Jeff D., list,
I've tried but all that I've come up with so far that's worth saying
consists in further quibbles.
You wrote,
Conclusion: The humble argument for the Reality of God is logical in
all three senses--according to the assurance of instinct, experience
and according to the exact requirements of good logical form. We
should remember, however, that this is not a claim that the
conclusion of the argument is true. Rather, the claim is that the
conclusion is plausible.
[End quote]
The claim is rather that the conclusion is
1. plausible (assurance by instinct) **and**
2. verisimilar (in Peirce's sense, likeness of conclusion to premisses,
the assurance by experience when experience has accumulated but is not
yet conclusive), **and**
3. formally valid. Abductive formal validity, if it does not include
plausibility (instinctual assurance), still includes at least critical
abductive formal validity (the abductive inference can be put into the
form of /rule/, /result/, ergo /case/, or into the form of CP 5.189, or
into whatever other form is accounted good for abduction at the critical
level, i.e., the level of critique of arguments. In addition, in your
paragraph beginning "Major premiss", you listed a series of
_/methodeutical/_ (not critique-of-argument) justifications for an
abductive inference, such as testability (I'll just discuss testability
for simplicity's sake). Indeed Peirce came to regard methodeutical
justifications as needed for completing the justification (i.e.,
validation) of an abductive inference, whereas no particular
methodeutical justification was needed for a deduction or an induction
to be valid (Carnegie Application, L75, 1902, New Elements of
Mathematics v. 4, pp. 37–38.
http://www.commens.org/dictionary/entry/quote-carnegie-institution-correspondence-0
). But I wonder whether the methodeutical justification can be
considered assurance by (logical) form. Is it _/assurance/_ at all?
That a claim is testable in principle (idioscopically or otherwise)
gives some kind of assurance versus claims that are untestable in
principle or uncertain as to whether they're testable in principle. Yet
such assurance in whatever degree is assurance not per se _/of truth/_
but of pragmatic meaningfulness, and that pragmatic meaningfulness is
not in turn a source per se of assurance of truth, but only of the
methodeutical possibility of reaching some sort of truth. That seems
the case, even though a claim that is pragmatically meaningless (its
object is uninvestigable, incognizable) even in principle amounts to a
false claim that something unreal is real. (Meanwhile a claim's
testability or untestability in merely our foreseeable practical future
lends it little if any assurance that it is true/false or pragmatically
meaningless in principle). The three assurances (instinct, experience,
form) belong to a trichotomy of kinds of sign in at least one of
Peirce's ten-trichotomy systems. I admit that I wouldn't know what to do
with an assurance that something is pragmatically meaningful in that
regard, if it is not a kind of assurance by form.
That was hard to write!
Best, Ben
*On 9/23/2016 2:32 PM, Jeffrey Brian Downard wrote:*
Hi Gary R., Ben U., List,
Yes, with respect to " Ben's "quibble" to the effect that "Peirce said
that every mental action has the form of a valid inference, not that
every inference is valid as a pattern of inference", the point is well
taken.
We'll see if any of the critics of the Humble or the larger Neglected
Argument want to take up the question raised at the end of the post. For
my part, I don't think that Dennett or Dawkins have much to offer by way
of a response to the question.
Here are two options that are open to a critic: (1) offer an alternate
hypothesis that can perform the grand totalizing and synthesizing
function that has traditionally be supplied by a conception of a
personal God that, in his Ideas and Ideals, embodies and gives life to
all of the laws of logic, metaphysics and nature. Or, (2) reject the
need for such a grant totalizing and synthesizing hypotheses.
One of Peirce's point is that many thoughtful and reflective human
beings (such as Plato and Emerson) have recognized the need for the
Ideas and Ideals embodied in this sort of hypothesis--and Peirce
recognizes the same need. He is asking each of us to reflect on some
basic operations of our own feelings, imagination and thought, and then
ask ourselves--do we recognize a similar need? Like Schiller, I think
that aim of further cultivating our habits of feeling, action that
thought does indeed seem to call out for the kinds of Ideas and Ideals
that will be sufficient to offer us hope as we seek to bring the
conflicting tendencies in our personal and social lives into better
harmony. Whether we call that embodied system of Ideas and Ideals
"Nature" or "God" matters little to me--so long as we grow to appreciate
the Beauty, Goodness and Truth of its Divine character.
--Jeff
Jeffrey Downard
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
Northern Arizona University
(o) 928 523-8354
________________________________________
*From: Gary Richmond
Sent: Friday, September 23, 2016 10:56 AM
To: Peirce-L
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce's Theory of Thinking*
Ben, Jeff, List,
Ben, I think your 'quibble' is well taken, and I agree with your analysis.
Jeff, I'm hoping that critics of the 'Humble Argument' as well as the
N.A. as a whole will respond to the good question at the end of your post:
JD: So, let us ask: does this hypothesis involving the conception of God
involve some kind of confusion on our part about the real character of
the inference, or does it rest on false premisses? Peirce's essay on
"The Neglected Argument" is a sustained effort to show that neither of
these is the case. As such, it is a reasonable hypothesis. Is the same
true of the alternate hypotheses?
Best,
Gary R
[Gary Richmond]
Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
C 745
718 482-5690
*On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 12:48 PM, Benjamin Udell wrote:*
Jeff, Edwina, list,
I've just a few quibbles, nothing major.
