Ben, Jeff D., lists,
That’s a good point, Ben, reminiscent of Peirce’s comment that “Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premisses which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected” (EP1:29). It also reminds me of Susan Haack’s crossword puzzle analogy: mutual reinforcement of solutions can be read as evidence for their correctness. gary f. From: Benjamin Udell [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 15-Sep-14 11:24 AM To: [email protected]; 'Peirce List' Subject: [biosemiotics:6839] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2 Jeff D., Gary F., lists, I seem to be recalling the neo-Scholastic de Wulf a lot lately, I don't know why, I didn't read him that much. Anyway, at some point he wrote of biology as "passing over" individual differences in order to understand species and so on. And I thought, that's not it at all. In Chapter 2, Paragraph 2 of the _The Origin of Species_ (I think I read up through Chapter 3 many years ago), Darwin wrote "It should be remembered that systematists are far from pleased at finding variability in important characters, and that there are not many men who will laboriously examine internal and important organs, and compare them in many specimens of the same species." http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/chapter-02.html When Peirce said that his effort required the "utter abandonment of all bias," he seems to have meant especially the possible bias that he might have had as somebody deeply versed in logic and in Kant. In order to avoid such bias, he tried to "to solve the puzzle in a direct speculative, a physical, a historical, and a psychological manner". In order to avoid bias by a particular one of those manners, he studied them all. His conclusion in the 1860s was, to attack the problem of the categories as Kant did, from the side of formal logic. I agree that this implies that he believed that any of the other manners of _solving_ the problem, especially any taken singly, tends toward prejudicing one's answer to the question. However this conclusion ought to be quite separated from a conclusion, which I don't seem him drawing, that _looking into_ direct speculations, physics, history, and psychology in order to learn about categoriality involves an excessive risk of prejudicing one's answer to the question. Indeed, Peirce never stops looking for categorial patterns in many fields including the special sciences. In later years, in one of the many passages that I failed to make a note of, he says that the inductive corroboration of his categorial views comes from continued fruitfulness of application in many subject matters. Indeed, his early categorial explorations of those fields may have helped him generalize back to logic, and later to phaneroscopy. (He came to regard philosophy as consisting of "so-called" logical analysis (intellectual autobiography, 1904, Ketner editor), and to regarding such logical analysis as really being phaneroscopic analysis (Peirce to James, 1909, CP 8.305); obviously by "logical analysis" in that context Peirce did not mean the study of logic _per se_.) Best, Ben
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