DaveW's invocation of panpsychism layers nicely atop his question about the typical consistency-oriented method for resolving
paradox by enlargening the frame. Nick seems to imply that EricS is comfortable with an "ontological wall" and that he
(Nick) is not. I don't read it that way at all. I think both Nick and EricS have faith in the observability of the universe
(caveat equivocation on "universe"). That nothing is occult, in principle. But EricS talks more about the practical
limitations in (several of) "our" approach vectors ... i.e. an "ontological manifold" more than a
"wall", a convex hull around the Underlying, however pocked with divots or even singularities [⛧]. They both seem
motivated to compress that manifold, perhaps to an infinitesimal point.
Allowing language that includes both "truth" and "non-[objective|physicalist]" seems, to me, to imply an inherent
disconnectedness of the Underlying. That the ontological manifold is not a convex hull around the Underlying. It allows for some "you
can't get there from here" experiences. Now, if we allow for things like staged irreversibility, then we might call some people
"weak monists", "ideal monists", or "practical pluralists" where, in principle (e.g. if we could reverse
time), we could get from one downstream state to a different downstream state, but only in principle. Their faith is in a convex Underlying
described by some principles of irreversible evolution. If we could do that, then EricS seems like a weak monist, to me. Nick seems to be a
strong monist and thinks that the Underlying has a non-pathological convex hull, where each region in the hull is reachable by any other
region in the hull.
If you generalize from the one specific constraint of [ir]reversible time to a class of
constraints (non-isomorphic space maybe?, fractality maybe?), then you might get to a
more radical non-connected Underlying. And the only way to "move" from one
region to the other is to *abstract* the regions into equivalence classes. My sense is
that DaveW is more of that camp, despite any monist homunculi he may harbor.
[⛧] Yes, I know ... "manifold" should also be in scare quotes. I should just
quote the whole damned thing. [sigh]
p.s. Of course, I'm always wrong, especially when it comes to evaluating
people. But I don't intend to offend. I realize some people get offended when
others try to categorize them. I'm open to correction or condemnation. I liken
it to posthumous baptism. One day there will be whole academic fields studying
y'all's writing (e.g. early Peirce vs late Peirce). It strikes me as more
respectful to categorize someone while they're still alive to argue.
On 1/20/23 15:28, Prof David West wrote:
Nick wrote: (emphasis mine)
/"Even though I might have to admit that the truth will never be found, *I still
find that the truth is an aspiration that I cannot live without.* So I think that
probably the underlying in Peirce as I see him is that human experience is the result of
cognition, both at the individual and the group level, and that cognition (habit
formation, etc.) is ultimately a truth seeking mechanism which operates statistically,
looking for human-relevant regularities in the stream of experience. *So while I might
have to agree that we will never know when we have arrived at the truth of any .matter
and that therefore, we will always have to deal with different versions of what that
truth is, etc., You are comfortable with that state of affairs, while I am not.* I need
to think we are working together toward something that can be won for us both and then
bullt upon by us both.... and everybody else."/
Reading your paragraph engendered a sense of guilt vis-a-vis my often vocal
(especially at St. John's) antipathy to truth. Almost as if I was challenging
Nick and not just Nick's ideas. That emotionalism aside, your statement
engendered these reactions:
1) truth is an aspiration ... Is there a truth continuum; from something like "the butler did it with a
knife in the library" to "F=MA" to "God Lives"? And, if so, how far along that
continuum does your aspiration take you?
2) different versions of what truth is and relativism ... is there no mechanism
for reconciliation? Might it be the case that two conflicting truths are but
'local minima' that our 'hill climbing algorithm' will ultimately bypass?
2A) you and I are fans of etymology as a vehicle for finding the "truth' of meaning
for a word. Is it possible to devise an analogous method/technique for finding the meaning of
a "truth?" This question arose recently when I was trying to discover why Catholics
, currently, hold the truth, 'life begins at conception' when both Aristotle and, more
importantly, Aquinas argued that a person did not exist until a soul inhabited a fetus,
something that occurred five months after conception for boys and eight months for girls. My
reading of Pierce hints at such a method, but that is probably a misconception.
