[peirce-l] Re: The composite photograph metaphor
Ben Udell wrote: Anyway, my semiotic four are, instead, object, sign, interpretant, recognizant. I don't know how Peirce and others have missed the distinct and irreducible logical role of verification. I keep an eye open regarding that question, that's about all. I don't have some hidden opinion on the question. Tom Short argued that there is a problem with answering how it is that semiosis learns to distinguish sense from nonsense, and Tom argued that Peirce saw this problem. I wasn't convinced that Peirce saw the problem, and I think that it's the verification problem; I can't help thinking that if Peirce had seen it, he would have addressed it more aggressively. Dear Ben, Folks-- Thanks, Ben, for your earlier helpful clarifications of my previous questions.Sorry I've taken so long to get back.I see that I did misunderstand some of your ideas. No doubt I've done so again in some of my remarks below. Though hopefully not in the same ways as before. Seems to me that your "semioic four" are all included in Peirce's third category of representation. In particular I think verification is a matter of comparing one sign with anotherin orderto develop acoherent, predictable account of the worldwe experience. Thosesigns thatpredict and coherewe count as moving toward truth. Those that do not we tend to discard as misinterpretations.Much as we might wish I don't think we have access to a non representational standard against which we can verify our representations of reality. Kicking a table orbeing poked in the ribsmay convince one that there is a world beyond his own will, but that is not the same as proving we have non representationalverification or awareness ofthese experiences. What, after all, does verification meanother thansome correspondence between expectation and perceived outcome -- both instances of representation.Verification isone of many useful things that can be done with signs. Signs can also be used for planning, communicatingandso on. These are all important and useful functions of signs but thisdoes not, in my opinion, make them fundamental or distinct modes of being which is, IMHO, thelevel of analysisPeirce was trying to address with his categories. I think Peirce was trying to answer the question -- what are the minimally adequateset of basic modes of being that are required to account for all experience. I believe he would say that verification is oneuse or example of representation. IOWs verification ismade possible by and is an instance ofrepresentation but is not itself a fundamental mode of being or pole of representation (as are quality, reaction and representation itself). OTOH one might argue that thePeircean category of secondness (orotherness)mightbe construed as a kind of objective verification of the interpretive pole of representation. Ben, can you give me an example of verification that does not involve signs or requires some action or experience that can not be achieved by signs alone? Maybe that would help me to better understand what you mean by verification as a fundamental category of being that goes beyond Peirce's three. I'm nottrying to say verification is not important. In fact I think that verification is the crux of the scientific method that Peirce so extolled.But Ialsobelieve thatPeirceexcluded verification (in thecategorical sense that you seem to be recommending) as a fundamental building block of experience. In part I think he did so in his criticism of positivism.And I certaintly don't agree that Peirce failed to recognized or address the problem of sense vs nonsense. Whatis the goal of logic and science if not toaddress this issue? Rather I'd say that he offered an alternative triadic analysisof this traditional duality. Seems to me many folks are are attracted to the definitive (and self serving) appeal of dualistic categories such as sense vs nonsense, good vs evil, us vs them andthe like -- but for Peirce experience was fundamentally triadic, continuous and a matter of interpretation. To say that Peirce missed the importance of distinguishing between sense and nonsense (or any other duality) is in my view to missa major point Peirce was trying to make. The answer is not either/or but both. Verification can not be divorced from purpose or POV and non of us has as yet achieved God's point of view. We are all captives of our individual point of view and the only path to freedom is community. Maybe. Ah, another thought -- there is perhaps a sense in which representation (or continuity)may besynonymous with verification. Continuity in the Peircean sense implies a circularity in which begining and end are inextricably joined or mediated in what one might call an expanding, evolving verification of nature's inherent purpose. In any case I've enjoyed your comments, Ben, though I don't have the background (or stamina!) to follow allof yourfourfold analyses. And I
