I'm afraid you are too caught up in Peircean worship to pay attention to what I'm saying, but that's the usual practice for you.

That problem was solved by semiotics. Peircean semiotics shows how the world can be divided into matter and symbol, and then interact and develop as a result of its causality being divided in this very fashion. — apokrisis

Peircean semiotics is too meek. The world not only can be divided into matter and symbol, but it always is-- existence and the meaning of existence (and the wider meanings of logic). The symbolic is not an addition of causality, but a necessary truth. It does not have to be added in. That's why there is no hierarchy. All meaning is already there. Anything is always possible.

More importantly, casualty is turned over entirely to existence. The interactions and developments of causality are entirely question of states which exist, not any symbolic meaning.

Now, it is true that which ever states exist express a symbolic meaning, so for a given state to be present (e.g. tree) the "presence" of a symbol ("tree") is always given, but that symbol is not how the tree exists. Existence does that.

The big problem for naturalism was doing justice to the apparent dualism that divides minds and worlds, top-down formal and final causes and bottom-up material and efficient causes. — apokrisis

With causality turned over to existence, this is resolved. There are no distinction of formal and efficient cause. All causes are of the same realm, material-- a state which brings about another, whether the given cause is an atom or someone's experience.

Yet although you can draw on Hegel and Pierce for elements of naturalism, I think both were actually 'romantic dualists' in some respects (at least, according to your classification, although I don't think that they would have used the terminology themselves): — Wayfarer

Yep. They both had their mushy edges being people of their times. But if we pay attention to the general logic of nature they were talking about, then we are on solid ground.

So if you go quote-mining their huge outputs, you can always pick out some plum that sounds like it speaks to romantic dualism...

The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. C.S. Peirce

You say that is Peirce espousing panpsychism. I say that Peirce sought to naturalise a four cause approach in talking about a reality that could develop robust habits. And what we call physical law are the four causes in their most attentuated possible form. They are the least mind-like condition - and yet mind-like in that the causality of constraints, the globally shaping causality of formal and final cause, is what the laws represent.

Absolute idealism is an ontologically monistic philosophy chiefly associated with G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling, both German idealist philosophers of the 19th century, Josiah Royce, an American philosopher, and others, but, in its essentials, the product of Hegel. It is Hegel's account of how being is ultimately comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole.

The latter is clearly descended from the (neo)platonic conception of 'the One' in my view (albeit considerably elaborated and re-interpreted by Hegel.) — Wayfarer

Yep. I see natural philosophy as detouring through German naturphilosophie and idealism. That is why German science has produced so many of the systems thinkers.

But in the end - as a pragmatist - one takes idealism as the epistemic condition, not the ontological model. So you accept all the constraints of being in a modelling relation with the world, but then you get on with actually modelling the world in the best way possible.

Aristotle was a naturalist - many would say the first! - but he also argued for a first cause or unmoved mover, etc, which was an essential premise of his philosophy. — Wayfarer

Aristotle didn't get everything right. Parts of what he said are in contradiction with others. And most of what he did say is still understood via the heavy filtering of scholasticism, which had its own agenda to meet.

So first causes and unmoved movers are where it really breaks down. He should have stuck closer to Anaximander, the first real recorded naturalist, here.

Semiosis certainly does offer a non-reductionist account of the processes of life, but at the same time, I don't think it recognizes that behind the idea of the sign an implicit idealism. — Wayfarer

How so? Isn't the whole point of Peircean semiotics that it deliberately starts at the "mind's end" of things so as not to leave the mind out?

So we are very used to the materialist approach of starting metaphysics way over where there is just brute matter tumbling about in a dumb void. The modelling begins in a realm without any trace of purpose, or design, or meaning, or logic. And by doing that, the modelling never gives itself the means to recover what it has deliberately abandoned.

But Peirce did the opposite. He started with the intellect that was doing all the intellectualising. He began with a model of logic and of the human mental processes that underlie that. Then he did the revolutionary thing (well, Hegel tried to the same with the Science of Logic) of seeing how this account of mentality could be also the account of metaphysical being.

Peirce was also of course a top scientist of his day. He could see how evolutionary theory and thermodynamics had put formal and final cause back into the game for science in a big way.

And so he did draw the natural conclusion that intelligibility was itself the driving principle of developed existence. If you have a model of the mind, it is also going to be a model of the world, as the same generic semiotic principles describe self-organisation of any possible kind.

If Plato had been a systems thinker, his Platonia would have been populated by fractals rather than triangles, the laws of thermodynamics rather than the beauty, truth and the good. :)

Oh for the ignore option that was one of PF's advantages.

