Re: [xmca] sense and sensibility

[Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu>]

Thanks for this quote, Martin. It could mean something not too far from my own thesis, expressed in my Feeling & Meaning work, and very coarsely summarized in my previous reply to David K. Semiotics does, I think, give us an alternative to mentalist notions of concepts and cognitive processes, provided that we take, as Morris seems to say, embodied experience and material interactivity as the root of symbols-for-us. Of course this has to be done in such a way that the Us plays its important role in relation to the Me, and with a developing repertoire of kinds of semiotic relations and kinds of signifiers. As I recall, Morris sticks to just Icons, Indexes, and Symbols, but that may be enough to at least sketch something like the ladder we climb, with a lot of help from our friends.

JAY.


Jay Lemke
Senior Research Scientist
Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
University of California - San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, California 92093-0506

Professor (Adjunct status 2009-11)
School of Education
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke 

Professor Emeritus
City University of New York







On Apr 28, 2011, at 5:21 PM, Martin Packer wrote:

> This from Morris’ dissertation: Symbolism and reality: a study in the nature of mind.
> 
> “The essay will aim to show that thought and mind are not entities, nor even processes involving a psychical substance distinguishable from the rest of reality, but are explicable as the functioning of parts of the experience of an organism as symbols to that organism of other parts of experience. Being then the symbolic portion *of* experience, the psychical or mental can neither be sharply opposed to the rest of experience, nor identified with the whole of experience. And since experience will be shown to be a portion of reality, it follows that mind and reality can never be utterly separated nor indiscriminately identified” (3-4)
> 
> On Apr 28, 2011, at 7:09 PM, Martin Packer wrote:
> 
>> Monica,
>> 
>> Charles W. Morris (May 23, 1901, Denver, Colorado – January 15, 1979, Gainesville, Florida) was an American semiotician and philosopher. George Herbert Mead directed his doctoral dissertation on a symbolic theory of mind, completed in 1925. His students included semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok. For some years I've had his "Six Theories of Mind" (1932) on the shelf, and recently found time to read it. (It's available on the web.)
>> 
>> Martin
>> 
> 
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