I agree with Søren that metaphor is not especially helpful here, since we still need to cash it out in terms of meaning, which on Peirce's view brings us back to his theory of signs.
The idea of a model, which can be used very generally from precise mathematical models through analogies to metaphors allows vague and more clear ideas, and progressive clarity of ideas. We have reason to clarify our ideas when we run into problems with respect to our expectations about the world. These very problems can guide us towards what we need to make more clear (the argument in my doctoral thesis on the incommensurability problem). It is very late here (I have insomnia tonight) or I would go into more detail.
What Søren calls hypercomplex Cliff Hooker and I called complexly organised, though we are not wedded to the term. Complexly Organised Dynamical Systems with C.A. Hooker (1999). Robert Rosen calls such systems closed to efficient causation, which is too strong a condition. He argues, correctly, that such systems have no largest model, meaning they may have accurate mathematical descriptions, but that these are incomplete. He thinks that such systems and living systems are congruent, but I am sure this is false.
Must try to sleep,
John
At 07:48 PM 2014-05-14, Mara Woods wrote:
Søren, List,
It is interesting that you bring up modeling plurality to help deal with the problems of modeling dynamic systems. Even representation of relatively static systems seems to require plurality of models. I've been chewing on this issue for the past week, not sure whether to bring it up because it did not feature in this chapter of Kees' book.
Discussing assertions of the truth of a proposition brings up the problem of the accuracy and precision of the representation of reality. As Vinicius Romanini discussed in a side thread, representation is always a metaphor for its object, and as such, is always to some degree a misrepresentation. As far as I understand it, such misrepresentation has two parts: some aspect of the representation introduces some idea in the immediate object that is not in the dynamic object and some aspect of the dynamic object is left out of the immediate object. The intrinsic fallibility of representation is mentioned at the end of section 8.2. The settled belief is no longer possible to correct, as Kees puts it. Might this mean that no representation can be a better one because any other representation offers new misrepresentations (noise, even) to bring the interpretants further away from the dynamic object?
Logically speaking, if our representations of reality (and here I assume we can include thought-signs) can do no more than speak metaphorically and approximately about the object, and since nothing is real except that which is the object of final belief, then there is an inherent indeterminacy about the object. However, it is unclear how we can say that our representations -- including thoughts -- about reality are merely metaphorical since anything outside of the metaphor, so to speak, is meaningless.
Might the solution be metaphorically related to the community of inquirers? Just as the variability in the individual subjectivity of the inquirers is weeded out through by identifying these as outliers when comparing their views intersubjectively with others, so can the representative power of a singular proposition, which leaves out something about the dynamic object and adds something unwanted to the immediate object, be strengthened by the overlap in a network of representations. In other words: modeling pluralism.
Mara Woods
On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 2:07 PM, Søren Brier <[email protected]> wrote:
- Dear Gary and Phyllis
- I have become fond of the term Hypercomplexity as a solution to the problem of change and realism as it signifies that there is order in process but it is not reducible to one model as there are multiple aspects and dynamics working at the same time. It is a bit what Prigogine and others points out that you create more entropy than you reduce when you try to get writ of it in searching for true and simple knowledge of a complex system, because no system can be completely isolated from outside interference and in doing science you always use energy and produce entropy. We can get all kinds of knowledge. They just have a prize. Which we by the way all know from our own lives.
- Best
- Søren
- Fra: Gary Richmond [ mailto:[email protected]]
- Sendt: 13. maj 2014 03:00
- Til: Phyllis Chiasson
- Cc: Mara Woods; peirce List
- Emne: Re: [PEIRCE-L] de Waal Seminar: Chapter 8, Truth and reality
- Phyllis, List,
- Gee, why wouldn't I get that you'd be thinking in terms of the NA at the moment?! Anyhow, I'm going to skip ahead to Chapter 13 of your Peirce's Pragmatism: The Design for Thinking to try to get a heads up on your thinking in this matter. You wrote:
- PC: But my point was that if the possibility of Chance is real in the sense of actions in mind or matter (degraded mind), then everything evolves somewhat unpredictably (or devolves if chance destroys its form into chaos). In any case, whatever something was was before it manifested would be real, according to Peirce, but may not enter into general experience until it is apprehended in actuality, then classified & named--or until it is described in such a way as it can be mentally apprehended.
