honor to which Peirce responded by renaming his philosophy “pragmaticism,” a term “which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers”! (5.414)
Peirce’s connections with academia, after his 1859 graduation from Harvard, were limited to a few years spent teaching at Johns Hopkins (1880-84), and several lecture series delivered at Harvard around the turn of the century, arranged by William James in part to help Peirce out of financial straits. See also Max H. Fisch and Jackson I. Cope, “Peirce at the Johns Hopkins University,” Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Philip P. Wiener and Frederic H. Young (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 277-311.
4 1.568-572. Peirce confesses: “I fully admit that there is a not uncommon craze for trichotomies… I am not so afflicted; but I find myself obliged, for truth’s sake, to make such a large number of trichotomies that I could not [but] wonder if my readers, especially those of them who are in the way of knowing how common the malady is, should suspect, or even opine, that I am a victim of it.” (5.568)
5 Cf. 1.135. This tendency in Peirce has been labelled panpsychism, as by Hartshorne, “The Relativity of Nonrelativity,” Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, p. 218. But I think it would be equally correct to note here Peirce’s insistence that “there is something in nature to which the human reason is analogous.” (1.316, emphasis supplied) Note that for Peirce this double-edged stance both entails an affirmation of straightforwardly “anthropomorphic conceptions of the universe” (1.316), and is grounded in a Darwinian argument that any organism which is to survive for long must exhibit some reasonable degree of congruence with the processes of nature, or lose out to some other organism better able to do so (1.374-399).
I think the best explanation of this two-sidedness in Peirce is the observation that for Peirce both mind and natural process are special cases of semiosis rather than vice versa, and so, though neither nature nor mind is reducible one to the other, properties of either may be abstracted and by analogy extended to the other.
This semiotic embracing of two alternatives on a single continuum by distinguishing but not separating them is, under the heading of “synechism” or “continuity,” one of the hallmarks of Peirce’s thought. Cf. 6.169-173.
6 This generality is for Peirce one of the differences between the “realism” of his semiotic, and the “tidal wave of nominalism.” Cf. 1.1-27.
7 Peirce’s Firstness seems in many ways a counterpart to traditional qualia, though a more helpful image to get a “feel” for Peirce would be to think, not of qualities hierarchically classified, more general and more particular, but rather of more and less finely nuanced qualities set-theoretically arranged “within” one another or “overlapping,” like the regions on a Venn diagram!
Peirce was less interested in the classification of qualities, and more in their subtle nuances: for example, the way the color scarlet resembles the blare of a trumpet, or an odor of frangipanni a personality (1.312-316). We are here in the realm of synaesthesia and creative metaphor– a note to which Peirce returns in one remark on metaphor and the origin of language (2.290, fn.).
8 As principle of individuation, Peirce’s Secondness is indebted to the Scotistic notion of hiccaeity.
As regards Secondness as “Otherness,” Peirce makes the etymological observation that the older English term for “second” was the word “other.”
9 Indeed– see 1.288-1.292– apparently the “snap-bead” model of molecules, which Peirce learned in his study of chemistry, was one crucial image in the formation of the logical aspect of his semiotic!
10 As I have argued elsewhere in some detail (cf. fn. 62), Peirce’s claim that Thirdness suffices is equivalent to the claim that semiosis can be built up according to a type of logical structure which mathematicians and computer scientists refer to as a “tree.” “Trees” can involve structures of an order higher than three, but as every computer programmer knows, any tree can be transformed into a functionally equivalent “binary tree” involving only triadic relationships. Cf. Peter Grogono, Programming in PASCAL (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1978), pp. 249ff.
11 Note that the “must” of necessary being is absent from Peirce’s semiotic scheme. Peirce considered the application of “must-be’s” and “must-not-be’s” to anything short of God as one more sign of “nominalism”– cf. 2.18-77, esp. 2.28-30; “The Spirit of Cartesianism,” 5.264. Cf. also Peirce’s fallibilism, 5.587.
12 The argument runs more or less as follows: (1) In any sequence of related signs and interpretants, each element serves as both sign to interpretants following and as interpretant of signs preceding, but there can be no first or last element of the sequence. (2) As applied to any finite span in a sequence, statement (1) and direct recursion iterated infinitely many times imply that elements of the sequence converge (as an infinite subsequence) to either endpoint of the finite span. (3) Applying statement (2) to every possible span traversed by the sequence implies that the semiotic sequence is in fact a linear continuum.
Note that this recursive structure supplies an explicit and rigorous connection between the triadic sign and the continuity which is such an important feature of Peirce’s semiotic. An interesting sidelight is that Peirce’s most formal definition of the dyadic structure of Secondness (1.445-447) involves indirect recursion, though not in such a manner as to yield continuity.
13 This is my reading of Peirce’s most extensive treatment of degenerate Secondness in 1.441-1.470. Peirce analyzes the first eight levels of degenerate Secondness, giving a diagram of the first eight “steps” of the catena.
“Poietical dyads,” at the eighth step in the catena, are already within hailing distance of genuine Secondness, though in theory infinitely many steps along the catena still intervene. Another helpful “icon” might be to imagine the “steps” of this infinite catena converging to genuine Secondness as the sequence of points 0, 1/2, 3/4, 7/8, 15/16, 31/32,… converges to 1.
14 My interpretation of the two degrees of degenerate Thirdness is based chiefly on Peirce’s discussions in 1.471-481, 2.283, 5.66-76. Peirce’s diagram of his division of signs, 8.376, may also, I think, serve usefully as an “icon” of the relationship among genuine, first-degenerate, and second-degenerate Thirdness.
15 Cf. Arthur W. Burks, “Man: Sign or Algorithm? a Rhetorical Analysis of Peirce’s Semiotics,” TCSPS 16:279-92.
The perceptive reader will see here the potential connections between Peircean semiotics and existentialism! A Peircean semiotic treatment of alienation would also obviously involve the degenerate categories. For a suggestive but not fully developed treatment of these connections, see Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1975).