I don't know, you seem to manage pretty well on your own. You never engage with criticism of Peirce, even with the people you don't have on ignore.

And so he did draw the natural conclusion that intelligibility was itself the driving principle of developed existence. If you have a model of the mind, it is also going to be a model of the world, as the same generic semiotic principles describe self-organisation of any possible kind. — apokrisis

This is the problem with Peirce. He puts all possible self-orgainsation into the principle of our minds, as if we new everything about the world by knowing a few general principles. Rather than putting models and meaning in the world, giving each state of the world its specific meaning which we might or might not know, he insists what we know must be the extent of the world. Instead of the world being intelligible of itself, its considered something the world needs to have added to it, something which the the world has to act towards. Peirce does not give enough respect to logical meaning and reduces the world to our present knowledge.

They both had their mushy edges being people of their times. But if we pay attention to the general logic of nature they were talking about, then we are on solid ground. — Apokrisis

Before, when I have called out Pierce's leanings towards idealism, or Hegel's idea of the 'world spirit', or Aristotle's acceptance of the 'uncaused cause', you will always say they were people of their times, they had their quirks, that is not what is important about them (or words to that effect).

That is exactly what I mean when I say you're redacting out some aspects of their thinking, so as to incorporate the aspects of it are useful for your approach. That is not an accusation of some wrong-doing, it is a natural consequence of where your interests lie, which are more oriented towards science and engineering than are mine. You want solid ground into which you can sink foundations. There's nothing that matter with that, but note that not everyone has the same motivations.

There's a PDF of a paper called The Intelligibility of Peirce’s Metaphysics of Objective Idealism, Nicholas Guardiano, (it's easy to google but I can't find a way to link to it.) It talks about Emerson's influence on Pierce. It's interesting, because in some respects Emerson, and then Pierce, did absorb something like non-dualism, from Emerson's reading of Eastern texts. This lead to his monistic view - the magazine they both published in was The Monist - which is that 'mind and matter' both form part of a continuum. However, I think they both have considerable difficulty conceptualising the substance of which mind and matter are both aspects. Granted, Emerson calls it 'Nature', which is 'all one' - this essay shows how Pierce's ideas were influenced by that. But what is nature, then? if it is something (caveat on using the word 'something' but there are few alternatives) that is both, yet neither, mind and matter - then what is it?

Now, I don't think *any* naturalism will have an answer to that. And indeed, it is when the question of what that essence is comes up that Emerson, Pierce, Hegel, (and whoever else) hazards an answer, that the talk veers towards the 'mushy edges'. The mystic, on the other hand, has the distinct advantage of not trying to articulate whatever 'it' might be, but approaching the whole subject through the method of un-knowing. (I know that that is going to sound thoroughly mushy, but to paraphrase the Tao, 'within this way there is something that can be tested'.)

Existence does that. — TheWillowOfDarkness

How does existence do this? By power ontology, teleology, tychism, etc?

This is the problem with Peirce. He puts all possible self-orgainsation into the principle of our minds, as if we new everything about the world by knowing a few general principles. Rather than putting models and meaning in the world, giving each state of the world its specific meaning which we might or might not know, he insists what we know must be the extent of the world. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Peirce was basically an idealist - didn't he think matter was "condensed" mind?

It's why it rubs me the wrong way when people believe in an objective, unknowable noumenon "just to say they're realists". It's as if it's just slapped in their in order to avoid being called a full-fledged idealist.

How does existence do this? By power ontology, teleology, tychism, etc? — darthbarracuda

By nothing. To exist is to be oneself, not some other means. A logical distinction which is given not by anything else, not by any idea about what is in the world, not even by a form. The difficulty in coming up with a set of principles or forms which defines the extent of a person, object or object is because self is an infinite expression, a nothingness in empirical terms, which always defines distinction in form.

No matter what we say about me part of the world, some object or even some part of an object, there is always its logical expression of self which extends beyond what we've identified. Anything always means more than what we can capture in any one idea or description.

The thing in-itself, the noumenon, we might say, is the logical expression of self-- the meaning of a thing which always defies categorisation and description as a finite form of the world. Nothing is the infinite expression of our existence. Logically, nothing "made" us or enables us exist-- that's a question for causality, for the interactions of particular states.

Peirce was basically an idealist - didn't he think matter was "condensed" mind?

It's why it rubs me the wrong way when people believe in an objective, unknowable noumenon "just to say they're realists". It's as if it's just slapped in their in order to avoid being called a full-fledged idealist. — darthbarracuda

To be realist is to understand that the noumenon is knowable: the infinite logical expression of self that we may understand.

