[peirce-l] Re: Panopedia
Steven... Aside from the issues of objective intent and textual authorship, the promise of an open and free internet with its unpoliced websites and networks that are responsible and reasonable is regrettably as yet unfulfilled. Even the serious lists continue to be filled with trivial atopical nonsense. Expert thinkers furthermore still covet their sound ideas, and in my experience are hesitant to post and store them in such an unpredictable environment. Striking a balance for the serious lists on the internet between being opened and closed or free and fee is obviously being worked and tooled by specialists in the field, and is cause for some optimism. This very site is perhaps a good example of it, for which the manager or owner in his kind wisdom should be applauded. (Forgive this injection, but by any logical or semiotic stretch, the message with its intent or effect is not the messenger, any more than the interpretant sign is the interpreter. Logically, it is pointless and meaningless and useless to say attack the messenger or the interpreter of a sign who merely expedites it. Any alternative in logic wrongly resorts to some form of psychologistic subjectivism or linguistic nominalism. The exception might be in finding the motive of desire for signers in seeking the logical truth of a sign initially in their efforts. This is a preliminary state of thought that logic seemingly cannot account for solely on its own alone. This may very well be the reason why abductive inference is available to mind, but then this too is an objective kind of logic. The solution to this problem of course is objective relativism, where the signer is held to be brought into a relation with the message they sense, rather than with their inner sense of the message, because it is after all the message that is said to be say nice or valid or sound or true.) Steven partly wrote... I am most firmly convinced that there is no message without a messenger; i.e. any message without a clearly identifiable messenger is simply meaningless. By which I mean literally without intent; absent the embodiment of meaning in a message creator. We are deceived if we believe that there is intent in any message in which the messenger cannot be clearly identified or identified by proxy through a transparent identity. We would do as well to consider astrology. Hence, from this point of view, almost everything that is in the Wikipedia is meaningless. Despite your criticism of elitism, you advocate aristocracy. I am not an aristocrat. Each idea I give out freely provides me with bills to pay. --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
in response to Benjamin Udell's message On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 22:31:19 +0100 Ben, thanks for your response. You write: I read about his Three Worlds picture in an earlier book of his, one which I understood only middlingly well. I once read a whole book explaining Goedel's incompleteness proof, but I just don't feel sure-footed on the subject, so I won't be the one to convince Penrose of anything if that's what it takes!. Penrose's Three Worlds strike me as possibly Peircean in ancestry, but it's not clear to me how best to align it with Peircean conceptions. Its structure, a cycle though the Worlds that gives you A, B, C, A, B, C... etc., doesn't seem a typically Peircean kind of determinational structure. Well, if it gives you A, B, C, A, B, C... etc., then it equally gives you B, C, A, B, C, A... etc. and C, A, B, C, A, B... etc.. And somehow these three sequences are the same sequence. Well, it's a very far cry ideed, but thinking along these lines you'll have in germ part of the keynote of the proofstructure of Robert Burch's Peircean Reduction Thesis. Hope this is cautiously enough expressed;-) I disagree with both Penrose and Peirce on Three Worlds, but I think Peirce's view is better thought out. Tegmark's four Levels, though more physics-oriented, and philosophically less explicit (unless I'm discerning too much into it), make more sense to me, which is not to say that I think that Tegmark's Multiverse theory or his views of what comprises math are true. Never heard about Tegmark, but such ideas seem to me to be quite common. Reminds me of Gotthard Guenther's Pluriversum and his non-aristotelean logic. Royce is similar too. Decidedly Hegelian all that. Well, peirce-l isn't really a project. Sure. It'not a project. It's a community. That's more isn't it? Ben, you write: I don't take a view on whether asymmetry or symmetry is more basic. If I see an equivalence in place A, and a strict implication in place B, and a strict reverse implication in place C, then I try to figure out a place D figure out what take the form of the mutual non-implication there. I like to trace out, extend, complete patterns, usually by finding a pair of mutually independent yet logically twinned bivaluate parameters. and You're the first person since I joined peirce-l who has suggested that I might be on the right track with structures even though they're noticeablyfourfold rather than Peirceanly threefold. If you hadn't really noticedtheir fourfoldness, you may wish now to reconsider! For me this sounds very much like you are replacing Peirce's categorial structure with a boolean lattice: two poles intertwined and in between two other poles. So you make this Peircean structure stronger. Very remarkable what Joe Ransdell recently replied to you saying: Is a