Axiomathes (2005) 15:575597 DOI 10.

1007/s10516-005-2780-6

Springer 2005

INNA SEMETSKY

FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION, OR: A PROPER STRUCTURE FOR A PROPER FUNCTION

ABSTRACT. It is suggested that Charles Sanders Peirces triadic semiotics provides a framework for a diagrammatic representation of a signs proper structure. The action of signs is described at the logical and psychological levels. The role of (unconscious) abductive inference is analyzed, and a diagram of reasoning is oered. A series of interpretants transform brute facts into interpretable signs thereby providing human experience with value or meaning. The triadic structure helps in demystifying the relations between Penroses three worlds when the latter are considered as constituting a semiotic triangle. KEY WORDS: abduction, Peirce, Penroses three worlds, process ontology, semiotic reality, the diagrammatic reasoning, the complex plane

1.

INTRODUCTION

Following the framework supplied by the triadic nature of a sign (linguistic or non-linguistic) as per C.S. Peirces semiotic categories, this paper will propose a type of structural or formal organization for what Millikan (1984) identied as proper functions. In other words, so as to function properly, a certain organizational pattern let us call it a proper structure must be satised. However, a proper structure proposed in this paper, and in contrast to Millikans conceptualisations, is not associated with explicit purpose, design or goal. Rather the goal is implicit or virtual, and as such is inherent in the dynamical or process-structure per se. The paper will also demonstrate that for the structure to be functional and not dis-functional (pun intended, but see also Bickhard 2004), we ought to assume the existence of a level beyond the reality of the world of objects out there accessible to sense perception. The paper will posit this level as semiotic or pre-symbolic, that is, in a
Conference Dynamic Ontology: An Inquiry into Systems, Emergence, Levels of Reality, and Forms of Causality University of Trento, Italy, September 711, 2004.

576

INNA SEMETSKY

certain way extra-linguistic. So in the most general terms this paper aims away from the infamous linguistic turn and towards, let me call it, a semiotic turn. The paper, rst, will introduce three basic Peirces categories and connect them with his three types of inference, including abduction. In the current philosophy of science discourse abduction is usually taken in one sense only, as an inference to the best explanation; this paper will posit abductive inference as open to interpretation in psychological and, quite possibly, naturalistic terms. Peirce sometimes used abduction interchangeable with retroduction. What he meant, however, is that retroduction is a process encompassing abduction. The paper, secondly, will propose a model of such a retroductive process. For this purpose I will employ a mathematical formalism borrowed from Gauss who left us an ingenious interpretation of a complex number (Figure 1). Third, and in order to demonstrate the very dynamics inherent in the retroductive process, I will model the components as vectors on the Gauss plane (Figure 2). This interpretation, I suggest, is in compliance with Peirce positing logic as a science of the necessary laws of thought and his also asserting that the semiotic categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness are the conceptions of complexity (Peirce CP 1. 526). The inferential process reected in the triadic relational structure presupposes the presence of continual feedbacks. The presence of

Figure 1.

The complex plane.

FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION

577

Figure 2.

The resultant vector.

feedbacks is, in accord with the dynamical systems theory, a precondition for self-organization. The self-organizing dynamics makes the positing of a design, or purpose, or external goal a moot point. However, this does not dispute the directionality, or teleological dimension, presupposed by Millikans proper functions founded as such on learning and integration or, as Peirce was saying, synthesis. In fact, the directionality is maintained and is inherent in the very denition of a vector, which has both magnitude and direction. It is just that a goal is immanent to the structure per se, tending towards what Peirce has rather mysteriously classied as a sign of itself. The directionality, however, is not meant to represent any direct cause-eect link. A triadic relation is indirect, or mediated, the very concept of causality therefore begging a question. Vectors, having both direction and magnitude, are potentially open to interpretation not only in mathematical, but physical terms as well; that is, the suggested model may very well represent the aforementioned hypothetical, semiotic, level of reality. Similarly, the triadic structure posits a level, which exceeds references: it is a level of meanings embedded in the ternary structure of the sign. While staying at the level of mathematical formalism, the triadic structure, nonetheless, may be considered as also representing physical qualities, thereby making a generic mental representation open in principle to explanation in physical and objective terms. Our conceptualisations in terms of self-organization and the emergence

578

INNA SEMETSKY

of meanings at a dierent level of complexity seem to overcome the analytic paradox as well as the suspected inconsistency between articulating representations and meanings as per Peirces semiotics. 2.
THE ACTION OF SIGNS

The word sign is ambiguous. While traditionally dened as something that stands for something else, the notion of a sign as used in this paper follows Peirces triadic conception so as to underline the dynamic character of the sign-process. A sign can be anything that stands to somebody, a sign-user, for something else, its object, in some respect and in such a way so as to generate another sign, called its interpretant. In the broadest sense, Peirce used the word representamen to designate a sign, in agreement with the word representation describing both the dynamic process and the terminus of such a process, by which one thing stands for another. Each representamen, or sign, is related to three things, the ground, the object and the interpretant . With respect to its ground, the representamen, as used by every scientic intelligence...may embody any meaning (Peirce CP 2. 229). Peirce gave the name semiosis to the process of generation, exchange, and interpretation of signs, that is, a continuous communication and interaction between signs by virtue of quasi-utterer and quasi-interpreter. The relation of standing for always involves the mind or quasi-mind, as in the case of quasi-utterer that, for example, utters the signs of the weather and is therefore quasi-intentional: because all thought is sign-process, all sign-processes are idea-like. Due to the innite stream of interpretants, that is, the systems relating a sign vehicle to its object, the total number of meanings is potentially innite. Furthermore, it is not required for the interpretant to actually exist: for Peirce, it being in futuro accounts for its reality. Signs grow and become other signs, contributing via their interpretants to learning and the evolution of human consciousness: a thought that has passed from a genuine doubt to belief is a sign of signs, or representation. The modern conception of logic has been developed by Peirce to include a general theory of signs, making semiotics tantamount to logic, the latter including what Peirce called abduction, or peculiar logic of discovery or hypothesis-generation. While representing, in a narrow sense, the necessary conditions for the attainment of truth, logic for Peirce is a science of the necessary laws of thought, or, better still (thought always taking place by means of signs), it is a

FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION

579

general semeiotics, treating not merely of truth, but also of the general conditions of signs being signs (Peirce CP 1. 444). Peirce also included in his conceptualisations the ideas of a set of beliefs, which as habits of thinking are both culturally produced and also derived from a common layer of shared experiences. The triadic nature of relations between signs leads to Peirces classifying signs in terms of three basic ontological categories: First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else. Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else. Third is the conception of mediation, whereby rst and second are brought into relation.... In psychology, Feeling is First, Sense of reaction Second, General conception Third, or mediation...Chance is First, Law is Second, the tendency to take habits is Third. Mind is First, Matter is Second, Evolution is Third (Peirce CP 6.7). Firstness is quality, possibility, freedom, spontaneity, and novelty. Secondness, as a relation of the First to the Second, is of opposites, this or that of reality, billiard-ball forces, rigid deterministic laws, direct cause and eect, action and reaction. Thirdness relates seconds to thirds; it is synthesis, communication, memory, and mediation in general. By virtue of their meanings, the ideas play a part in the real world (Peirce MS 967. 1). The relationship between meanings and habits is one of reciprocal presupposition: meanings may change depending on the formation of new habits; in turn, the new meanings eventually aect the change in habits, despite the seemingly xed character of the latter. For Peirce, the meaning of a thing lies in the habits it involves (Peirce CP 5. 4). Precisely because of the xed nature of habits, the abrupt change in meaning may come about by what Peirce identied as a cataclysm in the otherwise continuous evolutionary process. Peirce asserted that growth, evolution, and complexity represent the basic facts in the universe. He further noticed that these facts lead to a possibility that there is probably in nature some agency by which the complexity and diversity of things can be increased (Peirce CP 6.58). The mechanical law alone would not explain this complexity; the infallible mechanical laws are insucient. How can the regularity of the world increase, if it has been absolutely perfect all the time? asks Peirce (CP 1.174). Physical laws themselves are, in semiotic terms, the result of habits: matter (Second), for Peirce, is eete mind (First), and the mind (First) has to be entrenched in habits (Thirds) so as to congeal, as Peirce says, into

580

INNA SEMETSKY

matter (Second). Peirces basic categories are expressed in numbers that are not simply ordinal or sequential but cardinal, that is, the Thirdness, by denition, includes Secondness and Firstness. Peirce refused to conceive of the psychical and the physical aspect of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct (Peirce CP 6. 268). His holism implies the coordination between the two dierent aspects of one total process: matter is mind, whose habits became so xed and rigid that the mind in question is unable to either take a new habit or break an old one. Habit taking as an evolutionary process the cardinality of Thirdness exists only providing it includes Firstness in itself, in a form of chance, feeling, creativity, novelty, or freedom, as a necessary condition of its own dynamics. The result of abductive inference is the guess proered or the hypothesis drawn. If reasoning from premises to conclusion is considered to be either deductive, or inductive, or fallacious, then an abductive guess understood as an inference to the best explanation, that expresses merely some likelihood in reasoning, would seem to represent a fallacious kind, indeed, and is considered as such within the analytic discourse. In a Peircean sense, however, abduction suggests that something might possibly be the case (Peirce CP 5. 171). For Peirce, what is real cannot be in any way reduced to the actual, in fact the will-bes, the actually-iss and the have-beens are not the sum of the real. They only cover actuality. There are besides would bes and can bes that are real (Peirce CP 8. 216), such would-be-ness constituting the realm of the virtual, however, still semiotically real, world.1 The semiotically real world therefore includes possibilities articulated by means of abduction. At the ontological level, Firstness as a mode of being is possibility, Secondness actuality, that is, existence, and Thirdness potentiality. But because thoughts as the signs in the category of Thirdness must include Firstness as qualities and Secondness as facts, the ontological and experiential levels interpenetrate: the potentia of Thirdness is what connects the possible with the actual. By the same token, although Peirce assessed meanings as altogether virtual ... [because located] not in what is actually thought, but in what this thought may be connected with in representation by subsequent thoughts (Peirce CP 5. 289) in futuro, that is they are still maximally real due to their ability to produce real eects in terms of consequences, or practical bearings (Peirce CP 5. 402) in accord with Peirces pragmatic maxim. The realm of the virtual nonetheless constitutes Reality which by some means contrives to determine the

FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION

581

Sign to its Representation (Peirce CP 4. 536), the contrivance indicating a possession of an implicit goal or purpose. 3.
ABDUCTION AND INSIGHT

