Abstraction and self-control

Among the logical functions which are closely entwined with the social phenomenon of language, one of the key instruments of high-level anticipation is the process of abstraction. The product of this process is an ens rationis. Since the Latin age, philosophers have made a common distinction between an ens rationis and an ens reale or really existing thing. According to Peirce,

An ens rationis may be defined as a subject whose being consists in a Secondness, or fact, concerning something else. Its being is thus of the nature of Thirdness, or thought. Any abstraction, such as Truth or Justice, is an ens rationis. That does not prevent Truth and Justice from being real powers in the world without any figure of speech.

Lowell Lectures. 1903. Lecture 5. Vol. 1 | MS [R] 469:8. Term in M. Bergman & S. Paavola (Eds.), The Commens Dictionary: Peirce’s Terms in His Own Words. New Edition. Retrieved from http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/ens-rationis, 04.02.2017.

This kind of abstraction, called ‘hypostatic’ by Peirce to distinguish it from other uses of the term, is a vital process: in order to conceive of a concept’s implications for future conduct – that is, of its meaning – we have to objectify its depth. ‘When we speak of the depth, or signification, of a sign we are resorting to hypostatic abstraction, that process whereby we regard a thought as a thing, make an interpretant sign the object of a sign’ (Peirce, EP2:394). ‘That wonderful operation of hypostatic abstraction by which we seem to create entia rationis that are, nevertheless, sometimes real, furnishes us the means of turning predicates from being signs that we think or think through, into being subjects thought of’ (CP 4.549, 1906).

The question of whether apparently mind-created things can be real was the crux of debate between the scholastic realists and the nominalists, and Peirce declared himself (here as elsewhere) on the realist side by saying that entia rationis are ‘sometimes real.’ But why bother to think about thought-signs at all? Because consciousness of semiosis (i.e. semiotic awareness) enables higher grades of self-control. Abstraction is ‘the basis of voluntary inhibition, which is the chief characteristic of mankind’ (EP2:394); and ‘self-control of any kind is purely inhibitory’ (EP2:233).

If it seems a bit strange to say that voluntary inhibition (rather than voluntary action) is ‘the chief characteristic of mankind,’ reflect that in practice we cannot choose to do anything unless we can imagine a range of possible actions, or at least some ideal of practice which can be compared to the action contemplated. The person who reacts automatically to any situation, without stopping to think whether another response might be better, is incapable not only of self-control but of any deliberate act. The ability to choose a better course of action implies a more or less conscious comparison with some ideal standard of conduct. The more consciously choices are made, the higher the grade of self-control, as Peirce explains in a 1905 passage (CP 5.533):

To return to self-control … of course there are inhibitions and coördinations that entirely escape consciousness. There are, in the next place, modes of self-control which seem quite instinctive. Next, there is a kind of self-control which results from training. Next, a man can be his own training-master and thus control his self-control. When this point is reached much or all the training may be conducted in imagination. When a man trains himself, thus controlling control, he must have some moral rule in view, however special and irrational it may be. But next he may undertake to improve this rule; that is, to exercise a control over his control of control. To do this he must have in view something higher than an irrational rule. He must have some sort of moral principle. This, in turn, may be controlled by reference to an esthetic ideal of what is fine. There are certainly more grades than I have enumerated. Perhaps their number is indefinite. The brutes are certainly capable of more than one grade of control; but it seems to me that our superiority to them is more due to our greater number of grades of self-control than it is to our versatility.

Logic itself, as a normative science – one which can distinguish between good and bad reasoning, or strong and weak inference – is a means of exercising control over control of self-control. ‘Logic regarded from one instructive, though partial and narrow, point of view, is the theory of deliberate thinking. To say that any thinking is deliberate is to imply that it is controlled with a view to making it conform to a purpose or ideal’ (EP2:376). In Peirce’s view, recognition of that ideal is ultimately an esthetic judgment, to which most people (not being philosophers or logicians) give little critical attention. They settle instead for conformity to ‘a particular ideal’ which is ‘nothing but a traditional standard’ (EP2:377), and thus do not rise to the highest grade of self-control. This kind of conformity is often the most reliable guide in practical matters, and certainly stabilizes the community, but it has very little transformity. Social information is generated by the dynamic tension between individual and society – between internal and external guidance systems.