The subjective idealist does not realise this. They still treat noumenon, "nothingness," as if it is a state of the world, with finite forms, that we might identify. Supposedly, in understanding the "thing in-itself," we fail to grasp what is. There is meant to this "unknown" state with forms that exists beyond our empirical world, which we can just never know. They are treating logic as a state of world. What they don't realise is understanding the noumenon is "nothing" is to know it.

Peirce was basically an idealist - didn't he think matter was "condensed" mind? — darthbarracuda

You mean effete mind. Or extinct mind, in Schelling's term.

But what Peirce meant by mind is another question. ;)

The psychologists say that consciousness is the essential attribute of mind; and that purpose is only a special modification. I hold that purpose, or rather, final causation, of which purpose is the conscious modification, is the essential subect of psychologists’ own studies; and that consciousness is a special, and not a universal accompaniment of mind. (7. 366).

It's why it rubs me the wrong way when people believe in an objective, unknowable noumenon "just to say they're realists". It's as if it's just slapped in their in order to avoid being called a full-fledged idealist. — darthbarracuda

You realise Peirce wanted to fix Kant's dualism using Schelling's objective idealism?

And there you go. You tell me you don't intend to ad hom me and then repeat the ad hom.

Again, if you dispute aspects of my interpretation, and can back it up, then that would make for an interesting discussion. Instead you just make lazy dismissals with no substance. And get annoyed because I tell you that you are being lazy. — apokrisis

Well, I will give up coming back to this thread now, I don't engage in this kind of exchange.

I'm reading a little book of essays by Nicholas Bachtin, lesser-known brother of Mikhail. Nicholas was a keen classicist and a friend of Wittgenstein, who read portions of the Philosophical Investigations to him during the writing. In his essay on 'Realism in the drama' he has this to say:

Certainly the universe in which the Greek lived was not only different from ours but even, in several respects, incommensurable with it. And yet we have a right to claim that we belong to a different stage of the same civilization. For certain essential fictions created by the Greeks still ordain our vision of the real....[but] as soon as we leave the domain of our own civilization, the differences [in views of reality] become striking....and may concern even the most fundamental categories... — Bachtin

Thanks for your explanation mcdoodle, it seems then that we mostly agree, but use different terminology; what you call "metaphysical naturalism" I would call 'scientism'.

Would you go as far as to say, though, that science has nothing interesting to tell us about ourselves? — John

Perhaps we will talk of this in another thread. I do think science has a lot of interesting things to tell us about ourselves. I don't know why anyone would say anything different. But some things called 'science' are decidedly dodgy, from psychology to economics to very theoretical physics :)

That is exactly what I mean when I say you're redacting out some aspects of their thinking, so as to incorporate the aspects of it are useful for your approach. — Wayfarer

But it's not me who is trying to pin a single reading on what Peirce, Hegel or Aristotle "really meant" as if they were my spokesmen or my authorities.

I'm quite happy with the fact they were all complex thinkers whose own views evolved considerably over their lifetimes and so involve views that were in contradiction, or even - in my view - quite off the mark. at times.

Furthermore, Peirce was different as a philosopher in having a scientific attitude to his speculative cosmology. So the changes in his approaches can be viewed as a series of goes at striking upon the right formulation - one that would actually result in testable outcomes. In rejecting Newton's mechanical paradigm, he actually started proposing ways of checking to see if the geometry of the Universe was flat rather curved.

TL Short in What was Peirce’s Objective Idealism? 2010, makes the argument that his use of the term objective idealism marks only a phase in his thinking - one of his goes at making a developmental cosmology work. He tried it for a few years and moved on.

Now that is probably too strong. But I think we have to really examine the technicalities of Peirce's conjectures rather than simply flourish the comments where Peirce sounds enthusiastic about Emerson (a family friend) and Schelling.

Key here is Gaudiano's summary of the contrast between a materialistic and idealistic ontology...

(B) the psychical law as derived and special, the physical law alone as
primordial, which is materialism; or,

(C) the physical law as derived and special, the psychical law alone as
primordial, which is idealism. (EP1 292).

So as I say, Peirce tried to account for the cosmos in terms of "psychical law". And by that, he doesn't mean the application of some theistic or dualistic notion of mind, spirit or soul. He actually means the current psychology of his day. Remember that he was close to James. And he himself did foundational work in the application of the scientific method to psychological research.

