Stefan, I haven’t read enough of the authors you cite (except Berger and Luckmann) to answer this question, but I think that position would be an extreme one even among social constructivists. That’s why I refer to Stan’s argument as “radical” social constructivism, because he likes (or feels compelled) to polarize the issue. And Ben was responding in kind (appropriately, I think).
gary f. From: sb [mailto:peirc...@semiotikon.de] Sent: 21-Sep-14 5:41 PM To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:6912] Re: Natural Propositions, Dear Ben, Gary R., Gary F., List wich social constructivists with some reputation do hold the position "that the objects or findings of inquiry are unreal and mere figments"? Schütz, Berger & Luckmann, Piaget, von Foerster, Latour, Bloor or Knorr-Cetina? Foucault, Mannheim or Fleck? I wonder.... Best Stefan Am 21.09.14 23:10, schrieb Gary Richmond: Ben, lists, A most excellent post, and one of the strongest arguments against constructivist epistemology that I've read, having the added virtue of being succinct. Best, Gary Gary Richmond Philosophy and Critical Thinking Communication Studies LaGuardia College of the City University of New York C 745 718 482-5690 On Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 12:28 PM, Benjamin Udell <bud...@nyc.rr.com> wrote: Stan, If you think that five minutes' investigation would likely at best reach a trivial truth about a kind of phenomenon, then substitute 'five days' or 'five months' or 'five decades', etc. The point is the sooner or later, not an incompletable long run. You're simply not distinguishing between truth and opinion. If two traditions arrive at contrary conclusions about the same kind of phenomenon, the normal logical conclusion about the contrarity is that at most one of the conclusions is true and true for sound reasons, at most one is the result of sufficient investigation even though both traditions claim sufficiency. Peirce's semiotics is logic studied in terms of signs. You don't distinguish between sufficiency and claims of sufficiency, truth and claims of truth, and reality and claims of reality. Both traditions' conclusions might be false, results of insufficient investigation. They might both be mixes of truth and falsehood, various inaccuracies, and so on. Simply accepting contrary conclusions as reflecting two "realities" because two traditions arrived at them is a defeatist method of inquiry, a form of 'insuccessibilism'. Imagine the swelling mischief if courts treated widely discrepant testimony from various witnesses as reflecting different "realities" rather than different perspectives or mistaken or differently limited observations or memories, or lack of honesty or candor, and so on. Imagine being an accused defendant in such a court, with one's money, career, freedom, life, hanging in the balance. Waiting for the conflicting traditions to resolve their conflicts and hoping that their resultant conclusion will be the truth, is a method of inquiry of last resort, that to which a pure spectator is confined. To go further and _define_ truth as the conclusion of any actual tradition or actual dialogue among actual traditions, underlies the method of authority, a form of infallibilism. If two traditions don't resolve their argument and if you for your part have no way to investigate the question itself and arrive at a conclusion about the subject of their argument, then your normal logical conclusion would be that you won't know the answer to the question, not that there are conflicting true answers to the question. I disbelieve that you ever did physics in either way. I don't see why you'd want to impose such weak methods on philosophy, or have a semiotics in which contrary signs about the same object merely reflect different "realities"; such would turn logic and semiotics into mush. Peirce's theory of inquiry, which seems to reflect the attitude of scientific research, does not boil down to 'poll the experts' or 'poll the traditions', instead it boils down to 'do the science,' by a method actively motivated and shaped by the idea of putting into practice the fallibilist recognition that inquiry can go wrong (because the real is independent of actual opinion) and the 'successibilist' recognition that inquiry can go right (because the real is the cognizable). To argue about this, as you do, is to presuppose that there is a truth about this very matter under discussion, a truth that can be found and can be missed. Best, Ben On 9/20/2014 3:46 PM, Stanley N Salthe wrote: Ben -- Replying to: The main idea is not that of a long run. Instead the idea is that of sufficient investigation. Call it 'sufficiently long' or 'sufficiently far-reaching' or 'sufficiently deep' or 'sufficiently good' or 'sufficiently good for long enough', or the like, it's stlll the same basic idea. S: Then two different traditions might come up with differently sufficient understandings about one object. I accept that, and it implies nominalism. Sufficiency might be quite different for different traditions. If in a given case you believe that you've reached the truth about a given kind of phenomenon after five minutes of investigation, then you believe that you have reached, after five minutes, the opinion that anybody sufficiently investigating, over whatever length of time, would reach about that kind of phenomenon. It's far from automatically preposterous to believe that. S: But, I think, pretty 'shallow' and unsophisticated. There is no absolute assurance that actual inquiry on a given question will not go wrong for millions of years, remaining