3) human-relevant regularities in the stream of experience ... can any truth be
found if the stream of experience is constrained to one watershed? This is my
old argument about the impossibility of finding truth unless your stream of
experience includes psychedelics and other non-objective/physicalist
experiences.
4) premature truth ... not from something you wrote, but a personal reaction. When I am
at my most immodest, I fancy myself to be a haeresiarch—an arch-heretic vis-a-vis any and
every orthodoxy. I have probably misread, egregiously, Pierce, but I find his program
leading less to truth than to orthodoxy. This despite his insistence that all truth is
subject to revision. I am far more skeptical than Pierce when it comes to the possibility
of overcoming the inertia of "established" truth.
5) Cognition ... a topic for another time and place, except to note that my
best working hypothesis with regard cognition is grounded in panpsychism.
Thank you for your post, I found it quite provocative.
davew
On Fri, Jan 20, 2023, at 2:54 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
Eric,
I keep being torn between "honoring" your post by responding to it promptly and
"honoring" it by not responding prematurely. You rightly focus on the "underlying",
concerning which I am going append a paragraph from R. J. Bernstein's */Beyond Objectivism and Relativism:/*
which is cited in his */The Pragmatic Turn with/* which I am happily engaged at the moment. I am sorry that
the passage is in a photograph; I just didn't have heart to key it in with my very arthritic fingers.
I think it is becoming clearer that I have a hankering that you do not share and that I see that hankering expressed in Peirce, but expressed in a kind of minimalist way that I find very satisfying. Even though I might have to admit that the truth will never be found, I still find that the truth is an aspiration that I cannot live without. So I think that probably the underlying in Peirce as I see him is that human experience is the result of cognition, both at the individual and the group level, and that cognition (habit formation, etc.) is ultimately a truth */seeking /*mechanism which operates statistically, looking for human-relevant regularities in the stream of experience. So while I might have to agree that we will never know when we have arrived at the truth of any .matter and that therefore, we will always have to deal with different versions of what that truth is, etc., You are comfortable with that state of affairs, while I am not. I need to think we are
working together toward something that can be won for us both and then bullt upon by us both.... and everybody else. Peirce is quite haughty about cultural critiques because their goal is self-expressive rather than convergent.
I did my best to attach the Bernstein file. If it isnt there then ping me and
I will find a way to get it to you.
fi
On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 1:54 PM David Eric Smith <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Thanks Nick,
I need to affirm and thank Glen for the other post, which does indeed
attach to just what I was requesting. But I won’t be able to get to that today.
I wanted to reply to this one yesterday, and will hope the idea hasn’t
faded enough to miss what seemed to me an interesting direction your response
below can go.
A denial of status for “the underlying” seems, to me, to be the evil cult
that Neo-PoMo is selling. Back to that in a second, but as that thought comes
up, I recall Glen’s arguments over the hears that post-modernism wasn’t born
evil; its later generations of carriers turned it into that.
But from this thread, I have a new articulation of what the non-evil early
post-modernism might have been, or might have become. One might say that, had
post-modernism gone in its best direction, it would have been the project of
showing how difficult and subtle a true pragmatism is, when one realizes that
everything is “up for grabs”, to settle into a shorthand I used in the first
post for the various unpackings I wrote later to mean the same thing.
It would absolutely not have been a denial of any status for “the
underlying”, bur rather a call to understand what is the nature of the status
of “the underlying” in relation to our activity, which can include both “within
our activity” and “as context for our activity”.
I don’t think one escapes it, and I think your statement below affirms how
much you haven’t let it go, because you can’t.
You say “statistics is all we got”. If you think “you[‘ve] got” statistics,
then you have just committed to "a belief” (not a great word, but let me not
digress to look for a better one) in an underlying that, in fact, you don’t have, or
so I claim. The categories, the activities of observing and casting-in-language
that attach quantities to them, a language and logic of quantities, bring into
existence quantity-concepts, accepted tracks of argument to manipulate them.
