---------- Forwarded message --------- From: suteerth vajpeyi <[email protected]> Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2025, 9:12 pm Subject: A layman's defence of the pragmatic maxim of charles s. peirce and an invitation for discussion To: Peirce-L <[email protected]>
What is pragmatism ? Is it a method of clarifying the meaning of conceptions or a criterion for deciding if a statement is meaningful or not ? It serves both purposes. As a method of clarifying the meaning of conceptions, it can be stated as follows:- Consider what effects on your practice the object of your conception entails. The sum of all these practical effects is your entire conception of its meaning. Here the word 'conception' means any idea introduced to reduce the plurality of qualities and relations we are aware of into a harmonious unity. For example we reduce all the various sensations we perceive to one concept in the proposition "The stove is black". The stove is a bundle of qualities and relations which is unified under the general idea of 'a black object'. Thus 'black' is a conception here. All this is from peirce's article "On a new list of categories". What is meant by the phrase, 'the conception of meaning of a term'? The job of a conception is to unify. So when we have unified all the qualities and relations we are referring to into one representation using one term we will have grasped its entire meaning. Take the term 'Justice'. It is a representation of a quality prevailing in the relations between men when they strive to achieve their common good, the good of the unlimited community. So far we have only enumerated some examples to the effect that the real world outside us is made up of qualities and relations which can be confirmed by a multitude of observers from the same perspective or standpoint. We have seen that all propositions and words are a species of signs or representations and that the function of all representations is to unify a set of different qualities and relations into one. There are three modes of thought corresponding to the three different things that exist in the universe: qualities, relations and representations. They have been called by alfred north whitehead as the mode of presentational immediacy which grasps qualities, the mode of causal efficacy which grasps relations and the mixed mode of sign reference which grasps representations. Now we can also begin to understand how a representation that has no effect on our practice is meaningless. This is because by the term meaning, peirce referred to what is today called the conventional intension of a term. Not all the objective attributes possessed by a thing nor all the whimsical beliefs about that thing are what is referred to here. What is referred to here is the use to which a representation is put by a community of users. Why does a representation need to have an influence upon our actions in order to be meaningful ? Our ideas are in our heads while the real world to which they apply is outside. Now other observers or inquirers only share with us the external world in which we live. Our only contact with reality is via the two processes of observation and action. But why not simply say that the sum of all effects upon our observations is the entire meaning of a term. Why choose action over observation ? Indeed the logical positivists preferred to speak of the observational effects that trace their origin to the object denoted by a representation. Peirce on the other hand preferred to speak of action. Choosing action as a criterion of meaning has marked advantages over choosing observation. The reason for these advantages is simple. Action is the only point of contact between our external and our internal worlds. When we act, we modify reality and also observe the effects of that modification. Also, we have no clue about the thoughts of others. Only the actions that express those thoughts are what can be grasped by us. Thus, to know the conventional intension of a term or statement, we have to take stock of how it modifies the actions of ourselves and others. Meaning, in the sense of the conventional intension of a term must be user and observer independent. That is why, in order to make observation more objective and reproducible, peirce preferred to speak of an idea's influence over our actions. This also had the added advantage of making normative ideas more tractable and meaningful. With an observational criterion of meaning, one just cannot explicate the meaning of normative conceptions around which most of our time, interest and energies are spent. Normative conceptions by definition refer not to what exists but what ought to exist, not to our present state of affairs but to our future actions. This makes normative terms like justice and goodness clearer and more precise something that could not be accomplished by all the formidable tools of the mathematical logic of the positivists. References: Peirce- how to make our ideas clear, on a new list of categories. A.N. whitehead- modes of thought Do let me know your thoughts on this defence of pragmatism. Inform me of the mistakes and shortcomings of this exposition. Do you think that pragmatism has a future or do you think (like the philosopher nicholas rescher) that pragmatism as a criterion of meaning must give way to pragmatism as a methodological postulate ? Do you think that pragmatism can be proved from more fundamental assumptions or that a proof is un-necessary or impossible ? Could someone supply the complete proof of pragmatism from more basic assumptions (something which peirce was prevented from doing by his circumstances and ultimately his death) ? Finally let me know your thoughts on why peirce considered pragmatism a maxim of logic and called it the logic of abduction.
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