Thanks, Gary F. I think that one sometimes tends to forget that the
p—>q form means ~q—>~p. We don't get proofs of more general things
directly from these or those particular instances. But disproofs or
weakenings of a general claim can come pretty directly from particulars.
A philosophical theory of categories is borne out in 'less basic' (or
'higher') areas of philosophy, and beyond philosophy in the special
sciences. Consideration of special scientific issues could lead one to
see a need for a change in one's philosophical theory of categories. One
would, and should, try to found that change in general philosophical
considerations, perhaps revise one's general philosophy a bit, even
though one had been led to such changes initially by special-scientific
considerations. One just needs to distinguish the logical dependence
from the research-genealogical dependence. It's helpful if both are on
the record! I've often thought (and used to discuss in my woolier days
at peirce-l) that relativistic insights leading to the light cone
structure should be generalized to philosophy and even to phenomenology.
Just because phenomenologists didn't notice such things
phenomenologically doesn't mean that they ought not to have. Anyway,
fallibilism matters, as you continually say.
Best, Ben
On 9/15/2014 12:21 PM, Gary Fuhrman wrote:
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.
*From: * Benjamin Udell
*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/_.)
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