(On Small Differences in Sensation. By Charles Sanders Peirce & Joseph Jastrow (1885) http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Peirce/small-diffs.htm)

If you google for the link to Short's paper, What was Peirce’s Objective Idealism?, you can see the rather science-informed description of "the mind" that Peirce was applying to his cosmology. And it is basically the usual constraints-based system thinking I'm always talking about. So it is my claim here that "mind" boils down to "psychical law", which boils down to what I mean by organicism or systems casuality.

So as Short notes, Peirce was talking about habit-formation as being the critical dynamical process. And this led him to taking a rather odd, probably frankly self-contradicting, approach to consciousness or attentional level mental proocessing.

So for most people - especially when they think of idealism - they think it is all about the ineffable phenomenological aspect of "being conscious". That is the basis of Cartesian dualism - the apparently inescapable fact that there is something which it is like to be me, or you, or a bat. And then when Peirce starts talking about matter being effete mind, the natural assumption is that he means - panpsychically - that material substance is some kind of very dilute or deadened version of a mental substance.

Yet Peirce talks about consciousness quite differently as Firstness (where habit is Thirdness). So consciousness is associated with the brief fluctuations that are breaks in the smooth (unconscious!) running of habits. And this leads to a reversal of what you might expect.

Peirce's idea is that the cosmos started in a chaos of fluctuations and developed then the regularity of habit. And so the character of this beginning was of the kind of vivid, but undigested, consciousness of the newborn where all is a Jamesian blooming, buzzing confusion. Conscious feeling was at its most intense because absolutely everything is a disorganised surprise. But then also it was at its most chaotic or vague because it was nothing but a flood of disorganised surprises.

So what Peirce means by mind is the steady organisation which imposes order on raw feelings, or wild fluctuation. Law is the emergence of habit. A gradual suppression or constraint on surprise because the mind comes to read events in terms of signs that it interprets. We know that the beep of a car horn or the hand on the shoulder is an understood part of a world with an order. It is another example of that category of thing.

And Peirce was also careful to say he was not talking about individual minds, but the world as if it were a mind ruled by the psychical laws that psychology was establishing. Human minds are the product of neural complexity - Peirce knew that. So his argument was that they retain a lively capacity for surprise - for the flashes of attention that is the first experience of something novel - that then allows for the continual formation of new habits.

And if you follow his analysis of protoplasm, you can see how he hopes to argue a continuity from the extreme liveliness of human material organisation, through to the self-organisation of protoplasm, and eventually towards the now minimal - effete, extinct, dead - liveliness of the cosmos itself. The cosmos that is so past lively flashes of spontaneous thought that it lives as a collection of dry mechanical habits.

Importantly, Peirce point about protoplasm was the thermodynamic one. Thermodynamics had explained existence in terms of an entropy principle. And that made negentropy - the emergence of cosmic organisation a real problem. Even worse for Peirce's developmental cosmology, this new mechanical notion of entropy said the cosmos must begin in a state of high order, and his chaos is what comes at the end in a heat death.

So Peirce was wanting to say no. The ancient's had it right with their organicism. First there was an endlessly lively chaos, then this developed constraints to produce the well organised, very habitual, cosmos we see around us today. And so Peirce foresaw what was eventually proven by Prigogine. Boltzmann's mechanical version of thermodynamics is simply the reduced and deadened version of the livelier thermodynamics of modern dissipative structure theory. And cosmologists like Layzer have been championing a developmental cosmology as a consequence.

Anyway, the point is that when Peirce speaks about a cosmic mind, he means one actually ruled by psychical law and so one in which the key fact is not the emergence of consciousness - a surplus of feeling - but instead about the constraint or suppression of that in order to produce the regularity of habits.

As Short stresses, his objective idealism focuses on the principle of generalisation. Peirce is saying that lawfulness or habits develop via the "spreading" of a confusion of sharply felt instances. Over time, the differences fall away and some commonality emerges - a conception, a schema, a category, a universal. And this comes to encode a constraint on variety. It comes to encode the top-down formal and final purpose that constitutes the being of a habit, with its regulative effect on lively spontaneity.

So you do have a very difficult bit of philosophy here. But what is clear - in my opinion - is that while it sounds like Peirce is simply doing the easy thing of making panpsychic proclamations - the Universe is made of mind stuff - you really have to pay attention to the technical detail of how he really intends to cash out his objective idealism. And there he starts to talk about mechanical/material laws vs organic/psychical laws.

So - as is the case with modern biosemiotics - he really is focused on trying to fix the shortcomings of reductionism by bringing in four causes Aristoteleanism. He is saying life and mind do show there must be more to nature than a mechanist's conception of reality as a clutter of blindly bumping lumps, a rain of atoms in a void. And psychical laws - the story of habit formation in living beings right from humans down to protoplasm - capture the essence of that.

