Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

Now if you're paying very close attention, then you've noticed that this is a process by which meaning enters experience. A third experience translates between two others, or provides for mediated and reflexive access.

For Dewey, this caused a revolution in thinking about education. Deweyite education is all about working up from the real experiences of real people and intensifying the meaning they derive from their behaviors: Meeting people where they are, but pushing them to critical thought.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-0chE9P5UM

Semiosis is basically a process by which experiences like these come to bear on each other in these stances.

1st, some experiences serve as "reference" to others. 2nd, some experiences serve as "vehicles" for others. 3rd, some experiences serve as "interpretants" or "translatants" between 1 and 2.

So to recap:

1stness = vibez

2ndness = leo_pointing_meme.jpeg

3rdness = pointing_spiderman.png

In case I didn't quite make it clear: these simple stances between experiences can accumulate and create a vast, inter-connected system of meaning. It might be helpful at this point to think about Behaviorist theories of learning, because they are derivative albeit impoverished from this basic approach. The founding text of Behaviorism rejects introspection -- but Peirce went much farther in his "Four Incapacities" argument. Look it up later.
The upshot here is that interpreted life compounds.

For a Peircean, "meaning" does not involve reference to a Cartesian world of spirit. Quite to the contrary, "meaning" involves little more or less than the translation of a dyad of experiences through a third term. And the relationships between experiences 1 and 3, or 2 and 3, can themselves become the "dyads" for further translation by further "thirds." And from this elemental categorization of the ways experiences stand in as 1, 2, and 3, Peirce can create a larger logical structure of meaning

Now here's the really fun part: "Thirdness."

You see, some of those tangles of experience that we've identified as secondness also tangle in another glimpse of experience -- and sometimes that glimpse experience actually mediates between the dyad of experiences of secondness. That is, when you get a 3rd bit of experience that also links 1 and 2, this creates the potential for mediated access -- or we might call it "translative" or "interpretive" access. This is where "meaning" starts to enter.

"Secondness" starts to get a little harder to apprehend. Secondness describes those aspects of experience in which two things create a kind of correlate relation to each other. This dyad of firsts is the basis for brute fact, actuality, singularity, and reaction. Secondness is the domain of cause-and-effect. In the experience of organism, secondness is the base of apprehension of correlates, of causality, of *this* as distinct from *that*. An organism's reflex is behavioral secondness.

Organisms experience firstness. It's the stuff experience is built out of, in fact. And for Peirce, the fundamental stuff at the bottom of the universe is "tychic," meaning it's at its root subject to random chance. Quantum mechanics are a pretty good comparison if you want an idea of this sense of a cosmos that is at its base fundamentally chance and inchoate.

Anyway, the thing of it is that those glimpses of "first" experience sometimes get ensnared with each other. This leads us to 2ndness

I'm going to try to make this intro to semiosis as straightforward as I can, but I want to say straight off the bat that this subject usually requires people to radically reconstrue certain concepts.

The first part of semiosis is "firstness," the direct part of raw experience. "First" experience is going to be the ground of reference later. But for now, "firsts" are pure feeling, pure sense, that kind of thing. For Peirce, the continua of experience (like heat, color, or weight) are fundamental

The equivalent parallel of this for students of Peirce is that here, too, every atom of experience is processed by the system of meaning managed by some organism -- germ cell, human, Hobbesian leviathan, whatever. And as with Hegel, these glimpses of meaning add up to larger & larger systems -- but in an open-ended sense. No telos. The critical thing here is that there is a definite process that concerns any particular organism capable of winning-through to meaning: viz. the process of semiosis.

So let's think more about the trade that Dewey made in this exchange: he gets his powerful anti-philosophy and all he has to do is to think about how ideas bear consequences in the world of experience. Seems reasonable? Remember -- you're looking at a post-Hegelian. For Hegel, every atom of experience can be analyzed and interpreted to find the participation of that atom in a larger ecosystem of consciousnesses driving world-historical revolutions in self-awareness.The part goes up to the whole

So what was it about Peirce's pragmatism that was so appealing to Dewey? Pragmatism is really more of an anti-philosophy. The prime directive of pragmatism is to look for the way any belief would cash out in real experience -- and this comes with the corollary that if some theoretical novelty has no observable consequences, then it's only so much more verbiage. So at this point, Dewey gets to burn all his old notes (I'm imagining; I don't have a source for this) about Hegelian Absolute Being etc

The German generation of '48 brought over a lot of revolutionary Geist to US frontier metropolises, such as St Louis. (See Henry Clay Brockmeyer for example <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Clay_Brockmeyer>).
The upshot of Hegel for Dewey was that it gave him a framework to think about the history of ideas: the ages & stages of history that necessitated certain intellectual adaptations, the continuity between those, and so on. But for all of this, Hegelianism imposes a wagon-train of theoretical baggage.

So I've said Dewey was a pragmatist. In this case that means that he was directly a student of the inventor of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce. (It is sometimes said that Peirce was Dewey's dissertation advisor, but this is impossible for certain reasons academic logic.)

The main thing that you need to know at this point in the thread is that Peirce converted Dewey away from American Hegelianism. Yes, there was a distinctly American (albeit German-accented) school of Hegelianism at the time.

I've had a stressful day so here's a knowledge dump about Benjamin S Bloom, Dewey, and the fundamental semiotics of pragmatist theories of learning.

If you went to a school in the developed world that was taught by professionals, those professionals probably had a bit of their education shaped by John Dewey. Dewey occupies a weird memory-holed bit of American history. He reached maturity during the Gilded Age but only became known as a progressive pragmatist in the Great Depression.

oooo
shakalakalaka
ooo

I don't know what happens in the long run, but I know that LegacySite.com is still losing money for its Nth owner and even Pitchfork is dead these days. It's getting harder and harder for these overproduced elites to leverage the MFA into a byline someplace. Hateclicks still sell ads, but not so many. TikTok doesn't really honor credentials.

The sun is low and it's getting cold.

So for practical purposes, this is what you see:
(combining the 1st and 2nd bullet) LegacySite.com publishes steady drumbeat of headlines promoting wildly unpopular politics, like reparations or degrowth, driving popular political conversation from discussions of the plausible to the fantastical
- (combining 2 and 3) a concept like "degrowth" is genuinely not appreciated by these the freelancers for LegacySite.com, whose personal catastophe has consisted in failure to launch to the middle class

Some aspects of this dynamic to highlight:
- the overproduced elites are the ones who are still trying to keep the culture war bubbling because they have sold their MFAs as a way to get clicks on LegacySite.com
- for these people, the worst-case economic catastrophe has already happened, and so they no longer have any fear of radical redistribution being imposed on the rest of the world, and might even see themselves as the beneficiaries
- they genuinely do not think in terms of labor or output