insufficient for millions of years and leaving the actual inquirers not only ignorant but also erroneous all along the way. S: OK if the knowledge in question is not important to survival! But fallibilism implies not that the objects or findings of inquiry are unreal and mere figments, but only that they may be unreal and figments, insofar as the real does not depend on what any actual inquirers think of it. S: My position is that 'the real' either is not one thing, or that there might be several different traditions about it based on different approaches and knowledges. On the other hand, do you really believe that there are no cases where we've reached truths about general characters of things, done good statistical studies on the distributions of such characters, and so on? S: I would not think NO cases, but, given different language traditions surviving simultaneously, the world will be constructed by each via different models. So, given the learned fact one one must not tease certain snakes, different traditions will construct different mythologies about this. Our own tradition, involving concepts of evolution and chemistry is particularly elaborate, requiring a highly educated priesthood to come up with an -- or even more than one -- understanding. STAN On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 2:31 PM, Benjamin Udell <bud...@nyc.rr.com> wrote: Stan, list, The main idea is not that of a long run. Instead the idea is that of sufficient investigation. Call it 'sufficiently long' or 'sufficiently far-reaching' or 'sufficiently deep' or 'sufficiently good' or 'sufficiently good for long enough', or the like, it's stlll the same basic idea. If in a given case you believe that you've reached the truth about a given kind of phenomenon after five minutes of investigation, then you believe that you have reached, after five minutes, the opinion that anybody sufficiently investigating, over whatever length of time, would reach about that kind of phenomenon. It's far from automatically preposterous to believe that. There is no absolute assurance that actual inquiry on a given question will not go wrong for millions of years, remaining insufficient for millions of years and leaving the actual inquirers not only ignorant but also erroneous all along the way. But fallibilism implies not that the objects or findings of inquiry are unreal and mere figments, but only that they may be unreal and figments, insofar as the real does not depend on what any actual inquirers think of it. On the other hand, do you really believe that there are no cases where we've reached truths about general characters of things, done good statistical studies on the distributions of such characters, and so on? The idea that we can succeed in inquiry does not drive us to the idea that we can't fail in it. Peirce was both a fallibilist and, to coin a word, a successibilist (he opposed radical skepticism and held that the real is the cognizable). Peirce took these ideas as presuppositions to reasoning in general and shaping scientific method. He regarded such presuppositions as collectively taking on the aspect of hopes which, in practice, we hardly can doubt. Really, one can reasonably believe that sharks have a general character without knowing a great deal about sharks. They would be like other kinds of things where investigation revealed only over time certain definite characters common to members of a kind, some of which characters also distinguish the kind, the characters together parts of a complex character called the general nature of the kind. Best, Ben On 9/20/2014 10:03 AM, Stanley N Salthe wrote: Ben -- You asserted >But "real" in a Peircean context just means capable of being objectively >investigated such that various intelligences would converge sooner or later, >but still inevitably, on the same conclusions, rather than on some set of >mutually incompatible conclusions. Regarding suppositions about actual phenomena -- like, say, the nature of sharks -- since 'the long run' is NOT now, how can we know which version from different cultures is 'real'? This is the basic reason one must be a nominalist. STAN On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 10:31 PM, Benjamin Udell wrote: Howard, lists, Epistemologies are not claims about special concrete phenomena in the sense that they and their deductively implied conclusions would be directly testable for falsity by special concrete experiments or experiences. That's also true of principles of statistics and of statistical inference, yet such principles are not generally regarded as requiring a leap of faith. Mathematics is also not directly testable by special concrete experiments, yet mathematics, whether as theory or language, is not generally regarded as requiring a leap of faith. What mathematics requires is leaps of transformational imagination in honoring agreements (hypothetical assumptions) as binding. Two dots in the imagination are as good an example of two things as any two physical objects - better, even, since more amenable for mathematical study. Some sets of mathematical assumptions are nontrivial and lead inexorably, deductively, to nontrivial conclusions which compel the reasoner. If you think that mathematics is _merely _ symbols, still that's to admit that mathematical symbols form structures that, by their transformabilities, model possibilities. Contrary to your claim, physical laws are not physical forces and do not depend like forces on time and rates. Instead physical laws _are _ those dependences on time and rates and are expressed mathematically, which