Thread:
HP:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14168
JA:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14169
HP:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14177
Howard,
I was responding to your assertion that Peirce agreed with Hertz's epistemology.
The snippets you cite all echo one version or another of the
so-called "correspondence theory of truth", also known as the
"mirror of nature theory of science" because it assumes a purely
dyadic form of correspondence: analogies, diagrams, morphisms, etc.
The correspondence theory is naturally everyone's first theory of truth,
but not all reflectors on the mirror theory stop with that as their next
best guess. It was roundly criticized by some of the Ancients, by Kant,
and even though he took it as a useful first stepping stone, by Peirce.
As reflected in the images and metaphors you invoke, the correspondence theory
of truth leads to a very Cartesian view of things, a very Saussurean take on the
use of signs, and it issues in all the false problems of "symbol grounding" that
so bedevil some corners and cul-de-sacs of the cognitive cottage industries.
That "alien world" is no alien void, it is a plenum that we live our lives in
and play our parts in. The whole modifies the part that we are and the part
that we are modifies the whole. Many of those modifications, inside our skins
and out, amount to models and theories that we use to understand a part of what
is going on. The business of signs and inquiry is not mirrorly a reflection of
the whole but a form of participation in the world that leads to understanding.
Regards,
Jon
HP:Peirce, as a chemist (1887) also agreed with Hertz's epistemology (1884):
"The result that the chemist observes is brought about by nature
[Hertz: “the image of the consequents of nature”]; the result that
the mathematician observes is brought about by the associations of
the mind. [Hertz: “consequents of images in the mind”] ... the power
that connects the conditions of the mathematicians diagram with the
relations he observes in it is just as occult and mysterious to us
as the power of Nature that brings about the results of the chemical
experiment." [W:6, 37, Letter to Noble on the Nature of Reasoning,
May 28, 1987. (1897)]
HP: Hertz: "As a matter of fact, we do not know, nor have we any means
of knowing, whether our conception of things are in conformity with
them in any other than this one fundamental respect [Peirce's "power
that connects"].
JA: Peirce, unlike Hertz, did not stop at a correspondence theory of truth.
And that has made all the difference.
HP: Hertz also did not stop thinking about the correspondence,
or what physics now calls the epistemic cut.
HP, quoting HH:
| Outside consciousness there lies the cold and alien world
| of actual things. Between the two stretches the narrow
| borderland of the senses. No communication between the
| two worlds is possible except across this narrow strip.
| For a proper understanding of ourselves and the world
| it is of the utmost importance that this borderland
| be explored.
|
| [Keynote address,Imperial Palace, Berlin, 1891]
HP: Peirce has certainly explored this borderland,
but I am still not clear what "has made all the
difference." Phaneroscopy is on only one side
of the border and doesn't get us across the
narrow strip.
--
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