The enactive approach offers a distinctive view of how mental life relates to bodily activity at three levels: bodily self-regulation, sensorimotor coupling, and intersubjective interaction. This paper concentrates on the second level of sensorimotor coupling. An account is given of how the subjectively lived body and the living body of the organism are related via dynamic sensorimotor activity, and it is shown how this account helps to bridge the explanatory gap between consciousness and the brain. Arguments by O'Regan, Noë, and (...) Myin that seek to account for the phenomenal character of perceptual consciousness in terms of ‘bodiliness’ and ‘grabbiness’ are considered. It is suggested that their account does not pay sufficient attention to two other key aspects of perceptual phenomenality: the autonomous nature of the experiencing self or agent, and the pre-reflective nature of bodily self-consciousness. (shrink)

Noted psychologist and philosopher develops his own brand of pragmatism, based on theories of C. S. Peirce. Emphasis on "radical empiricism," versus the transcendental and rationalist tradition. One of the most important books in American philosophy. Note.

One of the great American pragmatic philosophers alongside Peirce and Dewey, William James (1842–1910) delivered these eight lectures in Boston and New York in the winter of 1906–7. Though he credits Peirce with coining the term 'pragmatism', James highlights in his subtitle that this 'new name' describes a philosophical temperament as old as Socrates. The pragmatic approach, he says, takes a middle way between rationalism's airy principles and empiricism's hard facts. James' pragmatism is both a method of interpreting ideas by (...) their practical consequences and an epistemology which identifies truths according to their useful outcomes. Furnished with many examples, the lectures illustrate pragmatism's response to classic problems such as the question of free will versus determinism. Published in 1907, this work further develops James's approach to religion and morality, introduced in The Will to Believe (1897) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), both reissued in this series. (shrink)

It is commonly supposed that the pragmatisms of Peirce and James are fundamentally opposed; this view is supported by the fact that in 1905 Peirce deliberately chose a new name for his original doctrine. Yet Peirce and James were not only life-long friends but to a surprising extent were life-long collaborators. It is true that their approaches to philosophy were very different, reflecting their distinct personalities, with James exhibiting a pluralistic and humanistic style as opposed to Peirce the analyst and (...) formalist. James was a popular philosopher and Peirce a philosopher for philosophers. But they followed each other’s work, corresponded about philosophical problems, and deeply influenced each other. Peirce never completely renounced James’s broader pragmatism and tried hard to find common ground, even to some extent reshaping his own views to accommodate James’s. (shrink)

1 This article examines Peirce's semiotic philosophy and its development in the light of his characterisations of "representationism" and "presentationism". In his definitions of these positions, Peirce overtly pits the representationists, who treat percepts as representatives, against the presentationists, according to whom percepts do not stand for hidden realities. The article shows that Peirce's early writings—in particular the essay "On the Doctrine of Immediate Perception" and certain key texts from the period 1868–9—advocate an inferentialist approach clearly associated with representationism. However, (...) although Peirce continues to deny the cognitive import of first impressions throughout his philosophical career, the new view of perception that emerges in the early 1900s indicates a significant move in the direction of a presentationist point of view, a development partly corresponding to changes in his theory of categories. The strongest evidence for this reading is found in Peirce's contention that the percept is not a sign. The discussion concludes with considerations of possible objections and alternatives to the proposed interpretation in addition to some reflections on the consequences and relevance of Peirce's turn toward presentationism. (shrink)

What makes a living system a living system? What kind of biological phenomenon is the phenomenon of cognition? These two questions have been frequently considered, but, in this volume, the authors consider them as concrete biological questions. Their analysis is bold and provocative, for the authors have constructed a systematic theoretical biology which attempts to define living systems not as objects of observation and description, nor even as interacting systems, but as self-contained unities whose only reference is to themselves. The (...) consequence of their investigations and of their living systems as self-making, self-referring autonomous unities, is that they discovered that the two questions have a common answer: living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. The result of their investigations is a completely new perspective of biological (human) phenomena. During the investigations, it was found that a complete linguistic description pertaining to the ‘organization of the living’ was lacking and, in fact, was hampering the reporting of results. Hence, the authors have coined the word ‘autopoiesis’ to replace the expression ‘circular organization’. Autopoiesis conveys, by itself, the central feature of the organization of the living, which is autonomy. (shrink)

The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan ...

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), the founder of pragmatism, is generally considered the most significant American philosopher. Popularized by William James and John Dewey, pragmatism advocates that our philosophical theories be linked to experience and practice. The essays in this volume reveal how Peirce developed this concept.

