Dear Colleagues,
With some hesitation, may I please call your attention to the extension
of
logic to real phenomena made by Lupasco? In this system, it is not so
much
possibility that is real but probability. It is a way of capturing
tendencies in "material ontology not even captured by standard modal
logic".
As Peirce is quoted as seeing, the predicates implied by certain laws,
regularities, tendencies, patterns do more or less strongly determine
others, but this cannot be logically expressed in any simple way. This
is
correct for any logic that is truth-functional or its mathematical
equivalent. In the Lupasco system it can be expressed as potentiality
evolving to actuality. In the catastrophic limiting case here, the
situation cannot be reversed, but fortunately this is not always the
case
in reality. Some failing marriages restart to work and wives recover
from
the depression induced by their husbands' failure .
Thank you,
Joseph
----Message d'origine----
De : [email protected]
Date : 09/03/2015 - 17:16 (PST)
À : [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Objet : [biosemiotics:8099] bankrupt suicide again
Dear Ben, lists,
I strongly appreciate the persistent work Ben has been doing in tracing
out, over many postings, the implications of Peirce's problems with the
"strange rule". I think Ben is quite correct in locating the ambiguity
in
the quantifier "some", taken to mean sometimes "a certain one",
sometimes
"some - one or several".
But I think there may lie a further reason behind this - linked to Ben's
reinterpretation in terms of modal logic where a necessity operator
distinguishes the two cases otherwise identified by the "strange rule".
When introducing his discussion of the "strange rule" in the April 1906
note, Peirce connects it to a modal observation: " … I soon discovered,
upon a critical analysis, that it was absolutely necessary to insist
upon
and bring to the front, the truth that a mere possibility may be quite
real." Why does he do that, as the bankruptcy-suicide inference is
ordinary first order logic without any modal semantics on the surface? I
think it is because what Peirce would like to catch is the meaning of
that
sentence (taken in ordinary language) that there is a causal-tendency
link
between the bankruptcy of husbands and the suicides of their wives. So
that the wife-suicide is a "real possibility" actualized by the
husband-bankruptcy. This is obviously indicated by saying t
hat
a "certain one" wife commits suicide if HER husband etc. This is not
full necessity, but "real possibility" (because other wives with
bankrupt
husbands may escape suicide even if threatened by it as a real
possibility). So - I think - Peirce's idea is that the strange rule
equates the "mere possibility" of "There is some married woman who will
commit suicide in case A husband fails in business." with the real
possibility in the claim connecting the two: "There is some married
woman
who will commit suicide in case HER husband fails in business." - which
he did not like because he wanted to distinguish those two types of
possibilities.
Of course, real possibility is not logic, it is material ontology not
even
captured by standard modal logic.
As Ben rightly indicated, this unease comes from reading more (ordinary
language) meaning into logical expressions than their formal definition
allows for. But simultaneously, this excessive meaning is scientifically
important - the mature Peirce, after 1897, seeing "real possibilities"
as
implied by scientific laws, regularities, tendencies, patterns etc.,
regarding how certain predicates, more or less strongly, determine
others.
This can not be logically expressed in any simple way, and I think that
was what tormented Peirce …
Best
F
Den 18/02/2015 kl. 15.41 skrev Benjamin Udell <[email protected]>:
Peirce said "there is some one individual of which one or other of two
predicates is true" ABOUT a specific proposition that he was
discussing.
So you need to read that specific proposition in order to understand
what Peirce meant by "there is some one individual" etc.: "There is
some
married woman who will commit suicide in case her husband fails in
business." which, Peirce finds, turns out to be equivalent to "if
every
married man fails in business some married woman will commit suicide".
