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Ben:
JR: I must say that I think you are missing
my point because of some mistaken assumption that I can't identify.
The reason I gave the simple example of a common sense verification was to make
as clear as I could that there is no deep logical point involved. Consider
again my simple example: You see something and tell me about it and I take
a verifying look. I see what I expect to see given what you told me to
expect and that's enough for me. That is a verification. It doesn't follow
that either of us grasped the truth of the matter, but if you did indeed grasp
it by taking a look as you passed by the object and I did indeed grasp it
by taking another look then we are both correct. But where in
all of that is this all important difference you keep talking about between mere
interpretation and experience" There was no more or less experience in my
look than in yours, and no more or less interpretation, as far as that goes,
other than the memory that the reason I took a look myself was because I wanted
to see if what you saw is what you thought it to be, which I am willing to
credit if, after taking a look myself, the description matches up.
There is no denial of verification involved in any of this. It is an
imaginary account of a very simple case of verification.
JR: Now you can complicate it as much as
you want, turn the look at a macroscopic object requiring no special instruments
of vision (a burning fire) into, say, the look at the object which is
involved in the case of scrutinizing a bunch of measurement data gathered from
cranking up a particle accelerator at CERN with the help of a thousand other
people, and the basic idea of verification or disverification is unchanged
except for being required to be vastly more sophisticated, given the enormously
different conditions of perceptual access to the object, and of course given the
equally enormously greater amount of inference involved in the one case than in
the other when we move from understanding the perceived object to be a
burning building to the compared case of understanding the perceived object
to be, say, a quark doing its thing under this and those conditions.
Exactly the same sort of gross macro description of it applies
as semiotically construed: an object is perceived as manifesting this
or that, which, semiotically, is talked about in the same terms regardless of
the difference between being an object with manifest qualities functioning
as representations interpreted as being a burning fire or quark doing
whatever quarks do.
JR: So I just don't get it,
Ben. Of course there is much of philosophical interest, at a
specialized level, if one wants to deal with highly complex experiences
instead of simple ones. I am not denying that. I assumed that you
would understand that. You say:
BU: One might make similar remarks on abductive inference, which is
belief-laden and context-sensitive and would require getting into lots of
details and variation case by case. Note that the kind of hypotheses which
inferential statistics characteristically produces are "statistical hypotheses"
rather than explanatory ones, and it is not as if statisticians never had an
interest in the subject; a few years ago one statistician wrote here at peirce-l
about being interested in general approaches to the production of the content of
hypotheses which go beyond the usual statistical kind. Statistics deals with
phenomena in general and, though often applied in idioscopy, is not itself about
any special class of phenomena. Yet one does, in at least some
philosophy, attempt and pursue general
characterizations _of_ abductive inference and this is
because abductive inference is a logical process of a general kind and
is therefore part of philosophy's subject matter.
JR: Yes, of course, but why would I deny any of
that? You then say:
BU: Verification is also a logical process of a general kind. The
question is, is it some kind of interpretation, representation, or
objectification, or combination thereof? Or is it something
else? JR: Now that baffles me. Of course it
is some kind of "interpretation, representation, or objectification, or
combination thereof." Why would you even say such a thing? Is it
something else? Well, it is supposed to be all of that considered as
occurring subsequent to some prior instance of "interpretation, representation,
or objectification, or combination thereof", relating to that prior instance as
sufficient like it (or in some other way relevant to it) to count as
something that might verify or disverify a claim made that cited the prior
instance as evidential relative to that claim. Yes, it is one thing to be
a verification and quite another to be that which is verified. But what is
all of this talk about the one being a mere sign and interpretant whereas the
latter is an experience? Both are equally describable in semiotic terms
and are equally experiential. And then you say:
BU: Now
there are two more questions here: Did Peirce think that verification was
important and determinational in inquiry? (Yes). Did Peirce think that
verification is a distinctive formal element in semiosis? (No.)
JR: Yes, well that is what I said,
too. But I thought that is precisely what you disagreed with?
