Mary- further to your extension of the concept of CAS [complex adaptive systems] to CAR [complex adaptive reasoning] - I certainly agree and consider such a framework to be a basic semiosic triadic process.

That is, complex systems are self-organized in order to be adaptive [aka pragmatic], and this requires a method for such pragmatic activity. This method is the triadic reasoning process, where, given input sensate data, the System can reference this input to its mediative analytic system [Peirce's Representamen/sign] wich acts as an If-Then analytic process. That is, this nodal site holds generalities and input sensate data is referenced to these generalities to produce a conclusion.

I think the triadic method is a vital morphology in the development of CAS ..

On another note, the mediative nodal site holds multiple possibilities for use to analyze input data. A simple system will have very few of these possibilities and therefore, a limited conclusion. This, frankly, provides the larger system with stability -you can't have atoms and molecules changing their format every two minutes]. A more complex system provides many more possibilities - but this can be problematic....How does mediation differentiate between valid and invalid conclusions? Induction is one method....But, entropic rejection of data as 'noise' is another....Both can lead to problems..

Edwina

 

On Wed 24/11/21 7:04 PM , Mary Keeler mkeeler@uw.edu sent:

[Let's see if this goes to the list?]

Thank you, Edwina, I have similar interests and agree with your conclusion about the applicability of the Peircean framework. 

I met John Holland before he died, and explained my extension of his CAS to CAR, leading to the idea of the "game of pragmatism" — which he called "a flight simulator for the mind"!

Here are a couple of papers that might help to explain (see more at the Revelator site, below)?

Complex Adaptive Reasoning:
Knowledge Emergence in the Revelator Game

http://conceptualgraphs.org/revelator/web/papers/keelerkcap09.pdf

Games of Inquiry
for Collaborative Concept Structuring

http://conceptualgraphs.org/revelator/web/papers/iccs05.pdf

 

Revelator: Game of Complex Adaptive Reasoning

http://conceptualgraphs.org/revelator/web/research/Papers.php

If pragmatism is essentially the scientific method, and we need that method for experimenting with ideas in order to develop Normative Science as the study of habit-change, then that game might give us a collaborative way to proceed?  It could (and should) incorporate graphical logic so that players can keep track of the development of effective arguments.

Here are just a few paragraphs from Peirce in support of this idea (selected from many more).

Mary

CP Vol 8 (1891)
Chapter 6: To Christine Ladd-Franklin, On Cosmology†1
316. My work in philosophy has consisted in an accurate analysis of concepts, showing what is and what is not essential to the subject of analysis. Particularly, in logic, my motive for studying the algebra of the subject, has been the desire to find out with accuracy what are the essential ingredients of reasoning in general and of its principal kinds. To make a powerful calculus has not been my care.

317. I may mention that my chief avocation in the last ten years has been to develop my cosmology.†2 This theory is that the evolution of the world is hyperbolic, that is, proceeds from one state of things in the infinite past, to a different state of things in the infinite future. The state of things in the infinite past is chaos, tohu bohu, the nothingness of which consists in the total absence of regularity. The state of things in the infinite future is death, the nothingness of which consists in the complete triumph of law and absence of all spontaneity.†3 Between these, we have on our side a state of things in which there is some absolute spontaneity counter to all law, and some degree of conformity to law, which is constantly on the increase owing to the growth of habit. The tendency to form habits or tendency to generalize, is something which grows by its own action, by the habit of taking habits itself growing. Its first germs arose from pure chance. There were slight tendencies to obey rules that had been followed, and these tendencies were rules which were more and more obeyed by their own action. There were also slight tendencies to do otherwise than previously, and these destroyed themselves. To be sure, they would sometimes be strengthened by the opposite tendency, but the stronger they became the more they would tend to destroy themselves. As to the part of time on the further side of eternity which leads back from the infinite future to the infinite past, it evidently proceeds by contraries.
318. I believe the law of habit to be purely psychical. But then I suppose matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit. While every physical process can be reversed without violation of the law of mechanics, the law of habit forbids such reversal. Accordingly, time may have been evolved by the action of habit. At first sight, it seems absurd or mysterious to speak of time being evolved, for evolution presupposes time. But after all, this is no serious objection, and nothing can be simpler. Time consists in a regularity in the relations of interacting feelings. The first chaos consisted in an infinite multitude of unrelated feelings. As there was no continuity about them, it was, as it were, a powder of feelings. It was worse than that, for of particles of powder some are nearer together, others farther apart, while these feelings had no relations, for relations are general. Now you must not ask me what happened first. This would be as absurd as to ask what is the smallest finite number. But springing away from the infinitely distant past to a very very distant past, we find already evolution had been going on for an infinitely long time. But this "time" is only our way of saying that something had been going on. There was no real time so far as there was no regularity, but there is no more falsity in using the language of time than in saying that a quantity is zero. In this chaos of feelings, bits of similitude had appeared, been swallowed up again. Had reappeared by chance. A slight tendency to generalization had here and there lighted up and been quenched. Had reappeared, had strengthened itself. Like had begun to produce like. Then even pairs of unlike feelings had begun to have similars, and then these had begun to generalize. And thus relations of contiguity, that is connections other than similarities, had sprung up. All this went on in ways I cannot now detail till the feelings were so bound together that a passable approximation to a real time was established. It is not to be supposed that the ideally perfect time has even yet been realized. There are no doubt occasional lacunae and derailments.†4

