I think Kees gets to the heart of the relationship between feeling and esthetics here.
I think we should also need to bear in mind that Peirce's "esthetics" has nothing to do with the development of taste, be it literary, artistic, culinary or whatever. Taste is indeed always contingent on embodiment and usually on cultural context too. Esthetics is just the science that ethics has to appeal to for its idea of "good", so that logic can have an ethical grounding for its normative judgment of reasoning. We might say that just as phaneroscopy observes the phaneron and asks, "What are its indecomposable elements?", esthetics looks at the phaneron and asks, "What could possibly be good about it (or about any ingredient of it)?" gary f. From: Cornelis de Waal [mailto:cdw...@iupui.edu] Sent: 22-Mar-14 9:11 AM To: Matt Faunce; peirce-l@list.iupui.edu Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapter 4, The Normative Science of Logic Dear Matt, Cathy, List It is sure hard to keep up with this list, especially since there are now various parallel threads, and I'm very much impressed with Gary Richmond who seems to on the ball pretty much every day. The moderation of this list surely got into good hands. I want to pick up on some aspects of Matt's questions, as others have done also, and say something more about Peirce's criticism of Sigwart in connection with Peirce's esthetics, a discipline about which Peirce says relatively little. When you look at Peirce's division of the sciences, esthetics follows immediately after phaneroscopy and precedes ethics and logic, which follow it in that order. It seems to me, though, that in Peirce's scheme of things the higher sciences cannot be derived from the more basic ones. And Peirce does not go that route either. Instead he argues backward from what he believes logic should be, to what this requires in terms of a more basic and also broader discipline he identifies as ethics, which in a similar vein requires certain other things to be settled before it can do its job and that fall outside its purview, which brings Peirce to what he terms esthetics, and esthetics, finally, is constrained by the results of phaneroscopy. The argument he gives is rather neat and hinges on, or is inspired by, his doctrine of the categories. This means, though, that when discussing esthetics this should take place within the context of what Peirce takes logic to be, which is the enterprise of distinguishing good from bad reasoning, where the former is defined as any reasoning such that the truth of the premises gives us some assurance that the conclusion be true as well. This may run from an airtight deductive argument to a very tentative abduction. By taking this course, Peirce rejects the idea, he ascribes to Sigwart, that logic be grounded in psychology. Psychology, which Peirce takes to be a descriptive science, can tell us how people do reason, what they do feel when they see something that appears obvious to them etc., but it cannot tell us how people should reason. Sigwart argued, at least in Peirce's reading of him, that a certain feeling of necessity accompanies certain arguments and that it is this feeling that enables us to distinguish a necessary argument from one that is, say, a very compelling abductive argument. Now feeling, both at the individual and the collective level, has proven to be an unreliable guide to logic, in that bad arguments can nonetheless elicit very strong feelings that the conclusion is inescapable. In fact there is a whole discipline, called rhetoric, which seems to be specifically designed to giving people strong feelings that certain bad arguments are strong ones. Hence, I think that, justifiably or not, Sigwart exemplifies for Peirce a route he thinks should not be taken, namely to develop logic through a study the actual operations of the mind, de facto making it a descriptive enterprise. Now Matt asks whether perhaps ultimately our instinctive "immediate feelings of necessity" conform to the same esthetic ideals that Peirce's logic ultimately conforms to, adding that it might be possible to say that that logic is grounded in something like a final feeling of necessity experienced at the end of inquiry. These are good questions. I think approaching the issue from this angle exposes an interesting misconception, or an equivocation if you like. For Peirce what makes an argument a good one has everything to do with the relationship of the premises to the conclusion, and that of itself has nothing to do with what anyone thinks or feels about this connection. I'm confining myself here to this "feeling of necessity." When in an introductory logic class you introduce a valid syllogism to your students and some feel it makes no sense, others feel it is convincing without knowing why, and yet others feel the conclusion inescapable, all those feelings do not matter; what matters is that the form of the argument is such that the conclusion is inescapable. Now it seems to me that if this is true, then one would need to add some sustained argument to make the point that somehow those feelings, which are not relevant for determining the validity of an argument when the final opinion has not been reached, suddenly become the deciding factor to determine the validity of that argument once the final opinion is reached. I'm not sure what such an argument could look like, especially since any attempt to analyze a (simple) feeling requires one to replace it with a structure of claims, which causes one to rely on the relationship between premises and conclusions, suggesting that the analysis of this relationship is more basic in terms of grounding than any feeling thatmight be elicited by being exposed to an argument. Briefly put, Peirce takes this approach to be a wrong one and his discussion of ethics and esthetics is his attempt to seek an alternative. Before signing off, as the house is waking up, one brief comment on another question of Matt, which I'll quote whole: "If the esthetic ideal is "that which is objectively admirable without any ulterior reason", "without any reason for being admirable beyond its inherent character," since we have no outside standard to judge this admirability by how can we even recognize it so to deliberately aim our actions at it?" I think the way to go about addressing this question is to go back to what I said above: that we cannot derive the subsequent sciencesfrom the sciences they are grounded in. Just as phaneroscopy cannot tell uswhat esthetics will be like, esthetics cannot tell us what ethics will be like. It befalls to the science of ethics to try to answer this question, and it does so by introducing such outside standards; they do not somehow evolve from esthetics but are alien to it. Cheers, Kees
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