Thread:
JBD:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/15230
JA:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/15235
SJ:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/15236
JA:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/15237
JA:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/15238
Since it may be tangential to Robert's paper, I split off a separate thread at
this point:
JBD:
One of the things I find particularly interesting about Peirce's approach to these
matters is the priority he gives to aesthetics over ethics and logic in the normative
sciences. The interpretative conjecture that Richard Smyth puts forward in
<Reading Peirce Reading> is that Peirce is coming at the problem of how we
might justify claims about the objectivity of our cognitions concerning what is real
by moving to weaker starting points about what, aesthetically considered, can be
justified as a matter of an intersubjectively valid claim about what is inherently
attractive (e.g., beautiful or sublime). These kinds of judgments are similar in
kind to the those that we make when we claim that something we have observed is
inherently worthy of our attention and seems to call out for some kind of explanation.
Here is another bit I wrote on the normative sciences a few years back:
☞http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Prospects_for_Inquiry_Driven_Systems#1.3.1._Logic.2C_Ethics.2C_Esthetics
1.3.1. Logic, Ethics, Esthetics
The philosophy I find myself converging to more often lately is the pragmatism of C.S.
Peirce and John Dewey. According to this account, logic, ethics, and esthetics form a
concentric series of normative sciences, each a subdiscipline of the next. Logic tells
how one ought to conduct one's reasoning in order to achieve the stated goals of
reasoning in general. Thus logic is a special application of ethics. Ethics tells how one
ought to conduct one's activities in general in order to achieve the good appropriate to
each enterprise. What makes the difference between a normative science and a prescriptive
dogma is whether this "telling" is based on actual inquiry into the
relationship of conduct to result, or not.
In this view, logic and ethics do not set goals, they merely serve them. Of
course, logic may examine the consistency of an arbitrary selection of goals in
the light of what science tells about the likely repercussions in nature of
trying to actualize them all. Logic and ethics may serve the criticism of
certain goals by pointing out the deductive implications and probable effects
of striving toward them, but it has to be some other science which finds and
tells whether these effects are preferred and encouraged or detested and
discouraged relative to a particular form of being.
The science which examines individual goods, species goods, and generic goods
from an outside perspective must be an esthetic science. The capacity for
inquiry into a subject must depend on the capacity for uncertainty about that
subject. Esthetics is capable of inquiry into the nature of the good precisely
because it is able to be in question about what is good. Whether conceived as
empirical science or as experimental art, it is the job of esthetics to
determine what might be good for us. Through the exploration of artistic media
we find out what satisfies our own form of being. Through the expeditions of
science we discover and further the goals of own species' evolution.
Outriggers to these excursions are given by the comparative study of biological species and the computational study of abstractly specified systems. These provide extra ways to find out what is the sensible goal of an individual system and what is the perceived good for a particular species of creature. It is especially interesting to learn about the relationships that can be represented internally to a system's development between the good of a system and the system's perception, knowledge, intuition, feeling, or whatever sense it may have of its goal. This amounts to asking the questions: What good can a system be able to sense for itself? How can a system discover its own best interests? How can a system achieve, from the evidence of experience, a cognizance, evidenced in behavior, of its own best interests?
Regards,
Jon
--
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