- Hm. I have a few reservations here. First, I don't think that matter is "degraded mind," only "mind hidebound with habits."
- (W)hat we call matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hidebound with habits. It still retains the element of diversification; and in that diversification there is life (CP 6.158).
- Yes, there is that moment--that moment of bifucation in Prigogine's version of chaos theory--where something either evolves or devolves. But there is more than mere chance in it--Peirce resisted his own philosophy being thought of solelhy in terms of his Tychism.
- There is no reality without the possibility of manifestation. This is the problem Peirce has with Hegel, that Hegel doesn't see the essential necessity of 2ns, of brute existence in reality. Well, that could have been stated better. So, an example:
- If, say, I am walking down the street and a brick dislodges itself from a building I'm passing and hits me on the shoulder, it may be that it will afterward be "classified & named," but its reality for me is very much an existential occurrence in its happening. And if I were, say, a dog, I wouldn't 'know' anything more than that shock and pain, etc. Reality implies all 3 categories being operative.
- Perhaps I am missing your point in one matter since, for me, a "would-be" is nothing that merely happens "unpredictably," but rather it is that which would come into existence if the conditions were set (or came about) for its happening. For example, in my ordinary day to day life I have rather considerable control over what "would be" the activities of my next day were I to plan it: say, lunch with a friend, and theater in the evening with my spouse. We make our lunch plans and I buy the theater tickets. That doesn't mean that it necessarily will happen--chance certainly enters into it if I suddenly have a dental emergency, say.
- But "would-bes" are category 3ns, the category of necessity--all things being equal. And, all things being equal, I will have lunch with my friend tomorrow, and I will go to the theater with my spouse--unless something unexpected, something untoward, happens--because I created the conditions for those events to occur (nature does something equivalent to this). Most often--but certainly not always--events in my life do frequently happen as planned. You concluded:
- PC: I can see how easy it is to seem nominalistic when describing stuff without the categories, because it is in naming or understanding signs that they become real to us. Sometimes, I feel very nominalistic myself, because it feels as though I actually taught someone how to be smarter --me me me--instead of enabling someone to evolve and express his or her innate potential.
- I agree that it's very difficult to divest ourselves of all traces of nominalism. Certainly Peirce--of all people!--was himself challenged in this regard. So what's to be done? Well, for me, it's a matter of trying to see those remnants of nominalism in my thinking--no easy matter--and the very self-awareness of them helps me eliminate them.
- I hear an echo of Rilke in your saying that it is by naming things that they become real to us, that, as Rilke saw it, we are here on earth perhaps precisely to name things: the forest, a rose bloom, my bedroom, love in all its varieties, my grief. I'm not at all sure about that, I mean that it's our sole reason for existing. But I am sure that Rilke was one of the greatest of modern poets and that there is some significant truth in it.
- And, yes, I agree that we (you and I) need the categories in some strange and important sort of way. And we surely can't rest in thirdness as Hegel did, and we oughtn't stop at 2ns as some of the existentialists and "strict individualists" did and do, and valorizing 1ns is swell for artists in terms of their art creation, but from the perspective of philosophy (and the 7 systems of philosophy which Peirce analyzes in the 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism), it can result in a nihilistic philosophy, or one of "Idealistic Sensualism," as Peirce phrases it in the lecture in question.
- So, all three categories need be embraced in the natural evolution of the person--of you and me--the idea with which you conclude your post. But one has to embrace Peirce's categories to feel this way, and many do not.
- Best,
- Gary
- Gary Richmond
- Philosophy and Critical Thinking
- Communication Studies
- LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
- On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 7:41 PM, Phyllis Chiasson <[email protected]> wrote:
- Gary,
- I was really thinking of Real vs Actual in terms of the Neglected Argument, which is much on my mind today, and his essay, What Pragmatism Is. I suppose Evolutionary Love is rattling around in there too, as I've read it often. He addresses evolution in terms of thought and general ideas in the latter essay (I discuss it in Chapter 13 of PEIRCE'S PRAGMATISM: The Design for Thinking. )
- But my point was that if the possibility of Chance is real in the sense of actions in mind or matter (degraded mind), then everything evolves somewhat unpredictably (or devolves if chance destroys its form into chaos). In any case, whatever something was was before it manifested would be real, according to Peirce, but may not enter into general experience until it is apprehended in actuality, then classified & named--or until it is described in such a way as it can be mentally apprehended.
