Ethical Habits by Massecar Aaron;

Author:Massecar, Aaron;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Attention and Abstraction

Before examining the specific types of association that Peirce looks at, it will be worthwhile to consider where association in general fits within Peirce’s work. This section will examine association as a power of attention and abstraction and how it connects with the rest of Peirce’s work.

Peirce believes that “association is the only force which exists within the intellect” (CP 7.453, W 5:326, 1886). Peirce’s position doesn’t change much over the years; association will nearly always be called the law of association, a law that dictates the way ideas relate to one another: “There is a law in this succession of ideas. We may roughly say it is the law of habit. It is the great ‘Law of Association of Ideas,’—the one law of all psychical action” (CP 7.388, 1893). “Now the generalizing tendency is the great law of mind, the law of association, the law of habit taking” (CP 7.515, c.1898). There is regularity to the connection of ideas, but that does not explain how those ideas are connected together. For that, Peirce turns to an explanation of attention.

In 1868’s “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” Peirce says that “attention produces effects upon the nervous system. These effects are habits, or nervous associations” (CP 5.297, W 2:232). A little later, he writes: “Thus the formation of a habit is an induction, and is therefore necessarily connected with attention or abstraction” (CP 5.297, W 2:233, 1868). In both instances, it is attention that is doing the work of forming the association that is necessary for the creation of a habit.

To explain how attention works, it is first necessary to look at the objects of attention. Peirce says in the same 1868 article that the objects of attention are feelings. Attention is not able to maintain its grasp on the feelings as currently thought, but is able to re-present the feelings and associate them with other feelings. This depends on “the same phenomenon present[ing] itself repeatedly on different occasions, or the same predicate in different subjects” (CP 5.296, W 2:232, 1868). When the same feeling is experienced in different circumstances, or when a feeling is experienced that would normally be associated with one phenomenon is associated with another phenomenon, then attention kicks in and claims, “These have this character,” and thereby a connection is made between feelings (ibid.). When this association happens, the feeling as re-presented becomes “the material quality of a mental sign” (CP 5.291, W 2:228, 1868). It is through this process that feelings are able to be re-presented and associated with one another as thoughts.

Insofar as attention is able to form a judgment about different phenomena by grouping those phenomena together based on similar feelings as represented in thought, “attention is an act of induction” (CP 5.296, W 2:232, 1868). Induction is the ability to bring disparate phenomena together that exhibit a particular quality; it is not ampliative in the sense of adding additional information, but it does add to our ability to unify the manifold into a single thought (CP 5.

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