Without all that machinery, you don’t “have” any “statistics” to “do”. In thinking
“you[‘ve] got” it, you have just made the essential commitment to “an underlying”
that creates a starting point from which the rest of your thought and discourse can
even emanate. To understand how and why you have done that, and probably why you
have had to do that, is the exercise of figuring out what the status of “the
underlying” is. I think the correct point of view is that all that framework
“statistics” that
you act toward _as if_ “you[‘ve] got”, is structurally just another
fluctuating pattern, analogous in its status to the sample-estimator values
assigned to particular quantities that get used when you apply statistical
conventions to some particular collection of experiences.
Remember that I wrote, originally and then again in the second post, that
the language of “sample estimators in relation to the underlying” was meant as
an analogy — within a frame taken as the context to express it — for the much
more interesting problem of arriving at faithful renderings. _Within_ the
illustration used to express the analogy, “the underlying” certainly exists, in
the sense that it has as well-defined roles in the structure of the process as
the states of knowledge which are values for the sample estimators. I did
_not_ say, and precisely did not _mean_ that the concreteness that “the
underlying” has in the illustration of doing a statistical inference problem —
more precisely, the peer status of the underlying and the sample-estimator
values, which are precisely _as concrete_ as each other, however concrete that
is, within that frame — then transports through to a comparably concrete
“underlying” in pragmatism in the sense of truth-notions. The
intended service of the analogy is that it allows us to see both sample
estimators and their “underlying” concretely, and thereby to recognize the
differentness of their places in our own thought organization and use. It is that
thought organization and use that (as I am proposing it) maps through the analogy
from the illustrative cartoon of a statistical inference application, to the general
case of “coming to terms” with “the world". But precisely because the frame
that makes “the underlying” given, in the illustrating cartoon, does _not_ map
through the analogy, we have a new project of understanding the nature of “the
underlying” in the truth-notion problem.
In my little self-invented world of uninformed story-telling, where that
was what could be seen in early post-modernism, one can see how through
whatever combination of error or malevolence, later generations (the
Neo-PoMoists) would have heard (probably, by disposition, _chosen_ to hear) the
original postmodern call to figure out the nature of the status of the
underlying as a denial that there is any such status, reducing all of life to
brute competitions for power, to which they then dedicated themselves, because
that’s the kind of people they are. But that life is same-old same-old. For
postmodernism to have become the next stage in a serious project of pragmatism
would, to me, have been very interesting.
Many thanks,
Eric
On Jan 18, 2023, at 5:41 AM, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I am finding what Mail.google
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fMail.google&c=E,1,oTroWtMEEiR-NXSvzbvTXwTxraw30bZ5Vqe84jNaHS8eF5vahfunyIUjdzzI5_lCc4LtthbLJffakVXWMRmc3tC6LE7d3ypXuyZH1u5TSA1KiQ,,&typo=1&ancr_add=1>
does to messages so confusing that I am gong to try to simplify here.
EricS writes
/*My liking of the analogy of sample estimators and underlyingvalues
*/Ii.e.values on which the estimations converge--NST/*] *//*is that, if one
felt that were a valid analogy to a specific aspects of Peirce’s
truth-relative-to-states-of-knowledge concept, it would completely clear the
fog of philosophical profundity from Peirce, and say that this idea, for a
modern quantitative reader, is an everyday commonplace, and one that we can
easily examine at all levels from our habits to our formalism, and study the
structure of in cognition.*/
To which I can only respond:
/*Y E S !!!!*/
I did feel obligated to reframe the word "underlying" because it adds back
a bit of the mystery that I am so glad to see expunged. Another way for thinking about
Peirce is to say that cognition is a statistical project and statistics is all we got.
Peirce is trying as hard as possible NOT to be profound.
Nick
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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