Hi all,
I’ve discovered through experience that when trying to justify Peirce to others, you can’t simply look to his literature. Peirce’s cosmology and his synechism is internally coherent but one challenge is to look outside it for evidence. But how to proceed when the architectonic encompasses everything? How about instead of “…because Peirce”, we try “…because Bruner”? There is an intense resemblance between the two. For instance, I’ve recently been reading “On Knowing”: Essays for the Left Hand”. In the chapter, “The Act of Discovery”, he states: *Weldon, the English philosopher, describes problem solving in an interesting and picturesque way. He distinguishes among difficulties, puzzles and problems. We solve a problem or make a discovery when we impose a puzzle form on a difficulty to convert it into a problem that can be solved in such a way that it gets us where we want to be. That is to say, we recast the difficulty into a form that we know how to work with- then we work it. Much of what we speak of as discovery consists of knowing how to impose a workable kind of form on various kinds of difficulties.” A small but crucial part of discovery of the highest order is to invent and develop effective models of “puzzle forms”. ~Bruner* I have recently come to recognize that what Bruner describes above is what Peircean abduction/semiosis/triadic reasoning consists in. A demonstration of this act of discovery is given in “Promoting Convergence: the phi spiral in abduction of mouse corneal behaviors”. It explores a wonderful phenomenon that marks a field of ~500um. This is an interesting scale because “*macroscale equations are only valid to about 150 microns without the need to include additional physics…The intermediate, mesoscale regime is precisely where the challenge of bridging scales exists, and where in situ data can be used to systematically span atomistic and continuum level simulations.” ~Turab Lookman, (ed., Avadh Saxena, Antoni Planes); * Also,* c.f., *the problem at 200-600um in cross section in *“*Influence of structural hierarchy on the fracture behaviour of tooth enamel”, Ezgi D. Yilmaz, Gerold A. Schneider, Michael V. Swain There are other wonderful associations in phi spiral abduction where questions can be pursued under a *hypothetical mode* (Bruner). hth, Jerry On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 5:28 PM, Clark Goble <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Feb 1, 2016, at 3:52 PM, Stephen Jarosek <[email protected]> wrote: > > Clark, the inspiration for my own thinking is Isaac Newton. What I would > love to see in the life sciences is an axiomatic framework that hangs > together, much as Newton delivered for the physical sciences... hence my > interest in Peirce. There’s a lot of bad, unfalsifiable science doing the > rounds, like multiverse theory, the invention of dark energy/matter, etc, > in regards to which Wolfgang Pauli’s dismissal “not even wrong” often comes > to mind. So it’s not a case of trying to provide a Peircean interpretation > of the different theories, but to provide a solid foundation for a life > science that hangs together. > > > I’m not sure I’d put dark matter in the same camp as the multiverse (of > various sorts). After all we might not know what dark matter is but we can > measure it. Likewise dark energy is just a category for unexplained > expansion. We might dislike the name but the phenomena seems very empirical. > > I’d also not say Newton delivered an axiomatic framework for the physical > sciences. But perhaps I’m not quite grasping what you mean by that. > > Peirce’s semiotics seems more than robust enough to deal with all this. > His ontology is much more controversial and perhaps also more unnecessary. > That said he does appear to take randomness in a frequentist interpretation > as an ontological component of the universe. That’s always interesting when > thinking implications of quantum mechanics. > > > > > > > ----------------------------- > 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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