Particular sounds

Early in the 17th century, Wilhelm von Humboldt observed the discrete nature of what we now call phonemes – the “atoms” of speech, which speakers combine to make words, phrases and sentences. In order to read these utterances, we must be able to hear their phonemic elements in order to recognize their combined forms as verbal. Humans are adept at picking out speech sounds even under very noisy conditions – in other words, isolating sequences of them from the ambient noise, just as a neuron uses a myelin sheath to insulate its signals from the electrochemical storm going on all around – and virtually isolating each phoneme from its neighbors in the sequence, in order to recognize ordered parts of the sonic stream as particular words.

The discreteness and articulation of phonemes is crucial to the functioning of spoken language as a symbol system, and we humans must learn to hear discreteness (as ‘articulated sound’) even when the stream of sound is actually continuous. Recordings of normal spoken language, displayed on an oscilloscope or otherwise ‘objectively’ observed, do not contain gaps of silence between phonemes. This is why ‘motherese,’ the peculiar style of articulation that adults use in speaking to very young children, exaggerates the discreteness of phonemes (see Kuhl et al. in Damasio et al. 2001): in order to acquire language, children have to grasp this discreteness before they can begin to combine the elements of language into words and sentences and thus comprehend (or produce) them.

The discreteness of speech sounds does not contradict the continuity of sound. Likewise there is no contradiction between gradual development and “punctuated equilibrium,” between creation and evolution, or between “sudden” and “gradual” enlightenment.

oh bless the continuous stutter
of the word being made into flesh.

— Leonard Cohen, ‘The Window’ (1993, 299)

Meaning time cycles

Why can’t you be “turned on” all the time, so that every moment is a “peak experience”? The simple answer is any special state of excitement can only emerge temporarily from the “ordinary” state, and then return to it for a longer resting period. This is part of the energy economy involved in semiosis.

This principle applies not only psychologically but also biologically, down to the cellular level. For instance, a neuron cannot ‘fire’ continuously; indeed it has to spend much of its time ‘resting’ in order to be ready to fire again. At the neural population scale, inhibition is as necessary as excitation for the propagation of the signal along a nerve. A similar cyclic pattern applies to complex chemical reactions and to the self-organization process in cellular slime molds.

The slime mold is not a real mold at all but a single-cell amoeba that feeds on bacteria. When there is a scarcity of food, the individuals aggregate, forming colonies of thousands of cells. These colonies can migrate as a unit over relatively large distances. Over time, the homogeneous assemblage of cells differentiates in such a way that part of it becomes a base rich in cellulose, while the other part becomes a “fruiting body” rich in polysaccharides. The fruiting body then bursts, scattering spores, which yield mobile cells when food is again available. The cycle thereupon starts over again with the individual amoeba.

— Depew and Weber 1995, 419

The gathering of individual amoebas into a multicellular organism is triggered by a chemical signal which spreads from cell to cell, each being stimulated by the chemical (cAMP) to release a burst of it.

But this is not enough to ensure an effective signal: it must also be destroyed, otherwise the whole dish of amoebas would become a sea of cAMP, and no signals would be visible. The amoebas secrete an enzyme, phosphodiesterase, which destroys cAMP. So the substance has a brief lifetime, and the diffusion profile of the signal from a stimulated amoeba has a steep gradient, generating an effective directional signal that allows other amoebas to use it for chemotaxis (directed movement in response to a chemical). However, there is a problem here: cAMP released from an amoeba diffuses symmetrically in all directions away from the source, so amoebas anywhere within the effective range of the signal could respond. This means that each stimulated amoeba could become the center of the propagating wave. The result would be total chaos. This does not happen … The reason is beautifully simple and natural: after an amoeba has released a burst of cAMP, it cannot immediately respond to another signal and release another burst. It goes into a refractory state during which it is unresponsive, recovering from the previous stimulus and returning to its ‘excitable’ condition. Therefore, the wave cannot travel backward, and the signal travels one way.

— Brian Goodwin (1994, 50)

This sort of thing ‘shows that spatial order arises with temporal order’ (Goodwin 1994, 76). Even at the microscopic level, meaning takes time and moves in cycles.

Concepts and connections

The life of a concept is its function in a system of thought, a guidance system.

Vygotsky (1934) realized that the conceptual structures which inhabit meaning spaces must form an organic system from the beginning:

Concepts do not lie in the child’s mind like peas in a bag, without any bonds between them. If that were the case, no intellectual operation requiring coordination of thoughts would be possible, nor any general conception of the world. Not even separate concepts as such could exist: their very nature presupposes a system.