Percy has also written, from a Peircean semiotic viewpoint, a chilling and carefully thought out fictional treatment of “the human being as a sign stripped of all vagueness” in his most recent novel, The Thanatos Syndrome (New York: Ivy Books, 1988).
16 My description of the matter here is much more clear and explicit than Peirce ever makes it. See also Gary Sanders, “Peirce’s Sixty-Six Signs?”, TCSPS 6:3-16.
17 This can also be an alternative approach to the division of signs. Peirce’s ten-class division was in place by some time in the 1890’s; his sixty-six class division dates from about 1906. Cf. 8.342-379.
18 Of course, any division of interpretant– immediate, dynamical, or final– can be an instance of any or all of the three categories. Peirce specifies the category which predominates in an interpretant by speaking of emotional, energetic, or logical interpretant. He also distinguishes an ultimate interpretant. Thus there are twelve kinds of interpretant altogether.
Peirce sometimes defines pragmatism as the pursuit of the (sic) ultimate final logical interpretant (5.475-476, 5.491). Any final interpretant is ultimate, but not all ultimate interpretants are final. A non-final ultimate interpretant (I believe) would be an at least partial discontinuity in the flow of semiosis– a jump or break in attention, a contoured structuring of consciousness, such as apparently emerges out of our experience of time (cf. 6.325)
19 Quoted in Donald W. Mertz, “Peirce: Logic, Categories, and Triads,” TCSPS 15:169.
20 1.363, in Mertz, p. 170.
21 Mertz, pp. 170-74. For Peirce’s account of his “logic of relatives,” see 3.456-552, esp. 3.483-487; and 4.307ff.
22 In this regard, I think Mertz could well consider more carefully why Peirce introduces his “existential graphs” into the argument. Peirce is not simply arguing in terms of propositional logic; his arguments overlap with what mathematicians today call “graph theory.” See my remarks, fn. 10, on “trees” and “binary trees.”
23 Herbert W. Schneider, “Fourthness,” Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, pp. 209-10.
24 Schneider, pp. 210-13.
25 Schneider, pp. 211-214.
26 Carl R. Hausman, “Value and the Peircean Categories,” TCSPS 15:207-09.
27 Hausman, pp. 209-10; cf. 2.198-199, 5.36, 5.122-132.
28 Hausman, pp. 21-13; cf. 5.36.
29 Hausman, pp. 214-16.
30 Hausman, pp. 216-21; cf. 1.353, 1.549.
31 For a succinct account of Peirce’s growing awareness on this point, see “Esthetics, Ethics, and the Summum Bonum,” in Thomas A. Goudge, The Thought of C.S. Peirce (New York: Dover Publications, 1969; orig. ed., University of Toronto Press, 1950), pp. 301-06.
32 According to Peirce’s later sixty-six-class division, final and even dynamical interpretant may be prescinded from immediate interpretant, much as Firstness may prescind from Secondness and Thirdness (cf. 8.337-340). That is, one can conceive of the interpretant without consciously positing final and dynamical interpretant, but not without supposing immediate interpretant.
33 Quoted in Carl G. Vaught, “Peirce’s Theory of Categories,” TCSPS 22:315-16. In physics classes, the “right-hand rule is usually taught to students as an indicator of the direction of rotation of the right thumb when right thumb, forefinger, and middle finger are held all at right angles to one another, and the hand is rotated with forefinger moving in the direction of middle finger. This is the “positive” direction of rotation, and an opposite rotation is designated “negative.”
An illustration of the point Vaught is making is the fact that Soviet physicists use a left-hand rule, which interchanges positive and negative as compared to their Western counterparts!
Compare also such terms as “clockwise” and “counter-clockwise,” or the older synonyms “with the sun” and “against the sun.”
34 Vaught, pp. 317-18.
35 Vaught, pp. 313, 318-25.
36 The argument requires in rigorous form some knowledge of vector spaces, mathematical induction, and finite group theory. But the basic argument runs as follows. On a line, we can arbitrarily select one of the two possible directions and call it “positive”; the other, “negative.” We can then extend this definition one dimension at a time by selecting one of the two directions along the nth coordinate axis as “positive” and joining it to the “positive” (n -1)-dimensional structure already established.
In Peircean terms, each act of selection is dyadic (more precisely, indexical); each act of joining is triadic. A final arbitrary indexical selection on the finished product gets us from “handedness” to “left-handedness” or “right-handedness.”
37 Douglas Greenlee, Peirce’s Concept of Sign (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), p. 7.
38 Greenlee, p. 9.
39 Greenlee, pp. 13, 23-24.
40 Greenlee, p. 52f.
41 Greenlee, pp. 24, 51-52, 54, 56.
42 Greenlee, pp. 55-58. Cf. 5.6. Greenlee notes, p. 58, fn. 5, that some writers have proposed precisely such an interpretation of Peirce’s pragmatist theory of meaning.
43 Greenlee, pp. 59-61.
44 Greenlee, pp. 61-63.
45 Greenlee, p. 64.
46 Greenlee, pp. 64-69.
47 Greenlee, p. 111.
48 Greenlee, pp. 106-17, 122-23.
49 Greenlee, pp. 81-84.
50 Greenlee, pp. 86-92.
51 Greenlee, pp. 93-96.
52 Joseph Ransdell, “Another Interpretation of Peirce’s Semiotic,” TCSPS 12:97: “Greenlee’s discussion is pertinent and valuable for anyone interested in the idea of semiotic. But I do not think his account succeeds, in general, in conveying an adequate understanding of what Peirce’s semiotic is all about.”
Jarrett E. Brock, “Draft of a Critique of Greenlee’s Peirce’s Concept of Sign,” TCSPS 12:111: “Peirce’s intentions are sacrificed (ignored, neglected, excluded, distorted, misunderstood, refuted) whenever they conflict with Greenlee’s notion of a general theory of signs.”
John J. Fitzgerald, “Ambiguity in Peirce’s Theory of Signs,” TCSPS 12:132: “…the aim of Greenlee’s book seems to be to arrive at a definition of sign that will apply equally well in each instance. In so far as he takes that to be Peirce’s aim too, I think that the evidence is to the contrary.”
