> On Dec 12, 2015, at 12:49 AM, John Collier <[email protected]> wrote: > > I tend to see “in the long run” as more a regulatory concept rather than > something actual. For a long time I did worry about how the “in the long run” > worked and raised concerns similar to yours. The question of whether it > really functions the way Peirce needs it to function if it’s not potentially > actual in some sense is still a big issue I think gets neglected too much. So > don’t think I’m brushing that aside. I do share some of your concerns there. > I’ve just come to think that for Peirce the fundamental issue is the meaning > of truth which then brings in the issues I raised as regulatory concepts. > > [JDC] Agreed. There are a number of counter-examples to convergence that are > worrisome, such as counter-induction, sets that show arbitrarily long > patterns for finite stages that aren’t reflected in the overall statistics of > the whole set, and so on.
One more thing I forgot to add. I think there’s a certain similarity here to the pragmatic maxim. By his mature era Peirce realized that the maxim only made since when considered in terms of counterfactuals. Put in more modern jargon Peirce realizes meaning isn’t an issue of the actual but of possible worlds. That seems pretty radical yet makes a ton of sense. Now we can perhaps quibble about whether the maxim is really a verificationalist theorem if it is verification only in possible worlds rather than actual worlds. It seems undeniable that this is how Peirce takes it. Along the same lines I think this “truth in the long run” need not be considered in a single actual world. It is enough that inquiry takes place through all possible worlds. The truth is what is knowable across all possible worlds with the constraints the object of knowledge places upon possibilities. i.e. to know what is aesthetic to human beings applies only to possible worlds where there are humans like us. If this is correct and “truth in the long run” is using the same sort of reasoning as the pragmatic maxim then of course the problems fall away. Having an infinite community of inquirers is a big problem in the actual world. It’s less of an issue when one is looking across all possible worlds. And it’s that appeal to possible worlds that I think moves Peirce a tad closer to the Platonic treatment of the issues.
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