— Vygotsky (1934, 110-11)

Popper (1968) confirms this with respect to science, which builds consensus by means of repeated observations: ‘for logical reasons, there must always be a point of view – such as a system of expectations, anticipations, assumptions, or interests – before there can be any repetition’ (59). Without such a system of anticipations, no act or observation could be recognized as ‘the same’. This ‘repetition-for-us’ is ‘the result of our propensity to expect regularities and to search for them’ (60).

This system of anticipations is inhabited by concepts, each of which can be regarded as an iconic map of the relationships among interconnected feelings and ideas.

A concept is not a mere jumble of particulars,— that is only its crudest species. A concept is the living influence upon us of a diagram, or icon, with whose several parts are connected in thought an equal number of feelings or ideas. The law of mind is that feelings and ideas attach themselves in thought so as to form systems. But the icon is not always clearly apprehended. We may not know at all what it is; or we may have learned it by the observation of nature.

— Peirce, CP 7.467 (1893)

We are often guided by these ‘diagrams’ without being conscious of them, and usually without visualizing them; they function implicitly. Semiotically, though, we can learn to contemplate them.

New niches

As the e-mail habit spread in the late 20th century, the user often found his or her ‘inbox’ deluged with unwanted, intrusive and inane messages, usually sent by automated systems. A name was needed for this suddenly common phenomenon: a niche opened up in verbal meaning space.

The niche was filled by the word spam, which Jesper Hoffmeyer (2008, 137-8) traces back to a song in a Monty Python sketch (because its ‘endlessly repetitive lyrics suggest an endless repetition of worthless text, similar to what is contained within the e-mail variety of spam’). The word had been coined much earlier as a ‘telescope word’ for canned spiced ham (a disagreeable dish for many), but it must have been a memory of the Monty Python routine that triggered the association that plugged the word firmly into the niche it came to occupy. Certainly the original inventors of the word ‘Spam’ had no idea what it would later come to mean.

Many of our linguistic habits have similarly creative (spontaneous, accidental) origins, and this accounts for some of the polyversity we find in language. But Hoffmeyer’s point is that the same sort of thing happens in the biological realm, when an opening suddenly appears for unused (or differently used) genetic material to be plugged into a new sequence which adds something significant to the genetic resources of the organism.

The decisive cause of the birth of a new functional gene would be a lucky conjunction of two events: 1) an already existing nonfunctional gene might acquire a new meaning through integration into a functional (transcribed) part of the genome, and 2) the gene product would hit an unfilled gap in the semiotic needs of the cell or the embryo. In this way, a new gene becomes a scaffolding mechanism, supporting a new kind of interaction imbuing some kind of semiotic advantage upon its bearer.

— Hoffmeyer (2008, 138)

The somatic interpretant of the new gene may turn out to be a structural or behavioral change that confers some kind of pragmatic advantage upon the organism, filling a niche in practical meaning space: genetic polyversity pays off.

Deeper logic

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip (Thoreau). Or as Eugene Gendlin put it a century later,

the chief malaise of our society is perhaps that it allows so little pause and gives so little specifying response and interpersonal communion to our experiencing, so that we must much of the time pretend that we are only what we seem externally, and that our meanings are only the objective references and the logical meanings of our words.

— Gendlin (1962/1997, 16)

As Goffman (1959) demonstrated, ‘pretending that we are only what we seem’ is crucial to the maintenance of social roles, “team” membership and morale – our personae or masks. This is probably true of all societies, not only ‘ours,’ but especially in this age of proliferating information we need ways to dip into deeper, more intimate meanings: we need intimologies, which entail a resurrection of the body as meaning space, and a deepening of “logic” into the study of semiosis (the process of meaning) as pioneered by Peirce.

The Ship of Knowledge

In an illuminating metaphor, social scientist Otto Neurath compares humans as knowers to “sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials.”

— Martin Benjamin, Philosophy & This Actual World, 59

Can any guidance system be perfected? Can a life reach a state of fulfillment so that no niche in meaning space is left unoccupied?

There is no conceivable fulfillment of any rational life except progress towards further fulfillment.

— Peirce, CN 3:124 (quoted in Cobley 2010, 90)

Systemic topologies

All of science, philosophy and religion begins by supposing that the universe is intelligible, that what happens around here makes some kind of sense to somebody, or at least would make sense to an omniscient being or an ideal reader with unlimited time and energy to read it. The confirmation of this is that our anticipations often turn out to be accurate – often enough that we are surprised when they turn out to be wrong. Surprises confirm that our models are both functional and imperfect.