53 Ransdell, p. 98; Brock, pp. 111-12, 117.
54 Ransdell, pp. 98-99.
55 Ransdell, pp. 104-06; Fitzgerald, pp. 131-32. Ransdell, p. 105, states succinctly the connection between immediate and dynamical object which Greenlee rejects: The immediate object may truly represent the real object, but then it may not… But the real object is not to be thought of as an unknowable Ding an sich, screened from our view by its own manifestations, but rather as that which appears to us in the immediate object when our interpretation is correct.”
56 Ransdell, p. 106: “It was precisely on [this] question of the eliminability of the object that Royce and Peirce disagreed.” Ransdell quotes Peirce, 8.129: “The truth is, that Professor Royce is blind to a fact which all ordinary people will see plainly enough; that the essence of the realist’s opinion is that it is one thing to be and another thing to be represented.”
57 Ransdell, pp. 101-04; Brock, pp. 118-21.
58 Vincent Colapietro, “Is Peirce’s Theory of Signs Truly General?”, TCSPS 23:206-11.
59 Colapietro, p. 216. “Intensity” is my interpretation; Peirce’s term, which Colapietro cites from a manuscript, is “not sufficiently complete sign.”
60 Colapietro, pp. 217-218; cf. Fitzgerald, p. 132.
61 Colapietro, pp. 219-21.
62 Cf. the diagram in f. 14. One concrete example of such a structure can be met with in a semiotic analysis of phenomenal time– cf. Paul Burgess, “A Peircean Semiotic Analysis of Time, in Response to Richard Swinburne’s Arguments on God and Time,” paper for philosophical theology seminar.
Another good example would be the structure of immediate, dynamical, and final interpretant; cf. my response to Schneider and Hausman.
These structures bear a resemblance to certain constructions in point-set and geometric topology, a field of some interest to Peirce in its infancy around the turn of the century.
63 Paul Watzlawick, Janet Helmick Beavin, and Don Jackson, of the “Palo Alto” psychiatric research group, throw out further hints along these lines in their Pragmatics of Human Communication (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1967) when they discuss “aha!” insights, psychotherapeutic use of paradox, Zen koans, and the spontaneous transformation of interpretive viewpoint by which people can break out of emotional double binds and escalating disputes.
Watzlawick et al. seem indebted for their semiotics to Peirce and to Charles W. Morris.
64 Hence Goudge’s guiding thesis of “naturalism” versus “transcendentalism” in The Thought of C.S. Peirce. Hence also Arthur Burks’ attempt to strain out Peirce’s “rhetoric” in “Man: Sign or Algorithm?”
65 See Peirce’s “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” 6.452-493.
66 Colapietro, p. 227.
Peircean Semiotics: A Brief Introduction
Source: The Biosemiotic Approach in Biology: Theoretical Bases and Applied Models
Peirce is often considered the founder of modern semiotics (Weiss and Burks 1945, 386). Semiotics was defined by Peirce as “the doctrine of the essential and fundamental nature of all varieties of possible semioses” (CP 5:484). Semiotics describes and analyzes the structure of semiotic processes independently of their material bases, or of the conditions under which they can be observed: inside cells (cytosemiosis), among tissues and cell populations (vegetative semiosis), in animal communication (zoosemiosis), or in typically human activities (production of notations, metarepresentations, etc.). In other words, Peirce’s concept of semiotics concerns a theory of signs in its most general sense. Peirce conceived general semiotics much like a formal science as mathematics is (CP 2:227). However, semiotics finds the objects of its investigation in the sign’s concrete, natural environment and in “normal human experience” (CP 1:241).
Semiotics is subdivided into speculative grammar, critical logic, and speculative rhetoric (CP 2:229). The first division of this science is what interests us here. Its task is that of examining the “sign physiology of all kinds” (CP 2:83), that is, the concrete nature of signs as they emerge and develop, and the conditions that determine the sign’s further development, nature, and interpretation. It is the branch that investigates (1) the conditions to which any and every kind of sign must be submitted, (2) the sign itself, and (3) its true nature (CP 1:444). As one of its tasks, speculative grammar elaborates on the classifications of signs or, in other words, the diversity of sign types and how they merge with one another to create complex semiotic processes. For Houser, the logician “who concentrates on speculative grammar investigates representation relations (signs), seeks to work out the necessary and sufficient conditions for representing, and classifies the different possible kinds of representation” (1997, 9). Between 1867 and 1911, Peirce developed a model of signs as processes, actions, and relations, and also elaborated divisions of signs in order to describe different kinds of semiotic processes.
Peirce’s pragmatic model of meaning as the “action of signs” (semiosis) has had a deep impact (besides all branches of semiotics) on philosophy, psychology, theoretical biology, and cognitive sciences (see Freeman 1983; Fetzer 1997; Colapietro 1989; Tiercelin 1995; Hoffmeyer 1996; Deacon 1997; Freadman 2004; Hookway 2002). First and foremost, Peirce’s semiotics is grounded in a list of categories—namely, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness—which corresponds to an exhaustive system of hierarchically organized classes of relations (Houser 1997). This system makes up the formal foundation of Peirce’s philosophy (Parker 1998) and his model of semiotic action (Murphey 1993).
In brief, the categories can be defined as follows:
1. Firstness: what something is, without reference to anything else. 2. Secondness: what something is, in relation to something else, but without relation to any third entity. 3. Thirdness: what something is, insofar as it is capable of bringing a second entity into relation to a first one in the same way that it brings itself into relation to the first and the second entities.
