Abstract
The purpose of this article is to start a dialogue between the so-called autopoietic enactivism and the semiotic pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, in order to re-examine both action and representation under a Peircean light. The focus lays on autopoietic enactivism because this approach offers a wider theoretical scope to cognition based on the continuity of life and mind, embodiment, dynamic and non-linear interaction between a system and its environment which are compatible ideas with Peirce’s semiotic pragmatism. The term ‘pragmatic’ has been introduced in cognitive science to reinforce the idea that cognition is a form of practice and to help action-oriented viewpoints to escape representationalism. In this paper, I shall try to demonstrate that Peirce’s semiotic pragmatism can be a meaningful methodological path to guide a reconciliation between not only anti-Cartesianism and representation but also representation and action. In order to accomplish this purpose, Peirce’s account to action, habit, thought and mind will be addressed through some of the guiding principles of his semiotic—sign and sign action. What follows is the re-examining of the problem of representation—as refuted by autopoietic enactivism—under the light of Peirce’s semiotic pragmatism.
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Notes
Autopoietic enactivism is one of the variants of enactivism. To this approach, the biological phenomenon of autopoiesis plays a central role in explaining fundamental properties of our mental life (Maturana and Varela 1992; Thompson 2005; Di Paolo and Thompson 2014). In both Sects. 2 and 4 of this paper I deal in more details with both enactivism and autopoietic enactivism.
One can cite the article From enactive phenomenology to biosemiotics enactivism by De Jesus (2016) as one of these attempts. Although De Jesus approach is consistently built and sounding, I will not deal with biosemiotics in this paper because, in my opinion, it is not the best option to address the problem of representation.
Peirce rejected Descartes’ ideas on thought and knowledge, especially his concept of intuition, and worked on this criticism since 1868 when he published a series of articles, known as The Cognitive Series, which were the starting point for the development of his anti-Cartesian method. For Descartes, intuition was insight, a strictly mental event that would furnish indubitable conceptions coming from an originary thought that would serve as premises for deduction and which were not previously determined by inferential thought. For Peirce each and every cognition should be determined by a previous cognition about the same object, and not by something outside the inferential process. Peirce advocated that: (1) we do not have an intuitive self-consciousness; (2) we do not have an intuitive power of distinguishing between the subjective imaginary elements of cognition from the real objective ones; and that (3) we do not have any power of introspection because all self-knowledge we have comes from external facts. To learn more, please see Peirce’s On a New List of Categories (1867/8); Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man (1868); Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (1868); Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic: Further Consequences of Four Incapacities (1869). Also, see Cardenas’ Pragmatistic Inferentialist and operationalist accounts: from Peirce to Brandom and back (2015) and Catherine Legg’s Making it Explicit and Clear: From ‘Strong’ to ‘Hyper’ Inferentialism in Brandom and Peirce (2008) to learn more about Peirce’s strong commitment to inferentialism which is opposed to representationalism. Menand Pragmatism: A reader (1997).
Peirce’s phenomenology differs from Husserl’s whose work he criticizes for being psychologistic in character. Joseph Ransdell’s original paper Is Peirce a phenomenologist? sheds some light on the very particular Peircean approach to phenomenology. Peirce identified phenomenology as the doctrine of the categories and one of his alternative labels for phenomenology was “categorics” (MS L75). Randell’s paper has never been published in English, but it appeared in a French translation by André De Tienne as Peirce est-il un phénoménologue? About Peirce’s methodeutic as a subdivision of his metaphysical architecture, please see Ivo Ibri’s Kósmos Noetós (2015).
The differences in ways and degrees of commitment concern issues such as: sectors of cognition (social, perception and action, higher order cognition, etc.); empirical evidence (biology, psychology, linguistics, cultural anthropology, robotics, engineering, neuroscience, etc.); if it is computational or not and in what degree; acceptance of representation and in what degree.
All citations by Peirce follow the customary procedures in Peirce scholarship: (1) CP for the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce followed by the volume (1–8) and paragraph – if the date is relevant to the discussion, it is given along with the volume number and paragraph. (2) WR Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce: A Chronological Edition followed by the volume (v. 1–3) and page. (3) References to the unpublished manuscripts are indicated by MS, followed by the number of the manuscript and sometimes the date, if it is available. (4) EP refers to The Essential Peirce: selected philosophical writings, edited by the Peirce Edition Project, followed by the volume (1–2) and page.
Scholastic realism is a doctrine that claims that there are “real generals” (universals, dispositions, laws, habits).