I don't get it, Ben. And then you say:
BU: Your discussion of an emphasis on verification
as reflecting a pathology of skepticism, a search for infallible truth, etc.,
goes too far in de-valorizing verification, certainly to the extent that you may
be ascribing such a view to Peirce.
JR: Ascribing such a view to Peirce? I was
doing no such thing, nor was I "devalorizing verification" but only saying that
there is nothing happening in verification that requires the isolation of some
analytical element not already available in the basic semiotical structure that
Peirce delineates. Next, you provide a long quote from Peirce on
verification, as follows;
.
BU quoting Peirce:
34. Mr. George Henry Lewes in his work on Aristotle(1) seems to
me to have come pretty near to stating the true cause of the success of modern
science when he has said that it was *_verification_*.
I should express it in this way: modern students of science have been successful
because they have spent their lives not in their libraries and museums but in
their laboratories and in the field; and while in their laboratories and in the
field they have been not gazing on nature with a vacant eye, that is, in passive
perception unassisted by thought, but have been *_observing_* --
that is, perceiving by the aid of analysis -- and testing suggestions of
theories. The cause of their success has been that the motive which has carried
them to the laboratory and the field has been a craving to know how things
really were, and an interest in finding out whether or not general propositions
actually held good -- which has overbalanced all prejudice, all vanity, and
all passion. Now it is plainly not an essential part of this method in general
that the tests were made by the observation of natural objects. For the immense
progress which modern mathematics has made is also to be explained by the same
intense interest in testing general propositions by particular cases -- only the
tests were applied by means of particular demonstrations. This is observation,
still, for as the great mathematician Gauss has declared -- algebra is a
science of the eye,(2) only it is observation of artificial objects
and of a highly recondite character. Now this same unwearied interest in testing
general propositions is what produced those long rows of folios of the
schoolmen, and if the test which they employed is of only limited validity so
that they could not unhampered go on indefinitely to further discoveries, yet
the *_spirit_*, which is the most essential thing -- the motive,
was nearly the same. And how different this spirit is from that of the major
part, though not all, of modern philosophers -- even of those who have
called themselves empirical, no man who is actuated by it can fail to perceive.
~~~99 [bold & italics at the Website]
JR: There is nothing in that quote
that cuts against my view, Ben. It is mostly concerned with stressing the
importance of active observation in experimental work, but all of that is as
true of the original observation on the basis of which the research claim is
made as it is of the observation that goes on in verificational
procedures. There is nothing in there to suggest that one is only about
signs and inferences but is not experiential whereas the other has to do with
experience, supposedly unlike the first. You then say:
BU: Can there be any serious doubt that Peirce did indeed think that
verification has a determinational role in inquiry, that it settles questions in
ways the support the further advance of inquiry?
JR: No, but who said anything about
doubting that? Dropping on down, you say:
BU: I point out that
verification involves, and is a kind of, experience/observation of a thing, and
that , so a verification is not a sign or interpretant in those relations in
which it is a verification.
JR: Now I find that sentence just unintelligible, something is
conceptually askew in it, e.g. in the phrase "sign and interpretant
convey information but not experience of the thing", which involves what is to
me an unintelligible contrast. The conceptions of "sign" and
"interpretant" are used in the analysis of experience. Any time you have
an experience there is, if one is regarding it semiotically, a sign and an
interpretant and an object, too, and whenever there is occasion to make use of
the conceptions of sign, object, and interpretant there is some implicit
reference to experience. Why? Because the representation
relation is a categorial -- hence universally present -- element of
experience. It is an aspect of an experience, any experience. And
you go on to say things like:
BU: But my
verification is not, for me, merely a sign, but instead an experience,
JR: "merely a sign"? "but instead an
experience"? "merely"? "instead"? I just don't get it.
Ben I don't mean to ridiculing you in any way in saying this
sort of thing, but am trying in doing so to isolate the misunderstanding which I
think must be underlying the production of sentences that I find puzzling as
grammatical constructions, given my understanding of the uses of semiotic
terminology.
From this point on I would just be repeating
myself, I think. So let me close this message at this point.
Joe
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