Firstness is the category of vagueness and novelty: “firstness is the mode of being which consists in its subject’s being positively such as it is regardless of anything else. That can only be a possibility” (CP 1:25). Secondness is the category of reaction, opposition, and differentiation: “generally speaking genuine secondness consists in one thing acting upon another, brute action. . . . I consider the idea of any dyadic relation not involving any third as an idea of secondness” (CP 8:330). Finally, Thirdness is the category of mediation, habit, generality, evolution, and conceptualization (CP 1:340).5
Semiosis and Information Processing
According to Peirce (CP 2:171, 2:274), any description of semiosis should necessarily treat it as a relation constituted by three irreducibly connected terms: sign-object-interpretant (S-O-I). Hereafter, we will refer to these terms of a triadic relation as S, O, and I, and to the triadic relation in itself, as “triad” (see figure 4.1). As the reader will note in figure 4.1, this triadic relationship communicates/conveys a form from the object to the interpretant through the sign (symbolized by the horizontal arrow). The other two arrows indicate that the form is conveyed from the object to the interpretant through a determination of the sign by the object, and a determination of the interpretant by the sign.
For Peirce, a sign is something that stands for something other than itself. Peirce defined signs in several different ways (Marty and Lang 1997), but here we will highlight the definitions that will be useful in our work. He conceived a sign as a “First which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, so as to be capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the same triadic relation to its Object in which it stands itself to the same Object” (CP 2:274; see also CP 2:303, 2:92, 1:541). The triadic relation between S, O, and I is regarded by Peirce as irreducible, in the sense that it is not decomposable into any simpler relation. Accordingly, the term “sign” was used by Peirce to designate the irreducible triadic process between S, O, and I, but he also used it to refer to the first term of this triadic relation. Some commentators have proposed that we should distinguish between the “sign in this strict sense” (representamen, or sign vehicle), when referring to the first term of the triad, and the “sign in a broad sense” (or sign process, sign as a whole) (e.g., Johansen 1993). Signs, conceived in the broad sense, are never alone.
In Peirce’s definitions, we find several clues to understand how signs act. Any sign is something that stands for something else (its object) in such a way that it ends up producing a third relational entity (an interpretant), which is the effect a sign produces on an interpreter. In the context of biosemiotics, an interpreter is a biosystem such as a cell or an organism. In many biological informational processes, sign interpretation results in a new sign within the interpreter, which refers to the same object to which the former sign refers, or ultimately in an action, which can lead to the termination of an informational process. That the interpretant is often another sign, created by the action of a previous sign, is clear in the following statement by Peirce: a sign is “anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on, ad infinitum” (CP 2:303).
Accordingly, it is important to bear in mind always that the interpretant is not necessarily the product of a process that amounts to “interpretation” in the sense that we use this term to account for human cognitive processes. As explained previously, the fundamental character of the interpretant in many biological processes is that it is a new sign produced by the action of a previous sign in such a manner that both share the same referent, and indeed, refer to it in a similar way.
One of the most remarkable characteristics of Peirce’s theory of signs is its commitment to a process philosophy. As a process thinker, it was quite natural that Peirce conceived semiosis as basically a process in which triads are systematically linked to one another so as to form a web (see Gomes et al. 2007). Peirce’s theory of signs has a remarkable dynamical nature. According to Merrell, “Peirce’s emphasis rests not on content, essence, or substance, but, more properly, on dynamics relations. Events, not things, are highlighted” (1995, 78). Thus, Hausman (1993) refers to the complex S-O-I as the focal factor of a dynamical process.
It is important not to lose sight of the distinction between the inter- preter, which is the system that interprets the sign, and the interpretant. The interpreter is described by Peirce as a “Quasi-mind” (CP 4:536), a description that demands, for its proper interpretation, a clear recognition of Peirce’s broad concept of mind (Ransdell 1977; Santaella-Braga 1994). It is not the case that only conscious beings can be interpreters in a Peircean framework. Rather, a translation machinery synthesizing proteins from a string of ribonucleic acid (RNA) or a membrane receptor recognizing a given hormone can be regarded as interpreters. A basic idea in a semiotic understanding of living systems is that these systems are interpreters of signs, that is, that they are constantly responding to selected signs in their surroundings. An interpreter is anything that carries on a sign process.
Thus, the interpreter does not have to be a conscious being, not even an organism, as it may be some part or subsystem within an organism, or a human-designed product. Nevertheless, because a sign process is itself an interpreter, the concept of interpreter appears to be secondary in Peirce’s semiotics, even though it can play a heuristic role in building some models of semiotic processes.
We also need to consider here Peirce’s distinctions regarding the nature of objects and interpretants, (For a review of these topics, see Savan 1988; Liszka 1990; Short 1996.) He distinguishes between the immediate and dynamical objects of a sign as follows:
We must distinguish between the Immediate Object—i.e., the Object as repre- sented in the sign—and . . . the Dynamical Object, which, from the nature of things, the Sign cannot express, which it can only indicate and leave the interpreter to find out by collateral experience. (CP 8:314; emphasis in the original)
and:
We have to distinguish the Immediate Object, which is the Object as the Sign itself represents it, and whose Being is thus dependent upon the Representation of it in the Sign, from the Dynamical Object, which is the Reality which by some means contrives to determine the Sign to its Representation. (CP 4:536)
And we should also consider his distinction between three kinds of interpretants:
The Immediate Interpretant is the immediate pertinent possible effect in its unanalyzed primitive entirety. . . . The Dynamical Interpretant is the actual effect produced upon a given interpreter on a given occasion in a given stage of his consideration of the Sign. (MS 339d:546–547; emphasis in the original)
and:
The Final Interpretant is the one Interpretative result to which every Interpreter is destined to come if the Sign is sufficiently considered. . . . The Final Interpretant is that toward which the actual tends. (SS 110–111)
Let us first consider Peirce’s distinction between the immediate and the dynamical objects of a sign. The dynamical object is something in reality that determines the sign, but can be represented by the sign only in some of its aspects. These aspects that the sign represents are the immediate object, that is, the dynamical object in its semiotically available form, that is, as immediately given to the sign. In another words, the immediate object is the dynamical object as the sign represents it (this is what we mean by “semiotic availability”). Because the sign represents the dynamical object in some of its features only, never in its totality, it can simply indicate that object, and it is left to an interpreter to establish what is the dynamical object through the interpreter’s competence as a user of that sign, which, in turn, results from its previous experience and learning to become an interpreter.6 This is why Peirce claims that the interpreter should find out what the dynamical object is by collateral experience. The system that is causally affected by the sign should establish which dynamical object the sign indicates through processes that have been selected for in the evolutionary history of that kind of system. In the ontogenetic timescale, the system will acquire its semiotic competence—that is, its competence as a sign interpreter—through development.
