Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

Silence does not speak. Nature does not speak. Even God is silent, except perhaps in the voice that humans find in themselves in the presence of God's silence.

People will argue against this. They will insist that silence bears meaning, and they will tell you what it means. People will say that nature speaks constantly in terms perfectly compatible with contemporary conversations. People will even say that their words are the words of God.
They are all liars and you do not have to respect them

"Thinking…consist[s] in the living inferential metaboly of symbols whose purport lies in conditional general resolutions to act. As for the ultimate purpose of thought, which must be the purpose of everything, it is beyond human comprehension…[But] by action, through thought, he grows an esthetic ideal, not for the behoof of his own poor noddle merely, but as the share which God permits him to have in the work of creation."
~ CS Peirce

The Logos, for a Peircean neoplatonist, is this property of the relationship patterns reviewed in emergent and dynamic behavior patterns. Logos from Nomos, and Nomos from Eros: Reason is built from the Law, and the Law is built on the Ends.

This exercises non-efficient "finious" (basically, final) causation throughout history: the lawlike alignments of all phenomena in phenomenon-space accumulate along emergent pathways.

The Logos writes itself from the absolute totality of those pathways.

CS Peirce described the universe as progressively evolving towards a state of perfect rational necessity, like a cthonic god of number manifesting itself from the ash-heap of history.

I think I'm a Ken Thompson hack truther.
I feel it's warranted by this analogous situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

Once again, I am speaking objective, empirically verifiable truths.

On New Year's Eve in Prairie du Chienne, Wisconsin, officials inaugurate the New Year by ceremonially dropping a carp from a crane onto their main street.

Geheimrat: Technocracy or Professional Managerial Class?

If it weren't for Toyota, you know there would be thousands of young Americans firstnamed "Camry."

Disregard Flat Earth,
embrace (quincuncial) Tiled Earth:

Time to clock out. Sorry internet. More later.

Pragmatists are not necessarily interested in deconstructing experience: in most cases, pragmatist systems assume that the motivations that people bring to their environments are valid and suitable for constructive use.
If affect is a domain of learning, and if that learning is a process of adaptation that adds up to an intensification of significance, then a pragmatic education of affect would lead people into more and more meaningful adaptations that relate self-observation and environment.

All of that is simply to say that we can imagine a more accurate integrated account of how psychomotor skill-building (which involves putting the body through different energetic states) might sometimes lead to affective self-interpretation, and cognition can be handmaiden for this and more.

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.