Jerry, List, Thanks for your response, Jerry. We are in agreement on a number of points that I will mark below. Others, not so much. My PhD thesis was an argument for realism that was basically Peircean, starting out with separating Peirce’s criterion for cognitive significance from even weak verificationism. Together they imply relativism (and nominalism), which sets up my search later for an alternative to verificationism to get at truth. It wasn’t entirely successful, but I was able to argue that incommensurability about meaning (from Quine and Kuhn) was a pragmatic issue, and show how this could be used to tease out differing but hidden background assumptions ( Polanyi’s tacit knowledge) to establish commensurability in at least some cases, and allow for a realist view of scientific progress. My remarks about nominalism and realism were largely based in this analysis. I should have published it, but I got involved with an information theoretic approach to self-organization in biology that quickly took up all my available time. Apparently there is still some confusion about these issues, especially concerning sociological and logical issues. As you probably know, the relativists focussed on and largely tried to reduce the logical issues to sociological ones. Now that this project has largely failed, perhaps there is room for my thesis again.
John Collier Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Associate Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal http://web.ncf.ca/collier From: Jerry LR Chandler [mailto:jerry_lr_chand...@mac.com] Sent: Tuesday, 31 January 2017 6:09 AM To: John Collier <colli...@ukzn.ac.za>; Peirce List <peirce-l@list.iupui.edu> Cc: Eric Charles <eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com>; Helmut Raulien <h.raul...@gmx.de> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Nominalism vs. Realism John: Thanks for your interesting and provocative insights. By way of background, I have compared the various theories of nominalism and realism for more than 20 years. I find your values deeply embedded in the assertion that one is a weaker hypothesis than the other. Often, nominalists appeal to the role of authority, historical precedence. (Think of the role of precedence in our legal and political systems.) Some points of your post deserves to be highlighted. Peirce thought we could get out of this by abduction, but empiricists don't allow this as part of logic. Nominalism says nothing else about the real essence of things. Realists have to add something in order to make their claims. Empiricists typically claim that we don't need anything more to do science. 1. Scientific empiricism, as I understand it, is virtually independent of any concern about abduction. In physics, chemistry and politics, empiricism seeks ways to justify past, present or future events. (Often, with the aid of statistics.) Agreed. 2. “Names”, as I pointed out, are critical to the logic of chemistry. Each chemical identity is an individual polynomial. It is not historically or grammatically possible to completely separate the concept of nominalism from the concept of names, is it? The thread connecting the concept of nominalism to names may be weak, but it cannot be completely ignored. Nominalism is grounded in a view of naming that it is arbitrary. Putnam and Kripke argue against this by arguing that the name should follow what Locke called the real essence. I don’t think that this was enough, since both retain some sort of verificationism and thus leave themselves open to my arguments from my thesis. Putnam explicitly calls his view internal realism, in contrast to metaphysical realism. Putnam’s view is a sort of nominalism. To reject it we need some sort of argument to the effect that naming is not arbitrary. Causal descriptivism is often invoked for this purpose (David Lewis, for example), but I don’t think this is enough; as Putnam argues, causation is “just more theory”. 2. Now, for the most important comment. It is almost certain that CSP’s notion of abduction as a method to generate a possibility space came directly from the concept of proof of structure. It follows from his notions of medads and graphic relations and relatives and the concept of variable valences of elements. The notion of abduction was a critical part of hybrid logic necessary to develop the simple algebra of labelled bipartite graph theory of the perplex number system. I would have to put this terminology into terms of contemporary logic to see if I agree with this. I suspect I do, but right now I reserve judgement. 3. Secondly, realists MUST add something to signs to make their claims. What must be added is the physical evidence that relates the parts (indices) to the whole (sinsigns) such that the abductive hypotheses can be distinguished from one another. Agreed. 5. The assertion "Empiricists typically claim that we don't need anything more to do science.” appears rather problematic to me. I don’t see this, Jerry. A typical example of a contemporary empiricist who argues specifically this is Bas van Fraassen, who specifically takes this view in his work, such as The Scientific Image. Classic empiricists like Locke, Berkeley and Hume also take this view. I would hasten to add that I distinguish between empiricism as a reductive sceptical constructivist movement and empiricism as the view that our interactions with the world are our only reliable touchstone for clarifying meaning and discovering the truth. I agree with the latter, and I don’t think it implies nominalism. But it also goes beyond classic empiricism, being more open to methods than reliance on observation and combining and projecting observations inductively. I would agree with Edwina and John Sowa that classic empiricism has been tied together with certain sociological views, but I don’t think that these are implied by the logic of empiricism. Stan Salthe is one who, it seems to me, ties the sociological aspects into a common “discourse” that he takes to define empiricism (but I think his alternative discourse makes the same errors). I am not keen on discourses as unanalysable wholes. I think they can be examined both internally and externally in a critical way. I think the external criticism is often opened up by internal criticism (e.g., Feyerabend’ s “Problems with empiricism” and Hanson’s work, as well as Kuhn’s, of course, and Quine’s “Two dogmas of empiricism”). John Cheers Jerry On Jan 30, 2017, at 4:36 AM, John Collier <colli...