Peirce defines the dynamical interpretant as the actual effect of a sign, while the immediate interpretant is its “range of interpretability”—the range of possible effects that a sign is able to produce (see Johansen 1993, 166–167). The dynamical interpretant is thus the instantiation of one of the possible effects included in the immediate interpretant. The final interpretant in a semiotic process is, in turn, the final state of this process, understood as a tendency being realized when a given chain of triads is triggered, but not determined or bound to happen, because other final states can follow from the semiotic process, as in the case, for instance, of misinterpretation. In one way or another, the final interpretant can be seen as temporally solving the instability that is included into the sign process.
Peirce (CP 8:177) writes that a sign determines an interpretant in some “actual” or “potential” mind (in other passages, a “Quasi-mind”; see CP 4:536). It is indeed possible to differentiate between “potential” and “effective” semiosis. Potential semiosis is defined as a triadically structured process that is not actually taking place, but has a disposition to take place at a given moment; that is, it could occur under the appropriate conditions. Effective semiosis, in turn, concerns a sign that, by being actualized, has an actual effect on the interpreter. Semiosis necessarily entails the instantiation of chains of triadic relations, as a sign in a given triad will lead to the production of an interpretant, which is, in turn, a new sign. Therefore, an interpretant is both the third term of a previous triad and the first term (sign) of a subsequent triad (Savan 1988; see figure 4.2). Here, we have a first transition accounting for the dynamical nature of semiosis, namely, the interpretant-sign (I-S) transition. By this “transition,” we simply mean that the same element that plays the role of the interpretant in a triad will play in a subsequent triad the role of the sign. After all, from a Peircean perspective, to perform sign processing and interpretation is to produce further (or, as Peirce says, more developed) signs.
Please also remember that the outline in this section is purely logical (or semiotic) and that within a particular physical, chemical, or biological system, the semiotic processes described here in general terms can be instantiated by different physical means, such as shifts in chemical con-
centrations or processes of molecular recognition. We will add this material aspect when we present our biosemiotic models.
When the I-S transition takes place, there is also a change in the occupant of the functional role of the immediate object (figure 4.2). When the interpretant becomes the sign of a new triad, the relation of reference to the same dynamical object depends on the fact that the new occupant of the role of immediate object stands for the same aspect of the dynamical object that the immediate object of a previous triad stood for. Thus, an object turns out to be a plural object via semiosis. We should stress, however, that instead of using the concept of reference in these models (as it is a highly debated and sometimes unclear concept that is not included in Peirce’s theory of signs), it might be good to replace this concept in future works by a concept internal to Peirce’s framework: the concept of ground.
As figure 4.2 shows, in a triad i a given sign Si indicates a dynamical object by representing some aspect of it, the immediate object Oi. Through the triadic relation, an interpretant Ii is produced in the semiotic system. This interpretant becomes the sign in a subsequent triadic relation, Si+1, which now indicates the same dynamical object. It should indicate this object through a new immediate object that corresponds to an aspect of the dynamical object represented in the sign. We now have a new occupant of the role of immediate object that stands for the same aspect of the dynamical object which was represented in the previous sign, Si. It is in this sense that there is a change in the occupant of the functional role of the immediate object, from Oi in a previous triad to Oi+1 in a subsequent triad. Through the triadic relation, a further interpretant, Ii+1, will be produced, which will then become the sign in a new triad, Si+2, and thus successively, up to the end of that specific sign process.
Peirce also defines a sign as a medium for the communication of a form or habit embodied in the object to the interpretant (De Tienne 2003; Hulswit 2001; Bergman 2000), so as to constrain the interpretant as a sign or the interpreter’s behavior (figure 4.1):
A Sign may be defined as a Medium for the communication of a Form. . . . As a medium, the Sign is essentially in a triadic relation, to its Object which determines it, and to its Interpretant which it determines. . . . That which is communicated from the Object through the Sign to the Interpretant is a Form; that is to say, it is nothing like an existent, but is a power, is the fact that something would happen under certain conditions. (MS 793:1–3) (See EP 2:544, n. 22, for a slightly different version.)
What is a form? There is a movement in Peirce’s writings from “form as firstness” to “form as thirdness.” Form is defined as having the “being of predicate” (EP 2:544), and it is also pragmatically formulated as a “conditional proposition” stating that certain things would happen under specific circumstances (EP 2:388). It is nothing like a thing (De Tienne 2003), but something that is embodied in the object (EP 2:544, n. 22) as a habit, a “rule of action” (CP 5:397), a “disposition” (CP 2:170), a “real potential” (EP 2:388) or, simply, a “permanence of some relation” (CP 1:415). Here, we would like to stress that the form communicated or conveyed from the object to the interpretant through the sign is not the particular shape of an object, or something alike, but a regularity, a habit that allows a given semiotic system to interpret that form as indicative of a particular class of entities, processes, or phenomena, and thus to answer to it in a similarly regular, lawful way. Otherwise, the semiotic system would not be really capable of interpretation.
The communication/conveyance of a form from the object to the interpretant constrains the behavior of an interpreter, in the sense that it brings about a constrained set of relations between the object and the interpretant through the mediation of the sign. We understand the “meaning” of a sign, thus, as an effect of the sign—conceived as a medium for the communication/conveyance of forms—on an interpreter by means of the triadic relation S-O-I. A meaning process can be thus defined as the action of a sign (semiosis).
