Ask Meno Questions • Discussion

Re: Victoria N. Alexander
At: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/8790

Tori & All,

My remarks are interspersed below.

VA: I've tried to address Meno's paradox in a new paper here:
     http://www.springerlink.com/content/h101371474236512/

VA: If we do not have models of that which we don't know;
     we can only recognize things for which we have models,
     how is learning possible?  We sometimes mistake things
     for that which we know.  This is possible because we
     know the world through signs.  Learning takes place
     when mistakes are positively reinforced.

VA: Creativity: Self-Referential Mistaking, Not Negating

VA: In C.S. Peirce, as well as in the work of many biosemioticians, the semiotic object
     is sometimes described as a physical “object” with material properties and sometimes
     described as an “ideal object” or mental representation.  I argue that to the extent
     that we can avoid these types of characterizations we will have a more scientific
     definition of sign use and will be able to better integrate the various fields that
     interact with biosemiotics.  In an effort to end Cartesian dualism in semiotics,
     which has been the main obstacle to a scientific biosemiotics, I present an argument
     that the “semiotic object” is always ultimately the objective of self-affirmation
     (of habits, physical or mental) and/or self-preservation.

I think you are stating several important insights here:

(1) The word "object" in pragmatism and pragmatic semiotics has a much wider range
     of meanings than the extremely reductive sense of a "compact physical object".
     Anyone who wanted to taste the richness of its meaning could hardly do better
     than to sample the senses of the Greek "pragma" that imbue the Latin-derived
     "object".  http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=pragma&la=greek#lexicon

(2) There is reason to think that the sense of the word "object" that means
     objective, purpose, target, intention, goal, end, aim, and so on is more
     fundamental than the more restrictive sense of a compact physical object.
     That is in fact one of the most critical insights that comes down to us
     from long lines of physical theory and also from the traditions known as
     "process thinking", suggesting that our concepts of physical objects are
     derivative in relation to our concepts of process, since they arise from
     our ability to discover "invariants under transformations", that is, the
     formal constructs that are preserved by the operations or processes that
     transform the states of a system.

Breaking here for now ...

Jon

VA: Therefore, I propose a new model for the sign triad:  response-sign-objective.  With
     this new model it is clear, as I will show, that self-mistaking (not self-negation as
     others have proposed) makes learning, creativity and purposeful action possible via signs.
     I define an “interpretation” as a response to something as if it were a sign, but whose
     semiotic objective does not, in fact, exist.  If the response-as-interpretation turns out
     to be beneficial for the system after all, there is biopoiesis.  When the response is not
     “interpretive,” but self-confirming in the usual way, there is biosemiosis.  While the
     conditions conducive to fruitful misinterpretation (e.g., accidental similarity of
     non-signs to signs and/or contiguity of non-signs to self-sustaining processes) might
     be artificially enhanced, according to this theory, the outcomes would be, by nature,
     more or less uncontrollable and unpredictable.  Nevertheless, biosemiotics could be
     instrumental in the manipulation and/or artificial creation of purposeful systems
     insofar as it can describe a formula for the conditions under which new objectives
     and novel purposeful behavior may emerge, however unpredictably.

-- 

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