Clark, List, I agree with the connection to the Pragmatic Maxim, especially in its later formulations, but I am pretty sure that there are even earlier formulations have a subjunctive component.
I think that verificationism is about meaning in all cases, not about the definition or nature of truth, though the two are connected by the notion of “truthmakers” – that which makes something true. I am not keen on possible worlds as a way to deal with modality, partly because of the Platonic implications. This is part of the reason I spoke of functions and cross-products of possible functions (the latter being the domain of possible worlds, if there are such things). As I described it, this takes us Aleph 3 cardinality at least, raising issues about accessibility of the possible worlds for things like verifiability (or truth, for that matter). I don’t see this as a bad thing, though it takes us some way from the usual interpretations of acceptance in the long run that people like Putnam and Rescher ascribe to Peirce. Since I think that this idea leads to at best internal realism, and Peirce has a stronger form of realism, I would say that Peirce should have had a stronger form of the end of though, not just the end in our world, but, as you suggest, across all possible worlds (assuming a rigorous notion of possible worlds, perhaps of the form I have suggested). In any case, we seem to be convergent on what Peirce requires. John Collier Professor Emeritus, UKZN http://web.ncf.ca/collier From: CLARK GOBLE [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, 14 December 2015 06:58 To: Peirce-L Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] in case you were wondering On Dec 12, 2015, at 12:49 AM, John Collier <[email protected]<mailto:[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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