Frederik - would you compare your understanding of ' a priori' with Thirdness? That is, it IS an 'ontological structure underpinning biological systems'. And, it cannot be accessed directly by empirical contact. And, yes, with Peirce's focus on the realism of universals (and Thirdness is all about universals) - these are not reducible to products of the mind.
This notion of 'a priori' has little to do with the same term used in the Fixation of Belief, which refers, I think, more to unexamined and even unconscious sociocultural beliefs. The 'a priori' in Fixation refers, I think, to the fact that these beliefs are not empirically directly accessible - that's the only correlation with the above notion of 'a priori' as objective dependence relations. Edwina ----- Original Message ----- From: Frederik Stjernfelt To: <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] 1 Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2015 4:45 AM Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8377] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch. 10: Dear Franklin, lists, You're probably right we'll have to agree in disagreeing. But my notion of the a priori has nothing to do with transcendentalism (see the refs. in my answer to Howard). And I would not say I am "professionally" committed to it, whatever that means. It is not in my university contract. Peirce vacillated as to the a priori. I know his 1878 rejection in "Fixation"; later in life, he described his own logic and semiotics as an a priori doctrine of signs. Your notion of empiricism as you define it, is obviously more sophisticated than the crude "sense data+logic" variant. I take note of you mentioning "conjunction and continuity" in experience - later you say these are the work of the mind. But indeed Peirce's claim would be that they are already present in reality and not merely the product of the mind. In your abduction-deduction-induction example, I do not think a priori and empirical stuff can be nicely separated. But all this comes down to us discussing two different notions of the a priori - you the Kantian one which you (rightly, I think) refuse, I the Husserlian one of objective dependence relations which we may only gradually come to know (hence fallibilism). Take biology. It is now accepted that life involves the interdependent notions of metabolism, replication, adaptation, evolution, etc. These are the ontological structures underpinning empirical biological research. Earlier ontological assumptions of "elan vital" and the like have been given up. So, the discussion will depend upon the interpretation of such basic concepts in the single sciences. Can there be given a convincing empiricist account of such concepts? I do not think a mentalist idea that such concepts are merely psychical constructions of the mind would work. Neither would Peirce, cf. his realism about universals. But such realism about universals, to me, is tantamount to apriorism in the sense mentioned. You're right, these mails grow long and we might get away from the discussion of ch. 10 of my book … Best F Den 21/04/2015 kl. 02.18 skrev Franklin Ransom <[email protected]> : Frederik, lists, I'm not sure, but this appears in my email as a separate thread, having copied posts that I sent to the other thread. Since Frederik replied to my posts on this one, I suppose I'll reply here for now. If this doesn't appear as a new thread to anyone else, then please ignore my comment. Just to be clear, I think that this will definitely be a case of "we will just have to agree to disagree". Frederik, you are clearly professionally committed to the a priori; I am constitutionally committed to radical empiricism. Now that you are forewarned about that, I'll say a couple of things about my point of view. I'm not so sure that empiricists like myself have an "a priori fear of the a priori". When I look at the philosophy of transcendentalism and its results, the fear strikes me as quite experience-based. One can also think about Peirce's remarks in "The Fixation of Belief" about the method of the a priori. I'm not, as an empiricist, particularly impressed with logical positivism as a form of empiricism. I believe it a commonplace in classical pragmatism that the theory of experience at play in pragmatism is not the atomistic approach of the British empiricists or their inheritors in logical positivism/empiricism. My understanding is that whether we are talking about Peirce, James, or Dewey, experience is not conceived on the model of a series of distinct, discrete sense impressions or sense-data. Instead, experience is much more complex, in which conjunction and continuity are just as much found in the experience as are disjunction and discreteness--we do not require some outside source to make our experiences appear connected for us in the first place. Certainly the mind works to bring connection and continuity to its experiences. But it does not do this ex nihilo; such connections and continuities work to extend in novel ways connections and continuities already experienced--the mind generalizes what it has been given to work with. So far as I see it, this is the empiricism that classical pragmatism is based upon, and is part of what my take on empiricism amounts to. I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "dependence structures of objectivity". I also find your ascription of fallibilism to a priori knowledge as bizarre. Rather than discuss what you have had to say further (this post would become inordinately long), I think it would be best to simplify the matter. Suppose I have a surprising experience, and then develop a hypothesis to explain that experience. Once I have the idea in hand from the hypothesis, I deduce consequences from this hypothesis to the point that I now know how to put the hypothesis to inductive experimentation. Now, at this point, I have not yet conducted any inductions. Is this process, from the gaining of a hypothesis to the deduction of consequences, altogether a priori on your account? -- Franklin On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 12:22 PM, Frederik Stjernfelt <[email protected]> wrote: Dear Franklin, lists - Sorry for having rattled Franklin's empiricist sentiments with references to the a priori! Empiricists seem to have an a priori fear of the a priori … but no philosophy of science has, as yet, been able to completely abolish the a priori - even logical positvism had to admit logic as a remaining a priori field (reinterpreting that as tautologies, that is true). I should probably have given a note here to my own stance on the a priori - for the interested, I wrote a bit about it in ch. 8 of Diagrammatology (2007). My take on it there comes more from the early Husserl than from Peirce: the a priori has nothing to do with Kantian subjectivity, rather, it consists in dependence structures of objectivity - this makes it subject to fallibilism - the a priori charts necessities - these come in two classes, formal ontology and material ontology - the former holds for all possible objects, the latter for special regions of reality (like physics, biology, society) - no discipline can function without more or less explicit conceptual networks defining their basic ideas - being fallibilist, a priori claims develop with the single scientific disciplines … I happen to think this Husserlian picture (for a present-day version, see Barry Smith) is compatible with Peirce's classification of the sciences where, as it is well known, the upper echelon is taken to be a priori in the sense of not at all containing empirical knowledge while the lower, "positive" levels inherit structures from those higher ones, co-determining the way they organize and prioritize their empirical material. So, it is in this sense of "material ontology" that I speak of biogeographical ontology and and the ontology of human culture development involved in Diamond's argument. Given these assumptions, Diamond's argument, so I argue, is a priori. His conclusion that Eurasia privileges the spread of domesticated animals does not depend on the empirical investigation of early cultural contacts, human migrations or trade routes across the continent - but only on the general knowledge that climate is (largely) invariant along latitudes and that the spead of human cultures involves that of domesticated animals (the two ontologies I claim are involved). As you can see my concept of ontology is deflated - which is also in concert with the ontological commitment in some Peircean ideas (cf. the idea that what exists is what must be there for true propositions to be true, 5.312) - so I do not participate in the analytical quest for the most meagre ontology possible … I would rather say that ontology should comprise general concepts necessary for the sciences at all levels (from elementary particles and genes to empires, wars, media and real estate …) Best F ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
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