Supposing matter to be but mind under the slavery of inveterate habit, the law of mind still applies to it. According to that law, consciousness subsides as habit becomes established, and is excited again at the breaking up of habit. But the highest quality of mind involves a great readiness to take habits, and a great readiness to lose them [(CP 6.613) 1893]. 

Pragmatism is the principle that every theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the imperative mood [CP 5.18, Lecture 1, “Pragmatism: The Normative Sciences” (1903)].

CP Vol. 5
What Pragmatism Is [First of three Monist articles, 1905]
1. Experimentalist’s View of Assertion
. . .
412. … The laboratory life did not prevent the writer (who here and in what follows simply exemplifies the experimentalist type) from becoming interested in methods of thinking; and when he came to read metaphysics, although much of it seemed to him loosely reasoned and determined by accidental prepossessions, yet in the writings of some philosophers, especially Kant, Berkeley, and Spinoza, he sometimes came upon strains of thought that recalled the ways of thinking of the laboratory, so that he felt he might trust to them; all of which has been true of other laboratory-men.
Endeavoring, as a man of that type naturally would, to formulate what he so approved, he framed the theory that a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life; so that, since obviously nothing that might not result from experiment can have any direct bearing upon conduct, if one can define accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or denial of a concept could imply, one will have therein a complete definition of the concept, and there is absolutely nothing more in it. For this doctrine he invented the name pragmatism. Some of his friends wished him to call it practicism or practicalism (perhaps on the ground that {praktikos} is better Greek than {pragmatikos}. But for one who had learned philosophy out of Kant, as the writer, along with nineteen out of every twenty experimentalists who have turned to philosophy, had done, and who still thought in Kantian terms most readily, praktisch and pragmatisch were as far apart as the two poles, the former belonging in a region of thought where no mind of the experimentalist type can ever make sure of solid ground under his feet, the latter expressing relation to some definite human purpose. Now quite the most striking feature of the new theory was its recognition of an inseparable connection between rational cognition and rational purpose; and that consideration it was which determined the preference for the name pragmatism.

---------------------

He explains pragmatism as a method that helps us to know what we think, the meaning of which is interpreted as our willingness to act on that thought—in terms of its conceived consequences.

Modern science, with its microscopes and telescopes, with its chemistry and electricity, and with its entirely new appliances of life, has put us into quite another world; almost as much so as if it had transported our race to another planet.  Some of the old beliefs have no application except in extended senses, and in such extended senses they are sometimes dubitable and subject to just criticism.  It is above all the normative sciences (esthetics, ethics, and logic) that men are in dire need of having severely criticized, in their relation to the new world created by science.  Unfortunately, this need is as unconscious as it is great. [CP 5.513 (c.1905) "Consequences of Critical Common-Sensism"]

“Pragmatism is not a system of philosophy. It is only a method of thinking ...” (CP 8.206, c. 1905).

On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 9:08 AM Edwina Taborsky <taborsky@primus.ca> wrote:

With the opening of this new site for the open and exploratory discussion of, among other things, the use of Peirce in the analysis of the modern world, I'd like to outline, briefly, my interests in this area.

I consider that the triadic semiosis is both a continuous process in the generation of matter on this planet - and- can also be understood as the morphological form of discrete entities. That is, a cell is both a triadic semiosic unit and an active process of the semiosic processing of matter...connected and networked to other semiosic units/processes.  I consider this outline well-documented within Peircean texts.

This view also goes along with my understanding that Peirce's 'objective idealism' is a view that neither Mind nor Matter are primordial but that both are co-evolving correlates. {See 6.24 and other texts].

And as such - I am interested in examining the world as a Complex Adaptive System, which means that both variety and stability are correlates in this generative, adaptive, 'far-from-equilibrium' world - with no final state.

These are major areas of my interest, which means that I consider that the Peircean framework is applicable to the physic-chemical, biological and societal/conceptual realms.

Edwina Taborsky
 

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