Thus it is not surprising that what kind of sense the universe makes to you depends on what kind of system you are. And if you belong to a symbolic species, it depends on the dynamics of the symbol system (the language) which is integrated with your guidance system. As Terrence Deacon points out, these dynamics are shaped by the ‘semantic topology that determines the way symbols modify each other’s referential functions in different combinations.’

In the study of complex systems, many researchers have recognized the critical formative influence of what might be described as topological universals. Boundary conditions of various sorts – spatial constraints, temporal parameters, connectedness of graphs and networks, recursive or re-entrant, causal or representational geometries, and mere finiteness of systems – can determine the characteristic patterns and stable attractor configurations of dynamical systems. Semiotic constraints affect the evolution of language in much the same way that boundary conditions affect the dynamics of physical systems.

— Deacon 2003, 103

This system of relationships between symbols determines a definite and distinctive topology that all operations involving those symbols must respect in order to retain referential power. The structure implicit in the symbol-symbol mapping is not present before symbolic reference, but comes into being and affects symbol combinations from the moment it is first constructed. The rules of combination that are implicit in this structure are discovered as novel combinations are progressively sampled. As a result, new rules may be discovered to be emergent requirements of encountering novel combinatorial problems, in much the same way as new mathematical laws are discovered to be implicit in novel manipulations of known operations.

Symbols do not, then, get accumulated into unstructured collections that can be arbitrarily shuffled into different combinations. The system of representational relationships, which develops between symbols as symbol systems grow, comprises an ever more complex matrix. In abstract terms, this is a kind of tangled hierarchic network of nodes and connections that defines a vast and constantly changing semantic space. … Whatever the logic of this network of symbol-symbol relationships, it is inevitable that it will be reflected in the patterns of symbol-symbol combinations in communication.… the symbolic use of tokens is constrained both by each token’s use and by the use of other tokens with respect to which it is defined. Strings of symbols used to communicate and to accomplish certain ends must inherit both the intrinsic constraints of symbol-symbol reference and the constraints imposed by external reference.… Because symbolic reference is inherently systemic, there can be no symbolization without systematic relationships.

— Deacon (1997, 99-100)

Genesis

The pattern that connects (Bateson) is also the pattern that creates, the sign that determines the form of existing things or systems. We discover these patterns by observing that similar beings have similar origins.

All natural classification is then essentially, we may almost say, an attempt to find out the true genesis of the objects classified. But by genesis must be understood, not the efficient action which produces the whole by producing the parts, but the final action which produces the parts because they are needed to make the whole. Genesis is production from ideas. It may be difficult to understand how this is true in the biological world, though there is proof enough that it is so. But in regard to science it is a proposition easily enough intelligible. A science is defined by its problem; and its problem is clearly formulated on the basis of abstracter science.

— Peirce, CP 1.227 (1902)

In biology, the genetic ‘idea’ is more recently called the genotype, and we now have a better understanding of its role in producing organisms classified by phenotype. But many biologists still do not see these as types in the Peircean sense, which here he calls ‘ideas’:

All classification, whether artificial or natural, is the arrangement of objects according to ideas. A natural classification is the arrangement of them according to those ideas from which their existence results. No greater merit can a taxonomist have than that of having his eyes open to the ideas in nature; no more deplorable blindness can afflict him than that of not seeing that there are ideas in nature which determine the existence of objects.

— Peirce, CP 1.231 (1902)

Meaning what you read

Facts or beliefs, once formulated, are in the public domain; but their actual meanings cannot be made public.

Only you personally can mean, at the moment, the sign you are reading. You can do that by investing in it your own experience of the object of the sign. That is the water of life which can revive the dry bones of a published text. But that’s a third-person view. From your point of view as reader, what you do is to let the text speak from experience. Without this ‘letting it mean’, the text is just a bag of tricks and traps – canned information, facts, opinions, stories and so forth. Reading those things into the text, rather than ‘letting it mean,’ is another kind of trap, though. For a maxim that might avoid both traps, try this: Let your body mean the text.

Real learning can occur only in dialogue with one’s body.

— Gendlin (1981, 160)

Gendlin’s ‘focusing’ technique requires the practitioner to let the answers to her questions come from her body, rather than getting caught in a repetitive verbal routine. The body, then – rather than some external authority figure, or some ‘visionary’ projection – is trusted as the source of revelation which can turn into new guidance. Once this has been grounded in the practice of attending to the immediately felt body, then the habitual boundaries we draw around what can be felt as ‘body’ can fall away. Perhaps it is only when the whole earth is your body that you can really learn from scientific inquiry. And only when precepts are realized in the practice of interaction with other earthlings can you really learn what they mean.