In a Peircean approach, information can be strongly associated with the concepts of meaning and semiosis.7 Peirce spoke of signs as “conveyers,” as a “medium” (MS 793), as “embodying meaning.” Accordingly, in his theory, the notions of meaning, information, and semiosis intersect and overlap in different ways (see Johansen 1993). Peirce defined “meaning” as the consequence of the triadic relation between sign, object, and interpretant (S-O-I) as a whole (EP 2:429), and also in terms of different correlates of a triad—e.g., object (MS 11, EP 2:274), interpretant (EP 2:496, EP 2:499; CP 4:536; see Fitzgerald 1966, 84; Bergman 2000). In turn, Peirce defined “information” at least ordinarily (CP 2.418) and metaphysically (CP 2.418) as a connection between form and matter, and logically (W 1.276) as the product of the extension and intension of a concept (Debrock 1996).
In the passage quoted earlier from MS 793, Peirce defines a sign both as “a Medium for the communication of a Form” and as “a triadic relation, to its Object which determines it, and to its Interpretant which it determines.” If we consider both definitions of a sign, we can say, then, that semiosis is a triadic process of communication/conveyance of a form from the object to the interpretant by the sign mediation. And we can also stipulate that semiosis is, in a Peircean framework, information. For this reason, we systematically refer to information as the communication/ conveyance of a form from O to I through S (Queiroz, Emmeche, and El-Hani. 2005; El-Hani, Queiroz, and Emmeche 2006; Queiroz and El-Hani 2006a, 2006b).
According to our interpretation of Peirce’s ideas, information has the nature of a process: it is a process of communicating a form to the interpretant and operates as a constraining influence on possible patterns of interpretative behavior. When applying this general semiotic approach to biological systems, information will most often be an interpreter-dependent process. It cannot be dissociated from the notion of a situated (and actively distributed) communicational agent (potential or effective). It is interpreter-dependent in the sense that information triadically connects representation (sign), object, and an effect (interpretant) on the interpreter (which can be an organism or a part of an organism). In a biological system, information depends on both the interpreter and the object (in which the form communicated in information is embodied as a constraining factor of the interpretative process). Thus, a framework for thinking about information as a process can be constructed in Peircean terms by employing the following definitions:
• Information = semiosis: a triadic-dependent process through which a form embodied in the object in a regular way is communicated or conveyed to an interpretant through the mediation of a sign.
• Potential information = potential semiosis: a process of communicating or conveying a form from an object to an interpretant through the mediation of a sign that has a disposition to take place at a given moment, changing the state of the interpreter.
• Effective information = effective semiosis: the process by which a sign actually produces an effect (interpretant) on some system (an interpreter) by making the interpretant stand in a similar relation to the same object (the object of the sign) as that in which the sign itself stand. Thus, the sign mediates the relation between object and interpretant. The sign effectively communicates or conveys, in this way, a form from the object to the interpretant, changing the state of the interpreter.
Phenomenology, Esthetics, and Ethics as New Sciences of Theoretical Philosophy
Source: LIMITATIONS ON APPLYING PEIRCEAN SEMEIOTIC
BIOSEMIOTICS AS APPLIED OBJECTIVE ETHICS AND ESTHETICS RATHER THAN SEMEIOTIC
Until the first years of 20th century, Peirce thought that theoretical philosophy included only two subdisciplines, logic and metaphysics. The basic structure of the concept of sign as a logical concept was fixed under the conception that logic provided the most abstract positive science. However, in 1901-1903, Peirce’s conceptions about the philosophical sciences and his own main work changed. He found out that theoretical philosophy —that he was practicing himself— actually contains a couple of other sciences that he previously had not recognized it containing. According to this new conception, theoretical philosophy divides into three subdisciplines, to phenomenology (later also phaneroscopy), normative sciences, and metaphysics. Normative sciences divide further into three: to esthetics, ethics (renamed later as practics), and logic (or formal semeiotic). This addition of new sciences did not changed the hierarchical character of the classification of sciences — higher sciences should still be completely self-sufficient in relation to lower ones. Most importantly, logic with its logical concept of sign appeared no more as the most abstract of the positive sciences. Metaphysics was no more dependent merely on logic and mathematics, but it could now appeal to these new sciences too.
Phenomenology was abstracted as the most general of all positive sciences. The categories (firstness, secondness, thirdness) that were earlier derived as logical ones (as categories of thought) and applied in metaphysics (as categories of being, cf. CP 1.300, 1894) became now understood as primarily phenomenological ones. Logical, metaphysical, and other corresponding categories are only applications of these phenomenological ones. Any psychological, metaphysical, or logical refutation of anyone of these categories is only a refutation of that application, not of the phenomenological category in itself.
Phenomenology (or phaneroscopy) is a pre-normative science that merely describes the phaneron (or ‘universal phenomenon’). By phaneron, Peirce meant “the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not”(CP 1.284, 1905). It is a description of the most general elements (i.e. universal categories) that are included in any content of any mind. However, ‘mind’here (as usually in Peirce’s philosophy) does not refer merely to “an instantaneous state of consciousness”but also to the unconscious or implicit content of mind (EP 2:362, 1905). Consciousness is usually capable of concentrating only on one basic element of mind at a time: either 1. to its actual content, i.e. qualities of feeling (firstness)49, 2. to the existential event of change in that content, i.e. a sudden compulsive appearing of a new quality that replaces the old one (secondness), or 3. to its mediative character, its bringing something not present to mind, i.e. its reference to the future or past, which means some kind of experience of generality or continuity in time (thirdness). Phenomenology is in itself a study of phanera in their firstness, i.e. of what is common to all of them as they are. It is the study of categories, their degenerate forms, and their mutual relations. Normative sciences consider the general effects of phanera, their relation to ends (i.e. how they act upon us and how our action impacts upon them), treating thus phanera in their secondness. Metaphysics studies what is real in phanera, what they tell us about the reality in general — i.e. it studies phanera in their thirdness. (EP 2:197, 1903.) These new sciences appear in the similar sense ‘transcendental’as logic did in our earlier consideration (cf. Ch. 2.3).
