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Mind Matters
Author(s) -
Halton Eugene
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
symbolic interaction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.874
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1533-8665
pISSN - 0195-6086
DOI - 10.1525/si.2008.31.2.119
Subject(s) - biosemiotics , semiotics , nominalism , epistemology , philosophy , fallacy , semiosis , philosophy of mind , problem of universals , cognitive science , psychology , metaphysics
The conceit that either mind is reducible to matter or that mind is utterly ethereal is rooted in a mind‐versus‐matter dichotomy that can be characterized as the modern error, a fatally flawed fallacy rooted in the philosophy and culture of nominalism. A Peircean semiotic outlook, applied to an understanding of social life, provides a new and full‐bodied understanding of semiosis as the bridge between mind and matter, and human biology and culture. I begin by first delineating the false divide and showing Charles Sanders Peirce's alternative to it, then explore the implications of a semiotic approach to mind as transaction, then consider the self‐transcending nature of the human body‐mind. Finally I outline my ecological, biosemiotic account of mind, which reveals that, indeed, mind matters, and in ways that unexpectedly resemble the forms of animism that characterized the hunting‐gathering foragers through whom we anatomically modern humans emerged.