Re: "nothing but a series of jerks" RE: 3rdness and mediation

From: Mike Cole (lchcmike@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Dec 26 2004 - 07:52:05 PST


Tony--

Your wrote, in part:
Does it help to think about the difference between "dynamics" and
"semiotics," where semiotics deals with triadic relationships that cannot be
reduced to "dynamics" [as in "The branch of mechanics that is concerned with
the effects of forces on the motion of a body or system of bodies ... The
forces and motions that characterize a system: The dynamics of ocean waves
are complex." (American Heritage Dictionary)]

Is it conceivable for a material system to be an irreducible emergent unity,
or a dynamic whole, constituted by combinations of dyadically dynamic
effects and interactions, rather than triadically mediating semiosic
relations?

I do not understand whey dynamics are restricted to combinations of
dyatically dynamic effects and interactions. Why does this follow from
the definition?
mike

On Sat, 25 Dec 2004 19:46:50 -0500, Tony Whitson <twhitson@udel.edu> wrote:
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Cole [mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com]
> Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2004 5:42 PM
> To: Xmca
> Subject: 3rdness and mediation
>
> Mike writes:
> I take the last two statements of these Russian intiators of
> cultural-historical psychology to imply that
> 1.the cultural habit of behavior (sign/tool mediated action) is not
> reducible to its parts
> 2.is emergent
> 3.is a qualitatively new psychological process with new meanings,
> affordances, etc.
> [drawing, inter alia,
> >From Jay (Dec. 17). I think we would say today in the language of complex
> systems theory that 3rds are _emergent_, and so tool mediation means here
> the sense in which subject-tool-object forms a dynamic whole, a new
> emergent unity, the sense in which a tool allows subject and object to
> become two parts or aspects or "moments" in a higher-order material system.
> Indeed this is a possible reading of LSV's original triangle. But this
> emergent new whole is not just a physical fusion (already implied by
> mediation-as-secondness), but a system with emergent properties and new
> meanings, new affordances, new possibilities for action
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I see a number of exciting insights and possibilities being opened up by
> this discussion.
>
> Just for the sake of seeing how "Thirdness" may contribute to our
> understanding:
> Does it help to think about the difference between "dynamics" and
> "semiotics," where semiotics deals with triadic relationships that cannot be
> reduced to "dynamics" [as in "The branch of mechanics that is concerned with
> the effects of forces on the motion of a body or system of bodies ... The
> forces and motions that characterize a system: The dynamics of ocean waves
> are complex." (American Heritage Dictionary)]
>
> Is it conceivable for a material system to be an irreducible emergent unity,
> or a dynamic whole, constituted by combinations of dyadically dynamic
> effects and interactions, rather than triadically mediating semiosic
> relations? It seems to me that it is conceivable. Maybe not likely (since a
> complex system comprised only of interdependent dyadic relationships would
> be brittle and lacking in adaptability.) But the thought experiment is
> useful, it seems to me, in forcing us to clarify the difference between
> complexes of dynamic dyads versus semiosic triads that are irreducible to
> complexes of dyads.
>
> There's a long footnote in my chapter in the Situated Cognition book
> (Kirshner & Whitson, 1997, fn. 3, pp. 103-104) where I use adaptive
> heliotropism for an example of a plant species as an "intelligent system"
> capable of triadic semiosis in Peirce's sense:
> ===========
> Excerpts:
> " ... The process does comprise a complex of ["dynamic" or] mechanical
> (dyadically caused) events, but the process itself occurs and the outcome of
> the complex of mechanical events is determined on the basis of a triadic
> relation in which the leaves respond to light not as a simple cause or
> stimulus, and not for the energy which that light made available for
> photosynthesis, but as a representamen; that is, as something signifying the
> energy available from the light to be absorbed later, after stems and leaves
> have moved. This triadicity can be seen in the corrigibility of the process,
> by which the response to light can be corrected, modified, or lost as the
> species "learns" from its "experience" in responding to the source of
> nonpresent (future) energy through the mediation of the present light.
> In the present light of this discussion, we can consider how the "scientific
> intelligence" of the botanists differs from that of the plants. ... The
> botanists themselves are at least partially aware that they are interested
> in these things as representations of things other than the signs
> themselves, so the scientists (unlike the plants) are capable of