fourthness required for the analysis of number? As I recall it the Peano Postulates make do with 0 through 3. Yes, Hegelian philosophy is in a certain sense just a philosophical/logical interpretation of number theory. I do not say that there is anything wrong with your approach. It's very strong indeed. Only maybe some time you'll have to choose whether you prefer incompleteness or undecidability;-) I would say that we have to go into the direction of weakness, however tempting and even fruitfull in certain aspects the other direction may be. Thirdness is just the personified violation of the law of excluded middle. With fourfoldness as a stronger system you exactly close the door to this. But Peirce doesn't simply introduce an additional truth value. He does something exceedingly subtle, so that in a sense the tertium non datur isn't even really violated. His tertium is form and not truth value. [Thomas] I guess we should discuss this how it pulls double-direction trick off further. No mercy!-) This is very important and something that seems to me to have been neglected as yet! I've wondered about it. I've been toying with the idea of intelligence as a kind of localized or individualized sink for a while now, involving both the running uphill and running downhill of the system, somehow. Toying is about all that I can do with it. I don't know whether it's original. I mean, obviously things like the soul is memory have been said since as long as anybody can remember. Yet to try to take that retention idea seriously in terms of entropy, order, etc., that's something such that I wonder whether anybody has done it. (Less work for me down the road.) A sink of what, exactly?--a sink of something sufficiently general in conception to relate it to biological, material, dynamic systems. And again, obviously it's been taken seriously in some sense, because of computers retaining memory (and, among other things, overheating). But I don't know what the big picture is between (a) memory, attachment, skill, adherence, and (b) things like entropy, order,
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Ben, You concluded: If Peirce was correct in what he offered, with a notable tone of scientific caution, as an explanation for science's finally having significant success, then what made the difference for science was the practice of verification, disconfirmation, etc. I believe that, if his semiotics omits such as a semiotic stage or element, then it is not logic. But the greatest logician since Aristotle in my opinion--I mean Peirce, not you :-) --the very inventor/discoveror of logic as semeitoic doesn't say that that there are no things like psychology and sociology, and especially psychic experience and social experience, life lived in the experimental laboratory, for example, something which is strongly suggested--at least to me--in the remark occurring just before the above quoted conclusion of your post: [BU] As a sign, man evolves, but man evolves as a sign because he evolves as a recognizant and as a semiotic and experientialsubject. There are richnesses of life which go beyond mere logic as semeiotic (even for the logician and scientist!) and involve the "whole of life" psychology sociability including the pyschic and social confirmation of hypotheses through experiments leading to the development of new or transformed theories and methods following from these--and it's here that I believe you recongizant belongs. Of course there most certainly is a need in inquiry both formal and informal for the "stage or element" of verification, disconfirmation, etc. Still, I am still not at all convinced that it is an element of semiosis as such, rather it is itself (as you say) the result of dependent upon semiosis--some actual fact of its occurring in some particular situation in some person or machine, say. Perhaps I have been guilty of confusing terminological matters somewhat, and especially in my early discussions (but even more recently) by myself trying to fit your "recognizant" into semiosis itself, wanting to find some place for what I still believe to be a powerful notion, but now not in relation to semeiotic as such, but in relation to the inquiry process as such, and to society, to the evolution of the individual (psychology) and community, etc. Perhaps when someone else on the list (or off) grasps what you're saying as being essential to logic as semeiotic--so essential, you hold, that if one "omits such as a semiotic stage or element, then it is not logic," and can perhaps rephrase or add to your argument in some way that clarifies and crystallizes it for those of us who just don't see this putatively fatal flaw in Peirce's semeiotic and the need for a fourth semeiotic element, then I will be forced to revise my thinking in the matter. Certainly you are well aware that I've tried to grasp your argument over many months and in hundreds of hours of study but have not been able to the recognizant as a necessary element or stage of semeiosis (although undoubtedly a necessary one in inquiry). As I recently noted, this may be the result of a lack in me. But I would like to see you convince at least one Peircean of the truth of your argument concerning the inadequacy of a triadic semeiotic. As for my musings on hubris, which you mentioned in your long post, in that regard I am always thinking of this passage where Peirce reflects on his own intellectual habit to avoid this. CP 6.181 There is one