- In NA Peirce writes "...for in most instances where the conjecture reaches the high peaks of Plausibility--and is really most worthy of confidence--the inquirer is unable definitely to formulate just what the explained wonder is; or can only do so in light of the hypothesis."
- I think both his metaphysics and abduction/retroduction (which he says is the way great systems, including newspapers and the cosmos work) are so dependent upon his phenomenology (and probably mathematics as well, which is beyond my ken) that they probably can't be understood well without somehow finding a way to clearly, and as literally as possible, braid the categories into relation into every explanation. Peirce does that, of course, but I have to do it myself (again, chickens & ducks) to relate to what he means.
- I can see how easy it is to seem nominalistic when describing stuff without the categories, because it is in naming or understanding signs that they become real to us. Sometimes, I feel very nominalistic myself, because it feels as though I actually taught someone how to be smarter --me me me--instead of enabling someone to evolve and express his or her innate potential. It's a school teacher's conceit, i guess.
- Regards,
- Phyllis
- Gary Richmond <[email protected] > wrote:
- Phyllis, Mara, List,
- The position I assume you're alluding to, Phyllis, is Peirce's Extreme Scholastic Realism, the reality of possibles and would-bes. Indeed, agapasm, as outlined, for example, in "Evolutionary Love," is a strictly evolutionary theory.
- Speaking here of Lamarckian evolution (also beginning to come back into fashion, although, of course, necessarily revised in the of decades of research since Peirce reflected on it), Peirce comments on the "double part" which habit plays in evolution,and how Lamarckian evolution in Peirce's understanding "coincides with the general description of the action of love":
- . . . Habit is mere inertia, a resting on one's oars, not a propulsion. Now it is energetic projaculation . . .by which in the typical instances of Lamarckian evolution the new elements of form are first created. Habit, however, forces them to take practical shapes, compatible with the structures they affect, and, in the form of heredity and otherwise, gradually replaces the spontaneous energy that sustains them. Thus, habit plays a double part; it serves to establish the new features, and also to bring them into harmony with the general morphology and function of the animals and plants to which they belong. But if the reader will now kindly give himself the trouble of turning back a page or two, he will see that this account of Lamarckian evolution coincides with the general description of the action of love. . . (CP 6.300, EP1:360).
- In Peirce's view the cosmos itself is evolving as you noted, Phyllis, apropos of the evolution of natural laws, while the 'last frontier' of evolution is the evolution of consciousness, of mind itself (recalling that in Peirce's synechastic philosophy matter is really mind). I'm quoting the following passage at some length (but with a few ellipses and broken up into shorter paragraphs for readability) because it seems to me a kind of précis of Peirce's views on evolution as it relates to the growth of learning (and, indirectly, to the evolution of consciousness). Philosophers, especially, should take note of the final segment below.
- Remembering that all matter is really mind, remembering, too, the continuity of mind, let us ask what aspect Lamarckian evolution takes on within the domain of consciousness. Direct endeavor can achieve almost nothing. It is as easy by taking thought to add a cubit to one's stature as it is to produce an idea acceptable to any of the Muses by merely straining for it before it is ready to come. . . .
- Besides this inward process, there is the operation of the environment, which goes to break up habits destined to be broken up and so to render the mind lively. Everybody knows that the long continuance of a routine of habit makes us lethargic, while a succession of surprises wonderfully brightens the ideas. Where there is a motion, where history is a-making, there is the focus of mental activity . . . Few psychologists have perceived how fundamental a fact this is. A portion of mind, abundantly commissured to other portions, works almost mechanically. It sinks to a condition of a railway junction. But a portion of mind almost isolated, a spiritual peninsula, or cul-de-sac, is like a railway terminus. Now mental commissures are habits. Where they abound, originality is not needed and is not found; but where they are in defect spontaneity is set free. Thus, the first step in the Lamarckian evolution of mind is the putting of sundry thoughts into situations in which they are free to play.
