you do not seem to have talked to my central question of motivation

I have done my best.

academic

God knows, I'm not academic.

What is it about Peirce that is more intriguing than the general concepts of communication you have excerpted from his work? Certainly, these concepts could be discussed unhindered by the attachment to a person.

huh? WTF, dude?

Someone else was to have given a more general presentation on Peirce in advance of my talk.

That didn't happen, so Monica asked if I could cover both. I don't get the problem here.

Issues with CS Pierce

Peirce is inventing Semiotics at a time when the disciplines of Psychology and Linguistics are also being formulated. Much of what Peirce describes appears to me to be thoughts that are pre-cursors to the psychology of perception and to the much more straight-forward notions of semiotics that we hear about these days.

Peirce is gathering a big pile of feelings, thoughts and observations. Later research will start to sort and organize the pile. It's obviously a pile of very important things, but somewhat of a confusion of things as it stands.

Several thoughts

It will be fun to hear the words of someone who has spent time on dissecting Peirce's pile - that is to say Prof Deacaon's talk

Peirce's piles leave us with nothing we can prove or disprove (in the sense of Popper's verifiability). If you cannot prove something or at least run a double blind clinical trial then what you have is something that's there for the fun of it.

If we follow too directly in Peirce's path we will end up exactly where we are today. The idea in going back to somebody like Peirce is to go back to the primary sources and try to guess/re-invent the path not taken.

Mark Carranza is quite correct in terming Peirce as a steampunk philosopher. Peirce is both a pre-cursor to the reality we are in - as well as visibly and interestingly a pre-cursor to alternate crazy-nerd realities.

Another one of Peirce's piles that might be interesting to dissect because of possible relevance to AI is abduction.

Hi Théo,

Your thoughts are interesting. About:

much more straight-forward notions of semiotics that we hear about these days

Given what I've been able to read so far, I haven't seen these more straight-forward notions. Pointers please!

I hope I've stressed enough, my own introduction to Peirce's sign relation framework of icon/index/symbol was through Deacon's explanation in The Symbolic Species. And it is this tiny little part: sign relation framework of icon/index/symbol, that I tried to introduce to the group.

I would have saved much effort if I had just sat down and read the "Symbols aren't simple" chapter to the group. I do not doubt that this might have been more effective in communicating the concepts.

And I will read (and encourage reading) this chapter again, specifically because these concepts are not simple. What made my effort creating the talk personally worthwhile was going outside of Deacon's writing on these concepts: but first being primed by Deacon's writing in:

• The sense that "icon/index/symbol" is important for an understanding of meaning in systems
  
• The sense that "icon/index/symbol" is easily and often misunderstood
  

Without this "priming," I don't think I would have dared Peirce. And had the larger surprise of finding value there.

[reply broken up for brevity and focus]
Hi again,

These two sentences seem to me to be in an enlightening logical opposition to each other:

if we follow too directly in Peirce's path we will end up exactly where we are today.

The idea in going back to somebody like Peirce is to go back to the primary sources and try to guess/re-invent the path not taken.

I disagree with the first sentence, and somewhat agree with the second sentence, which to me also disagrees with the first sentence.

It seems to me that Peirce's paths are in large still not taken and would take us to different places than where we are today. This statement is not really provable/falsifiable either in the sense you mean, I think, but it's not "just for fun." Can we have a science of knowing? Does all knowing need to be provable/falsifiable?

I sat in a graduate seminar at UC Berkeley last fall, Rhetoric 230 Thinking Technologies given again this fall. I highly suggest it for its content and discussion is specifically related to AI: the intellectual history of thinking as mechanism.

But the real shock and benefit was reading Descartes, Babbage, Turing, Vannevar Bush, Licklider, in the original texts and finding out that while I thought I knew their ideas from a lifetime of reading books about their ideas, my thoughts about their ideas were wrong. Not completely wrong, but in some sense, wrong enough that I had missed things much more interesting and useful in the original than what was "passed down."

I found that with Peirce as well and re-encourage reading these original texts.