Clark, list,
Sorry, I got busy for a while.
Immediate objects may have averageness but the averageness seems not
definitive of them, and Peirce never makes it so. They may also have
distinctiveness; an unusual characteristic, perhaps displayed at an
unusual moment, might be a prominent part of the immediate object, as a
result of a single prior experience. Also, immediate objects may be both
simplified, e.g., a practical "essence" consisting in a rule for
mentally re-constructing the object, and complicated, as in the way that
Tom Wyrick discussed or as, when one hears the word "copula," one may
think of a vaguely structured jumble of things such as a copula
instanced in a grammar book, the copula as an abstract conceptual
relation, and so on. Consider what are immediate objects of "animal" and
"triangle" in universal statements about them. "Every animal is a
eukaryote." "Every (Euclidean) triangle's angles sum to 360 degrees." In
each case it can seem as if there were a horde of objects competing to
serve as the immediate object.
If, as you consider doing, we take "average" loosely in the sense of
"truth in the main" and use that idea of the average to distinguish the
cenoscopic (philosophical) inquirial goal from the idioscopic (physical,
psychological, etc.) inquirial goal, it brings us back to Peirce's
definitions of cenoscopy, e.g., in his 1904 intellectual autobiography
wherein he defines (cenoscopic) philosophy as logical analysis (by which
Peirce in other writings indicates he means _/phaneroscopic/_ analysis)
of that sort of common experience that people cannot seriously doubt.
The truth of such experience is not even a question (or serious
question) for (cenoscopic) philosophy, since, after all, one cannot
seriously doubt it. Peirce wrote:
Philosophy merely analyzes the experience common to all men. The
truth of this experience is not an object of any science because it
cannot really be doubted. All so-called 'logical' analysis, which is
the method of philosophy, ought to be regarded as philosophy, pure
or applied.
[End quote]
I don't think that an immediate object _/automatically/_ has either that
undoubtability of such common experience or the kind of
truth-in-the-main (figured as averageness or otherwise) that is based
upon it.
Furthermore, if such truth-in-the-main as goal distinctive of cenoscopy
is a kind of _/average/_, but is not a deductive probability, or even a
deductive fuzzy probability, then it seems to consist in a
_/verisimilitude/_, in Peirce's sense, a likeness to experience as
embodied in premisses of an inductive inference.
http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/verisimilitude .
1910 | Note (Notes on Art. III) [R] | ILS 123-4; CP 2.663
I will now give an idea of what I mean by _/likely/_ or
_/verisimilar/_ . [—] I call that theory _/likely/_ which is not yet
proved but is supported by such evidence, that if the rest of the
conceivably possible evidence _/should/_ turn out upon examination
to be of a _/similar/_ character, the theory would be conclusively
proved. Strictly speaking, matters of fact never can be demonstrably
proved, since it will always remain conceivable that there should be
some mistake about it.
[End quote]
There's another quote at the link, and that second quote is part of a
longer passage (c. 1910, Letters to Paul Carus, ILS 274-5; CP 8.222-4)
in which he elsewhere ascribes verisimilitude to induction. Peirce means
that a good induction, one with verisimilitude, is that which is
commonly called an inductive generalization; Peirce doesn't call it
that, because by "generalization" Peirce means a notably selective
generalization, decreasing the comprehension while increasing the
extension, whereas (at least in the early years, in the JSP papers)
induction keeps the comprehension the same while increasing the extension.
Using such an idea of _/verisimilitude/_ to _/distinguish/_ cenoscopy
rather suggests that cenoscopy would be the science that draws inductive
conclusions, and that inductive inference in idioscopy would ipso facto
be applied cenoscopy - things that Peirce never (so far as I know) said,
and that I think he would not say, although I would say them.
Maybe the immediate object usually has some sort of verisimilitude, if
not always of a pure cenoscopic kind (if one accepts that idea of
cenoscopy at all), insofar as, even if deduced as an average (or a
distribution of probabilities, or whatever), it is not merely that
deductive result but instead is its inductive extension to stand as the
object as represented in a new sign. An immediate object that focuses on
the distinctiveness of the object might have a verisimilar
distinctiveness, and so on. Still, if one does not have previous
experience with the object of the sign, the immediate object might be
marked more by (attempted) plausibility, in Peirce's sense of natural
simplicity, than by verisimilitude. I also wonder whether an immediate
object could be marked by deductive novelty or nontriviality.
Best, Ben
On 6/24/2016 2:47 PM, Clark Goble wrote:
On Jun 23, 2016, at 12:14 PM, Benjamin Udell <baud...@gmail.com > wrote:
Peirce somewhere talks about taking a companion's experience as one's
own, say, if the companion has better eyesight. The companion reports
discerning a ship on the horizon, while one sees just a blurry patch
there, which one lets count as the object in question. There's an
idea of the commind floating around there. Anyway, Peirce didn't
always use the narrowest interpretation of the word "experience."
Still, the less direct an experience, the less experiential it seems.