- As to growth by exercise, I have already shown, in discussing "Man's Glassy Essence," . . . . what its modus operandi must be conceived to be . . .. Namely, it consists of the flying asunder of molecules, and the reparation of the parts by new matter. It is, thus, a sort of reproduction. It takes place only during exercise, because the activity of protoplasm consists in the molecular disturbance which is its necessary condition.
- Growth by exercise takes place also in the mind. Indeed, that is what it is to learn. But the most perfect illustration is the development of a philosophical idea by being put into practice. The conception which appeared, at first, as unitary splits up into special cases; and into each of these new thought must enter to make a practicable idea. This new thought, however, follows pretty closely the model of the parent conception; and thus a homogeneous development takes place. The parallel between this and the course of molecular occurrences is apparent. Patient attention will be able to trace all these elements in the transaction called learning (CP 6.301, EP1:361).
- Best,
- Gary R.
- Gary Richmond
- Philosophy and Critical Thinking
- Communication Studies
- LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
- On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 4:12 PM, Phyllis Chiasson <[email protected]> wrote:
- Mara, Gary, List,
- Or could it be both? Peirce identifed pure chance as a real and operable element of reality. If chance is real, as however small an element of reality, then the idea that laws (and even the universe itself) evolve would be real as well. There must be a Peircean (non-nominalistic) way of stating that, especially now that new cosmological discoveries are suggesting he is correct about laws of nature evolving.
- Of course it is not our naming them that makes them real, but pure chance does imply something ocurring/coming to exist that never was before. For example, maybe it was pure abductive-like chance that a 3M chemist thought to use a failed & worthless non- super glue on scraps of paper, to mark pages in his choir book? The potential usefulness of the USELESS glue evolved right out of the "discovery" that the hoped for super glue didn't work. I don't know how I'd ever keep things straight in my mind these days without Post It Notes. Were they only real after they were invented and named? Or was the potential for their reality inherent all along--even BEFORE that glue failure?
- Regards,
- Phyllis
- Gary Richmond <[email protected] > wrote:
- Mara, list,
- Sorry that it's taken a while to get back to your stimulating first post for this chapter, Mara, but personal matters took over, and some are still with me. So, just a few interleaved comments for now, all probably needed further reflection. You wrote:
- MW: According to [Peirce's] view, the real is that which persists and therefore that which affords induction. However, couldn't another interpretation be that explanation is a type of regularity-making about the dynamic, ever-changing qualities of the universe? After all, the concept of a final belief can imply a static or discrete sign attempting to represent a dynamic or continuous process.
- If I understand you correctly, it seems to me that what you offer as an alternative to Peirce's view of the real as persisting and so affording induction--namely, that "explanation" itself might be seen as "a type of regularity-making" about a fluid universe-- represents a version of the sort of nominalistic thinking Peirce sought to debunk since it reduces the truth of any reality to that "explanation" and so is a kind of a priorism. On the other hand, many a postmodernist does seem to hold that alternative position and, so, there are many divergent opinions, although "schools" of them.
- As for the concept of a final belief possibly implying a static representation of a dynamic universal process, I would say that by a "final belief" Peirce means merely a "regulative principle," the intellectual hope that, given continuity/synechism, we may come to know the truth of reality of many a thing we may inquire into. But the approach is ever asymptotic. You concluded:
- MW: Also presumably, just as the object has to be independent, the community of inquirers must have empirical and/or logical access to the object, otherwise no shared belief can come out of it. Can rational conduct simply mean the opinion or definition about the isolated concept? Or does it require that the concept fit into a more general theory of how the concept is related to other concepts?
- Good question. Again, I would appeal to Peirce's synechism to say that any final belief that is true will be really related to other true beliefs.
- Best,
- Gary R.
- Gary Richmond
- Philosophy and Critical Thinking
- Communication Studies
- LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
- On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 5:48 PM, Mara Woods <[email protected]> wrote:
- List,
- Welcome to the slow read, emceed by Mara Woods and Ben Udell, of Chapter 8, "Truth and reality" in Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed by Cornelis de Waal.
- Let's get started with this introduction provided by Ben Udell:
- Kees begins the chapter with an excellent summary of Peirce's views on the scope of metaphysics, its place in philosophy, its status as a science, and its being the first science for which (philosophical) logic supplies principles outside of logic itself.