is to say that some mathematics is instantiated in the actual, although you think that mathematical limit ideas of absolute continuity and absolute discreteness should be instantiated like photons, rocks, trees, or Socrates in order for mathematics to be real. But "real" in a Peircean context just means capable of being objectively investigated such that various intelligences would converge sooner or later, but still inevitably, on the same conclusions, rather than on some set of mutually incompatible conclusions. You think that some sort of dynamicism is a safer and more skeptical bet than realism about generals and modalities. But the idea that varied intelligences will not tend toward agreement about mathematical conclusions is no safe bet. So the question is, again, do you think that numbers can be objectively investigated as numbers? - such that (individually, biologically, etc.) various intelligences, proceeding from the same assumptions, would reach the same conclusions. If you do think so, then you are a nominalist or anti-realist in name only. One man, two votes, for Dominic Frontiere Rigid bodies, and incompletely but sufficiently rigid bodies, although able to go through transformations that leave them, e.g., rotated 180 degrees, and so on, still cannot change their chirality or handedness in that manner (except in an eldritch elder Outer Limits episode). Opposite-handed but otherwise equivalent objects conform to the mathematics of their mirror-style equivalence as inexorably as a dynamic process follows dynamic laws. Phenomenologically, forces are like sheriffs enforcing the physical laws. Yet there are mathematical rules that physical phenomena respect without forces pushing one around when one attempts to defy them, such as the lack of a non-deformative continuous transformation into a chiral opposite. Sometimes mathematics rules by 'smart power'. The idea that mathematics' real end is to help physics, with which your wording suggests agreement, was put forth by some positivists, one of whom went so far as to say that mathematicians who thought themselves to have some other or broader purpose should discount their subjective feelings about it as merely illusory and due to their choice of profession. I could go on, but the question is, do you think that numbers can be objectively investigated as numbers? If so, then you are a nominalist or anti-realist in name only, and a realist in the Peircean sense. If not, then you do not believe that there is a reliable mathematical expression of physical phenomena. Best, Ben On 9/18/2014 11:42 PM, Howard Pattee wrote: At 10:39 AM 9/18/2014, Benjamin wrote: Only humans (at least here on Earth) do sociology, psychology, biology, chemistry, or physics. I have no evidence that elementary nature does even simple physics, or even wears a lab coat. HP: I agree. These are all fields in which humans make models of their experiences. They may agree on their models but still disagree on different epistemologies, realism, nominalism, eliminative materialism, and so on. These epistemologies are interpretations of their models with respect to what they believe exists or what they believe is real. Epistemologies are not empirically decidable, e.g., not falsifiable. True belief in any epistemology requires a leap of faith. There are degrees of faith, skepticism being at the low end. In my own view as a physicist, nominalism requires a much safer leap of faith than realism. However, I often think realistically. I see no harm in it as long as I don't see it as the one true belief. BU: Being alive, instantiating life, is far from enough to do biology. Instantiating mathematical structure is far from enough to do mathematics. HP: Again, I agree. That does not mean that "doing math" is the same as "doing physics". Mathematics is the best language that we use to describe physical laws. There is an inexorability in physical laws that does not exist in the great variety of mathematical concepts and rules. > [HP] No one has discovered a point or a triangle or a number, the infinite or > the infinitesimal, in Nature BU: In your sense, nobody has discovered a physical law in nature either. Rules, constraints, norms, distributions, etc., are not animals, vegetables, minerals, or particles. Therefore by your standards they are not real. HP: Here I disagree. You are not distinguishing mathematical rules from physical laws . Mathematics provides the most exact symbolic language in which the laws are described. Symbolic rules are not like physical material forces. Specifically, laws are inexorably time and rate-dependent. Logic and mathematics do not involve time and rates. That is why I say that "only humans do mathematics" (manipulate symbols), which they do at their own rates. Humans cannot "do forces and laws". Forces act at the lawful rates whether we like it or not. By saying that X is "real," Peirce means that X is objectively investigable as X. You won't use the word "real" in that way. HP: I do not understand. What I call real depends only on my epistemic assumptions, and I am not at all sure that defining "real" is important to have a good model. What we need to understand is what Wigner called the "unreasonable effectiveness" of our mathematics in describing laws. There is no good reason for this effectiveness. Wigner quotes Peirce: " . . . and it is probable that there is some secret here which remains to be discovered." 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)] 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"]. Howard
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