intellectual habit which I have laboured very seriously to cultivate, and of which I have a number of times experienced advantages enough, each one of them, to repay all the work I have done toward acquiring it: I mean the habit, when I have been upon the point of assenting, in my own mind, to some conclusion, [and when] I knew that some other mind (whose ways of thinking were very unlike my own, but whom I had known to have reached, in his way, truths not easy to reach) had considered the matter and had reached a conclusion inconsistent with the one that was recommending itself to me, of pausing, endeavoring to put myself in that other's point of view, reconsidering more minutely my whole reasoning, seeking to weld it to other reasonings and reflexions which all sound thinkers would approve, and doing my best to find weak points in the reasoning I came so near to embracing. I should not venture to recommend the cultivation of this habit to any of those who set up their own accidental impossibility of conceiving, as a permanent and essential one, before which all other men ought to crook the knee; since the very essence of their mental malady consists in an exaggerated loyalty to their own principles, i.e. a heartfelt and rather intolerant religion whose divinity is their past mental selves. Perhaps I myself need to work harder to acquire this habit of great intellectual integrity. For the moment I'll conclude with some quotations from the Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898 to perhaps suggest better what I meant above by saying that "there are richnesses of life that go beyond mere logic as
[peirce-l] Re: Panopedia
Steven, Catherine, Ben, list, I would like to suggest that Ben's analysis perhaps rather nicely bridges the gap between what seems like the polar positions held by Steven and frances, Frances arguing on the one hand that: The need for identifying the messenger is in my opinion overstated and overrated. It too often smacks of celebrity elitism, and lionizes the messenger to the detriment of the message. and Steven on the other that: I am most firmly convinced that there is no message without a messenger; i.e., any message without a clearly identifiable messenger is simply meaningless. Tending to reconcile these two positions, Ben wrote: My initial take is that a transparency-requirent version of Wikipedia is an excellent idea, but that, considering the kind of energy which has been put into Wikipedia, it may take quite some time for similar energy to build for the Panopedia. Yet ultimately it could happen. It would be nice if it could systematically include links to corresponding Wikipedia articles. In effect, both systems would be run, checkably against each other. A body of commentary by each about the other would be built up, too. I especially like Ben's idea that the Panopedia site might "systematically include links to corresponding Wikipedia articles" not only because a great deal of solid work has been done there which could be referenced, but that where authors of Panopedia articles believe the Wikipedia article in question is in error, incomplete, one-sided, etc. they could point to those errors in their own articles. Ben continued. I don't oppose the permitted anonymity of Wikipedia, because I think it frees people to say true things that they wouldn't otherwise say. That's a good thing in every society. It could, perhaps, use a label briefly stating that there isn't transparency, summarizing briefly, if that's possible, the kinds of checks that are in place. I mean a label such as would be carried along with articles' contents to other sites continually using such articles, e.g., about.com . Again, this tends to lend support to the value of both approaches (why either/or?) although, as Ben notes, even were one to add to theWikipedia site a label stating lack of transparency, etc. that, as Ben says, ". . . it seems indeed doubtful that all drawbacks can be remedied in the Wikipedia framework." Nevertheless, even the case of grave error which Steven pointed to was found and was corrected. I personally have found Wikipedia a valuable resource, but then I always triangulate any research with other sources. Steven, I spent some time exploring it yesterday, and I like the look of your Panopedia project. I also enjoyed a romp through your home page which points to all sorts of valuable resources, for example, reminding me that I want to sign up for Skype. Best, Gary Richmond --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] RevisedCfP : First International Pragmatic Web Conference
Link to pdf file . Please find below a link to an attractive flyer of the slightly revised Call for Papers for the First International Pragmatic Web Conference, Interested folk might want to download and reproduce it for further distribution. See: http://www.pragmaticweb.info/CfP%20PragWeb%202006.pdf Both the pdf and the ascii versions include a few revisions, the most important of these being: Papers up to 5000 words can be submitted to [EMAIL PROTECTED] before the deadline. Formatting guidelines and detailed submission instructions can be found at www.pragmaticweb.info. Proceedings will be published as Lecture Notes of Informatics by the German Computer Science Society (GI). Please note also that the Theory, methods, and technologies section adds Applied pragmatic theories as a topic. Apologies for any cross-posting. Gary Richmond City University of New York ** CALL FOR PAPERS