Meanings exist in virtue of the relational sign-process in which the whole triadic relation of the sign to its object via interpretant becomes the object of the new sign. As the First logical category, abduction therefore is part of the total inferential or reasoning process.2 All cognition, for Peirce, is sign-mediated, however the Firstness of abduction is presented in an instance and is directly had prior to the Thirdness of mediation. Abductive inference blends into a perceptual judgment, which is subconscious...[and] does not have to make separate acts of inference but performs its acts in one continuous process (Peirce 1998, p. 227). Abduction does seem to function instantaneously not because there is no temporal interval of inference, but because the mind remains unaware of when it begins or ends: psychological immediacy and logical mediation constitute what Peirce has called a mediated immediacy (Peirce CP. 5. 181). It is amenable to a clear insight, therefore becoming conscious: sure enough, the abductive suggestion comes to us as a ash. It is an act of insight (Peirce CP 5. 181). Albeit fallible, it still has a mysterious power of guessing right (Peirce CP 6. 530) even while being pre-conscious and not rationally controllable so that it leads to judgment forced upon ones acceptance by the totally involuntary mental process. At this level of the real and physically ecient (Peirce CP 5. 431) generals, a hypothetical idea constitutes what Peirce called a psychological ground for a habit that carries a avour of anticipation: it is already determinative of acts in the future to an extent to which it is not now conscious (Peirce CP 6. 156). Describing the structure of perceptual abduction, Peirce pointed out the rst premise is not actually thought, though it is in the mind habitually. This, of itself would not make the inference unconscious. But it is so because it is not recognized as an inference; the conclusion is accepted without our knowing how (Peirce CP 8. 6465). For Peirce, the hint to conjecture or hypothesis is derived from experience: the stimulus to abductive guessing is out there, in the specic, hereand-now, conditions present in the phenomenal world. At the psychological level, abduction is an intuitive and quasiimmediate perception of the object. Peirces genuine doubt is not a

582

INNA SEMETSKY

personal doubt of a Cartesian subject but has an external origin by virtue of a surprising, anomalous or perplexing, instance: it is an objective uncertainty constituted by tension or dierence between the present experience and the whole of the organismenvironment system.3 It is just a feeling, the First, indeed an imaginative hint amounting to sensations so faint (Peirce and Jastrow 1884, quoted in Hacking 1990, p. 205) so as to bypass the level of cognitive awareness.4 Peirce emphasized the feeling-tone of abduction saying that every abductive inference involves a particular emotion: the various sounds made by the instruments in the orchestra strike upon the ear, and the result is a peculiar musical emotion... This emotion is essentially the same thing as a hypothetic inference (Peirce CP 2. 643). In a characteristic language, Peirce and Jastrow commented that the insight of females as well as certain telepathic phenomena may be explained in this way. Such faint sensations ought to be fully studied by the psychologist and assiduously cultivated by every man (in Hacking 1990, p. 206). An unconscious inference functioning abductively as intuition is the cognitively unmediated, as Firstness, access to knowledge. The knowledge organization that proceeds in a habitual way becomes fully accepted (Peirce CP 7. 37) and as such tends to obliterate all recognition of ...premises from which it was derived (CP 7. 37): the inferential steps per se stay out of consciousness, we are not aware of them. Sure enough, Peirce considered intuition not as a capacity of the mind, but just the opposite, as one of the four so-called incapacities articulated by Peirce in 1868: we cannot intuit knowledge directly as every cognition is logically determined by previous cognition. But if we were to subject this subconscious process to logical analysis, we should nd that it terminated in what this analysis would represent as an abductive inference (Peirce CP 5. 181). What seems to be a paradox is part and parcel of the tri-relative, synechistic, and self-generative (Peirce CP 1. 409) semiotic process, described by a general law ultimately dened in terms of the tendency of all things to take habits (Peirce CP 6. 101). Habits, for Peirce, are dispositions to act in a certain way under specic circumstances and when actuated by a given motive (Peirce CP 5. 480), a motive performing therefore a purposeful, teleological function. The mind hidebound with habits (Peirce 1955, p. 351) is what we call matter; there is life in the diversication of structures and combination of forms; those forms embody ideas. An act of

FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION

583

imagination that in-habits the Firstness of possibilia is potentially transformative, according to Peirce, in its function to generate a meaning for a habit. Peirce called these ontological possibilities airy nothings to which the mind of a poet, pure mathematician, or another might give local habitation and a name within that mind (Peirce CP 6. 455). New information, derived from as though nothingness of the unconscious with the help of an insight and as the eect of interpretation, not only conceptualises an idea but also embodies it in the physical world of action: it is the Thirdness of interpretation that governs Secondness because it brings information ...determines the idea and gives it body (Peirce CP 1. 537). Interpretation contributes to trans-formation of in-formation from the unconscious into consciousness, implying a possibility of not only habits taking but also habits breaking. This transformation, or habit-change inscribed in the evolutionary process, would be impossible if not for the Thirdness of mediation, which is the continuity of it [and] is brought about by a real eective force behind consciousness (Peirce 1955, p. 237), as well as for the Firstness as a category of tychism. Peirces philosophy is evolutionary not because of its sole reliance on Darwinian principle of natural selection but because the greater realizations of meanings due to the chain of interpretants involved in a continuous semiotic communication is a feature of organic evolution: the man-sign acquires information and comes to mean more than he did before (Peirce 1955, p. 249). Peirces typology of signs, in terms of the dierent manner in which signs stand for their objects, includes icons (or images), indices, and symbols, and a perfect sign, for Peirce, would have had an ideally equal admixture of the iconic, indicative, and symbolic characters (Peirce CP 4. 448). As for utterances, however, the fact of substituting an index for the meaning more often than not, impoverishes the linguistic signs because of mistaking the part for the whole (see note 14 further below), analogous to the mechanistic Secondness considered to be all there is, at the expense of Firstness and Thirdness. 4.
A DIAGRAM OF REASONING

Peirce asserted that all logical relations, and accordingly the process of semiosis, could be studied by means of being displayed in the form of existential graphs, or iconic representations; such diagrammatic reasoning may yield solutions to the otherwise

