> On Dec 5, 2016, at 2:34 PM, Helmut Raulien <[email protected]> wrote: > > I am not nearly as skilled in this subject, and about Peirce-texts as you > are, but I am happy to learn, that Peirce was opposed to positivism and > behaviourism. Because I always was having the impression, that Peirce was a > bit on the positivist side
A good book that gets at the differences is C. J. Misak’s Verificationism: Its History and Prospects. The main difference is that for Peirce the pragmatic maxim is a criteria for meaning whereas for the positivists it’s a criteria for truth. That has big implications particularly in terms of how Peirce’s conception of truth is rejected by the positivists (and arguably to a certain degree by James and the later neopragmatists). The second thing is that the positivists and then how they were used in psychology sees content as a kind of black box where the interior doesn’t matter so long as there’s a habit of behavior between inputs and outputs. Peirce in contrast has his doctrine of continuity which allows one to care about the interior of signs. Indeed such matters become quite important. As John Sowa noted earlier today, it was an unfortunate blind alley that both psychology and philosophy went down where the interior didn’t matter. It devolves into a naive functionalism which is quite at odds with Peirce’s thought. I’d say that the positivists are actually more interesting than they are treated by contemporary philosophy. Unfortunately they are misrepresented to form a kind of boogey-man that can be attacked and dismissed. Their thought, while misguided, was actually far more nuanced than presented. In particular famous attacks on them (here thinking of the ‘disprove’ that falsification was supposed to give) were just plain silly. Typically such matters were already considered at part of their thought. The stronger arguments were from Quine and that’s why it’s really after him that positivism largely dies in philosophy. (Before my time, but I think the analytic/synthetic division is pretty problematic) > Habit for me does not seem to be a metaphysical concept. One can certainly apply signs and talk about habits just with reference to human use. But I think this misses the place of regularity in nature (such as Peirce’s famous weather vane example). It’s Peirce’s move to take these as ontological - roughly redoing Spinoza with a new substance made up of firstness, secondness, and thirdness - that gives them their greatest flexibility. As I’ve long said, this ontological stance is one of his most controversial elements. (Let alone the deeper cosmology we discussed here in September and October) I think one need not adopt the ontology to adopt his logical analysis. > Ok, the term "emergence" did not exist at the time of Peirce, it has to do > with chaos theory. Emergence pre-dates chaos theory by quite a bit. However it was some of the interesting mathematical discoveries in the early 90’s and late 80’s that did perhaps popularize emergence. But you can find plenty of discussion of it prior to that - especially in the free will literature where radical or ontological emergence was seen as the way out for free will and consciousness. Chaos proper in mathematics is purely determinative and the chaos part is much more an epistemological limit due to how extremely small errors magnify the error of prediction extremely quickly in some systems. This then gets at the question of what is merely unknowable as a practical matter epistemologically versus what is truly open. But that debate goes back quite a long time. It’s best seen in the debate about whether randomness in quantum mechanics is epistemological or real. (I think consensus is moving strongly towards realism but there are still some holdouts) I should note I’m deeply skeptical of ontological emergences (the idea that the properties of the whole can’t be even in theory explained by the properties of the parts, their interactions and if relevant the properties of the observer). I tend to think regular in theory reductive emergence explains most examples like the feel of water or other such matters. Without a practical example of ontological emergence I’m not sure one should accept it. Or, to quote Peirce, what’s the difference that makes a difference? > But there was transcendental philosophy, and Peirce sort of started with > Kant. But if you compare Kants and Peirces concepts of "A-Priori", then there > is a difference: For Kant it means something like conditions for knowledge > out of pure reason. For Peirce, in his four methods of inquiry, it is rather > something having to do with feeling or instinct. Which are positive things, > but not transcendent, grounded in metaphysics, things. So I am a bit confused > now. Ok, you might say, that semiotics is a sort of metaphysics, and a > behaviour has a better chance to become a habit if it goes along with > existing transcendental laws such as pure reason or natural laws. The latter > though are habits themselves, so: Circle. Remains pure reason. Did Peirce > believe in that, or is it also a matter of habit for him? Confused, but > wishing you the A lot of Peirce really goes back to Kant. The key differences are first the dismissal of the thing in itself which has many implications for transcendence. Then there’s the simplification of the categories. I also think Peirce as a practical matter effaces the analytic/synthetic difference much as Quine did in the mid century. You can see that in the ontological considerations of the categories we’ve discussed so much here this year. I also think Peirce is quite open to the type of holism Quine embraces. (Indeed many people noted the parallels between Pierce and Quine but they were all apparently accidental - Quine was fairly ignorant of Peirce and even has a paper on his ignorance) Getting back to habit, the question really is what enables the habit. That’s what the behavioralists (and the positivists) didn’t really care about. But of course it makes all the difference in the world. And for Peirce that means it has a different meaning. Going back to Kant (especially his ethics which are so tied to the in-itself) this means that one can’t treat as fully transcendent laws. While Peirce’s aesthetics are his least developed part of thought, he grounds ethics on aesthetics. I think he’s mostly following Kant even if he doesn’t follow him exactly. Kant you may recall has aesthetics as this weird feeling in general without reference to particular phenomena but tied to phenomena in general. It’s a kind of odd middle ground between the in-itself noumenal and phenomenal realm. (I’ll confess I find Kant pretty difficult here) Peirce I think has something similar in mind with how ethics grounds things like logic. You can see a breakdown of the synthetic/analytic there. But maybe people who are a little better versed in Kant and Peirce’s aesthetics can chime in here. I’m pretty ignorant I confess.
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