- As Kees points out, much of his metaphysics consists in drawing implications of logic and pragmatism for reality and the universe. In the course of this book, metaphysics' coming after logic and, in that sense, after epistemology, seems so natural that one needs to stop and note that this comes as a surprise to many readers these days, any number of whom may think that metaphysics, or at least ontology, is more basic than logic and mathematics too, or at least is not in some common structure with those subjects and is not in some ordering involving them. We may want to keep an eye on these aspects of Peirce that many of his readers take for granted but which many others do not, especially as we come to the discussion of nominalism versus realism.
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Below I address some of the questions that arose from my reading of the first sections of the chapter.
- Kees characterizes Peirce's view of metaphysics as the work that generalizes the experiences of or engagement with the universe. Human intuitions and instincts about the universe developed from our species' practical dealings with that universe in our environment. Getting a general sense of the universe that extends beyond our species' habitual niche into the continually-being-discovered realms by the special sciences involves inducing generals in that universe that explain the variety perceived in particulars. Is this introduction of logic into our conceptions of the universe really justified here by the assumption that the universe can be explained? Is the assumption that the universe is regular enough to afford explanation? Or is it simply an affirmation of the power of the combination of instinct, intuition, logic, mathematics, and phaneroscopy to create explanatory patterns out of randomness?
- These two assumptions -- that the universe can be subject to general explanation and that the universe consists in great variety -- seem to foreshadow Peirce's dynamic cosmology of change and habit-taking as basic components of the universe.
- Kees points out that the purpose of metaphysics, according to Peirce, is to develop a general account that can form the basis of the special sciences. Indeed, without this step, scientists rely on their own crude metaphysics, presumably based on instinctive or intuitive notions. He divides metaphysics into three categories: general metaphysics, or questions regarding reality; physical metaphysics, or questions regarding time, space, natural laws, etc.; and psychical metaphysics, or questions regarding God and mind. Chapter 8 is devoted to the first category, also called ontology, and addresses first the issues of truth and reality.
- According to Kees, the concept of truth is derived from the concept of reality: a statement is true when its immediate object is real. Reality consists in anything that is independent of what we might call interim thoughts about it. That is, it is not what a particular person or group of people think about it now that matters, but what the indefinite community of inquirers would finally think about it. The real's independence from individual thought is what enables the inquirers to eventually have a shared opinion about it.
- If we apply the related concepts of reality and truth to the original metaphysical assumptions, then the regularities the indefinite community of inquirers would find to be general to our experiences with the universe are to be considered real and statements that express those regularities would be true. According to this view, the real is that which persists and therefore that which affords induction. However, couldn't another interpretation be that explanation is a type of regularity-making about the dynamic, ever-changing qualities of the universe? After all, the concept of a final belief can imply a static or discrete sign attempting to represent a dynamic or continuous process. (I'd like to discuss the nature of the sign and its final interpretant in a later post).
- Kees, and Peirce, gets to the connection of reality to being the object of final beliefs (final interpretant) by applying the pragmatic maxim to get "reality" to the 3rd grade of clarity (129). Since Peirce limited the pragmatic maxim to intellectual concepts only (115) and "the only intellectual effect such objects can have upon us, Peirce claims, is to produce belief" (de Waal 130), only the (immediate) objects of final beliefs are real. It seems that the import of the intellectual effect of intellectual concepts comes from the pragmatic maxim itself, by which only the consequences for rational conduct is considered (116). Is that because only the habits of which a person is conscious of, agrees with the consequences of, and intentionally maintains are rightly considered beliefs? Or is it because the pragmatic maxim can only be practically applied to those consequences of the acceptance of the maxim to rational conduct that can be foreseen (and therefore are based on known habits)?
- Kees seems to jump a few steps in the reasoning here, but presumably because the whole conception of all practical consequences of a belief must include what the indefinite community settles on, that aspect of the belief must be included in its definition. Also presumably, just as the object has to be independent, the community of inquirers must have empirical and/or logical access to the object, otherwise no shared belief can come out of it. Can rational conduct simply mean the opinion or definition about the isolated concept? Or does it require that the concept fit into a more general theory of how the concept is related to other concepts?
- Mara Woods
- M.A., Semiotics -- University of Tartu
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