Re: [PEIRCE-L] Possible Article of Interest - CSP's "Mindset" from AI perspective

[Mike Bergman]

Hi Jon, Not to carry this thread beyond some useful threshold, see below: On 2/10/2017 7:18 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt wrote: Mike, List: I suspect that the questions of whether all generals are real and whether the fictional is real are connected.  If some generals are fictional, and nothing fictional is real, then some generals are not real.  As an example, "unicorn" is a general term for something that is fictional, and most people would probably say that "a unicorn has one horn" is a true proposition.  Does this mean that unicorns are real?  Most people would presumably deny this. I keep coming back to Peirce's definitions of "real" and "fictive" that I quoted previously.  The distinction is whether the characters of the object in question depend on what a person or finite group of people thinks about them.  A unicorn has one horn only because people have agreed to this as part of the definition for a certain kind of imaginary (i.e., non-existent) thing.  By contrast, an Indian rhinoceros has one horn regardless of what anyone thinks about it.  People having thoughts about unicorns does not make them real, and the Indian rhinoceros would be real even if no one ever actually had any thoughts about it. Unicorns are the perfect case! We have never actually seen one. But, we can describe one, perhaps write long, learned articles about them, render them so their icon is clear, and even discuss them in this thread. That is real. Now, the character of this unicorn thing is that it has many characteristics of cloved mammals, but also has a nasal horn, perhaps twisted, and lives in the forest. And, oh, by the way, this thing is not actual or has not been known to tangibly exist. In short, we can call this character either fictive or imaginary. The way to break through this understanding is to see the term "unicorn" as the mere token, or "unicorns" as the type. The "idea of a unicorn" is real, perhaps in a related way to why the "idea of gravity" is real. The habitual aspect of gravity may be stronger than unicorns, but a lot of consensus has gone into deciding what all of this means. That strikes me as real, and if I asked CSP about it he would agree, but he would also point out subtleties that I glaringly missed. I might smile or not in reaction. As for fallibility, our current inability to be absolutely certain about the reality of something has no bearing on whether it is, in fact, real. Sorry, I probably was not clear. I was bringing up the question of fallibility in terms of the "some generals are not real" discussion, not as you refer. I'm happy to let this thread dye. Thanks for your input! Mike Thanks for the additional comments on indexicals; again, interesting stuff! Regards, Jon S. On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 10:59 PM, Mike Bergman <m...@mkbergman.com> wrote: Hi Jon, Thanks for commenting. Please see below: On 2/9/2017 8:28 AM, Jon Alan Schmidt wrote: Mike, List: I read your linked article and the earlier one that it referenced, and found them very interesting, especially the whole notion of "mindset."  My first introduction to Peirce's thought was a doctoral dissertation that used it to identify and explicate a distinctively Lutheran way of thinking, which appealed to me not only because I am a Lutheran myself, but also because I have long desired to identify and explicate the distinctive way of thinking that we engineers employ in doing our jobs.  My series of articles on "The Logic of Ingenuity" was the outcome, and the final installment (Part 4, "Beyond Engineering") is now scheduled to appear next month. However, I disagree with a couple of things that you mentioned in your last message. MB:  I take ideas and all generals to be real, including the idea of concepts to represent ideas. I think this is supported by Peirce. I also take the fictional to be real, but not actual. While Peirce certainly held Ideas to be real--"the fact that their Being consists in mere capability of getting thought, not in anybody's Actually thinking them, saves their Reality" (CP 6.455; 1908)--his position was not that all generals are real, only that some of them are. CSP:  Consequently, some general objects are real. (Of course, nobody ever thought that all generals were real; but the scholastics used to assume that generals were real when they had hardly any, or quite no, experiential evidence to support their assumption; and their fault lay just there, and not in holding that generals could be real.) (CP 5.430; 1905) Good point, and thanks for this reference. However, I have to say, I'm not sure I either understand or agree with why some generals are real while others are not. As best as I can tell, Peirce maintains that certain (undefined or unspecified) opinions are the ones that are not real. That strikes me as arbitrary, and an argument of degree not kind. My thinking has been that all thoughts, once thought, become instantiated and thus real. Types, which Peirce described as subjective generalities, I think he considers to be real. Are you aware of any better bright lines that Peirce offers for when some generals are not real? My logic is that anything that can be conceived becomes real once thought of or considered, including how we naturally class individual particulars into types. All thoughts have characters. I understand