> On Sep 10, 2015, at 3:22 AM, Stephen Jarosek <[email protected]> wrote: > > What we are discussing has more to do with pragmatism than with the three > categories. Perhaps rather than discussing things in terms of the “degree of > consciousness” it makes more sense to proceed along the lines of pragmatism > and “the degree to which things matter.”
I’m not sure they are that separable, depending upon what you mean by pragmatism. (Apologies - I’ve not followed the full evolution of the discussion) If you mean the maxim it’s an interesting question since of course the traditional problem of consciousness is how to verify something has consciousness. Now unlike the positivists verification criteria Peirce clearly thinks his pragmatic maxim can deal with metaphysical claims that are useful. Exactly how to apply it here is unclear to me though. I think that at best Peirce’s assertions about consciousness and swerve are only hypotheses. If we ask about cash value, then I guess the answer is in our calculations. However our calculations are, I think, intrinsically tied to the categories. > Do Newton’s axioms of physics apply less to a pebble in your hand than they > do the planet Jupiter? No, they don’t. Same with the relevance of the > categories to consciousness. I think it rather depends upon the types of questions we are asking. For some questions Newton’s conceptions of physics are fine. For many others they are not. Both for the pebble or for Jupiter. Certain calculations with Jupiter require GR. Certain calculations with a pebble require post-Newtonian chemistry. This may seem trite, but if we are talking the pragmatic maxim I don’t think we can separate the type of question from all of this. If we speak too broadly I suspect it becomes easy to confuse ourselves. Certainly context matters in all of this. Both in terms of making sense of our measurements but also in terms of narrowing them down. This is why verification or falsification are hard. Typically there are other ways to interpret the data. With regard to your later comments about self-control, I think we have to recall that Peirce’s pragmatic maxim becomes in his mature thought a matter of “could have.” That is there is a certain counter-factual aspect to the maxim. With regard to self-control that entails the issue is whether we could have controlled it not whether we did. Whenever considering pragmatism it seems we have to combine with it an economic recognition that we can’t do everything we might wish given finite resources such as time. Because we are dealing with counterfactuals typically this doesn’t affect the purview of the maxim. So, for example, a diamond is hard because we could measure it’s hardness not that we do measure its hardness. Likewise we have self-control if we could have modified our behavior not that we did modify our behavior. This of course makes verification more difficult in some practical ways as I think Peirce recognized. However it also avoids many of the problems that I think the 20th century positivists retraced.
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