[peirce-l] Re: The composite photograph metaphor
Ben Says: I don't know how Peirce and others have missed the distinct and irreducible logical role of verification. I keep an eye open regarding that question, that's about all. I don't have some hidden opinion on the question. Tom Short argued that there is a problem with answering how it is that semiosis learns to distinguish sense from nonsense, and Tom argued that Peirce saw this problem. I wasn't convinced that Peirce saw the problem, and I think that it's the verification problem; I can't help thinking that if Peirce had seen it, he would have addressed it more aggressively. REPLY: I don't think Peirce overlooked anything like that, Ben. It is just that verification is not a distinctive formal element in inquiry in the way you think it is, and Peirce's approach to logic as theory of inquiry doesn't mislead him into thinking that one has to give a formal account of such a thing. Oh, well, one can of course explain about how publication works, and how people are expected to respond to the making of research claims to do what one can describe as "verifying" them. That would involve discussing such things as attempts to replicate experimental results, which can no doubt get complicated in detail owing to the fact that it would only rarely involve exact duplication of experimental procedures and observations of results, the far more usual case being the setting up of related but distinguishable lines of experimentation whose results would have rather obvious implications for the results claimed in the research report being verified or disverified, depending on how it turns out. I don't think there would be anything very interesting in getting into that sort of detail, though. Take a common sense case of that. You tell me that you observed something on the way over to my house to see me, e.g. a large fire at a certain location, and I think you must have made a mistake since the edifice in question is reputed to be fire-proof. So I mosey over there myself to check it out and, sure enough, the fire is still going on at the place you said. Claim verified. Of course, some third person hearing about this might think we are both mistaken or in collusion to lie about it, and having some financial interest in the matter, might not count my report as a verification of your claim. So he or she might mosey over and find that we were both confused about the location and there was no fire at the place claimed. Claim disverified. But then some fourth person . . . Well, you get the idea.So what is the big deal about verification? (This is pretty much what Jim Piat was saying, too, perhaps.) The question is, why have philosophers of science so often gotten all agitated about the problem of verification as if something really important hinged on giving an exact account of what does or ought to count as such? You tell me, but my guess is that it is just the age old and seemingly insatiable but really just misguided quest forabsolute and authoritative certainty. Why this shows up in the form of a major philosophical industrydevoted to the production of theories of verification is another matter, and I suppose that must be explained in terms of somenatural confusion of thought like those which make it seem so implausible at first that we can get better control over our car when it goes into a skid if weturn the car in the direction of the skid instead of by responding in the instinctively reasonable way of trying to turn it in opposition to going in that unwanted direction.Okay, not a very good example, but you know what I mean: something can seem at first completely obvious in its reasonableness that is actually quite unreasonable when all relevant considerations are taken duly into account. some of which are simply too subtle to be detected as relevant at first.Thus people argue interminably over no real problem. It happens a lot, I should think. In any case,a will-of-the-wisp is all that there is in the supposed need for some general theory of verification. There is none to be given nor is there any need for one. People make claims. Other people doubt them or accept them but want to be sure and so they do something that satisfies them, and others, noting this, are satisfied that the matter is settled and they just move on.Of maybe nobody is ever satisfied. That's life. Of course it can turn out at times that it is not easy to get the sort of satisfacion that counts for us as what we call a verification because it settles the matter in one way, or a dissatisfaction because it settles it in a contrary way. But that is all there is to it. Maybe there are fields or types of problems or issues in which the course of experience of inquiry about them has resulted in the development and elaboration ofprocedures that are regarded as having verification or disverification as their normal result, but that will surely just be because that particular sort
