Ben
I've been there, even if for different reasons. You'll be welcome when you return.
Cheers and all the best
Arnold
On 9/13/06, Jim Piat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I know the feeling, Ben. I look forward to your return. All the best! Let me know if I can be of any practical help.Jim Piat----- Original Message -----From: Benjamin UdellSent: Wednesday, September 13, 2006 4:14 PMSubject: [peirce-l] Until later (was "Re: The roots of speech-act theory in the New List")
Jim, list,This remains interesting, but, generally, this forum is too addictive for me! I have to get on with practical matters which are, at this point, getting over my head. So I'm unsubscribing for a few months. Thanks for people's interest, Gary, Joe, Jim P., Jim W., Bernard, and any others, for discussing/arguing with me. More generally, keep peirce-l bustling.Best, Ben Udell----- Original Message --------From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2006 3:50 PMSubject: [peirce-l] Re: The roots of speech-act theory in the New ListBen,You say,"Saying that the NLC 'theory' of cognition (which seems to me no more a cognition theory than Peircean truth theory is an inquiry theory even though it references inquiry) is sufficient except when we talk about possibility, feasibility, etc., is -- especially if that list includes negation (you don't say) -- to deny that there is an issue of cognizing in terms of alternatives to the actual and apparent, etc., even though then logical conceptions of meaning and implication become unattainable. " (END)It is not a sufficient theory. I see it as asking "what are the most general elements in a process by which the mind forms propositions." The example is a simple case of perceptual data. But, it is not a complete theory of knowledge. In fact, it is more of a chapter in the history of cognitive psychology. It is a logical description of a psychological process;some parts of which may be empirically established. (For instance, Peirce thinks it is questionable what the then current results of empirical psychology have established with respect to acts of comparison and contrast.) If the paper is coupled with some theses from the JSP series, it seems clear to me that a theory of cognition emerges that could be of interest to psycholinguists and cognitive scientists working in language formation and even speech-act theory. Does it handle all epistemic interests, propositional attitudes, modalities? No.But it is not a special science since the results uncovered are precisely the most general elements used in any inquiry. It is more nearly what the 1901 Baldwin entry suggests, namely, erkenntnislehre, a doctrine of elements. Peirce struggled with where to assign this study. Is it a part of logic or pre-logical? There doesn't seem to be much of the normative concern that later demarcates logic proper. But there is a law-like element that is presupposed in so far as "one can only discover unity by introducing it." That transcendental point could easily mark a historical divide between naturalists such as Quine and "static" modelists such as Chomsky. In some sense, grammar is the issue, although generalized to the utmost. Both could take the spirit of the paper and do things, Chomsky in the specialized application to syntactic structures and transformational grammar, and Quine, in so far as the theory is empirically testable, as shedding some light on knowModern epistemology cannot even get off the ground with this NLC paper unless the enterprise is so naturalized that the theory (historical curiosity or not) is used to guide research in the relevant special sciences. The specific perceptual cognition and cognitive assertion under discussion meet none of the criteria for knowledge in the "classical" picture. The assertion "this stove is black" need neither be justified, true, or even believed. The paper, at least in part, is merely explanatory, if only insufficiently, of what is required to even begin the classical assessment.You say,"But the point in philosophy is not rephrasability, but instead to understand the result and end of such procedures, in which the description of signs is a _means_ to _transformations_ of extension and intension, transformations which themselves are a means to represent real relationships. The research interest of smoothing and smoothly "encoding" cognitions into common convenient keys or modes guides deductive maths of propositions, predicates, etc.; but does not guide philosophy, which is more interested in the corresponding "decoding." Philosophy applies deductive formalisms but is no more merely applied deductive theory of logic than statistical theory were merely applied probability theory." (END)Well, I agree. It is not for nothing that normative science is structured the way it is in Peirce's architecture. The purpose of logical analysis, linguistic analysis, "theory criticism," can't be lost sight of.Jim W-----Original Message-----From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Sent: Wed, 13 Sep 2006 10:39 AMSubject: [peirce-l] Re: The roots of speech-act theory in the New ListJim,>[Jim Willgoose:] I am playing at trying to reject it. ("poss.Bs & poss.~Bs") I have accepted it more often than not.Now you tell me.>[Jim] I also understand the difference between discussing formal properties that hold between propositions (modal or non-modal) and forming a "1st order" proposition out of the discussion of contingent propositions and the formal properties. This could be made clearer by noting the following:>[Jim] "P" is a contingent proposition>[Jim] "P" & "-P" are feasible.>[Jim] "&" and "feasible" are part of the metalanguage used to discuss contingent propositions.>[Jim] "feas. P" & "feas.-P" are ill-formed.>[Jim] Explanation: "Feasibility" is a 2nd order predicate used to discuss....It does appear that you understand the difference, though the example could be misleading. We often do not have distinct words for the object and the sign, and, even in the case of the word "true" where we can distinguish "true" (corresponding to the real, to the genuine, etc.) from "real," "genuine," etc., nevertheless the word "true" does double duty and we do use the word "true" about objects in order to call them genuine, real, authentic, rather than in order to call them signs corresponding to the real. In the cases of "possible," "feasible," etc., we're not always going to have enough words to make the distinction easily. Thus saying that some proposition "Hs" is feasible could be taken to mean that "Hs" is something which is feasible as a proposition. Thus formal logic has functors and ordinary English has adverbs which grammatically modify the whole clause. Some of the functors are too powerful for 1st-order log>[Jim] This looks strangely similar to where we started in terms of rephrasing "she is possibly pregnant" as 'it is possible that "she is pregnant"' or ':she is pregnant" is possible.' But then, 2nd order assertions obey the theory of NLC cognition except we talk of feasibility, optimality, possibility and even assertibility. "Assertibility" would be an even higher-order predicate. Wasn't your initial concern with certain epistemic predicates that qualify "1st order" predicates?To the contrary, my initial concern was with the categories {substance, accident, whetherhood, and object(s)-to-object(s) relations (e.g. mappings)}.As I've said, the point is that the mind must be able to treat things in terms of alternatives to the actuality with which it is presented, and all the normal minds of which we actually know do this, even that tribe http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,414291,00.html whose language was recently found to contain none of the grammatical conjunctions which enable the _expression_ of complex structures of such thoughts. But they do say, just as we sometimes do, "You go there, you see it" in the sense of "If/when you go there, you'll see it." Living among polyglot immigrants, I hear that kind of talk all the time. Anyway, meaning and implication are in terms of alternatives to that which is. Saying that we can and should treat such matters in terms of descriptions of signs is like saying that philosophy needs a mirrorish shield in order to keepBest, Ben UdellMessage from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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