Frances to William and others... My replies are inserted into your original message.
W: If all truth is fallible then what of falsehood? Is falsehood fallible? If so, is the false falsehood truth? That implies that truth does exist in the sense that all truth is false. Thus the false is the true. F: Fallibility is a conditional limit and a provisional ground for a sign, not an absolute fixed state. Fallibility therefore does not necessarily entail the falsity or truth of a sign, but merely its growth and change. Fallibility can even account for a sign being neither false nor true, in that the sign can be logically senseless, as is the situation with unverifiable signs that are genuinely or mainly icons. W: I'm really not at odds with the idea that empirical truth is conditional since scientific process often leads to new facts replacing old facts that stand until falsified. But how are art facts falsified? What art or metaphysical truth can be tested? Indeed, what art truth can be replicated? F: Empiricism is only one of many scientific methods, but it is central and pivotal to science. Not all things felt or found can be sampled and tested empirically, yet those same things can still remain as objects of science. In the case of metaphysical phenomena, such objective things are mentally "observed" by the phenomenologist, and the result of that observation is "expressed" in reports to other experts similarly engaged, so that a consensus of opinion about the phenomena can be tentatively agreed upon. The method is logical, but it is more formally structural than empirical. The works or classes of art may be prone to similar scientific operations. Furthermore, the results of all empirical experiments may yield proof of falsity or truth about the samples tested, but this proof is not absolutely positive because it also is fallible. The proof and truth of discovered results culled by the methods of empiricism must be accepted with a degree of skeptical doubt. The structural scientific process for metaphysical phenomenology, and perhaps also of fine artworks, is by the dual way of inner private observation and outer public expression. W: In Western art history there are examples of that effort. Perspective, for example, is an art truth, I suppose, since it was invented to provide convincing pictorial aims in artistic composition. The same goes for the study of human anatomy and for all the other quasi-scientific methods and ends of art. This kind of science as art is the thesis of Gombrich's notion and it was a feature of the Western canon in art. Now toppled. With the advent of modernist end-game art like Duchamp's and Warhol's, it seems that no art fact can be invalidated. Anything can be truthful art. But not anything can be truthful science. F: The seeming representational haze taken as signs by sense is of likely metaphysical stuff given by nature to feel, which phenomenal haze and stuff is accidentally discovered or found by mind, and not arbitrarily invented or made by mind. What is found however is a fluid world of dispositional tendency, and not a rigid world of predetermined creation. The agent of this telic design is a bent for phenomena to lean in a fit way toward a good end goal. Even properties of art like the illusion of depth born by way of perspective are found as icons of objective formal similarity. If the forms of artworks are broached in this objective semiotic and methodic manner, then art may very well be a sound candidate as a scientific object. F: What pragmatist experts have expressively agreed upon is that all phenomena so far observed are made of phenomenal "categories" tentatively held to be: (1) monadic qualities of firstness; and (2) dyadic facts of secondness; and (3) triadic laws of thirdness. These categories of phenomena, at least for idealist realism, are what normal persons have been consistently found to indeed feel what was sensed. The results of pragmatist phenomenology are then preparatory and contributory and combinatory to all the other sciences. W: Peircian philosophy becomes fuzzy in the face of the different tokens regarded as art and science. To escape by saying that both are questing truth is not good enough if there's no recognition that the concept art and the concept science are separate "tokens", signal different concepts, by Peircian thinking. Is this a contradiction of his theory? I take it that for Peirce, a token was something that stands for a concept. Separate tokens referred to separate concepts. Frances may correct my error. F: This final statement of yours may not be fully understood by me. The part about the use of tokens in the separation of art and science is especially hazy. Allow me nonetheless to take a stab at responding to the seeming gist of the statement. F: The material tokens of acts like art and tech and science are sensed samples used to stand for the mystical tones and material tokens and mental types of those acts. The tokens may have form with factual meaning and value and worth and even force, but they need not necessarily have any truth to be good as tokens. What the tokens of art and tech and science have in common is that they are all real actions. The same token of say truth therefore might be used to stand for any or all of these actions. F: Any percept or concept or idea or thought is a mental act in mind, but it is also a sign and thus a token of some object. The conceptual thought and the idea it carries for example is not in the mind, but is in the sign, which sign may of course be in the hand or in the mind. F: In the jargon of Peirce and under the semiotic dimension of "immediate" semantics, any active "sinsign" which may be be a token or a replica will stand for any potential "qualisign" which may be a tone, or any familiar "legisign" which may be a type or a code or a seme. These "immediate" objects are semantic "subsigns" that stand for or refer to other "immediate" objects. F: It seems to me that an object like a concept of say truth in art or tech or science can be referred to by many substitutive paradigmatic tokens, all synonyms referring to the same object. Furthermore, separate objects like different concepts in different acts can be referred to by one and the same translated token. In the world of typical art and science for example, many separate works and theories can be held as tokens of either type with both types being found as a global class of human action. F: It may also be useful to consider the role of codes in relation to tokens. The codes of types and "legisigns" are not the tokens or "sinsigns" of types. In the fine graphic art of printmaking for example a "sinsign" token is a genuine original print, while a "sinsign" replica is a mere reproduced copy. If this art were carried over into a mode of science, then a pure token would be true, while a fake replica would be false. Now a "legisign" code of a type, like Morse and Braille and Semaphore, is not a "sinsign" token of the type, because "sinsign" tokens and replicas must logically be either false or true, while "legisign" types and codes and semes must necessarily be true, because they like symbolic enigmas and ciphers cannot be denied to exist. F: Thanks in advance for any comments and corrections.