the arguments Peirce makes for why some (his qualifier) generals are real, but I don't see where the converse gets argued (that is, that some generals are not real) and why. I also have a hard time squaring the assertion that some generals are not real with these two statements: "Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity." (CP 5.431) "That which any true proposition asserts is real, in the sense of being as it is regardless of what you or I may think about it." (CP 5.432) If I try to tease out what CSP is trying to say in these sections, I interpret he is saying that only generals that are true, are destined, or have ultimate fixity (perhaps all saying the same thing) are real. Generals not meeting those conditions would therefore not be real. But this is hard to square with fallibilism since we can not know absolute truth, only approach it as a limit function. When does the determination occur that one opinion is real while another is not? Perhaps under this calculus we could say that false or disproven assertions are not real, but that also seems a slippery yardstick to me. Again, if anyone on the list can help on this question I'd love to see the CSP citations or hear the arguments. From these passages, I'm not sure that Peirce has made the compelling counter argument that some generals are not real. Peirce also made a sharp distinction between the real and the fictional. CSP:  That is real which has such and such characters, whether anybody thinks it to have those characters or not. At any rate, that is the sense in which the pragmaticist uses the word. (CP 5.430; 1905) CSP:  For the fictive is that whose characters depend upon what characters somebody attributes to it; and the story is, of course, the mere creation of the poet's thought. Nevertheless, once he has imagined Scherherazade and made her young, beautiful, and endowed with a gift of spinning stories, it becomes a real fact that so he has imagined her, which fact he cannot destroy by pretending or thinking that he imagined her to be otherwise. (CP 5.152; 1903) Perhaps all you meant is what Peirce says in that last sentence--the fictional is not itself real, because it depends entirely on what characters its author attributes to it; but the fact that the fictional has the characters that the author attributed to them is real from that time forward. Well, Jon, I'm not sure how sharp a distinction Peirce is making here. I see his reference to fictive similar to other qualia. Once conceived, a fictional thing is real, though it does have the character of not being actual, not having existence, and being fictive. So, yes, by definition the fictive is not actual or tangible, but any fictional instantiation is real. MB:  But I also take all names and labels to be indexicals, about which they refer. This is also Peirce's view, I believe. Indexes can be analyzed, but not reasoned over via inference. Peirce certainly came to see all proper names as indexes, and I think that there is merit in exploring your suggestion that "all names and labels" are, as well.  Would you (or anyone else) care to elaborate on that?  Perhaps you could begin by saying more about that last sentence. I understand indexicals to include proper names, class (or type or general) names, definitions, indices, abstracts, synonyms, jargon, acronyms, links (URLs and URIs), seeAlsos, citations, references, and icons, amongst similar pointers. This grouping of things is known as annotation properties in the semantic Web data models and languages of RDF and OWL. I actually think there is a pretty good overlap with Peirce. In OWL, one can not inference over annotation properties, which I think is the right choice. As CSP says, "Icons and indices assert nothing." (CP 2.291) However, as types it may be possible to do some reasoning over labels (proper names and common names are subsumed under labels, for example) and it is also possible to do real analytic work (such as word embeddings or other NLP tasks) over definitions and the like. So, analysis can be employed over indexicals. Ultimately, these kinds of inspections get back to how to establish a grammar and then parsers for language in relation to Peirce's signs. I'm still trying to understand how this Peircean view dovetails (which I suspect it does) with other first-logic views of word symbols. What relations, then, are true relations (A:A, A:B) versus indexicals (re:A) is a question I am spending much time on at present. I would like to hear other views on these questions. Thanks for the good questions, Jon. Mike  Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt -- __________________________________________ Michael K. Bergman CEO Cognonto and Structured Dynamics 319.621.5225 skype:michaelkbergman http://cognonto.com http://structureddynamics.com http://mkbergman.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/mkbergman __________________________________________ -- __________________________________________ Michael K. Bergman CEO Cognonto and Structured Dynamics 319.621.5225 skype:michaelkbergman http://cognonto.com http://structureddynamics.com http://mkbergman.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/mkbergman __________________________________________

-----------------------------
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 . To 
UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to 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 .