[peirce-l] Re: The composite photograph metaphor
Joe, Gary, Jim, list, [Joe] Ben Says: [Ben] I don't know how Peirce and others have missed the distinct and irreducible logical role of verification. I keep an eye open regarding that question, that's about all. I don't have some hidden opinion on the question. Tom Short argued that there is a problem with answering how it is that semiosis learns to distinguish sense from nonsense, and Tom argued that Peirce saw this problem. I wasn't convinced that Peirce saw the problem, and I think that it's the verification problem; I can't help thinking that if Peirce had seen it, he would have addressed it more aggressively. [Joe] REPLY: [Joe] I don't think Peirce overlooked anything like that, Ben. It is just that verification is not a distinctive formal element in inquiry in the way you think it is, and Peirce's approach to logic as theory of inquiry doesn't mislead him into thinking that one has to give a formal account of such a thing. Oh, well, one can of course explain about how publication works, and how people are expected to respond to the making of research claims to do what one can describe as "verifying" them. That would involve discussing such things as attempts to replicate experimental results, which can no doubt get complicated in detail owing to the fact that it would only rarely involve exact duplication of experimental procedures and observations of results, the far more usual case being the setting up of related but distinguishable lines of experimentation whose results would have rather obvious implications for the results claimed in the research report being verified or disverified, depending on how it turns out. I don't think there would be anything very interesting in getting into that sort of detail, though. 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,attemptand pursue general characterizations_of_ abductive inferenceand this is becauseabductive inference is a logical process of a general kindand is therefore part of philosophy's subject matter.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? 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.) 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. From the Collected Papers of C.S. Peirce Vol. I, I. General Historical Orientation, 1. Lessons from the History of Philosophy, Section 3. The Spirit of Scholasticism, Paragraph 34, http://www.textlog.de/4220.html 66~~~ 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.
[peirce-l] Re: The composite photograph metaphor
Gary, Joe, Jim, list, (continued,3rd part) [Gary] Again, you maintain that the "logically determinational role" of "such recognition" cannot be denied and yet I can't even find it! For me it is less a matter of its being denied than my not even missing it (clearly you've fixed your own ideas in this matter quite differently). Your arguments around the interpretant seem absolutely convincing to you, but I have not been able to fully comprehend your argument regarding the logical necessity of this fourth "intuition" of the object as a proxy for the it. Perhaps this originates in my not being able to find it unmediated in my experience (as phenomenologist, as semeiotician, as ordinary "muser" etc.) But you say you cannot see how it is possible to argue logically for anything except a categorial schema which includes this putatively necessary fourth element that is so obvious to you, but a mystery to me. You're mixing the proxy up with the recognition and misattributing to me the view that experience is unmediated. You seem to have forgotten the difference between "direct" and "unmediated." The logically determinational role is that of (dis-)confirmatory experience. I look and see that person X is wearing a hat as I expected. I see X wearing the hat as I expected. Now, it's confirmatory in regard to my interpretive expectation based on signs, confirmatory in logical virtue of what the contents of the sign, interpretant, and object-as-represented were and inlogical virtue of what the object now shows itself to be and indeed what the object, sign, and interpretant now all show themselves to be. It is indeed confirmatory of a massive amount of prior semiosis without which I couldn't make enough sense of what I was seeing in order to think or say "looka there, he's wearing a hat!" In that sense, the experience is indeed logically mediated and logically determined. There was even a logically determined need for such a confirmation. My further stream of interpretation and verification will be decisively determined logically by the fact that I have confirmed that X is indeed wearing a hat just as I expected on the basis of earlier signs and interpretants. The confirmation