First International Pragmatic Web Conference (PragWeb 06) 21-23 September 2006, Stuttgart, Germany The World Wide Web has been very successful in enabling information sharing among a seemingly unlimited number of people worldwide. The vast and ever-growing amount of documents on the Web, however, results in information overload and makes it often difficult to discover the information that is relevant, because the current Web is a syntactic web. The goal of the Semantic Web is thus to provide the basis for intelligent applications that enable more efficient information retrieval and use by not just providing a set of linked documents but a collection of knowledge repositories with meaningful content and additional logics. The key elements of the Semantic Web are ontologies representing the basic conceptual knowledge about some domain. Ontologies are not fixed specifications but always depend on the context of use. Therefore, ontologies co-evolve with their communities of use. Members of a community have to negotiate continuously about what they agree to be their shared background. This is especially important in an (inter)organisational context, where participants from different professional, social, or cultural backgrounds need to understand each other in order to collaborate effectively. In order to enable the use of the Web for communicating, agreeing upon, and cooperatively modifying ontologies, the support provided by the Semantic Web needs to be extended. The crucial questions are first how to model and analyze collaboration, context, organizational commitments, and meaning negotiation; second, how to use these conceptual models in the design and implementation of real-world tools and applications. This new paradigm for effectively exploring and exploiting the potentials of the Web is called the Pragmatic Web. It constitutes the new challenge that will complement the Semantic Web. The goal is to augment human collaboration effectively by modelling and developing appropriate applications of the Semantic Web, such as systems for ontology negotiations or for ontology-based business interactions. We call for contributions for the First International Pragmatic Web Conference dealing with theoretical, methodological, and technological aspects of the Pragmatic Web as well as business, governmental, and other applications. Papers up to 5000 words can be submitted to [EMAIL PROTECTED] before the deadline. Formatting guidelines and detailed submission instructions can be found at www.pragmaticweb.info. Proceedings will be published as Lecture Notes of Informatics by the German Computer Science Society (GI). Topics include but are not limited to: * Theory, methods, and technologies - Technology acceptance/media choice theories - Language/action theory - Evaluation methods - Communication modelling methods - Context modelling methods - Semantic Web technologies - Web services - Applied pragmatic theories * Applications - Organisational communication - Collaboration - Decision support - Knowledge management - Negotiation - Community informatics - Collaborative working environments - Active knowledge systems - Appropriate technologies - E-business, E-government, E-politics, E-health etc. - Information brokers and mediators Invited Talk by Ian Horrocks, University of Manchester, UK Dates Submission Deadline: 31 May 2006 (submissions to be sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Notification of Acceptance: 1 July 2006 Final Version: 1 August 2006 Conference: 21-23 September 2006 Conference Chairs Mareike Schoop, University of Hohenheim, Germany Aldo de Moor, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium Jan Dietz, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Panopedia
Dear Gary, My thanks for your encouraging words. I agree that Ben's suggestion of cross referencing to Wikipedia is interesting - and I am thinking about the implications of that approach. Wikipedia articles do not have stable states. Who would own the labels? I did consider that one solution was to produce a reviewed version of Wikipedia which took a snapshot and reviewed all the articles - deleting the most onerous - but I concluded that this was impossible to maintain and did seem rather egotistical. However, as I note in my response to Frances the almostness of Wikipedia is an interesting effect; rather like writing poetry by cutting out random words from a magazine and throwing them on a table. Of course, I am rather hoping that Ben will want to build a taxonomy :-) With respect, Steven Gary Richmond wrote: Steven, Catherine, Ben, list, I would like to suggest that Ben's analysis perhaps rather nicely bridges the gap between what seems like the polar positions held by Steven and frances, Frances arguing on the one hand that: The need for identifying the messenger is in my opinion overstated and overrated. It too often smacks of celebrity elitism, and lionizes the messenger to the detriment of the message. and Steven on the other that: I am most firmly convinced that there is no message without a messenger; i.e., any message without a clearly identifiable messenger is simply meaningless. Tending to reconcile these two positions, Ben wrote: My initial take is that a transparency-requirent version of Wikipedia is an excellent idea, but that, considering the kind of energy which has been put into Wikipedia, it may take quite some time for similar energy to build for the Panopedia. Yet ultimately it could