@ukzn.ac.za<mailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za>> wrote: Jerry, List, Nominalism is a weaker hypothesis than Realism, so if something is consistent with realism, then it is consistent with nominalism. Locked, for example, distinguished between the nominal essence and the real essence. The former tells us what we think something is like, while the latter is what the thing is really like. According to his semiotic theory we only have access to the nominal essence, which is constructed from our experience. The real essence we can never directly know. We can get at it only via other signs, which makes them, by his account, nominal. He also thought that meaning usually followed the nominal essence, which is historically questionable, but the difference between what we take to be the real essence and the nominal essence has to be a nominal distinction. There are no unmediated signs of reality and, for Locke, there is no way to get out of this mediated representation. Peirce thought we could get out of this by abduction, but empiricists don't allow this as part of logic. Nominalism says nothing else about the real essence of things. Realists have to add something in order to make their claims. Empiricists typically claim that we don't need anything more to do science. So, logically the consistency of realism entails the consistency of nominalism. Get Outlook for Android<https://aka.ms/ghei36> ________________________________ From: Jerry LR Chandler <jerry_lr_chand...@mac.com<mailto:jerry_lr_chand...@mac.com>> Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2017 9:51:30 PM To: Eric Charles Cc: Peirce List; Helmut Raulien Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Nominalism vs. Realism Eric: On Jan 28, 2017, at 4:23 PM, Helmut Raulien <h.raul...@gmx.de<mailto:h.raul...@gmx.de>> wrote: In my view of sytems theory, a system is more than it´s parts, of course, and what is more, is real and natural. But in my opinion "natural" does not mean "good for us". A sytem that contains other systems, Beyond statistics, I am not aware of your scientific background. Indeed, I am interested in your views as a statistician with regard to part-whole illations. For several years, in the 1990’s, I taught a course (at the NIH) entitled “ Health Risk Analysis” that was an inquiry into the logic of distributions and pragmatic public health assessment of the “realism” of chemical and radiation exposures. The questions raised in these lectures was a factor that contributed to my study of logic and CSP’s writings. In my view, Peirce was first a chemist and logician, and later added to these belief systems various conjectures about other philosophies. Again, in my view, Peirce crafted his logical beliefs to be consistent with the chemical sciences as they stood in his era, an era when the chemical sciences were undergoing rapid development. Now, some “leading principles” behind my questions to you. The meta-physical notion of “nominalism” is simply not consistent with the basic foundational structures of the chemical sciences as it stood in the late 19 th Century. Hence, CSP was faced with the logical tension between the empirical evidence and the structural logic of chemical graph theory with the meta-physical principle of nominalism. The consequences of this logical tension are far-reaching. CSP introduces the ‘leading principles’ to ground the historical developments of CSP’s numerous attempts to update his philosophical premises of “relationism” to be consistent with scientific developments during his era - his efforts to construct a atomic table of elements, chemical bonding, electricity as particles, thermodynamics, handedness of molecules, the nature of thought, etc. These scientific developments led directly to his notions of mathematical “relations" as grammatical objects, and his constructive notion of graph theory. With these facts as background, I would venture to say that, in part, CSP rejected the meta-physical notion of nominalism because of the role that the concept of “name” in chemical calculations. The role of a chemical name, in its primary scientific function, expresses a illation between a collection of properties and an individual object (singular). Two or more chemical names, when combined, generate a new name. Sodium and chlorine combine to form a new name, a new particular, a new individual, a new concept with new attributes.. Hydrogen and oxygen combine to form a new name, a new particular, a new individual, a new concept with new attributes. And so forth for any combination of any number of chemical elements. These facts manifest themselves concretely. Mathematical calculations for all chemicals are based on the concepts of atomic weight, atomic valence, molecular weight, molecular formula, molecular structure, molecular handedness and molecular forms. Physical measurements are used to determine the parameters for these calculations. Although these simple facts are well documented for a huge number of examples, the logical implications are almost universally rejected in the philosophies of man and nature - for example the philosophy of mathematics (set theory and category theory, etc.) and physics. The relationship between the primary role of chemical names as atomic numbers and molecule numbers and the mathematical notion of a statistical variable or a dynamic variable is a secondary role for describing the change in chemical names. (See, for example, the works of Rene Thom on the birth and death of forms.) Today, at least in the scientific world in which I work, it is very rare to meet a nominalist. Nevertheless, it appears to me, that many, if not most, bio-semioticians are nominalists! May I ask how you view the role of nominalism in the philosophy of statistics? More particularly, what would be the role of nominalism in the expression of an associative law? And in the expression a distributive law? Cheers Jerry Research Professor Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study George Mason University ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu<mailto:peirce-L@list.iupui.edu> . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu<mailto:l...@list.iupui.edu> 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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