touches not only on the question of whether X is wearing a hat and the ramifications regarding X, but also on the validity and soundness of the whole semiosis leading up to the confirmation, ultimately on the whole mind as aninference process. In sum: If the experience is formed *_as_* collateral to sign interpretant in respect of the obect, then object, sign, and interpretant logically determine it in its collaterality. And it in turn logically determines semiosis going forward. It really should be setting off one's philosophical alarm bells if one finds oneself denying that experience, recognition, verification, have a logically determinational role. I don't understand how anybody could argue that a claim does not logically determine the character of its verification (in the sense that, e.g., a claim that a horse is on the hill determines a verificationconsisting in looking for a horse on the hill) or that the claim's verification does not logically determine further inference involving the claim (e.g., a horse was confirmed to be on the hill, and it's good news that a horse is nearby, and it's also good news that the semiosis leading up to the verification was faring quite well, and Joey the horse-spotter was right again, and so forth, and all those items factor determinatively into semiosis going forward, a semiosis which would go _very differently_ if it had been dis-confirmed that a horse was on the hill). I don't understand how anybody could argue such, but I'm willing to examine such an argument if one is offered. So, the semiosis can't be diagrammed in its logical determination without lines representing relationships of experience to object. You could draw little dots in the line to show that the experiential relationship is, from another viewpoint, interpretively mediated. But that doesn't stop the line from being an experience line, any more than breaking a representation line into atoms and their motions turns the representation line into a mere mechanics or matter line. If you insist on showing the experience line as a mere interpretation line, then you have no way to display experience of the object such that the experience is "outside" the interpretant and sign of the object. That's part of why nobody has sat down and drawn a diagram showing how recognition or verificationis merely interpretation. Another seemingly open door gets closed when an intended signhood turns out to be the mind's experience's serving as a sign of some other object than the object of which it is the mind's experience. Of course one experiences things as being signs of still more things. Now, the following seems simple to me: __The object does not, of itself, convey experience or even
[peirce-l] Re: The composite photograph metaphor
Joe, Gary, Jim, list,
I forgot that I had wanted to make a remark on the Pragmatic Maxim in the
present connection.
[Joe] I forgot to say something about the supposed problem of
distinguishing sense from nonsense. That's what the pragmatic maxim is all
about, isn't it?
The Pragmatic Maxim is all about distinguishing sense from nonsense, given
a healthy inquirial setting. By itself, it is about the clarification of
conceptions. It is not about actually checking them, which also is important in
order _soundly_ to distinguish sense from nonsense. I think that,
as a practical matter, the result of semiotics' more or less stopping at the
stage of clarification, is that degenerate forms of pragmatism, feeling the
importance of practical, actual verification and consequences,have
emphasized actual outcomes ("cash value") at the expense of the conception of
the interpretant, an expense exacted throughpersistent misreadings of the
Pragmatic Maxim as meaning that the meaning of an idea isin its
actualobserved consequences "period, full stop."
Yetthe Pragmatic Maximprovides a basis for saying that _the
interpretant is addressed to the recognizant_. The interpretant, the
clarification, is in terms of conceivable experience having conceivable
practical bearing. It is a narrowing down of the universe represented by the
sign -- it picks out some ramifications of value or interest under the standards
of the interpreter. As an appeal to possible relevant experience, _it
is an appeal to possible recognizants_. As experiences, the
recognizants are not merely"specialized" down from the sign's represented
universe; instead they are downright singularized, insofar as experience is
singular. For instance,a prediction based on a hypothesis is a
potential recognizant, or a step in the formation of an actual recognizant. It
tends to be a prediction which is, itself, crucial-testable, and whose
confirmation lends support to the hypothesis, while its disconfirmation
disconfirms the hypothesis. The less crucial-testable a prediction is, the more
it is like a hypothesis itself if it is testable at all.