The idea of three normative sciences: esthetics, ethics, and logic, is a classical one, but Peirce adopted it in a modified sense. He took all of them as theoretical sciences, not as Arts or as disciplines that aim at practical purposes (as justice). Earlier Peirce did not consider ethics and esthetics as the sciences of theoretical philosophy but — if sciences at all— either as practical ones (belonging to practical philosophy) or as psychical ones. But now they were abstracted from their conventional practical nature so that especially ethics should not be confused with the corresponding practical science.50 While logic was defined as a science of self-controlled thought, ethics was determined as the general science of self-controlled conduct. Because thinking is a species of conduct, logic appears as a kind of ethics of thought — ethics is thus a more abstract normative science than logic (e.g. EP 2:272, 1903). All the principles that will be found in ethics are the principles of logic as well, but not vice versa. The findings of logic do not bind ethical conceptions.
Source: LIMITATIONS ON APPLYING PEIRCEAN SEMEIOTIC
BIOSEMIOTICS AS APPLIED OBJECTIVE ETHICS AND ESTHETICS RATHER THAN SEMEIOTIC
Source: LIMITATIONS ON APPLYING PEIRCEAN SEMEIOTIC
BIOSEMIOTICS AS APPLIED OBJECTIVE ETHICS AND ESTHETICS RATHER THAN SEMEIOTIC
“A New Approach to the Problem of the Order of the Ten Trichotomies and the Classification of Sixty-six Types of Signs in Peirce’s Late Speculative Grammar.”
Restrepo, Jorge Alejandro Flórez and Juliana Acosta López de Mesa.
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy, vol. 57 no. 3, 2021, p. 374-396.
Using Peircean Semiotics as the Grounding of Cognition †
Eduardo Camargo
and Ricardo Gudwin *
Department of Computer Engineering and Industrial Automation (DCA), School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (FEEC), State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas 13083-852, SP, Brazil; cepcamargo@gmail.com * Correspondence: gudwin@unicamp.br; Tel.: +55-19-99701-7522
† Presented at Philosophy and Computing Conference, IS4SI Summit 2021, Online, 12–19 September 2021.
Evaluating Intelligence: A Computational Semiotics Perspective
Ricardo R. Gudwin, Department of Computer Engineering and Industrial Automation – DCA Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering – FEEC State University of Campinas – UNICAMP – Brasil gudwin@dca.fee.unicamp.br
Semiotic Oriented Autonomous Intelligent Systems Engineering
Rodrigo Gonçalves Ricardo Gudwin
rodrigo@dca.fee.unicamp.br
gudwin@dca.fee.unicamp.br
Department of Computer Engineering and Industrial Automation – DCA – Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering – FEEC – State University of Campinas – UNICAMP – Brazil
Angelo Loula, Ricardo Gudwin, João Queiroz Dept. Computer Engineering and Industrial Automation FEEC – UNICAMP Av. Albert Einstein, 400 Campinas – SP, Brasil 13083-970
0angelocl@dca.fee.unicamp.br,
gudwin@dca.fee.unicamp.br,
queirozj@dca.fee.unicamp.br
Sidarta Ribeiro Dept. Neurobiology Duke University Medical School Durham, NC, USA ribeiro@neuro.duke.edu
Ivan de Araújo Dept. Experimental Psychology University of Oxford Oxford, UK ivan.araujo@psy.ox.ac.uk
Corresponding author: queirozj@dca.fee.unicamp.br
Special Issue on Computational Intelligence and Semiotics
S.E.E.D. Journal (Semiotics, Evolution, Energy, and Development
Moving Pictures of Thought Diagrams as Centerpiece of a Peircean Epistemology
Originally, “Diagrams as Centerpiece in a Peircean Epistemology”, in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Summer, 2000, vol. XXXVI, no. 3, 357-92.
In its adapted version, ch. 4 of Diagrammatology. An Investigation in Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics, Dordrecht 2007: Springer Verlag, 89-116.
The Criterion of Habit in Peirce’s Definitions of the Symbol
Author(s): Winfried Nöth Source: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 46, No. 1, A Symposium in Memory of Peter H. Hare / Joseph Palencik & Russell Pryba, Guest Editors (Winter 2010), pp. 82- 93 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/TRA.2010.46.1.82 .
Semiotics and Semiosics:the Terminological Connotations and Conceptual Relations
Min Niu
1 School of Foreign Languages, Guizhou Minzu University, Guiyang, 550025, China 2 University of Shinawatra, Bangkok, 10400, Thailand *E-mail: niumin810@163.com
International Journal of New Developments in Education ISSN 2663-8169 Vol. 2, Issue 3: 04-13, DOI: 10.25236/IJNDE.2020.020302
Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, Rutgers University, Piscataway, N.J, 08854, USA
Received 17 May 2017, Revised 1 September 2017, Accepted 5 September 2017, Available online 9 September 2017, Version of Record 19 December 2017.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
Volume 131, December 2017, Pages 387-401
Integral Biomathics 2017: The Necessary Conjunction of Western and Eastern Thought Traditions for Exploring the Nature of Mind and Life Edited by Plamen L. Simeonov, Arran Gare, Koichiro Matsuno, Abir U. Igamberdiev
Towards a multi-level approach to the emergence of semiosis in semiotic systems
João Queiroz1,2 & Charbel Niño El-Hani2,3,4
1. Dept. Computer Engineering and Industrial Automation, FEEC – UNICAMP. <queirozj@dca.fee.unicamp.br> 2. Research Group on History, Philosophy, and Biology Teaching, Institute of Biology, (UFBA). <charbel@ufba.br>
3. Graduate Studies Program in History, Philosophy, and Science Teaching (UFBA/UEFS). 4. Graduate Studies Program in Ecology and Biomonitoring (UFBA).
