Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

Obviously the physiological parts of affect correspond to certain patterns of action: elevated heartrate and muscle tension are great for behaviors involving energetic movement. But emotions are not self-evident: they are experiences, usually linked to stimuli, and as such they can always be interpreted or translated through third experiences. What we know as affect, or emotion, involves a great deal of cultural and personal interpretation of those experiences. Cognition can critique this.

I should mention at this point that it's kind of screwy and dumb that Bloom divided up learning along the scholastic division of mind (cognition), body (psychomotor), and spirit (affect). Charles S Peirce would call you a superstitious little ninny for such things. But if we were feeling more charitable, we could interpret these domains of experience along the lines outlined by pragmatist George Herbert Mead. For Mead, affect is part of the adaptive process -- and therefore we can link all 3.

I've started to secretly slip some things into this discussion that I should just explicate at this point.

Benjamin S Bloom is most famous for his taxonomy of *cognitive* skills (befitting college education), but over the course of his career he developed two other taxonomies -- one for psychomotor skills (befitting our poor voc-ed students) and one for the affective domain (I'll save that for last). All three taxonomies can be interpreted through pragmatic semiosis.

A critically reflective baker begins to ask questions about the symbols that mediate the experiential "firsts" of baking (such as the flavor and moistness of a cake) and the "seconds" of baking (such as the accurate correspondence between what the recipe says and what the baker does). An experience that reflects and mediates between these might be something like a taste test. And the critically reflective baker uses the experience of the taste test to drive further inquiry into baking arts.

"Thirdness" cognitive skills, like critical thinking, are those that involve the recognition of the mediated and reflexive access that we have to our knowledge through symbols.

So let's imagine a Deweyite baker. At the most basic level of learning (firstness) the baker is paying attention to the experiences of baking: smells, feels, time, etc. At the intermediate levels the baker is refining practice, such as by following recipes and techniques. But at the third level, the baker gets weird...

But if you recall the predominance of Deweyite approaches to education during the period of Bloom's taxonomy, the taxonomy becomes mildly more interesting.

Bloom's Taxonomy describes stages of semiosis, really. The lowest stages of cognitive skill deal with firstness -- the mere awareness and recognition of experience. The middle stages deal with secondness -- correlative pattern-matching behaviors that develop through straightforward causal chains. The most advanced stages involve thirdness.

What Bloom created to describe patterns of educational outcomes is now called Bloom's Taxonomy, and if you were taught at an institution run by professionals then chances are that those people are already aware of Bloom's Taxonomy.

Bloom's Taxonomy is most commonly understood as describing a sequence of cognitive skills beginning with the simplest (recall) and advancing to more and more complex skills (creation). Do the simple before the complex: As it's normally taught, the lesson stops here.

Anyway, this inclusive and progressive approach was really hunky-dory for New Dealers who were looking for a way to make public institutions relevant to the disaster of the Great Depression.

Dewey predominated in educational theory for decades.

One of the projects in educational research during those subsequent decades sought to create a common vocabulary for describing the types of learning that were happening in higher education. The lead researcher on this was Benjamin S Bloom.

Deweyite education was a hit, and perhaps more importantly it was backed with a generally progressive sensibility that met its moment in the Great Depression. Pragmatists including Dewey believed that this same process of learning could also be applied to organisms greater than an individual human, and so the semiotic process could also be seen at work in the deliberative processes of a free society. The public school, the union-hall, the voting booth are all venues for pragmatic deliberation.

So this meant that Dewey was perfectly comfortable working with vocational education -- even though at first he was only allowed to work with voc-ed students because they tended to be the ethnic underclass. Deweyite education has no chill w.r.t. education that makes no cash-value difference for its students, and it sets the expectation that pragmatic education should deepen and intensify the significance or meaning that people derive from their behaviors -- even behaviors like dry-cleaning.

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