Dear Tommi, lists,
Regarding Peirce's uncertainty about the ordering of physical vs.
psychical sciences, I should provide a quote because he doesn't express
his uncertainty in the other sources that I provided. In his 1904 draft
intellectual autobiography (L 107 and MS 914, in Ketner 2009
http://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783050047331/9783050047331.35/9783050047331.35.xml
), Peirce wrote:
[....] Idioscopy is occupied with the discovery and examination of
phenomena, aided by mathematics and philosophy. It is extremely
doubtful which of its two wings should be placed first. [....] [End
quote]
I seem to remember Peirce's saying somewhere that it might not make much
difference, but I haven't been able to find the quote. Anyway, in the
1902 Carnegie application, Peirce put psychical sciences before physical
sciences
http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/l75/ver1/l75v1-02.htm
<http://www.iupui.edu/%7Earisbe/menu/library/bycsp/l75/ver1/l75v1-02.htm> ,
then in the 1903 "Syllabus" classification he put the physical sciences
first
http://web.archive.org/web/20111105121054/http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/peirce/cl_o_sci_03.htm
<http://web.archive.org/web/20111105121054/http://www.princeton.edu/%7Ebatke/peirce/cl_o_sci_03.htm>
.
He did not show such uncertainty in putting religious, or psychical,
metaphysics before physical metaphysics, although he did note in the
1903 classification that the two fields at that time regarded each other
with "supreme contempt."
While, as you said, Peirce sought to classify the sciences as researches
pursued by groups of actual living people, he did find his kind of
trichotomy popping up often enough, particularly when the divisions that
he found in their actual activity turned out to be more logical than
genealogical. The physical-psychical distinction is the most obvious
case where he refuses to impose trichotomy where he doesn't find it in
the facts. The physical-psychical distinction is, for him, the
distinction between efficient causation and final causation. In his
physical metaphysics, he argues for three operative principles in the
cosmos - spontaneity a.k.a. absolute chance (tyche), which is First,
mechanical necessity (anance), which is Second, and creative love
(agape), which is Third, and three corresponding modes of evolution -
tychasm, anancasm, and agapasm. But he finds corresponding divisions of
the special sciences corresponding only to anance and agape. In his
refinement (in Kaina Stoicheia) of Aristotle's four causes, he basically
sees the efficient and material causes as, respectively, external and
internal Seconds, and the final and formal causes as, respectively,
external and internal Thirds. Tyche, chance, does not appear there;
Aristotle himself likewise did not include chance (spontaneity) among
the four causes, and, in a sense, absolute chance is not a cause - the
sense that what happens by spontaneity happens without cause, or without
definite cause at least. Still, if there were a third division of
idioscopy, one for tyche and tychasm, what would it be? The following
quote is suggestive and a bit surprising. "The First Rule of Logic"
Lecture 1 of 1898:
[End of CP 5.586]
The instincts connected with the need of nutrition have furnished
all animals with some virtual knowledge of space and of force, and
made them applied physicists. The instincts connected with sexual
reproduction have furnished all animals at all like ourselves with
some virtual comprehension of the minds of other animals of their
kind, so that they are applied psychists. Now not only our
accomplished science, but even our scientific questions have been
pretty exclusively limited to the development of those two branches
of natural knowledge. There may for aught we know be a thousand
other kinds of relationship which have as much to do with connecting
phenomena and leading from one to another, as dynamical and social
relationships have. Astrology, magic, ghosts, prophecies, serve as
suggestions of what such relationships might be.
[End quote]
Note that this was well after his 1887 "Criticism on Phantasms of the
Living" in which he criticized the paranormalist work of Gurney, Myers,
and Podmore.
Best, Ben
On 12/8/2014 5:09 AM, Tommi Vehkavaara wrote:
Dear Howard, Stan, Ben, Garys and others
For me, the understanding of the reasons and principles of Peirce's
classification of sciences has been the major key that has organized
Peirce's philosophy as more understandable than just confusing.