584

INNA SEMETSKY

unsolvable logical problems. A diagram is an icon in Peircean categorization, and because icons are described in term of structural properties common with their referents, the diagrammatic reasoning is especially advantageous in semiotics or logic of relations, as well as bringing out experimental and exploratory character of reasoning (Greaves 2002). Unlike the sentential dyadic reasoning, an abstract diagram is open to the Thirdness of interpretation thereby creating meaning, which is implicit in its very structure. In this section I suggest a model of abductive inference based on Peirces triadic structure of a sign.5 The spatial representation of the structure is a grid, although non-Cartesian: the two coordinate axes are located on a Gauss (or Argand) plane and marked with imaginary, on a vertical axis, and real on a horizontal axis, numbers, respectively. An imaginary number i is the square root of minus one. Descartes had a rather derogatory attitude towards imaginaries: it was he who rst coined the name. There was no place for them in Newtons mechanistic philosophy either: he considered them plainly impossible. Leibniz recognized their intermediary character and positioned them at the ontological level between being and non-being. The true metaphysics of imaginary number was elusive even for Gauss. He, however, agreed that their geometrical or diagrammatic representation establishes their meaning. Imaginary and real numbers together form a plane, on which a point represents a complex number a+bi. The point therefore stands for the pair, a of the real numbers and b of the imaginary numbers (Figure 1). Abductions place would be on the vertical axis: because it is an act of insight, an intuitive leap, a jump in imagination, an imaginary number seems to be the appropriate symbol to signify the Firstness of abduction, especially considering its indeterminate and elusive character. The level of Secondness is marked along the horizontal axis by means of real numbers, in the actuality of the physical world of action that includes linguistic behaviour. So in this model the syllogistic reasoning is complemented by imagination, insight, and intuition, such logic being represented by means of complex numbers as the ordered pair on a complex plane. The analytical representation of direction is also possible, by means of a vector: the two vectors along the horizontal and vertical axes add up, geometrically, to a resultant vector r on a complex plane represented by an arrow from the origin to the point a+bi (Figure 2).

FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION

585

A vector, by denition, has both magnitude and direction, that is, it can be described in principle both by a mathematical quantity and a physical property. A vectorial diagram, therefore, represents the dynamics inherent in abstract structure: it is an organisational pattern or a process-structure reecting Peirces process ontology. The process organisation is what determines the structures causal power. Everything that has causal power is organized, and has the particular causal power that it does by virtue of...its organization (Bickhard 2004, p. 124). The cause in question is what Peirce considered to be the other kind of causation, the one that forms a strange loop embodied in the closed shape of the triangle on Figure 2. The resultant vector may be considered to represent evolution in meaning as dierent from the preceding, infamous, prior knowledge, because abduction contributes to explicating that what was yet tacit and implicit; but also by virtue of it enabling a transition from the level of real numbers onto the succeeding level of numbers on the complex plane, it therefore contributes to the complication of knowledge. Peirce indeed distinguished between what he called an ampliative and explicative forms of reasoning, suggesting that the former aims at plainly increasing existing knowledge while the latter, by contrast, is capable of making hidden or implicit knowledge explicit, of making manifest what has been latent. Indeed, the addition vector as a whole is irreducible to the (arithmetical) sum of its parts, making the mind as a whole, represented by the shaded area, greater than its Cartesian cogito. Without the Firstness of abduction, all knowledge would remain pretty sequential, because signs would stay at the level of Secondness: they would be growing in magnitude solely because of the arithmetical progression along the horizontal axis, yet not being able to change their direction. It is merely some prior knowledge that would be amplied, precluding the emergence of novelty because the tacit and preconscious, implicit and pre-conceptual knowledge would lack any possibility of explication so as to enable the new knowledge, represented now as a vector on a complex plane, with a denite direction, determined by both horizontal and vertical evolutions and pointed to by the end of the arrow, to enter cognition.6 It is the Thirdness as a diagonal transversal line that enables the coming into being of the new objects of knowledge, for us, as the newly created concepts. The dyadic relation alone would not lead to the creation of meanings: a sign, in order to fulll its oce, to

586

INNA SEMETSKY

actualise its potency, must be compelled by its object (Peirce CP 5.554) therefore it strives to abductively leap from the unconscious into being integrated into consciousness as though driven by a purpose or goal. However, if we imagine positioning ourselves in the very midst of this resultant line, there are two perspectives that may emerge: Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness (Peirce CP 6. 268). Respectively, we may view the resultant vector as embodying two dimensions simultaneously, external and internal, therefore representing the dynamics inscribed in the indiscernible succession of mental states.7 The complex number a+bi pointed to by the arrow of the vector represents a single synchronic slice of the total diachronic evolution, or a quasi-determinate content constituted by both internal and external features.8 Millikans (1984, 1999) prominently externalist position considers past evolutionary history as all there is to a proper function. The model suggested here, at least with respect to ones cognitive function, would consider such description as incomplete because of its disregard towards both the present moment (cf. Bickhard 2004) and a possible future evolution.9 We remember that, for Peirce, the object to which a sign refers may not have a solely physical existence but may very well be a thought, a dream or a totally imaginary entity; ditto for the interpretant whose being in futuro, as a non-manifest goal, will suce (Peirce CP 2. 92). The abduction as a quasi-instantaneous action is informed (literately, as informare in Latin means giving material form) by the instance of the real, here-and-now experience, and the magnitude along the vertical axis of imaginary numbers would inadvertently aect the direction the diagonal resultant vector would have taken. A novel hypothesis might literally, as we can see on the Figures 1 and 2, bring a new direction into the line of reasoning, and the semiotic categories of Firstness and Thirdness, the two categories outside the formal logic, functioning only on the margins the latter, are capable of constructing the new level of knowledge brought into being at the dierent level of organization. Abduction (or intuition, or imagination, or insight, in mentalistic terms) creates a magnitude along the vertical axis, the logical depth, that is, a leap towards the dierent level of order in the complex knowledgesystem.10 Peirces semiotics reects the novelty that alone provides

FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION

587

uberty or richness of thought (Deely 2001, p. 627) contained in the Firstness that carries the level of reality over and above the customary mechanistic Secondness usually considered as constituting the whole truth about existence (Deely 2001, p. 627). For Peirce, signs always move from one to another; they grow and engender other signs because the triadic logic leads to signs always becoming something more and something else exemplifying the notion of learning from immediate experience as a necessary condition for the evolution of signs. The diagrammatic representation expressed in Figures 1 and 2 is conceptualised on the premise of what Peirce called a portraiture of Thought (Peirce CP 4. 11). As such, it conforms to the semiotic categories of representation, relationality and mediation and appears to be capable, albeit in a static format, of rendering literally visible before ones very eyes the operation of thinking in actu (Peirce CP 4. 571), or demonstrating the very dynamics of the inferential process. The eld of the complex numbers is undierentiated and would appear to be, in Peirce words, what the world was to Adam on the day he opened his eyes to it, before he had drawn any distinctions, or had become conscious of his own experience (Peirce CP 1.302). The complex plane as a whole contains what Peirce would have called an admixture or, in other words, the weighted sum (cf. Penrose 1997; Seager 1999) of real and imaginary components, a and bi. Peircean holism anticipated a peculiar partswhole systems organization, which conceptualises all causal relations as if owing in two directions at once, bottom-up and top-down, thereby creating a strange feedback loop. The triangle as per Figure 2 is a self-organising process-structure or, in terms of the logic of explanation, a self-cause (cf. Juarrero 1999) disregarded by a science of modernity, which reduced the four Aristotelian causes, including formal and nal, to a single ecient causation. Based on Aristotles fourfold scheme, the Latins in the later times rened the latter to account for the objective order of physical phenomena.11 The external, ideal, causality a type of blueprint, or plan, or design is introduced from without, in contrast to the natural Aristotelian formal cause that organises its material from within. One more causal type, however, pertains to the role of observer who exercises a type of objective causality. Deely (2001) explains its functioning in the following way: On the subjective side, a thinker may try to turn attention toward or away from [the object]; but the measure of success lies not in the

588

INNA SEMETSKY

subjective eort but in the objective content surviving the eort. And since presenting objects is exactly the function of signs, the action of signs is a species of this...extrinsic formal causality, called specicative (Deely 2001, p. 633), which is irreducible to either ideal or intrinsic formal cause but is retaining, as embedded in the total system, the objective signicance for the human subject. Peirces categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness demand such an admixture of mind-dependent and mind-independent relations that are ultimately supposed to solve the problem of intelligibility and understanding. The eld Adam has awaken up to is the infamous blooming, buzzing confusion, indeed the weighted sum of dream and reality, possibility and actuality (Deely 2001, p. 645) in its as yet undierentiated state of both mind-dependent and mind-independent relations that comprise the totality of human experience. In other words, the causal loop demands a quasi-mind, as we said earlier, that is, a dialogical organismenvironment communication, an intervention of cognition, or interaction (see Bickhard 2004) so as to ensure the signs potential relation to itself as a condition for ultimate intelligibility. For the function so as to fulll its purpose, that is, to be proper, it has to have a triadic structure as a necessary condition of this very fulllment. Specically, for the cognitive function of us, biological beings, to function properly, that is, comprise all three Peircean categories, means to reason (Thirdness) properly, that is, analytically (Secondness) but also insightfully or intuitively (Firstness).12 The sign, reduced to Secondness only, is what Peirce called de-generate or we may call dis-functional, that is, not capable of performing its function properly. Only as genuine, the triadic sign would amount to the Thirdness of synthetic consciousness, ...sense of learning (Peirce CP 1.377). Abduction or intuition is a necessary condition for production of meanings; the very etymology of the word conrms this: to in-tuit means to learn from within, even if the parish of percept [is] out in the open (Peirce CP 8. 144) of the experiential world, in conformity with the total retroductive process demanding the two-directional evolution. Without the Firstness of insight or abduction no closed loop would be formed. Functioning at the level of as yet pre-conscious presentations, it nonetheless posits itself, as Peirce has said, as a real force behind consciousness. As a powerful and quiet possibly real physical force because of its vectorial quality, it reaches the representation

FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION

589

in consciousness at the level of Secondness, along the horizontal axis of real numbers. It will surely have a dierent magnitude: using a trivial example, pain is directly had, but may be interpreted as a toothache or as an eect of being burned and hence judged to be a singularity of a specic kind. The diagonal resultant vector casts its own shadow (cf. note 14 further below) on the horizontal axis emerging as though from nowhere because its end-point a+bi exists at the level of complexity exceeding the realm of real numbers. The very function of abduction is to create a semiotic bridge that joins the infamous gap between existence and essence. Its eect consists in the inward [or] potential actions...which somehow inuence the formation of habits (Peirce CP 6. 286) precisely because these actions were initiated due to the causal loop, the circularity of Thirdness having provided conditions for the ight of abductive inference because of the difference perceived in experience. This inward direction creates an internal dimension, the logical depth of meaning, as a necessary outcome within the process of semiosis. We never have a total tabula rasa. If there were no triadic structure, then the leap of imagination or insight as a sign of Firstness, if such indeed were to take place, would have sunk back into the dyadic existence, back to the point of its own departure and, worse, we would not even know this as there would not be any dierence for us to interpret and, respectively, to make a dierence in the world of action, to create novelty. The dierence in the present experience brings in novelty and change that, instead of eliciting adaptation as a sole consequence of the natural selection, aects and transforms the total organismenvironment situation as a whole. The natural world is not limited to its solely mechanical aspect similar to experience as not being reduced to action and reaction taking place at the level of Secondness. Thirdness enters the process as mediation and learning, it takes time and self-reection; it enables response to meanings rather than to direct physical stimuli, and meaning is dened as that form in which the proposition becomes applicable to human conduct (Peirce CP 5. 425), thereby contributing to further habits taking. Nature is much broader and includes its own virtual or semiotic dimension, which is, however, never beyond experience. But in semiotic terms experience itself is a relational category. Structured by sign-relations, human experience is an expression of a deeper semiotic process. Because every sign conveys a general nature of thought, and the Thirdness is