This chapter examines the pragmatist approach to cognition and experience and provides some of the conceptual background to the “pragmatic turn” currently underway in cognitive science. Classical pragmatists wrote extensively on cognition from a naturalistic perspective, and many of their views are compatible with contemporary pragmatist approaches such as enactivist, extended, and embodied-Bayesian approaches to cognition. Three principles of a pragmatic approach to cognition frame the discussion: First, thinking is structured by the interaction of an organism with its environment. Second, (...) cognition develops via exploratory inference, which remains a core cognitive ability throughout the life cycle. Finally, inquiry/problem solving begins with genuinely irritating doubts that arise in a situation and is carried out by exploratory inference. (shrink)

From Cause to Causation presents both a critical analysis of C.S. Peirce's conception of causation, and a novel approach to causation, based upon the semeiotic of Peirce. The book begins with a review of the history of causation, and with a critical discussion of contemporary theories of the concept of `cause'. The author uncovers a number of inadequacies in the received views of causation, and discusses their historical roots. He makes a distinction between "causality", which is the relation between cause (...) and effect, and causation, which is the production of a certain effect. He argues that, by focusing on causality, the contemporary theories fatally neglect the more fundamental problem of causation. The author successively discusses Peirce's theories of final causation, natural classes, semeiotic, and semeiotic causation. Finally, he uses Peirce's semeiotic to develop a new approach to causation, which relates causation to our experience of signs. (shrink)

The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

This systematic investigation of computation and mental phenomena by a noted psychologist and computer scientist argues that cognition is a form of computation, that the semantic contents of mental states are encoded in the same general way as computer representations are encoded. It is a rich and sustained investigation of the assumptions underlying the directions cognitive science research is taking. 1 The Explanatory Vocabulary of Cognition 2 The Explanatory Role of Representations 3 The Relevance of Computation 4 The Psychological Reality (...) of Programs: Strong Equivalence 5 Constraining Functional Architecture 6 The Bridge from Physical to Symbolic: Transduction 7 Functional Architecture and Analogue Processes 8 Mental Imagery and Functional Architecture 9 Epilogue: What is Cognitive Science the Science of? (shrink)

Pragmatism has been called America's only major contribution to philosophy. But since its birth was announced a century ago in 1898 by William James, pragmatism has played a vital role in almost every area of American intellectual and cultural life, inspiring judges, educators, politicians, poets, and social prophets. Now the major texts of American pragmatism, from William James and John Dewey to Richard Rorty and Cornel West, have been brought together and reprinted unabridged. From the first generation of pragmatists, including (...) the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and the founder of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce, to the leading figures in the contemporary pragmatist revival, including the philosopher Hilary Putnam, the jurist Richard Posner, and the literary critic Richard Poirier, all the contributors to this volume are remarkable for the wit and vigor of their prose and the mind-clearing force of their ideas. Edited and with an Introduction by Louis Menand, Pragmatism: A Reader will provide both the general reader and the student of American culture with excitement and pleasure. (shrink)

Peirce’s method of categorial development reveals the experimental nature of phenomenology, of metaphysics, and of the relation between their respective claims. The phenomenological categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness come to light as an interrelated set of meanings, abductively generated as a tool for focusing on the richness of experience in order to elicit its illusive, “intangible” but pervasive textures, “traits” “tones or tints”. The move from experiential claims to metaphysical claims is an imaginative extension via analogy. In the development (...) of his metaphysical categories, there is an exaggeration of the experimental method by which we have meaningful everyday experience. There is an exaggeration of the metaphorical, imaginative, creative features of the meanings which arise out of past experience though abductive fixations of experience, and which legislate for the analysis of future experience. Further, there is an exaggerated attentiveness to what appears in experience, to its pervasive features or textures, an attentiveness which both founds the categories and serves to verify their adequacy. The claims of his experimental phenomenology, and hence the claims of the metaphysics which it grounds, are fallibilistic and open to alternative categorial possibilities. (shrink)

Synechism, as a metaphysical theory, is the view that the universe exists as a continuous whole of all of its parts, with no part being fully separate, determined or determinate, and continues to increase in complexity and connectedness through semiosis and the operation of an irreducible and ubiquitous power of relational generality to mediate and unify substrates. As a research program, synechism is a scientific maxim to seek continuities where discontinuities are thought to be permanent and to seek semiotic relations (...) where only dyadic relations are thought to exist. Synechism and pragmatism mutually support each other: synechism provides a theoretical rationale for pragmatism, while use of the pragmatic maxim to identify conceivable consequences of experimental activity enriches the content of the theory by revealing and creating relationships. (shrink)

A good deal of attention is beginning to be focused on Peirce’s understanding of perceptual judgments and the issue of foundations, and ultimately the nature of the percipuum is central to this issue. An examination of Peirce’s understanding of the dual senses of the percept, the perceptual judgment, and the percipuum, as well as the role of the ponecept and ponecipuum, in the logic of perceptual awareness, reveals the radical nature of his rejection of foundationalism. It will be seen that (...) Peirce uses the term “percipuum” in two different senses, a wide sense and a narrow sense, highlighting two corresponding senses of the perceptual judgment, and that what is “given” at the most fundamental level of perceptual awareness is in fact a “taken”, incorporating both the nature of the taking and the nature of what is taken. For Peirce, perceptual facts at their very primordial core emerge neither from mind alone nor from the dynamic reality of the universe alone, but rather from the interaction of the two which constitutes experience. (shrink)