Here is Michael Shapiro's letter (which went unpublished) to the New York Times editor about the essay "Let's Shake Up the Social Sciences."
TO THE EDITOR:
Nicholas A. Christakis's essay, "Let's Shake Up the Social Sciences" ("Gray Matter," Sunday Review, July 21st, p.12), is only the latest installment in a series of recent attempts to reorient the study of human beings in society by examining the biological basis of behavior along lines pursued in the new century by neuroscience. It is noteworthy that Dr. Christakis does not mention linguistics among the social sciences that need retooling, even though language is the basis of human thought and communication, and has been during the last 200,000 years of evolution. As with psychology, the recent vogue for the label 'cognitive' among linguists has given rise to the idea that there is something genuinely scientific only to disciplines conducted under the cover of this label, as if the exploration of the neurophysiological processes involved in speech (both its production and understanding) were the key to language and its use. But as Charles Sanders Peirce, America's greatest philosopher-scientist and the modern founder of sign theory, emphasized, the sign has no chemistry. As social beings, we transact our behavior by thinking in and exchanging signs, a process Peirce called 'semeiosis'. Semeiosis is always at bottom a matter of interpretation, the ability to assign and understand meaning. If we are to explain the thought processes that underlie intentionality and purposive behavior, which are at the root of the social sciences, it will only be by developing sign theory in the spirit of Peirce's whole philosophy, including his great achievement, the working out of the theory of interpretation. No matter how deep our knowledge of neural networks, synapses, and the prefrontal cortex, such knowledge will always be fundamentally beside the point because it will explain neither semeiosis nor interpretation.
MICHAEL SHAPIRO
Manchester Center, Vt.
The writer is an emeritus professor of Slavic and semiotic studies at Brown University.
2 comments:
This is cool!
"No matter how deep our knowledge of neural networks, synapses, and the prefrontal cortex, such knowledge will always be fundamentally beside the point because it will explain neither semeiosis nor interpretation."
Peirce would not agree with this, depending exactly on what this means.
As far as I can tell, Peirce did not give fundamental priority to any particular science (or kind of science) in the explanation of semeiosis. So while neuroscience would not be THE source of explanation for semeiosis, it would likely be a considerable part of the explanation.
First you have to consider that Peirce frequently refers to physiological facts in the explanation of some semeiosis. Consider pragmatisism and the "energetic interpretant". Pragmatism holds that all thought (thought-semeiosis) must play role in determing purposive behavior. Why? That's the big question. Behavior must play some role in connecting the thoughts to their objects (or at least their dynamical objects). Peirce is clear that indices are related to their objects causally, and all symbols have indexical elements (especially propositions). So how mental symbols (i.e., thoughts) connect to their objects causally? At some level the complete explanation must involve nervous habits, if action plays a role in connecting the symbol causally with its object. So neuroscience will be relevant to the explanation. So will the social sciences, since many human symbols are products of social-psychological forces. Again, I find nothing in Peirce that suggests that he favors only one level of explanation in the explanation sign activity.
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