590

INNA SEMETSKY

ultimately a mode of being of intelligence or reason, the generality does come about from a quasi-mind comprising what Peirce called a repository of ideas or signicant forms. Signs do catch on, that is, they are capable of receiving information, or signicant meaning, that cannot be reduced to either merely a physical [or] even merely a psychical dose of energy (Peirce c.1907: ISP nos. 2056 as quoted in Deely 2001, p. 629). This level of signicance is semiotic in its core and, by analogy with the biosphere, it has acquired a name semiosphere during the post-Peircean times.13 This other, semiotic, level would have encompassed the biological in itself like two nested circles, similar perhaps to Pythagorean tetractys encompassing natural numbers that are inside the integers that are inside the rationals that are inside the reals, and the real themselves being just a line among the complex numbers populating the whole plane, notwithstanding an increase in dimensions, and hence order.14

5.

SEMIOTIC REALITY

For Peirce, the whole universe is perfused with signs; signs are all there is; yet nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign (Peirce CP 2. 308). The semiotically real world does address possibilities; by the same token, the realists view asserts the reality of potentialities not yet actualised. The natural world is not reduced to the facts of Secondness but becomes an object of interpretation, and human understanding is the necessary Thirdness in this relationship, for man is natures interpreter (Peirce CP 7. 54) in a continuous ow of semiosis. The actualisation of many potentialities through the magnitude of Thirdness appears to take place due to subjective bottom-up intervention of the mind (Shimony 1993, p. 319) that performs the role of an interpretant in the semiotic triad into a signifying chain of semiosis. Says Shimony: It is honorable to be an epigone of Peirce (1993, p. 245). The continuity of inference, even if only in a probabilistic sense, dees the idea of some unknowable thing-in-itself, the latter being only hypothetical like any other First and is to be ultimately known as a sign, or Thirdness of Firstness, after it being present to me (Peirce CP 5. 289). Yet this very intervention may be considered objective in a sense of itself being implemented by a choice of a global, top-down, character, analogous perhaps to the

FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION

591

semiotic functioning of some relationis transcendetalis. A choice of this kind may be accounted for by means of what Shimony, addressing the hypothetical status of mentality in nature (Shimony [Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright, Hawking] 1999, pp. 144160), dubbed a super-selection rule in nature. Considering that the genuine Thirdness, as thought and reason (intelligence, consciousness, potentiality), and it being the cardinal, always includes the Firstness of abduction (or intuition, the unconscious, possibility) in itself and governs Secondness (actuality, which in turn encompasses the Firstness of possibility) by bringing information and embodying the ideas, the process of making the unconscious conscious (in other words, actualisation of the virtual) thereby completing the causal circuit is crucial. Process ontology, as non-physicalistic, that is, irreducible to the Secondness solely, posits potentiality as a semiotic bridge. This connection enables the very transition between consciousness and unconsciousness [which] need not be interpreted as a change of ontological status but as a change of state, and properties can pass from deniteness to indeniteness and conversely (Shimony [Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright, Hawking] 1999, p. 151). Peirce considered consciousness a rather vague term and has noted that if it was supposed to mean Thought it is more without us than within. It is we that are in it, rather than it in any of us (Peirce CP 8. 256). We have to remember that a genuine sign has a triadic structure, while the relations at the level of Newtonian laws are dyadic. An active interpretation (or interaction, in Bickhards conceptualisation) and not a passive adaptation is what transform the brute facts of natural world into interpretable signs with which the universe is always already perfused. And interpretation creates the meaning, or provides an experience with value that, albeit implicit in each and every triadic sign, is as yet absent among the brute facts of Secondness. We remember that because every sign is capable of transmitting something of the thoughts general nature and, respectively, receiving a signicant meaning, Peirce posited the quasi-mind as repository of ideas or signicant forms. Process metaphysics and the absence of the ontological dualism therefore presuppose what Roger Penrose, non-incidentally, has dened in terms of a contact with some sort of Platonic world (Penrose [Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright, Hawking] 1999, p. 125). The relationship between the three worlds, namely the physical world, the Platonic world of

592

INNA SEMETSKY

ideas, and the mental world has been considered a mystery, heavily debated, and dubbed as gaps in Penroses toilings (Grush and Churchland 1995).15 The core of Penroses argument is that the physical world may be considered a projection of the Platonic world and the world of mind arises from part of the physical world, thus enabling one in this process to insightfully grasp and, respectively, understand some part of the Platonic world. Because the Platonic world is inhabited by mathematical truths, but also due to the common feeling that these mathematical constructions are products of our mentality (Penrose [Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright, Hawking] 1999, p. 96), the mysterious dependence of the natural world on strict mathematical laws and the trirelative relationship can be inscribed in the following diagram on the Figure 3. The relations stop being mysterious though if we consider Penroses three worlds as constituting a semiotic triangle and encompassing Peirces three modes of being. The mathematical laws express the Thirdness of habit taking that would have been represented, for Penrose, by a part of Platonic world which encompasses our physical world (Penrose [Penrose, Shimony,

Figure 3. Three Worlds and three mysteries (reproduced with permission from Penrose [Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright, Hawking] 1999, p. 96).

FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION

593

Cartwright, Hawking] 1999, p. 97) of matter, or Seconds. Bits of Thirdness, we may say, are accessible by our mentality (1997, p. 97) by virtue of the Firstness of insight or abduction, the latter intrinsically non-computable. Indeed, what in-habits the Platonic world is not only the true but also the good and the beautiful, which are all non-computable elements for example, judgement, common sense, insight, aesthetic sensibility, compassion, morality (Penrose [Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright, Hawking] 1999, p. 125), all the moral attributes of the psyche that necessarily mediates between the world and the intellect. The causal circuit closes up on itself in the process of creative semiosis. The rules of projective geometry, which indeed serves as a basis for conceptualising the diagram as per Figure 3, establish the oneto-one correspondence like in a perspectival composition towards a vanishing point implying therefore isomorphism, or mapping of the archetypal ideas of the Platonic world onto the mental and physical worlds.16 The level of meanings exceeds references because it encompasses our thinking (mental world) as belonging with (cf. Seibt 2004) our doing (physical world, the world of action), that is, the very organismenvironment interaction, which proceeds in accord with the speculative grammar of Peirces semiotics. Abduction enables the grasp of moral meanings as primum cognitum making therefore the aforementioned relationis transcendetalis in fact immanent in perception! The brute facts of the physical world intervene in practice and not only supervene in theory: Firstness is a dream out of which ens reale, the category of Secondness, inevitably at times awakens a sleeper (Deely 2001, p. 661). An ex-sleeper that has been awaken has changed her perspective or her point of view literally: a perspectival point is now in the mental world, leading to isomorphism appearing between a generic mental representation and the other two worlds, the world of ideas together with the world of action. The archetypal ideas that are, intrinsically, forms without content acquire this very content relationally within the dynamics of self-organising semiotic process. The informational content therefore always already is, albeit potentially or unconsciously.17,18 The self-organising dynamics of sign-relations overcomes the paradox of new knowledge as well as what appears to be an inconsistency between articulating representations and meanings in terms of Peirces logic of signs.

594

INNA SEMETSKY NOTES

Peirce seems to have anticipated contemporary developments in quantum mechanics. His pragmatic philosophy deals with the might-be-ness of counterfactuals and, as Penrose (1997) stated, it is quantum mechanics [that] enables you to test whether something might have happened but didnt happen...[it] allows real eects to result from counterfactuals! (Penrose 1999, p. 67). See further below. 2 See Magnani (2001) for the extensive review of abduction in the philosophy of science discourse and in the eld of AI. Magnani cites H. Simon ([1965]1977) on the subject of abduction in terms of the logic of normative theories: The problem-solving process is not a process of deducing... [I]t is a process of ...trial and error using heuristic rules derived from...experience, that is, sometimes successful in discovering means that are more or less ecacious in attaining some end...it is a retroductive process (Simon 1977, p. 151, in Magnani 2001, p. 16). Modern logic allows accounting for the nonmonotonic or dynamic character of abduction by means of belief revision (Magnani 2001, p. 24), the latter capable of representing cases of conceptual change (2001, p. 39). The nonmonotonic logic permits the jump or leap to the [fallible] conclusion in the absence of immediate contradictory evidence. This jump is nonetheless inferential and appears to correspond to Peirces logical form of abduction: The surprising fact, C, is observed; But if A were true, C would be a matter of course: Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true (Peirce CP 7. 202). 3 Deely (2001) expresses the same idea in the following way: Modern philosophy began with the universal doubt whereby Descartes had made being a function of his thinking. Pragmaticism [Peircean pragmatism] begins rather from a belief in the reality of what is more than thought, and proceeds by continually putting to test the contrast between thought and what is more than thought, between merely objective being and objective being which reveals also something of the physical universe (Deely 2001, p. 627, brackets mine). See also Bickhards (2004) interactive theory based on error-guided experiential learning. See also Semetsky (2003) for the ontology of dierence and its function within the process of semiosis. 4 See Kihlstrom (1993) for his description of this now-classic experiment on subliminal perception by Peirce and his student Jastrow. Kihlstrom provides many references to the contemporary research in experimental psychology and cognitive science on the topic of psychological unconscious understood as a domain of mental structures and processes which inuence experience, thought, and action outside the phenomenal awareness and voluntary control (1993, p. 125). 5 I initially addressed this idea in the paper Learning by abduction: a geometrical interpretation presented at the Peirce Symposium: Cultivating the art of inquiry, interpretation and criticism, INPE 8th Biennial Conference, August 711, 2002, University of Oslo, Oslo Norway. See also Semetsky 2004. 6 Bickhard would have agreed. He states that process metaphysics is a prerequisite for the dierent, novel, emergent causal power. The possibility of emergence is ubiquitous in new organization of process (Bickhard 2004, p. 124). 7 Seager (1999) suggests an analogous approach for addressing the internalist externalist debate in the philosophy of mind. 8 I guess the whole Swampman argument becomes then a moot point.

FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION

9

595

See Bigelow and Pargetter (1999) for the forward-looking theory of functions that objects to Millikans aetiological position and proposes instead the notion of dispositions or a survival-enhancing propensity (1999, p. 109) in view of a future goal. 10 The term logical depth has been elaborated in Homeyer (1993). The information theory denes a messages logical depth as the expression of its meaning, its worth or value. Homeyer labels such logical depth a semiotic freedom (1993, p. 66). In Peircean terms, freedom is of course the manifestation of Firstness, the logic of creative abduction. 11 See Deely (2001), chapter 15, Charles Sanders Peirce and the Recovery of Signum, pp. 611668. See also Rescher (2000). Rescher reminds us of medieval causa as a concept that abolishes a dualism between causes and reasons which the moderns since the time of Descartes have... insisted on separating sharply (2000, p. 40). 12 This is logic as an ethics of thinking (see Deely 2001, p. 622), which for Peirce is inseparable from human conduct, that is, an ethics of doing. 13 In Semetsky (2000) I explored a concept of semiosphere that was rst coined by Russian semiotician of the Tartu school, Yuri Lotman (1990). Lotmans term has undergone its second birth when recently posited by molecular biologist Homeyer (1993) who dened semiosphere as a holistic structure that penetrates to every corner of these other spheres [the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and biosphere], incorporating all forms of communication [and constituting] a world of signication (1993, p. vii). Deely (2001) suggests the all-encompassing term signosphere to pay tribute to what he calls Peirces grand vision, which has the advantage of being rooted in science rather than in mysticism (Deely 2001, p. 630). 14 Cf. Thom (1985). Peirces form of the sign, as we said earlier, includes icon, index, and symbol. Introducing the genesis of image (or copy, or icon) in the context of Peirces semiotic categories, Thom acknowledges the necessary isomorphism of forms and makes it clear that the correspondence is produced by interaction or coupling. In the case of projected shadow, for example, isomorphism is maintained because the light, illuminating the original and casting the shadow, performs the function of interaction. Thom believes that the formation of copies (that is, representations, for the purpose of this paper) is a manifestation of the universal irreversible dynamics. He notices that stability of biological forms has to have a dynamically physical character, that is, depend on constraints imposed by the physical level: the organic release of evolution allows the appearance of forms, more rened, more subtle, more global...and...charged with meaning (Thom 1985, p. 280). Archetypal forms, for Thom, are located on this physical level. Thom notices that very often we reduce a whole being to its index as an act which confers on the latter a symbolic value. In language, this procedure is at the root of many tropes (metonymy in particular: taking the part for the whole) (1985, p. 282). 15 Rick Grush and Patricia Churchland (1995) argue against Penroses positing a possible direct insight into Platonic truths, and therefore understanding the meanings of the (mathematical) concepts, over following the logic of computational rules. But the logic and psychology of abduction, as advanced in this paper, would have refuted the claim.