Towards the emergence of meaning processes in computers from Peircean semiotics
Antonio Gomes
Ricardo Gudwin
Charbel Nino El-Hani
Joao Queiroz
Mind & Society (2007) 6:173–187
DOI 10.1007/s11299-007-0031-9
Modeling Intersemiotic Translation: Notes towards a Peircean Account
Daniella Aguiar State University of Rio de Janeiro (Brasil)
João Queiroz Federal University of Juiz de Fora (Brasil)
Proceedings of the 10th World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS/AIS)
Semiotic modelling of biological processes: semiotic systems
João Queiroz a,b,c & Charbel El-Hani a,b
a. Graduate Studies Program in History, Philosophy, and Science Teaching, Federal University of Bahia/State University of Feira de Santana, Brazil. b. Research Group in History, Philosophy, and Biology Teaching, Institute of Biology, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil.
c. Institute of Arts and Design, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil.
Pervasive informatics: theory, practice and future directions
Kecheng Liu1*, Keiichi Nakata1, Chris Harty2
1Informatics Research Centre, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6BW, UK 2Innovative Construction Research Centre, School of Construction Management and Engineering, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AY, UK
Intelligent Buildings International 2 (2010), 5–19, doi:10.3763/inbi.2009.0041
Semiotic Machine
Dr. Mihai Nadin
Ashbel Smith University Professor The University of Texas at Dallas
nadin@utdallas.edu
The Public Journal of Semiotics I(1), January 2007, pp. 57-75
SEMIOTIC MODELS IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PROBLEMS
D.A. Pospelov
40, Vavilov St., Computing Center USSR Academy of Sciences
Moscow 117535, USSR
Artificial General Intelligence
Ben Goertzel Cassio Pennachin (Eds.)
ISSN 1611-2482 ISBN-10 3-540-23733-X Springer Berlin Heidelberg New York ISBN-13 978-3-540-23733-4 Springer Berlin Heidelberg New York
2007
Possibility theory, probability theory and multiple-valued logics: A clarification ∗
Didier Dubois and Henri Prade
Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (I.R.I.T.) – C.N.R.S., Université Paul Sabatier, 118 route de Narbonne, 31062 Toulouse Cedex 4, France E-mail: {dubois, prade}@irit.fr
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 32: 35–66, 2001.
Founding Director and Associate Professor Communication, Culture, and Technology Program Georgetown University Washington, DC
irvinem@georgetown.edu
[Chapter to appear in The Bloomsbury Companion to Semiotics, ed. Jamin Pelkey (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). Final pre-publication draft, slightly revised.]
ON BUILDING A BIOLOGICALLY-INSPIRED EXPERIMENT ON SYMBOL-BASED COMMUNICATION
Angelo Loula
Department of Exact Sciences, State University of Feira de Santana, Brazil Department of Computer Engineering and Industrial
Automation, FEEC, State University of Campinas, Brazil angelocl@ecomp.uefs.br
Sidarta Ribeiro
International Institute of Neuroscience of Natal Edmond and Lily Safra (IINN-ELS), Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil sidartaribeiro@gmail.com
Ricardo Gudwin
Department of Computer Engineering and Industrial Automation, FEEC, State University of Campinas, Brazil gudwin@dca.fee.unicamp.br
João Queiroz
Graduate Studies Program on History, Philosophy, and Science Teaching, Federal University of Bahia/State University of Feira de Santana, Brazil queirozj@ ecomp.uefs.br (corresponding author)
Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology · January 2010
DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-79100-5_5
On Modeling Adaptive and Cognitive Systems
Angelo Loula and João Queiroz
Published in Angelo Loula & João Queiroz (Eds), Advances in Modeling Adaptive and Cognitive Systems. UEFS, 2010.
Self-organization and emergence of semiosis
João Queiroz (1), and Angelo Loula (2,3)
(1) Institute of Arts and Design (UFJF), Brazil. (corresponding: queirozj@pq.cnpq.br)
(2) Dept. of Computer Engineering and Industrial Automation, State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil.
(3) Dept. of Exact Sciences, State University of Feira de Santana (UEFS), Brazil
Modeling the Emergence and Evolutionary History of Semiotic Systems and Processes
Editorial Preface
Angelo Loula, State University of Feira de Santana, Brazil
João Queiroz, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil
On the Emergence of Indexical and Symbolic Interpretation in Artificial Creatures, or What is this I Hear?
Angelo Loula , Ricardo Gudwin and João Queiroz
Informatics Area, Department of Exact Sciences, State University of Feira de Santana (UEFS), Brazil Department of Computer Engineering and Industrial Automation, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, State
University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil Institute of Arts and Design, Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), Brazil
* queirozj@pq.cnpq.br
Studying Sign Processes in the emergence of Communication
University of Applied Sciences Nibelungenplatz 1, 60318 Frankfurt am Main, Germany {ubauer,mfwagner}@fb2.fh-frankfurt.de {mail}@ulrich-schrader.de {g.doeben-henisch,l.erasmus}@ieee.org http://www.fh-frankfurt.de
Published in Angelo Loula & João Queiroz (Eds), Advances in Modeling Adaptive and Cognitive Systems. UEFS, 2010.
1 Scientific and Philosophical Studies of Mind Program, Franklin & Marshall College 2 Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, University of Connecticut
tony.chemero@fandm.edu, michael.turvey@uconn.edu
Published in Angelo Loula & João Queiroz (Eds), Advances in Modeling Adaptive and Cognitive Systems. Editora UEFS, 2010.
Semiotics, decision sciences and value systems – Greimas contributions to the emergence of XXI century meaning-making challenges
LACERDA NOBRE Ângela, Escola Superior de Ciências Empresariais do Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal ESCE-IPS; CEFI-UCP; CHAM; LABCOM-IFP angela.nobre@esce.ips.pt; lacerda.nobre@gmail.com
On Peirce’s Theory of Propositions: A Response to Hilpinen
Nathan Houser
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society
Notes for a Dynamic Diagram of Charles Peirce’s Classifications of Signs
Priscila Farias and Queiroz, J. (2000)
Semiotica 131 (1/2), 19–44.
“A New Approach to the Problem of the Order of the Ten Trichotomies and the Classification of Sixty-six Types of Signs in Peirce’s Late Speculative Grammar.”
Restrepo, Jorge Alejandro Flórez and Juliana Acosta López de Mesa.
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy, vol. 57 no. 3, 2021, p. 374-396.
Viewpoints which Matter 