There are several other important differences between Peirce’s and James’s pragmatism addressed by Misak in The Cambridge Companion to Peirce (2004).
The other approaches are sensorimotor enactivism (SE) and radically enactive cognition (REC).
This commitment to a strong continuity between life and mind and the role of adaptive autonomy are precisely the points that differentiate autopoietic enactivism from sensorimotor enactivism and radically enactive cognition.
In this passage one can find the explicit connections between the instances of a phenomenon and the three Peircean categories which are present and observable in all phenomena of thought and nature: Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. Firstness is the category of affection and manifests itself as qualities, and indetermination; Secondness is related to action, reaction, effectiveness, and expresses itself in all dyadic relations; Thirdness is related with continuity, thought, generality, representation, and express itself in triadic relations. See On a New List of Categories (CP 1.545–559, EP1: 1–10, 1867).
See Sandra Rosenthal’s The Percipuum and the Issues of Foundations at http://www.commens.org/encyclopedia/article/rosenthal-sandra-percipuum-and-issues-foundations.
The author is aware that there are phenomenological nuances regarding perception depending on the variety of enactivism one is considering, but this paper will not address them. The author considers that these differences do not generate any incompatibility or great disagreements among adepts of any of its varieties.
Although it is tempting to take Peirce’s theory of perception as a kind of conceptualism, this is a very controversial issue because although perception for him is already an interpretative and cognitive process, one has the ability to grasp the qualities of feelings in the process through abduction. An abductive inference is a type of reasoning which offers suppositions or hypotheses about facts; but, as Atkins (2014, p. 3) points out, despite Peirce’s theory of propositions allows us to sustain that perception has a propositional content, it does not entail that perceptions have an appropriate structure to justify beliefs.
One good example is Newton's law of gravity, which is expressed by a purely mental formula that represents the real and natural motion of the planets.
For Peirce, time and space are not a kind of intuition that introduces continuity in nature. Time and space are continuous because they embody a condition of possibility, and the possible is general (universal). What follows is that time is the most perfect continuous of experience because as a kind of generality it is always present in any event.
There have been attempts to redeeming some aspects of Peirce’s theory of signs or representation in cognitive science, especially in the field of neurocognitive research. For example, in the article From Symbols to Icons, Williams and Colling (2018) argues that one crucial aspect of the so-called “cognitive neuroscience revolution” is a shift away from thinking of representations as arbitrary symbols towards thinking about them as icons. The paper slightly touches on Peirce’s concept of the icon but fails on the understanding of the icon as only one mode of sign while the other two are indexes and symbols. Icons are signs which resemble their objects through quality or character, but it is not that simple since icons can be sin-sign, legi-sign or quali-sign, depending on the kind of resemblance on which they are grounded. The modes of signs, in Peirce, can be deceiving for they are relational, have nuances and are not ‘things’ that can be atomized or disconnected from their context. Sign modes are logical deductions of Peirce’s phenomenological categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, so they are constitutive of his systematic and cohesive semiotic theory that cannot be fully and correctly understood if one dismembers it in parts. Although this is a fascinating discussion, it could not be properly addressed in this paper.
Peirce’s Mediation: a Rich Philosophical Contribution to Embodied Cognition Studies by Patrícia F. Fanaya and Isabel Jungk was an oral communication originally presented in the conference Pragmatism and Embodied Cognitive Science, in Koblenz, Germany, 2015.
“Chance […] has a double meaning: (i) something not derivable or explainable causally by reference to antecedent facts. There are those who assert the reality of such chance. On this view there are many possibilities in store in the future which no amount of knowledge would enable us to foresee or forestall. Indeterministic theories of the will assert possibilities of this sort also. (ii) Chance may mean that which, while necessary causally, is not necessary teleologically; the unplanned, the fatalistic. From this point of view the ‘possible’ is that which unexpectedly prevents the carrying-out of a purpose or intention.” (CP 6.366, 1902).
It is worth noticing that Peirce sharply criticizes the traditional perspectives of causality. He disagrees that all phenomena can be explained by cause-effect or action and reaction, in other words, only by the rules of mechanical necessity. Peirce rather chooses the term “causation” to express his teleological point of view. For him, the causal nexus in a phenomenon involves three inseparable elements that are not present in traditional conceptions: (1) an efficient; (2) a final or teleological; and (3) chance. See Hulswit 2002, p. 187.
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Fanaya, P.F. Autopoietic enactivism: action and representation re-examined under Peirce’s light. Synthese 198 (Suppl 1), 461–483 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02457-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02457-6