Jeff, you wrote:
Every inference is, in one way or another, valid as a pattern of
inference, including those that are instinctive. Those that appear
to be invalid are patterns of inference that are, themselves, valid,
but the appearance of invalidity is really due to the fact that we
have misunderstood what kind of inference it is (e.g., we think it
is inductive, when it is really abductive). Or, the apparent
invalidity is really just a lack of soundness in that something in
the premisses involves an error on our part and it is really false.
[End quote]
Some of that is very close to what Peirce said in his articles in
_Journal of Speculative Philosophy_ in 1868, but with a decisive
difference. Peirce said that every mental action has the form of a valid
inference, not that every inference is valid as a pattern of inference.
In "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," he said:
It is a consequence, then, of the first two principles whose results
we are to trace out, that we must, as far as we can, without any
other supposition than that the mind reasons, reduce all mental
action to the formula of valid reasoning.
[CP 5.266, W 2:214,
http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/conseq/cn-frame.htm
Yes, invalidity of inference arises from mistaking what kind of
inference it is - where "it" refers to the mental action. But saying
that every inference is valid as a pattern of inference sounds
confusingly like saying that there is no invalid inference.
An unsound deduction is unsound by virtue (or should I say 'vice') of a
falsehood in the premisses, an invalidity in the deductive form, or
both. A valid deduction is unsound if it has one or more false
premisses, and is necessarily unsound if there is an inconsistency
(a.k.a. necessary falsehood) in a premiss or among premisses. A
'forward-only' deduction can be valid and unsound yet true in its
conclusion, e.g., Socrates is a cro-magnon, all cro-magnons are mortal,
ergo Socrates is mortal. (A particularly vacuous example, based on a
necessarily false conjunction of premisses, is: /p/&~/p/, ergo /p/ or
~/p/.) It's difficult to think of a deduction whose seeming invalidity
boils down to the occurrence of something contingently or necessarily
false in its premisses, maybe that difficulty is what Edwina was getting
at in her reply (I haven't had time to catch up with this thread).
Anyway, whether one can explain seeming invalidity as unsoundness in
non-deductive inference modes depends I guess on how one defines
validity and soundness for them.
Best, Ben
*On 9/21/2016 5:06 PM, Jeffrey Brian Downard wrote:*
Hello Jon, List,
The argument you are trying to reconstruct could be fleshed out more
fully in a number of ways. Here are a few suggestions for filling in
some of the details a bit more:
Major premiss: Every inference is, in one way or another, valid as a
pattern of inference, including those that are instinctive. Those that
appear to be invalid are patterns of inference that are, themselves,
valid, but the appearance of invalidity is really due to the fact that
we have misunderstood what kind of inference it is (e.g., we think it is
inductive, when it is really abductive). Or, the apparent invalidity is
really just a lack of soundness in that something in the premisses
involves an error on our part and it is really false. As a form of
inference, every retroductive conjecture that meets certain conditions
(e.g., it responds to a question occasioned by real doubt, it is really
explanatory, it is possible to deduce consequences that can be put to
the test, it is possible to make inductive inferences that will tend to
show the hypotheses is confirmed or disconfirmed by observations, the
observations that will be used to test the hypothesis are not the same
observations that will be used to make the inductive inference, etc.) is
a valid abductive inference--and hence has a logical character. Such
arguments can, in time, be the subject of further development in
arguments that are more fully under our conscious control. As such, they
can be made into logical inferences that may rise up to higher levels of
assurance, including those of experience as well as form.
Minor premiss: The humble argument for the Reality of God is a
retroductive conjecture endorsed by instinctive reason. What is more, it
has in fact be met with the support of large communities of inquirers at
different times and places in human history and culture. In fact, it
appears that the core inferential patterns in the argument are prevalent
in the thought of virtually all reasonable human beings. Over time,
different communities have developed the instinctive hypothesis in a
number of different ways, but the core ideas seem to cut across all such
communities--including those communities that are quite spiritual in
orientation as well as those that claim to be less spiritual in
orientation. Setting aside the particularities of how the conceptions
have been developed in different human communities, and focusing on the
core ideas that appear to be held in common, we can see that those core
ideas can be developed into hypotheses that can be affirmed in a
responsible and self-controlled manner by those who are deeply infused
by the desire to learn and who have a relatively refined sense of how to
conduct their inquires according to experimental methods.
Conclusion: The humble argument for the Reality of God is logical in all
three senses--according to the assurance of instinct, experience and
according to the exact requirements of good logical form. We should
remember, however, that this is not a claim that the conclusion of the
argument is true. Rather, the claim is that the conclusion is plausible.
While it may lack something by way of security, it possesses much by way
of uberty. In fact, our experience shows that this grand
hypothesis--which serves a remarkable totalizing and synthesizing role
in the great economy of our ideas--both within the realm of our long
growing commitments of common sense and in our most cutting edge
inquiries in the special sciences--has shown and continues to show great
uberty in the way that it informs the healthy growth of our aesthetic
feelings, our ethical practices and in the ongoing logical growth of our
thought.
So, let us ask: does this hypothesis involving the conception of God
involve some kind of confusion on our part about the real character of
the inference, or does it rest on false premisses? Peirce's essay on
"The Neglected Argument" is a sustained effort to show that neither of
these is the case. As such, it is a reasonable hypothesis. Is the same
true of the alternate hypotheses?
--Jeff
Jeffrey Downard
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
Northern Arizona University
(o) 928 523-8354
________________________________________
*From: Jon Alan Schmidt
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2016 12:24 PM
To: Peirce-L
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce's Theory of Thinking*
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