SUO: Re: Ontology, Epistemology, Semiotics
Tom,
I basically sympathize with you, and I think that Peirce's
solution deflates the emotional baloons that puff up the debate:
TJ>... As Daniel Dennett has admirably shown, in his "Darwin's
> Dangerous Idea", biologists incessantly approach new biological
> phenomena -- structures, behaviors, etc. -- by asking themselves
> "What on earth can this be good for?" or, in other words, "What
> is its purpose?" In biology, this is called adaptationism. In
> Dennett's own parlance, referring back to an earlier volume of his,
> it is called "taking the 'intentional stance'".
>
> Steven Jay Gould strongly disagreed with Dennett. On the other hand,
> Richard Dawkins is a big fan of Dennett's. So there are big gun names
> on both sides of this issue, let alone the fact that Dennett is a
> prominent philosopher of science in his own right.
All these people agree that there is something significant about
living organisms, but they can't agree what to call it. Any
traditional metaphor they choose is likely to raise somebody's
hackles.
Peirce's solution was very simple: he called it Thirdness.
That is one of Peirce's "ugly terms", which cannot stir up
anybody's preconcieved associations.
I forget where exactly he mentioned it, but one of my
favorite quotations from Peirce is that rather than searching
for the origin of life, it is better to search for the first
irreducible Thirdness in the world. That is better because
it is more precise, less emotion laden, and more likely
to be answerable in a definitive way.
One point I frequently make is that the primary difference
between "instinct" and "knowledge" is whether the learning
is encoded in the genes or encoded in the neurons. Either
way, it's Thirdness. Nobody likes to attribute "purpose"
or "intention" to a bacterium, but Thirdness can be
attributed to any living organism at any level.
In my interchange with Pierre, I used the words "purpose"
and "intent" because I didn't want to go through the overhead
of giving a tutorial on Peircean semeiotic before I could
get to the point.
But my major complaint about Dennet, Gould, and all those
debaters is that they could have solved their problems
much more simply if they had just done their homework
and read Peirce. To anybody who has studied Peirce,
they sound like a bunch of frat boys sitting around
a bull session without the logical and linguistic tools
to have an intelligent discussion.
John
PS: And that gets to my major complaint about Vulgar Rortyism:
Rorty was exposed to Peirce, but he was too puffed up with his
own reflection to recognize the goldmine he was digging in.