596
16

INNA SEMETSKY

This is of course my conjecture solely, albeit supported by Roger Penroses positing Platonic world as being projected onto the physical. The rigorous proof would have required a detour to set theory and the concept of innite cardinality and is out of scope of this paper. 17 Hence the problem of zombies who become automatons (or what Peirce would have called the de-generate signs), the logic of which is reduced to the dyadic relations between the world of ideas and the physical world of blind and unconscious action. 18 What may be called the language of thought is therefore extra-linguistic: it is a sign-system, that by denition would have included not only verbal symbols but also icons and indices as per Peirces triad. Lacan was correct when he said that unconscious too is structured as a language. But the language in question is the language of signs. Thom (see note 14, above) concludes his article From the Icon to the Symbol (1985) in those words: Only those who know to listen to response of Mother Nature will come later to open a dialogue with her and to master a new language. The other will only babble and buss in the void, bombinos in vacuo. And where, you may ask, will the mathematician be able to hear Natures response? The voice of reality is in the signicance of the symbol (Thom 1985, p. 291).

REFERENCES

Bickhard, M.: 2004, Process and Emergence: Normative Function and Representation, Axiomathes 14, 121155. Bigelow, J. and R. Pargetter: 1999, Functions, in Buler David J. (ed.), Function, Selection and Design., Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 97114. Deely, J.: 2001, Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-rst Century, University of Toronto Press: Toronto. Greaves, M.: 2002, The Philosophical Status of Diagrams, Center for the Study of Languages and Information Publications: Stanford, US. Grush, R. and Patricia S. Churchland: 1995, Gaps in Penroses Toilings, Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(1), 1029, United Kingdom: Imprint Academic. Hacking, I.: 1990, The Taming of Chance. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. Homeyer, J.: 1993, Signs of Meaning in the Universe, trans by. Barbara J. Haveland. Bloomington & Indianopolis: Indiana University Press. Juarrero, A.: 1999, Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System, The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. Kihlstrom, J. F.: 1993, The Rediscovery of the Unconscious, in Harold J. Morowitz and Jerome L. Singer (eds.), The Mind, The Brain, and Complex Adaptive Systems, Proceedings Volume XXII, Santa Fe Institute, Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company (=The Advanced Book Program), pp. 123143. Magnani, L.: 2001, Abduction, Reason, and Science: Processes of Discovery and Explanation, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers: Dordrecht.

FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION

597

Millikan, R.: 1984, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, MIT Press: Cambridge MA. Millikan, R.: 1999, Proper functions, in Buler David J. (eds.), Function, Selection and Design, Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 8596. Peirce, C. S.: 18601911, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. I- VI, C. Hawthorn and P. Weiss (eds.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Peirce, C. S.: 1955, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, J. Buchler (ed.). New York: Dover Publications. Peirce, C. S.: 1998, The Essential Peirce: Selected philosophical writings, vol. 2 (198931913). (Peirce Edition Project, eds.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Penrose, R., A. Shimony, N. Cartwright and S. Hawking: 1999, The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind, paperback edition, Cambridge University Press: UK. Rescher, N.: 2000, Realistic Pragmatism: An Introduction to Pragmatic Philosophy, State University of New York Press: Albany. Seager, W.: 1999, Theories of Consciousness: An Introduction and Assessment, Routledge: London and New York. Seibt, J.: General Process Theory: A Descriptive Framework for Dynamic Ontologies, paper delivered at the conference Dynamic Ontology: An Inquiry into Systems, Emergence, Levels of Reality, and Forms of Causality, University of Trento, Italy, September 711, 2004. Semetsky, I.: 2000, The End of a Semiotic Fallacy. SEMIOTICA 130, 3/4. Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin, New York, 283300. Semetsky, I.: 2003, The Magicians Autopoietic action, or Eros Contained and Uncontained, Tricksters Way, vol. 2, http://www.trinity.edu/org/tricksters/TrixWay/current/Vol%202/Vol23/semetsky.html. Semetsky, I.: 2004, The Role of Intuition in Thinking and Learning: Deleuze and the Pragmatic Legacy, Educational Philosophy and Theory 36(4), Blackwell Publishing, 433454. Shimony, A.: 1993, Search for a Naturalistic World View, vol. II, Cambridge University Press. Thom, R.: 1985, From the Icon to the Symbol, in Robert E. Innis (ed.), SEMIOTICS: An Introductory Anthology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 275291.