>[CG] It’s worth going even farther than that. All experiences are
themselves mediated. The phenomena you present above is just one
example of a mediated experience. Yet mediation is always occurring
and mediation entails transformation in various ways. An obvious
example is memory where my experience during the events is always
different from my memory of the events as an experience of the
original events. History itself is a classic example of that kind of
mediation.
The example of everydayness I gave from Peirce the other day of
erroneous views of Richard III really is just this. A kind of low
level often extremely fallible kind of indirect experience we draw
upon for intelligibility in communication. It’s an average not in the
sense of mean but in the sense of including quite a lot in a more kind
of sea of chaos as a source of meanings to draw from.
>>[BU] I remember years ago Joe Ransdell posted a message "What
'fundamenal psychological laws' is Peirce referring to?" (22 Sept.
2006)
https://www.mail-archive.com/peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu/msg01394.html .
Joe wrote:
In "The Fixation of Belief" Peirce says that
"a man may go through life, systematically keeping out of
view all that might cause a change n his opinions, and if he
only succeeds -- basing his method, as he does, on two
fundamental psychologicl laws -- I do not see what can be
said against his doing so".
[End quote of Joe & Peirce]
As I recall, people in reply agreed that one of the laws that Peirce
had in mind must have been the law of association, but then what
would the other law be?
>[CG] I just reread part of that thread. That’s fascinating and I
somehow had zero memory of it. One of Joe's initial thoughts is worth
quoting.
I was thinking of the argument one might make that social
consciousness is prior to consciousness of self, and the method of
tenacity seems to me to be motivated by the value of
self-integrity, the instinctive tendency not to give up on any
part of oneself, and one's beliefs are an important aspect of what
one tends to think of when one thinks of one's identity. Losing
some beliefs e.g. in religion, in one's parents, in the worthiness
of one's country, etc., can be experienced as a kind of
self-destruction and people often seem to demonstrate great fear
of that happening to them. But this sense of self-identity could
be argued to be a later construct than one's idea of the social
entity of which one is a part. (Joe Ransdell 9/23/06)
>[CG] Something else that came up in that discussion is what Peirce
means by psychologizing here. Again let me quote from Joe, as I think
it has direct bearing on the notion of “average” or “everydayness.”
In the terminology Peirce adopted from Jeremy Bentham, we should
distinguish between a COENOSCOPIC sense of "mind" or "thought" or
other mentalistic term and an IDIOSCOPIC sense of such terms..
The former is the sense of "mind" or "thought" which we have in
mind [!!] when we say something like "What are you thinking
about?", "What's on you mind?", "He spoke his mind", and so
forth, as distinct from the sense which is appropriate for use in
the context of some special scientific study of mind.
To understand what is meant by the word "mind" as used in
scientific psychology, let us say, we have to find out what people
who have established or mastered something in that field
understand by such terms since the meaning of such terms in that
context is a matter of what the course of special study of its
subject matter has resulted in up to this point. That is the
idioscopic sense of "mind", "thought", etc. But long before there
was anything like a science of psychology and long before we were
old enough to understand that there is any such thing as
psychology we had already learned in the course of our ordinary
dealings with people something about the nature of mind in the
"coenoscopic" sense of the term. For we all learn early on, as
small children, that we have to figure out what people are
thinking in order to understand what they are wanting to say, for
example; we learn that people can be sincere or insincere, saying
one thing and thinking another; we learn that they sometimes lie,
pretending to think what what they do not actually think or
believe; people change their minds; they tell us what is on their
minds; and we learn also that they believe us or doubt us, too,
when we say something, and so forth. We become constantly -- I
don't mean obsessively but just as a mater of course -- aware of
that sort of thing in any conversation we have or any
communications we read. In other words it is just the plain old
everyday understanding that is indispensable for ordinary life,
which may be shot through with contradiction and incoherence
but,.for better or worse, is indispensable nonetheless
>[CG] He then quotes Peirce on something I think /extremely/ pertinent
to our notion of average. (Emphasis mine)
Now it is a circumstance most significant for the logic of
science, that this science of dynamics, upon which all the
physical sciences repose, when defined in the strict way in which
its founders understood it, and not as embracing the law of the
conservation of energy, neither is nor ever was one of the special
sciences that aim at the discovery of novel phenomena, but merely
consists in the *analysis of truths which universal experience has
compelled* every man of us to acknowledge. Thus, the proof by
Archimedes of the principle of the lever, upon which Lagrange
substantially bases the whole statical branch of the science,
consists in showing that that *principle is virtually assumed in
our ordinary conception* of two bodies of equal weight. *Such
universal experiences may not be true to microscopical
exactitude*, but that *they are true in the main* is assumed by
everybody who devises an experiment, and is therefore more certain
than any result of a laboratory experiment. (CP 8.198, CN3 230 — 1905)
>[CG] I think this notion of “true in the main” is more or less what
average means relative to the immediate object. It’s not really
average in the sense of mean in its strict mathematical sense. Rather
it’s the distinction between what Peirce calls the coenoscopic and
idioscopic senses of such terms.
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