Naturalizing Peirce’s Semiotics: Ecological Psychology’s Solution to the Problem of Creative Abduction

Abstract

It is difficult not to notice a curious unrest in the philosophic atmosphere of the time, a loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions, a mutual borrowing from one another on the part of systems anciently closed, and an interest in new suggestions, however vague, as if the one thing sure were the inadequacy of extant school-solutions. The dissatisfactions with these seems due for the most part to a feeling that they are too abstract and academic. Life is confused and superabundant, and what the younger generation appears to crave is more of the temperament of life in its philosophy, even though it were at some cost of logical rigor and formal purity.William James (1904) Abstract. The study of model-based reasoning (MBR) is one of the most interesting recent developments at the intersection of psychology and the philosophy of science. Although a broad and eclectic area of inquiry, one central axis by which MBR connects these disciplines is anchored at one end in theories of internal reasoning (in cognitive science), and at the other, in C.S. Peirce's semiotics (in philosophy). In this paper, we attempt to show that Peirce's semiotics actually has more natural affinity on the psychological side with ecological psychology, as originated by James J. Gibson and especially Egon Brunswik, than it does with non-interactionist approaches to cognitive science. In particular, we highlight the strong ties we believe to exist between the triarchic structure of semiotics as conceived by Peirce, and the similar triarchic stucture of Brunswik's lens model of organismic achievement in irreducibly uncertain ecologies. The lens model, considered as a theory of creative abduction, provides a concrete instantiation of at least one, albeit limited, interpretation of Peirce's semiotics, one that we believe could be quite fruitful in future theoretical and empirical investigations of MBR in both science and philosophy.

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“…Brunswik's (1952) model takes into account the complexity of the environment and assumes both a selective nature of perception and that people have the skills and knowledge to make sense of the world. Hence, this methodology investigates many selected variables simultaneously to study people's perceptual judgments in experimental conditions that simulate the natural world conditions (Kirlik and Storkerson, 2010;Storkerson, 2001Storkerson, , 2003Storkerson, , 2009Storkerson, , 2010). Gigerenzer's (2007) studies of judgment in naturalistic or ecological settings build upon Brunswik's (1952) model of perceptual august .…”

Factors Affecting Interpretation of Diagnostic Images as a Decision Process:

“…Brunswik's (1952) model takes into account the complexity of the environment and assumes both a selective nature of perception and that people have the skills and knowledge to make sense of the world. Hence, this methodology investigates many selected variables simultaneously to study people's perceptual judgments in experimental conditions that simulate the natural world conditions (Kirlik and Storkerson, 2010;Storkerson, 2001Storkerson, , 2003Storkerson, , 2009Storkerson, , 2010). Gigerenzer's (2007) studies of judgment in naturalistic or ecological settings build upon Brunswik's (1952) model of perceptual judgments and theory of the inherent complexity and equivocality of naturalistic environments.…”

Camouflaging Truth: A Biological, Argumentative and Epistemological Outlook from Biological to Linguistic Camouflage

“…The lens model is based on the idea that the relationship between the organism and the environment is mediated by the use of the so-cafled proximal stimuli, from which the organism can infer the distal state of the environment, that brought it about. Ecological validity is the term introduced by Brunswik to refer to the situation in which a given proximal stimulus acts as a valuable indicator of a certain distal state or event; ecological validity is a normative measure about how diagnostic certain proximal stimuli are with respect to a given distal event (Vicente, 2003;Kirlik and Storkerson, 2010).…”