happen. It would be nice if it could systematically include links to corresponding Wikipedia articles. In effect, both systems would be run, checkably against each other. A body of commentary by each about the other would be built up, too. I especially like Ben's idea that the Panopedia site might systematically include links to corresponding Wikipedia articles not only because a great deal of solid work has been done there which could be referenced, but that where authors of Panopedia articles believe the Wikipedia article in question is in error, incomplete, one-sided, etc. they could point to those errors in their own articles. Ben continued. I don't oppose the permitted anonymity of Wikipedia, because I think it frees people to say true things that they wouldn't otherwise say. That's a good thing in every society. It could, perhaps, use a label briefly stating that there isn't transparency, summarizing briefly, if that's possible, the kinds of checks that are in place. I mean a label such as would be carried along with articles' contents to other sites continually using such articles, e.g., about.com . Again, this tends to lend support to the value of both approaches (why either/or?) although, as Ben notes, even were one to add to theWikipedia site a label stating lack of transparency, etc. that, as Ben says, . . . it seems indeed doubtful that all drawbacks can be remedied in the Wikipedia framework. Nevertheless, even the case of grave error which Steven pointed to /was/ found and /was/ corrected. I personally have found Wikipedia a valuable resource, but then I always triangulate any research with other sources. Steven, I spent some time exploring it yesterday, and I like the look of your Panopedia project. I also enjoyed a romp through your home page which points to all sorts of valuable resources, for example, reminding me that I want to sign up for Skype. Best, Gary Richmond --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Panopedia
Steven says: Transparency is a pragmatic. Or, exactly as Joe suggests that Peirce implies (is there a reference to this Joe?): identifying the author is a logical necessity. REPLY: Here's some quotes to that effect: CP 2.315 (c. 1902) For an act of assertion supposes that, a proposition being formulated, a person performs an act which renders him liable to the penalties of the social law (or, at any rate, those of the moral law) in case it should not be true, unless he has a definite and sufficient excuse; and an act of assent is an act of the mind by which one endeavors to impress the meanings of the proposition upon his disposition, so that it shall govern his conduct, including thought under conduct, this habit being ready to be broken in case reasons should appear for breaking it. CP 5.30 (1903) Now it is a fairly easy problem to analyze the nature of assertion. To find an easily dissected example, we shall naturally take a case where the assertive element is magnified -- a very formal assertion, such as an affidavit. Here a man goes before a notary or magistrate and takes such action that if what he says is not true, evil consequences will be visited upon him, and this he does with a view to thus causing other men to be affected just as they would be if the proposition sworn to had presented itself to them as a perceptual fact. MS 70 (1905) Declarative sentence: a sentence which, if seriously pronounced, makes an assertion; that is, is intended to serve as evidence of its utterer's belief, to compel (so far as a sentence may) the belief of those to whom it is addressed, and to assume for the utterer whatever responsibility may attach to the particular form of the declaration, at least, his reputation for veracity or accuracy. New Elements, in EP2, pp. 312f MS 517 (1904) As an aid in dissecting the constitution of affirmation [assertion] I shall employ a certain logical magnifying-glass that I have often found efficient in such business. Imagine, then, that I write a proposition on a piece of paper, perhaps a number of times, simply as a calligraphic exercise. It is not likely to prove dangerous amusement. But suppose I afterward carry the paper before a notary public and make affidavit to its contents. This may prove to be a horse of another color. The reason is that the affidavit may be used to determine an assent to the proposition it contains in the minds of judge and jury--an effect that the paper would not have had if I had not sworn to it. For certain penalties here and hereafter are attached to swearing to a false proposition; and consequently the fact that I have sworn to it will be taken as a negative index that it is not false. . . . An affirmation is an act of an utterer of a proposition to an interpreter, and consists, in the first place, in the deliberate exercise, in uttering the proposition, of a force tending to determine a belief in it in the mind of the interpreter. Perhaps that is a sufficient definition of it; but it involves also a voluntary self-subjection to penalties in the event of the interpreter's mind (and still more the general mind of society) subsequently becoming decidedly determined to the belief at once in the falsity of the proposition and in the additional proposition that the utterer believed the proposition to be false at the time he uttered it. Joe Ransdell Joe Ransdell -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 267.15.12/265 - Release Date: 2/20/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