So it is not that nature has phenomenological experience everywhere in some degree - the panpsychic position. It is that nature everywhere is organised by this common "psychical" principle of habit-formation or the universal growth in reasonableness.

You could say in this light that matter is effete mind in having gone right to the extreme of being so habitual as to be deterministic. And humans - because of their complex organisation - are instead a lively balance of feeling and habits. Humans have huge capacity for development in their own lifetimes.

After his objective idealism phase, Peirce did continue to develop his semiotics more fully, which is why I personally would describe his ultimate goal as pansemiotics. If you can drop the apparent appeals to phenomenological experience - Peirce was quite plain he was against this dualistic reading - then you are left with his emphasis on a commonality of a semiotic mechanism. It is the way that minds work - by generalising away a chaos of fluctuating feeling to arrive at the intelligible regularity of habit - which is the insight he wanted to apply to a developmental metaphysics of existence itself.

Hey that's a fantastic reply, very illuminating, and thanks for it. Can't find anything to differ with.

Now this immanent holism then treads on the toes of theistic and transcendental metaphysics - the same dualism and romanticism that informs the (muddled) Continental conception of the world — apokrisis

I agree with most everything you write in this post and certainly about dualism. But I think romanticism is an absolutely pivotal disposition, indispensable for the health of the human spirit, so we may diverge when it comes to that.

It is its Romantic essence that in my view makes German Idealism one of just a very few key moments in the history of thought. It is insofar as pragmatism, which has its roots in German Idealism, departs from this romantic spirit (which had been so well expressed by the Transcendentalists and still by Royce, and at times by James and Peirce, but sadly, not much by Dewey) that I cease to value it as a suitable philosophy. Process philosophy though, is an important movement to redress the baby that was thrown out with the bathwater.

Yes, I hope we do find an opportunity to do that.

I don't know why anyone would say anything different. — mcdoodle

Well Landru, I believe, would say just that; and I had thought you were agreeing with him about it.

I'm hardly against the fruits of romanticism. I have the misspent youth to prove that. :)

So my argument is the dichotomising one. There are two parts to living - the rationalising and the experiencing, or however we choose to term it. And both matter to us. And it is recognising their essential difference that would let us do both well.

My beef with romanticism is when it is treated as a model of rational things - in particular, a model of human psychology or society.

And so for instance, psychology focused on the development of mental habits, sociology on the development of cultural ones. But romanticism then focuses on the individual's reactions in the instant - especially those that are the highest in novelty and sensation and reaction. So it puts the non-habitual in first place and rails against the constraint on freedom that is either intellectual or cultural habit.

So we have quite dichotomous ultimate targets of explanation when romanticism enters the arena of metaphysics. It seems obvious to the romantic that the real thing of intense emotion and free evaluation are what the dry old sticks are missing. The romantic then tries to establish a metaphysics of unconstrained feelings. The talk becomes all about poetry and intuition and other "freely creative ways of intellectualising".

Well I guess you can have that other brand of philosophy if it does you good. But I just prefer to experience life and art and girls, or whatever. And I certainly don't see any reason to think that romanticism offers the correct analytical framework for when it comes to doing the job of rationalising about things.

The Peircean point is that it is pointing back to the generative chaos rather than forward to the emergence of regulative habit. It is regressive rather than progressive as metaphysics. It is only progressive in the context of battling Scientism - reminding the reductionists there is more to life. But a holist already knows that.

My beef with romanticism is when it is treated as a model of rational things - in particular, a model of human psychology or society. — apokrisis

I can sympathize with this. Romanticism is not a very good basis for human psychology or society; since these things, insofar as they are logistic and systematic, are amenable to statistical analysis, and that is antithetical to romanticism. Actually I'm not valorizing romanticism as a basis for any discursive enquiry, but I am valorizing the romantic as a healthy disposition underlying attitudes to the world, to nature and the creative and spiritual dimensions of the human. The sense of the enchantment of life, and the sense of reverence for it and the openness to a spiritual dimension that is not beyond the everyday but inherent in it.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour*

This is the essence of the Romantic spirit.

I certainly don't think that experiencing "life and art and girls, or whatever" is precluded by the romantic disposition, or by any healthy spirituality. I do agree with you that romanticism has no place in the hard sciences or pure mathematics, as a methodology; I mean , that much seems obvious. But even in these fields we often find the romantic disposition, no? I mean, you don't want to suggest that we must be stuffy, pedantic, hard-nosed old farts when it comes to what possibilities we might choose to entertain, do you?

*William Blake Auguries of Innocence; here is the link to the full poem:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43650