The extended mind from a pragmaticist viewpoint

contributions from Charles Sanders Peirce’s philosophy to psychic sci-ences

Abstract

In this paper, we intend to indicate some possible contributions inferred from Charles Sanders Peirce’s Philosophy that can substantiate studies on psychic sciences, specifically the Theories of the Expanded Mind. For that, we use Peirce's pragmaticism and his concept of mind. According to him, the mind is intensive, interactive, expanded and changeable. At the process of mental expansion exists connections between cognitions (quasi-minds) guided by quasi-purposes, which are updates of the Final Cause ( finious). The Final Clause constitutes a power of excitement that seeks to expand reasonableness. The finious is reinforced by states of irritation, derived from friction between quasi-minds existed in relationship. These resistances are resolved through the generation and transformation of habits, expanding and bringing intricacy to the correlated mediations. This way, what was otherness – through the action of habit – becomes part of an expanded mind. From a pragmatic point of view, the experimental consequences of the concept of expanded mind should be: the emergence, evolution and coupling of regularities, materialized in heterogeneous bodies. Starting from the study of these regularities, it should be possible to infer: the associations of purposes and mediations for the resolution of the “irritation” of the quasi-minds, involved in a process of mental expansion. It’s up to a psychologist investigating the expanded mind to update these processes in specific contexts.