Best, Ben Udell http://tetrast.blogspot.com/
---
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[peirce-l] Re: The composite photograph metaphor
Ben: JR: I must say that I think you are missing mypoint 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 graspit by taking another look thenwe 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 otherwhen we move fromunderstanding the perceived object to be a burning building to the compared case ofunderstanding 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 assemiotically construed: an object is perceived as manifesting this or that, which, semiotically, is talked about in the same terms regardless of the difference between beingan object with manifest qualities functioning asrepresentations interpreted as being aburning 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 complexexperiences 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,attemptand pursue general characterizations_of_ abductive inferenceand this is becauseabductive inference is a logical process of a general kindand 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:
[peirce-l] Re: The composite photograph metaphor
Ben, Joe, Jim, list, Ben, not having gotten your argument for a putative necessary fourth semeiotic element earlier--and I've certainly tried--your most recent comments have also not helped me get any closer to what you apparently find near-obvious, or at least "simple." You write: [BU] It really should be setting off one's philosophical alarm bells if one finds oneself denying that experience, recognition, verification, have a logically determinational role. I wouldn't disagree that experience, recognition and verification have their logical roles which appear to me to occur as semeiotic events in the Peircean, that is, triadic sense (allowing for an extra-semiotic dynamical object, and that one can build up collateral experience which "points" to such a reality which simply is what it is, etc.) You write: BU: I don't understand how anybody could argue that a claim does not logically determine the character of its verification (in the sense that, e.g., a claim that a horse is on the hill determines a verificationconsisting in looking for a horse on the hill) or that the claim's verification does not logically determine further inference involving the claim (e.g., a horse was confirmed to be on the hill, and it's good news that a horse is nearby, and it's also good news that the semiosis leading up to the verification was faring quite well, and Joey the horse-spotter was right again, and so forth, and all those items factor determinatively into semiosis going forward, a semiosis which would go _very differently_ if it had been dis-confirmed that a horse was on the hill). I don't understand how anybody could argue such, but I'm willing to examine such an argument if one is offered. Again, it's a matter of one's understanding of the semiotic role of "verification." No one--and least of all Peirce--has argued against verification, experience, collateral knowledge as important. But I see verification as a stage in a given semiosis, just as the writing (or reading) of Hamlet would have stages (of recognition, for example, as Hamlet begin to see the intimate relationship of Gertrude to the villainous king). I don't think I would say with you that it logically determines the character of its verification as meaning for it appears to me part of an existential-semeiotic thread which intertwines with the rest of the threads of the evolving cable/symbol. In short it is a stage, albeit a significant stage, in some semeiotic event. I thought that this was a part of Joe's point too (in both his earlier response and his more recent and expanded one) Joe quoted you then commented: [BU] I don't know how Peirce and others have missed the distinct and irreducible logical role of verification. I keep an eye open regarding that question, that's about all. I don't have some hidden opinion on the question. Tom Short argued that there is a problem with answering how it is that semiosis learns to distinguish sense from nonsense, and Tom argued that Peirce saw this problem. I wasn't convinced that Peirce saw the problem, and I think that it's the verification problem; I can't help thinking that if Peirce had seen it, he would have addressed it more aggressively. REPLY: [JR] I don't think Peirce overlooked anything like that, Ben. It is just that verification is not a distinctive formal element in inquiry in the way you think it is, and Peirce's approach to logic as theory of inquiry doesn't mislead him into thinking that one has to give a formal account of such a thing. I agree with Joe that "verification is not a distinctive formal element in inquiry." You say it is up to us argue against something which for me at least isn't even there as "a distinctive formal element in inquiry"--as I've remarked, I cannot find it to argue against it. You say it is there; I (we?) say it is not. So while this is very simple (and obvious) to you, to me it remains a mystery. You wrote: [BU] <>Now, the following seems simple to me: __The object does not, of itself, convey experience or even information. The sign interpretant convey information but not experience of their object. Those considerations settle in the negative the question of the adequacy of a triad of interpretant, sign, and object, for verificative purposes. Verification, qua verification, has a determinational role in logic.__ I don't know why any of this doesn't seem simple to others. Well, I've simply come to another conclusion: the immediate object is involved in the semeiosis, and "verification, qua verification" points exactly to its involvement in the growing symbol, the richer, truer meaning--say, perhaps, of my life as a sign-user and whatever role I might play in my society as a result of my seeing that object more clearly. Perhaps I don't think verification is "determinative" in the way you say it does. "The object determines the sign for the interpreter" and there is both a dynamical and an immediate object determining. Verification seems