> deliberately and consciously changing their representational and
> interpretive practices to better serve their interests (including
> scientific, as well as budgetary, career, ideological, or other interests).
> Peirce would have accounted for this as an example of how triadicity is more
> fully realized in the
> semiosic activity of the botanists than in that of the plants. A false
> hypothesis or less than satisfactory model or instrument can be corrected or
> improved through critical symbolic reflection and does not depend on such a
> crude corrective mechanism as survival of the fittest.
> Although the plant species might also exhibit rudimentary triadic
> intelligence, its triadicity is relatively "degenerate" ...
> We see that Peirce's notion of scientific intelligence extends beyond the
> traditional American psychologist's notion of intelligence in human
> individuals. It would include the social intelligence involved in situated
> cognition at the level of "interactions between people over the course of
> a few minutes," as discussed by Clancey and Roschelle (1991, p. 4; Roschelle
> & Clancey, 1992).
> Beyond this, it includes various kinds of intelligence in broader social
> processes. ....
> [Toulmin's] evolutionary model might suggest how the intelligence of peer
> review in determining survival of the fittest research programs more closely
> parallels the intelligence of heliotropic plants than some philosophers of
> science would like to think.
> Beyond that, of course, .... we need to understand that presumably
> scientific and cognitive activities at any level may be determined by the
> interested generation of new realities, rather than by "cognitive" or
> "scientific" interests per se.
> End of Excerpts
> ================
>
> In the example of heliotropism, the plant species has evolved a dynamic
> mechanism for directing leaves toward the source of energy. Although the
> mechanism operates dynamically at the level of the organism, it exists in
> the species only by virtue of the survival value of its (triadically)
> mediating function.
>
> Compare this with an imaginary hypothetical example of, say, a
> geothermically heated rock within an ecosystem where water falling on the
> rock is heated and circulated as water vapor so that vegetation grows where
> it would otherwise be too cold and dry. This may contribute to an
> irreducibly complex dynamic material system, in which the hot rock mediates
> to bring water, heat, and vegetation into fertile relationships that would
> otherwise not exist. But, in my view, this would be an example of what Jay
> refers to as "just a physical fusion (already implied by
> mediation-as-secondness)." The rock's mediating function (unlike the
> mediating function of the heliotropic mechanism in the plant species) is
> accidental to what it is or where it is or how it affects the falling water.
> There is mediation here, but it is merely secondness, merely a complex of
> dyadically dynamic relationships.
>
> In considering these issues, it occurred to me that Dewey's 1896 article on
> "The reflex arc concept in psychology" is actually a superb source for
> considering the difference between mediation as Thirdness vs. Secondness in
> human thought and behavior. Dewey doesn't use Peirce's vocabulary here
> (indeed, he writes explicitly about "Thirdness" only in two later articles,
> in 1935 and 1946); but the conceptual distinctions are richly illustrated.
> Today I've been taking extensive notes on relevant passages in Dewey's
> article; but this post is already way too long, so I'll confine myself to
> just one passage that might be of interest for how it locates these issues
> in relation to concerns within the history of psychology:
> Dewey writes (ew.5.99) that
> "... the reflex arc idea leaves us with a disjointed psychology, whether
> viewed from the standpoint of development in the individual or in the race,
> or from that of the analysis of the mature consciousness. As to the former,
> in its failure to see that the arc of which it talks is virtually a circuit,
> a continual reconstitution, it breaks continuity and leaves us nothing but a
> series of jerks, the origin of each jerk to be sought outside the process of
> experience itself, in either an external pressure of "environment," or else
> in an unaccountable spontaneous variation from within the "soul" or the
> "organism.""3
> the footnote:
> >3 It is not too much to say that the whole controversy in biology
> regarding the source of variation, represented by Weismann and Spencer
> respectively, arises from beginning with stimulus or response instead of
> with the co-ordination with reference to which stimulus and response are
> functional divisions of labor. The same may be said, on the psychological
> side, of the controversy between the Wundtian "apperceptionists"
>
> [Footnote Page Break ew.5.100]
> and their opponents. Each has a disjectum membrum of the same organic whole,
> whichever is selected being an arbitrary matter of personal taste.
>
>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Jan 01 2005 - 01:00:04 PST