Ben & Listers, You wrote: Well, my experience with basic categorical thinking, even before I first read Peirce, has been that basic philosophical categories don't shed much light except in exchange for at least a little light shed upon them. To the extent that that's true, even for Peirceans the proof will take one back to the categories for some exploration.
My comment: Speaking Of Categories I had a categorical discussion of sorts with my 3 year old grandson this morning. Whether interesting or frustrating, I will leave to you to decide. [I should mention that I have a rule that I have always enforced across the board with 3 year old & teenager children & grandchildren: NEVER ARGUE WITH THEIR TRUTHS. They already know everything and become very frustrated when someone suggests otherwise. ] Jordie pointed to a stuffed dog and asked: "Gramma, what this?" I mistakenly thought it was an actual question. "It's a dog." "No!" he said forcefully, "It's a pet!" "Yes," I agreed. "It's a pet that is a dog." "No! Not a dog! A pet!" "Then what about Roo (their dog)? Isn't Roo a pet!" "NO! Roo a dog!" he said even more emphatically, "Not a pet!" "Oh. I didn't know that before," I said quickly. I followed my rule and extricated myself from further discussion on the topic. So, we obviously have a little work ahead with Jordie on categories and levels of abstraction. But that conversation set me to wondering about the whole issue of how one's grasp of categories affects (or maybe effects) one's place in society. I've been trying to figure out why my oldest grandchildren (now 16 & 13) are so smart. Their mother, one of our adopted fetal alcohol affected children, has an excellent vocabulary & perfect grammar, despite an IQ hovering in the borderline retarded range (she cannot read or do math). Their father is not by any stretch the sharpest knife in any drawer and his grammar is rather poor. He reads only well enough to follow a recipe, which is much more than mom can do. Yet Aaron & Sara have their mother's vocabulary and grammar skills. Aaron was identified mathematically gifted in 2nd grade. He's in honors for most HS classes (though not in one of the best schools in town). Sara is doing terribly in school but reads and writes (fiction only) very well. (The schools in her area only value expository reading and writing right now, because they have to get their state test scores up. She says they give dumb topics for the writing portion of those tests. I'm sure they don't offer topics about vampires or werewolves, which would be her preference.) All of our 8 grandchildren are either the children of our various adopted children or, in the case of my biological child, adopted. They're all real smart. Which does not make sense, unless it has to do with categories. Even our two fetal alcohol damaged children have had the experiences & learned the categories and language that children from educated upper middle class backgrounds have (they were raised in Bill Gates' neighborhood). The two alcohol damaged girls (now 40 & 42) are on Social Security Disability, Medicare, Medicaid and participate in Arizona's remarkable program for the seriously mentally ill (SMI). Each lives on her own, has a payee who manages bills. They are teetotalers, keep close contact with the children, us, each other, their extended family and many friends. They help us out now that we're getting old and help my 89 year old mother too. And yet those two grandchildren are really, really smart as smart as all of the others who have smart parents. It must be categories, don't you think? Regards, Phyllis Phyllis, list, Thanks for your thoughtful and clear post. I'm a fellow "unreal" philosopher, but differ from you in that I've no professional occasion of connection with Peirce's thought at all. I remember years ago finding a discussion of the ways in which people mean things that they say, and it occurred to me that the ways seemed to correspond, ingeniously, to at least of some of Peirce's 10 trichotomies of signs in a letter to Lady Welby, and then I noticed that you were the author or one of the authors (this was long ago and I don't now know what article I was reading). Anyway, I'll attempt to form a few thoughts. I just skimmed some of Jeremiah McCarthy's Version 2.0 of "An Account of Peirce's Proof of Pragmatism" http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/mccarthy/proof2.htm, so I may have been influenced by it. I'd say that (as McCarthy points out), for Peirce's proof of pragmatism (on which I'm no expert), one needs to know his ways of thinking. Insofar as one does not know his phaneroscopic categories, one will need to study them, and so, to the outsider pursuing the proof, they'll seem like part of the proof - a preparation at least. For Peirce, all (cenoscopic) philosophy, pure or applied, is phaneroscopic analysis. So one needs to think in a framework where phaneroscopy and, in particular, Peirce's tri-categorical phaneroscopy, is the philosophical basis of philosophy; this sets things up for Peirce to argue that logical goodness is a species of moral goodness, and moral goodness is a species of the most general goodness: esthetic goodness. So I agree with you that the proof of pragmatism needs to begin in phaneroscopy, in the sense that all Peircean philosophy so begins, and also as a present-day practical matter, in the sense that people interested in the proof don't always know Peirce's phanerscopy and categories well. Well, my experience with basic categorical thinking, even before I first read Peirce, has been that basic philosophical categories don't shed much light except in exchange for at least a little light shed upon them. To the extent that that's true, even for Peirceans the proof will take one back to the categories for some exploration. Best, Ben On 4/28/2014 5:17 PM, Phyllis Chiasson wrote: Listers I would like to approach this section about Kee's discussion of the 'proof of pragmatism' backwards--from experience to theory. I came into my understanding of pragmatism in this way and still find it difficult to analyze from the other direction. I've many years of practical experience with these concepts (15 of the nearly 40 years pre any knowledge that they WERE concepts, let alone Peircean). This experience still shapes the way I am most able to think clearly about these issues. In 1975, circumstances that left me without any other materials with which to teach junior and senior language arts students forced me to make use of a set of unused workbooks called, "Creative Analysis," by Albert Upton. Once my students and I made it through the first three sections of that workbook, we all (me included) had learned to qualify (affective, sensory, rational), to analyze based upon diagrams developed by deliberate qualitative choices and to understand and apply the immensely complex construct that Upton simply called "Signs." So, I feel that everyone should know that I am not a 'real' philosopher-my only credentials are that I was able to write my first book (and everything else) in isolation (I have still never met a formally trained Peircean in the flesh). I started my first book pre-searchable discs, using only my limited collection (3 anthologies) of Peirce's writings, a few well-answered questions from Dr. Ransdell, Cathy Legg (and some amiable Deweyans) and what I knew (know) from Creative Analysis, as well as a non-verbal assessment of Peirce-based non-verbal inference patterns, which I also did not know was based on Peirce. If Howard Callaway had not read an early snippet from the manuscript and suggested I send it to Rodopi via him when it was complete & if John Shook had not refereed that manuscript and accepted it for publication, that first book would probably still be just a manuscript. If I had not made an online (and now actual and close) friend of Jayne Tristan (a Deweyan) who vetted my manuscript for philosophical trigger words-like "necessary," I would probably have made a complete fool of myself. (I still worry a lot about that, but should probably just say dayenu here). Thus, it is from this perspective of an aging and experience-based amateur that I invite Peirce-l to join me in this excellent adventure. Kee's points out that any ".proof should begin with phaneroscopy and then run through the normative sciences." I understand this as meaning that the proof of pragmatism begins with a close examination of the qualities (potential as well as actual) of phanera (as facts and occurrences). Peirce says that an occurrence is "a slice of the Universe [that] can never be known or even imagined in all its infinite detail" and that every fact within every occurrence is "inseparably combined with an infinite swarm of circumstances, which make no part of the fact itself" (Rosenthal, 1994, pp. 5-6). Peirce points out that a fact, which can be extracted from this swarm of circumstances by means of thought, is only so much of reality as can be represented by a proposition (Rosenthal, 1994, p. 5). One aspect of preparing a proposition for testing is determining which factors within the swarm of circumstances matter and which do not. It seems that the call for the proof of pragmatism to begin with phaneroscopy speaks to the examination of relevant properties (qualities of affect, sense, reason) of whatever fact is under consideration. Since Peirce allows for comparison & contrast, as well as sorting (and by implication) diagrammatic thinking (as a perceptual, rather than a logical judgment) in this non-normative branch of philosophy, it seems there is much "work" that a phenomenologist can do here before engaging the normative sciences, in particular, logic as semiotic (the semiotic paradigm) to craft the theoretical construct. It seems to me that the individual "strands" of the rope are discovered and explored within phaneroscopy, based upon their qualities and their possible relevance to something &/or one another. Only then would they be tested against norms before being added to the rope-like braid that Kees describes. I wonder how many others also see the 'Proof' beginning in phenomenology in this sense of discerning? In another sense? Or do some of you see it beginning somewhere else altogether? ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
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