Gary,
Thanks for this. Speaking of deja vu, I've had this nagging feeling for a month or so that I once
wrote a more detailed exposition of the "triple-correspondence" aspects of Peirce's sign definition,
but numerous web searches failed to turn it up. But when I went looking through my files for those
long ago chats with Howard Pattee et al. on the old Organization Complexity Autonomy (OCA) List --
voila, I found a version of what I recalled writing. These discussions occurred across several
discussion lists, but I copied Peirce-related posts to the Arisbe Dev List. (That wasn't my blog,
but a list that was set up by Elijah Wright during some transitional phase of the Peirce List.)
I've copied what text files I found to the InterSciWiki site and I'll work on cleaning them up as I
get time.
☞http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/User:Jon_Awbrey/INQUIRY_2001
I'll pull out the bits dealing with the "triple-correspondence" aspects of Peirce's sign definition,
see what I can do to improve them from my current vantage point, and post them to a separate thread.
Regards,
Jon
Gary Fuhrman wrote:
Thanks for this overview of your work, Howard, which I’m copying to peirce-l
(since your work is
not as well known there as it is to the biosemiotics list). I don’t know why
you say that it
shows my thumbnail sketch to be “incorrect”; to me it confirms (in greater
detail) my view as
expressed and thus shows it to be “dim” only in the sense of being parsimonious.
gary f.
From: Howard Pattee [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 20-Mar-14 11:25 PM
At 11:43 AM 3/20/2014, Gary F wrote:
On the biosemiotics list, we have at least two "semiotic" analyses which differ
from the Peircean
because their purposes are different. One is Howard Pattee's, and his purpose,
as far as I can
tell, is to restate (I won't say "solve") the traditional "symbol-matter
problem" in physics.
HP: Gary F takes a dim and incorrect view of what I have been doing
https://www.academia.edu/2767702/Historical_introduction_to_LAWS_LANGUAGE_A ND_LIFE for the
past 75 years (see esp. pp. 3-8 of link). So I need to make my activities
clear. My purpose has
been to understand the nature of life and how it might have originated in a
lifeless physical
universe. I accept the current scientific views of physical laws and the latest
knowledge of
molecular biology and evolution as a given framework. I also accept von
Neumann's logical
conditions for Self-Reproduction
<http://cba.mit.edu/events/03.11.ASE/docs/VonNeumann.pdf> (see
pp. 84-87) that requires the conceptual separation of symbolic "description"
and material
"construction" for evolvable life. This symbol-matter problem
<https://www.google.com/#q=%22symbol-matter+problem%22> is not just a physics problem! It exists
at all levels of evolution in including the philosophers classic mind-body
problem. [The current
argument about genes as symbols misses the essential fact that there are no isolated symbols.
Symbols exist only as elements of a language. That is why the origin of life is a hard problem.]
So far, I have explained in some detail, at least to the satisfaction of many
physicists and
biologists (disclosure: some of them were my doctoral students), the necessary
conditions for
material symbol vehicles to function as informational boundary conditions
(constraints) on
physical laws that satisfy both the empirical facts life and von Neumann's logical conditions (
Physics of Symbols <https://www.academia.edu/233726/The_physics_of_symbols_bridging_the_epistem
ic_cut> ).
GF: Since [Howard] limits himself to the specialized lexicon of physics, and
has no interest in
logic (not even in the forms of reasoning employed by physicists), he has no
use for the Peircean
analysis of signs, and generalizes from this to the vociferously expressed opinion that
biosemiotics has no use for the minute Peircean analysis of semiosis.
HP: Again, a dim and a false view. Anyone who has read my papers will find a
vocabular common to
wide areas of science and references to philosophers, even Peirce! I have been
interested in
Peirce for many years beginning with his pragmatism, which obviously requires a
commitment to
empiricism as well as parsimony, both of which physics requires. I also agree
substantially with
what I have read of Peirce's philosophy of science and many other of his ideas.
It was his
"thought experiments" about what he called logic that did not fit with the
empiricism so obvious
in his extensive scientific work.
So, about 13 years ago I questioned Jon Awbrey about empiricism on his Arisbe
blog. If you read
our discussion ( http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2001-August/000833.html
<http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2001-August/000833.html> continuing for several links) I
think you will see that Jon wants to talk about his favorite logic, but is reluctant (or maybe
evasive) talking about empiricism. Our current discussions are deja vu all over again, only with
Jon being replaced by Gary F acting as Peirce interpreter-in-chief. The current
participants
(except Sung) on the biosemiotics list and Peirce-L are not interested in
talking about empirical
issues either.
The only issue where I fundamentally disagree with Peirce (and agree with
Poincaré and modern
physics) is the foundations of logic. My opinions about Peirce's refinements
and classifications
of signs are "vociferous" simply because cannot understand why they are
helpful. Eventually they
may be useful, but at present they appear to be producing more arguments than
enlightenment. I
have no doubts about Peirce's formal logic and mathematics where he is an
expert, and I agree
with most of his opinions.
For most modern physicists the properties of logic and reason are considered
neither
psychological nor anti-psychological. Also, physicists and mathematicians think
in such diverse
and often mysterious ways that any attempt to impose "right reasoning" or how one
"ought" to
reason becomes, as Poincaré says, nothing but shackles. The choice of logics is
just an empirical
issue like the choice of concepts of probability. If a logical process does not
lead to correct
empirical results, don't use it. Classical (Boolean) logic does not lead to
correct QM results,
so we try something <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic> else
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic> . (Ironically, this requires a formal mathematics
that Pierce helped develop, lattice
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthocomplemented_lattice>
theory <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthocomplemented_lattice> .)
This result does not invalidate any logic, common sense, or even Peirce's "right
reasoning" when
they work, as they often do in normal life. What non-Boolean logic and the
"spooky" unreason of
QM strongly suggests is that logic of any type is neither normative nor
universal, but like
sensorimotor controls and languages, has evolved from many evolutionary levels,
empirically
tested by natural selection and all types of experience.
Howard
--
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