Bailey Fernandez
University of Vienna/ Central European University
In this presentation, I argue that the “behavioral spaces” proposed by Wayne Wu as models for his version of the “attention-as-selection-for-action” thesis meet the conditions for “diagrams” as understood within the literature of and inspired by the pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. In so doing, I derive the following corollary accounts : 1). A Peircean account of attention, which does not exist in the literature on the philosopher; 2). a logical formalization of Wu’s account within an existing framework for practical reasoning, and 3). More sketchily, a formalisation which preserves the uniquely visual aspects of Wu’s model. To achieve these ends, the talk is structured as follows. In Section 1, I delineate the initial framework of “behavioral spaces” as developed by Wayne Wu and contrast it with other “attention as selection for action” accounts. In essence, a behavioral space is a set of possible mappings between various input stimuli and output behaviors represented in geometric terms which the talk will elucidate. In Section 2, I discuss the framework of “diagrammatic reasoning” in Charles Sanders Peirce with explicit attention given to Frederik Stjernfelt’s reconstruction in Diagrammatology (2007). I advance that diagrams in this reconstruction must contain at least three necessary conditions:
a). they are icons, in that they represent their object not by a convention or rule (such as the word “map” in respect to map), but rather by standing in an somorphic relationship which stands between the representation and the world;
b). they are types, in that the diagrammatic relationship might be realised in any number of instances;
c). they are manipulable, in that an Agent (in Peirce’s terminology an “Interpretant”) might experiment with the diagram to derive new information about that which it represents. In Section 3, I argue that Wu’s behavioral spaces meet all three conditions and thereby derive the aforementioned corollaries.
Chair: Sven Eichholtz
Time: September 7th, 11:20-11:50
Location: SR 1.006
SOPhiA 2026 