C.S.Peirce and the Mind-Body-World Relation

It seems reasonable to suggest that the sensible body-mind complex, when examined from within the kind of philosophical perspective envisioned by Peirce, can be seen as functioning as a dynamic, “localising” or “focusing” semiotic space – a kind of natural “force-field” or “nexus”26, facilitating the self-organisation of a type of “habituated boundedness”, which in each individual organism, exerts a unique “subjective” kind of filtering and perspectivising influence on the on-going flux of phenomenological experience. This general way of thinking about things strikes me also as rather similar to the notion of how attractors function to exert a pull on certain processes in conceptual, or other types of phase space, as suggested by Peter Bøgh Anderson recently in relation to his semiotic theory for modelling genres as dynamic self-organizing systems (see Bøgh Andersen 2000) At the same time, the body-mind complex remains open for future re-organisations of its habituated (and habituating) configurations of categorising relations at any given time. According to this view, relational reorganisations result from semiotic processes instigated by certain types of (surprising) experiences, allowing for the development of innovative configurations of perspectival filterings related to, but not isometric with. other self-organizing semiotic processes in the natural environment external to the more “local” (both subjective and intersubjective) perspectivising environment that each mind-body nexus offers through its own currently habituated ways of organizing and categorizing signs in terms of meanings. We have seen that in a living, breathing world it is not, seen from Peirce’s point of view, sufficient to operate with dichotomised distinctions between pairs of “entities” such as mind and body, or body and world. Mind, body and world are seen by Peirce as living and moving together in a creative dialogue with one another, interwoven in semiotic processes that generate and respectively modify the cognitive, physiological and material regularities (habits) which self-organize, through their ongoing orderings and reorderings inherent in their own “embodiedness”, the unique interrelationships that develop and change over time in a continuity of interactions of mind, body and reality. As human beings, we are locally situated in the developing complexity of a material, conceptual and interactional world, our minds are locally situated in material, conceptual and interactional bodies, and,these three semiotic “loci” of world, mind and body interact continually with one another in the further “sympathetic” development of one another.