Succinct, clear and beautifully outlined. Thanks, Gary F.
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
From: Gary Fuhrman
To: [email protected] ; 'Peirce List'
Sent: Sunday, September 14, 2014 12:38 PM
Subject: [PEIRCE-L] RE: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
Lists,
I'd like to introduce here a couple of comments on Chapter 2 of NP
(specifically, on the beginning of 2.5), but I'd also like to note that much of
the valuable conversation on these issues has been taking place under other
subject lines, and this post is meant to reflect on that previous conversation
as well.
Here are the first three sentences (also the first 3 paragraphs!) of NP 2.5:
NP (p.44): Both Peirce's and Hussel's antipsychologicist semiotics are based
on the observation that even if simple, singular signs exist, most interesting
signs, beyond a certain degree of complexity, are tokens of types, and many of
these, in turn, refer to general objects (Peirce) or ideal objects (Husserl).
A very important rule here is the Frege-Peircean idea that the semiotic
access to generality is made possible by general signs being unsaturated and
schematic: the predicate function "_ is blue", for instance, is general 1)
because referring possibly to all things blue, 2) because of the generality of
the predicate blue, having a schematic granularity allowing for a continuum of
different particular blue shades.[i]
This generality is what makes it possible for the sign to be used with
identical-general-meaning, at the same time as the individual users are free to
adorn their use with a richness of individual mental imagery and associations
(like Ingardenian filling-in during literary reading) without this imagery in
any way constituting meaning-sameness of meaning in language being granted by
successful intersubjective communication, reference, and action.
GF: The first sentence above explains the subtitle of this section, which is
"The Indispensability of the Generality of Signs". But it is not only the signs
employed by science which must have generality, but also the objects of those
signs. Science can say nothing about a unique phenomenon occurring only at a
single point in spacetime, unless it can recognize the event as belonging to a
type of occurrence (in which case it is not unique!).
At this point the old debate between nominalism and realism rears its head.
Peirce frames his usage of the word "thought" this way: "one must not take a
nominalistic view of Thought as if it were something that a man had in his
consciousness. Consciousness may mean any one of the three categories. But if
it is to mean Thought it is more without us than within. It is we that are in
it, rather than it in any of us" (letter to James, Nov. 1902).
Clearly NP follows Peirce in taking a realistic view of "thought"; and from
that point of view, Howard's claim "that logical and mathematical operations
can be observed existing as activites of human brains and brains of lower
animals" is quite unfounded. What scientists can empirically observe (to a very
limited extent!) is the activity going on in brains. They can then hypothesize
about how brains manage to carry out "logical and mathematical operations", but
that is not direct observation of anything "existing", it's an interpretation
based on the assumption that the brain activity is correlated with a process
which we believe to be occurring; and that belief is not based on the
observation of brain activity but on inference from what the 'owner' of that
brain is doing or saying. Realists say that the type of operation (i.e. the
"Thought") is just as real as the empirically observed brain events. Not all
scientists say that, but they all act as if they believed it - otherwise no
type of thought process would be intelligible, or could be an object of
scientific study.
The second sentence/pargraph quoted from NP above adds to this realism the
crucial point that "semiotic access to generality is made possible by general
signs being unsaturated and schematic". The term "unsaturated" here can be
taken as a metaphor from chemistry, related to Peirce's concept of logical
"valency", referring to the 'blank(s)' in a predicate which have not yet been
filled by subject(s), where the number of blanks is an aspect of the schema or
form of the predicate. This is a crucial point in Chapter 3, which we'll be
starting in another week, so I'll just observe here that in NP it links the
"indispensability of generality" with Peirce's doctrine of the Dicisign.
The third sentence/pargraph quoted above implicitly relates these issues to
Peircean pragmaticism, by observing that "sameness of meaning in language" is
"granted by successful intersubjective communication, reference, and action."
As I hope to have showed above, this is just as true for psychologists as it is
for logicians. Science is a communal practice - and that's why it can't be done
by individual brains studying singular phenomena - not unless we assume general
types of phenomena to be as real as their existing tokens, rather than
imaginary or "social constructions".
gary f.
} The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the
easiest person to fool. [Richard P. Feynman] {
www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm }{ gnoxics
From: Frederik Stjernfelt [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 14-Sep-14 7:29 AM
To: [email protected]; Peirce List
Subject: [biosemiotics:6806] Re: Natural Propositions
Dear Howard, lists -
But then neither is the opposite .
Best
F
Den 14/09/2014 kl. 03.51 skrev Howard Pattee <[email protected]>
:
At 04:35 PM 9/13/2014, Frederik wrote:
Dear Stan, lists -
Good. I tend to side with Peirce here - though I would change the wording
slightly: logic exising "outside" of human thought, meaning logic existing
independently of human thought (which is why it may be implemented, to some
degree, outside of human thought) .
HP: Scientists would say that logical and mathematical operations can be
observed existing as activites of human brains and brains of lower animals.
Whether they exist independently in inanimate nature appears to be merely an
irrefutable opinion, based simply on how you choose to define nature andlogic.
That is why for millennia there has been continual undecidable controversy over
the foundation of logic and mathematics.
Siding with Peirce or taking a vote of opinions is not persuasive.
Howard
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