First, to Stan, the hierarchy, physics - chemistry - biology -
sociology, is Comte's one, but from him Peirce adopted the principle
of ordering, not the order itself. As Ben already noted, physical
sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) and psychical (e.g. sociology)
are not ordered by Peirce linearly but they form two branches of
special sciences.
Secondly, I am not sure whether Peirce's hierarchy is a subsumption
hierarchy, namely, though the principle of ordering is according to
abstractness of the objects of inquiry, what are classified are
individual inquiries that consitute the disciplines (i.e. sciences are
not the collections of theories or doctrines), so perhaps the
hierarchy should rather be seen as a control hierarchy instead?
Then to Howard, although it may seem to be, I would say that Peirce's
classification of sciences does not give any foundational hierarchy,
or at least it should not interpreted as such - the thorough-going
anti-foundationalism is one of the major basis of criticism against
Cartesian, classical empiricist, Kantian, Hegelian, and classical
positivist (e.g. Comte, Spencer, Mach) thinking. As far as I can see,
for Peirce (as for other classical pragmatists too) no logical or
metaphysical (nor phaneroscopical) foundation for a science is needed
- successful inquiries in any special sciences can be made (and in
fact /are / made) relying on scientists intuitive and culturally
inherited /logica utens / and metaphysics (perhaps we could talk about
/metaphysica utens/ as well). But if the results of an inquiry are not
expected or do not increase our knowledge enough, the reason may be in
inaccurate basic metaphysics (too rich or too limited) or in some
logical fallacy in the making of the inquiry as well as in the
specific theory, observations, and experiments peculiar to that
inquiry. As a summary I would see special sciences to be mainly
meta-level dependent on Peirce's Philosophical sciences, i.e. making
of an inquiry is a logical (normative) process, that mere
psychological descriptions (or speculations about the brain processes
behind) cannot sufficiently describe.
Moreover, Peirce emphasized also that his classification of sciences
is not meant to be a logical hierarchy, but the description of
sciences at their current state and therefore it is historically
changing - Peirce valued both Hegel's Encyclopedie and Comte's as
approximately correct at their time but but terribly outdated about at
the turn of the century - it would be expectable that some parts of
Peirce's classifiacation are similarly outdated in our days, e.g. when
it comes to subclasses of mathematics and of psychical sciences
(espec. the place of introspective psychology).
Yours,
Tommi
At 20:59 12/7/2014, Howard Pattee wrote:
SS: If we understand the meaning of the Spencer-Comte-Peirce
hierarchy (a subsumptive hierarchy)
{physics {chemistry {biology {sociology}}}} I think it is impossible
to be unpersuaded by it!
HP: I was not talking about subsumptive hierarchies, but the Peircean
claim that logic/semiotics is "higher" than science. I think this
means that you should begin all your models with logic/semiotics. It
claims that logic is the foundational on which all other models, like
science, must rest.
Penrose's three-world model says that there is no such logical
hierarchy. Rather there are three irreducible foundations with an
illogical nontransitivity. The brain is a subset of the physical
world. The world of abstract mathematical forms is a subset of the
brain's models. The physical world is a subset of the world of
mathematical models.
http://unlocktao.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/penrose-worlds2.png
<http://unlocktao.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/penrose-worlds2.png>
Logic cannot be the foundation of an illogical model. (Neither can
classical logic be the foundation of Quantum mechanics.)
*******************************************************************
"Cousins to the ameba that we are, how could we know for certain?"
- Donald T. Campbell
*******************************************************************
University of Tampere
School of Social Sciences and Humanities - Philosophy
Tommi Vehkavaara
FI-33014 University of Tampere
Finland
Phone: +358-50-3186122 (work), +358-45-2056109 (home)
e-mail: [email protected]
homepage: http://people.uta.fi/~attove
https://uta-fi.academia.edu/TommiVehkavaara
*******************************************************************
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