Gary,
This "knee-jerk view" of logic and thought is one of many places where Peirce makes interesting
suggestions worth pursuing but where the pursuit almost immediately runs into a host of problems.
These issues have been discussed, here and elsewhere, many times before, and I cannot begin to sum
it all up at this time, but here is one hint from a modern fore-runner with a deep knowledge of
Peirce's work and its potential applications to AI, cognitive science, and neuroscience:
http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2013/11/15/what-weve-got-here-is-a-failure-to-communicate-6/
Excerpt from Warren S. McCulloch,
“What Is a Number, that a Man May Know It, and a Man, that He May Know a
Number?” (1960)
<quote>
Please remember that we are not now concerned with the physics and chemistry, the anatomy and
physiology, of man. They are my daily business. They do not contribute to the logic of our problem.
Despite Ramon Lull’s combinatorial analysis of logic and all of his followers, including Leibniz
with his universal characteristic and his persistent effort to build logical computing machines,
from the death of William of Ockham logic decayed. There were, of course, teachers of logic. The
forms of the syllogism and the logic of classes were taught, and we shall use some of their devices,
but there was a general recognition of their inadequacy to the problems in hand. […] The difficulty
is that they had no knowledge of the logic of relations, and almost none of the logic of
propositions. These logics really began in the latter part of the last century with Charles Peirce
as their great pioneer. As with most pioneers, many of the trails he blazed were not followed for a
score of years. For example, he discovered the amphecks — that is, “not both … and …” and “neither …
nor …”, which Sheffer rediscovered and are called by his name for them, “stroke functions”.
It was Peirce who broke the ice with his logic of relatives, from which springs the pitiful
beginnings of our logic of relations of two and more than two arguments. So completely had the
traditional Aristotelian logic been lost that Peirce remarks that when he wrote the Century
Dictionary he was so confused concerning abduction, or apagoge, and induction that he wrote
nonsense. Thus Aristotelian logic, like the skeleton of Tom Paine, was lost to us from the world it
had engendered. Peirce had to go back to Duns Scotus to start again the realistic logic of science.
Pragmatism took hold, despite its misinterpretation by William James. The world was ripe for it.
Frege, Peano, Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, followed by a host of lesser lights, but sparked by
many a strange character like Schroeder, Sheffer, Gödel, and company, gave us a working logic of
propositions. By the time I had sunk my teeth into these questions, the Polish school was well on
its way to glory.
In 1923 I gave up the attempt to write a logic of transitive verbs and began to see what I could do
with the logic of propositions. My object, as a psychologist, was to invent a kind of least psychic
event, or “psychon”, that would have the following properties: First, it was to be so simple an
event that it either happened or else it did not happen. Second, it was to happen only if its bound
cause had happened — shades of Duns Scotus! — that is, it was to imply its temporal antecedent.
Third, it was to propose this to subsequent psychons. Fourth, these were to be compounded to produce
the equivalents of more complicated propositions concerning their antecedents.
In 1929 it dawned on me that these events might be regarded as the all-or-none impulses of neurons,
combined by convergence upon the next neuron to yield complexes of propositional events. (McCulloch
1965, 7–9).
</quote>
Warren S. McCulloch, “What Is a Number, that a Man May Know It, and a Man, that He May Know a
Number?”, Ninth Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, General Semantics Bulletin, Numbers 26 and 27,
Institute of General Semantics, Lakeville, CT, 1961, pp. 7–18. Reprinted in Embodiments of Mind, MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA, 1965, pp. 1–18. Online.
Regards,
Jon
Gary Fuhrman wrote:
For those who haven't yet obtained the book or read the introduction, I'd
like to present here a quotation from Peirce which shows that long before he
developed the famous ten classes of signs (diagram EP2:296), he was already
thinking (as Frederik put it yesterday) that "the main phenomenon is
reasoning, the chain of arguments - and the whole of the semiotic machinery
is developed to understand the physiology of reasoning - so icons, rhemes,
etc. refer to specific aspects of the chain of reasoning." For Peirce, this
"physiology of reasoning" extends from the formal syllogism all the way down
to the most primitive forms of cognition, and NP p.5-6 quotes this example
from 1883:
The cognition of a rule is not necessarily conscious, but is of the nature
of a habit, acquired or congenital. The cognition of a case is of the
general nature of a sensation; that is to say, it is something which comes
up into present consciousness. The cognition of a result is of the nature of
a decision to act in a particular way on a given occasion. In point of fact,
a syllogism in Barbara virtually takes place when we irritate the foot of a
decapitated frog. The connection between the afferent and efferent nerve,
whatever it may be, constitutes a nervous habit, a rule of action, which is
the physiological analogue of the major premiss. The disturbance of the
ganglionic equilibrium, owing to the irritation, is the physiological form
of that which, psychologically considered, is a sensation; and, logically
considered, is the occurrence of a case. The explosion through the efferent
nerve is the physiological form of that which psychologically is a volition,
and logically the inference of a result. When we pass from the lowest to the
highest forms of inervation, the physiological equivalents escape our
observation; but, psychologically, we still have, first, habit--which in its
highest form is understanding, and which corresponds to the major premiss of
Barbara; we have, second, feeling, or present consciousness, corresponding
to the minor premiss of Barbara; and we have, third, volition, corresponding
to the conclusion of the same mode of syllogism. Although these analogies,
like all very broad generalizations, may seem very fanciful at first sight,
yet the more the reader reflects upon them the more profoundly true I am
confident they will appear. They give a significance to the ancient system
of formal logic which no other can at all share. ("A Theory of Probable
Inference", 1883, 2.711 )
--
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