Mike, list,
You wrote,
I think this does place Horace before Descartes.
I can't beat that. If somebody says it's a bad pun, I say /the worse,
the better/. Even Jon Awbrey ought to be impressed. You wouldn't
believe the elaborate puns he used to do here, only problem was that one
needed to be pretty familiar with physicists' names and old American
animated cartoons and the like in order to get them. I think many
didn't even realize what he was up to.
I think that you do get the ideas that I was trying to convey. There's
just to be careful to avoid making it sound like the real depends on our
particular opinions, though it does depend on representability in
general, because that's part of what it is. I feel kind of weird, a
semi-Peircean laying down the Peircean line. I feel like I ought to
suggest or discern fruitful lines for further discussion rather than
just "setting people straight". I've a notion that the general and the
relations among experiences are "more" real in a Peircean sense than the
individual, subjective perspective, but I don't know whether I'll end up
saying anything definite about it. Joe Ransdell, who founded and long
managed and moderated peirce-l, was good at going beyond "correcting".
Ah well, I have to say something because I've gotten too delayed on this.
Best, Ben
On 2/11/2017 2:43 PM, Mike Bergman wrote:
Hi Ben, List,
Thanks for the thought and effort you put into this response. Your
argument makes sense to me and is consistent with what else I know. I
will definitely keep this response, which clears up many confusions
that I had a part in this thread in perpetuating.
This argument, your argument summarizing your understanding of Peirce,
strikes me as a likely true proposition and therefore real. The
implication of the argument is that a something which is logical and
not known to be false may be real. A unicorn or unicorns in general
are not real. (The thought of a unicorn is real, but what is real is
the thought, not the unicorn.) However, were we to encounter a unicorn
in the woods, that would be a surprising fact that would cause us to
re-assess that reality.
Another implication is that any supposition understood as logical with
what else we know to be true for which we have no falsifying evidence
is (may be) also real. I presume, prior to testing, that any
legitimate abductive hypothesis would also be real (or should be, else
we pose a false hypothesis). Testing may surface new falsities, which
would cause cause the hypothesis to be rejected and then seen as not real.
Still another implication seems to be that reality should be treated
in a similar way to how Peirce handles truth. That is, as limit
functions; we may never be able to have absolute confidence. Only
falsity or errors in logic can render something as not real, though
our confidence in actual reality is dependent on the preponderance of
evidence.
Do those implications sound about right?
So, I am satisfied that your argument fits within my understanding of
fallibilism and Peirce's emphasis on the scientific method. Thanks for
helping to clarify my thinking! I think this does place Horace before
Descartes.
Best, Mike
On 2/11/2017 12:45 PM, Benjamin Udell wrote:
Mike, list,
I think that you're putting the cart before the unicorn. The idea of
the unreal a.k.a. fictitious in Peirce begins as the idea of the
object of a false proposition, an idea rooted, for Peirce, not in
ontology but in logic and its presuppositions, to which ontology is
posterior. There are true general propositions if and only if there
are real generals. There are false general propositions if and only
if there are fictitious, a.k.a. unreal, generals. If there were no
false general propositions, then science would have little if any
purpose, since it would be unable to err about generals even if it
wanted to. No more proofs by reduction to absurdity. The object of a
sign is ultimately the universe of discourse of said object. If it is
false that there has existed a unicorn, then a universe of discourse
in which there has existed a unicorn is an unreal, fictitious
universe of discourse. For Peirce, logic and reason presuppose that,
for a proposition to be true, it must not depend on what we think of
it, likewise for its object to be real, it must not depend on what we
think of it; for it to be real, it must also be cognizable, such that
sufficient inquiry would find it inevitably, sooner or later. The
presuppositions of fallibilism and cognizabilism are both needed in
order to keep the way of inquiry unbarred.
After that, we can bring all kinds of nuances in, e.g., a universe of
discourse that is at least a coarse-grained version of our actual
world in the vast majority of respects, except in containing a
unicorn. People could argue about whether a unicorn's evolution is
feasible or probable. If it were significantly feasible or probable,
we could say that the unicorn species (as a kind of form) is a really
feasible or probable possibility, and we could dub animals belonging
to the predecessor species that would evolve into unicorns as
"unicorniferous" or suchlike, and regard that as a property as real
as the hardness of a diamond even if nothing ever happens to try to
scratch that diamond. We could regard the capacity for harboring
unicorns as a real property of the Earth. Suppose that a highly
intelligent observer were on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago,
when animals first emerged onto land. That observer might have
predicted that flying animals would evolve some day. It's happened at
least four times, so it seems quite feasible. A square circle, on the
other hand, is _/necessarily/ _ unreal by the definitions of the
terms (if a square were defined not as an equilateral rectangle but
as an equiangular equilateral quadrilateral, then I suppose something
could be both a circle and a kind of degenerate square in some
non-Euclidean space). Even in mathematics it's not always so
cut-and-dried, e.g., the case of zero to the zeroth power, and there
the issue is not simply a touch of the arbitrary in the definition of
an object (still, mathematicians seem to regard 0⁰ as most
"naturally" equal to 1 rather than equal to 0 or undefined). Of
course then there are the mathematical intuitionists. Most
mathematicians aren't intuitionists, but the intuitionists and some
others convinced most mathematicians to prefer constructive proofs.
If we get into that subject, I'm afraid I'll get lost. The more
specialized discussions of what is real in various domains usually
involves some applications of philosophical thinking. I've seen the
theory of limits referred to as "the metaphysics of mathematical
analysis" and the philosopher Berkeley actually did motivate work there.
The idea that the unicorn or its species is real because of a
corresponding factor or style in thought and culture involves the
kind of equivocation about the term "unicorn" that people often
delight in. "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Yes%2C+Virginia%2C+there+is+a+Santa+Claus%22
. The 1947 movie _Miracle on 34th Street_ plays on it too,
particularly in the trial scenes. I used to go along with that kind
of realism about Santa Claus, Cthulhu
https://www.google.com/search?q=Yes%2C+Virginia%2C+there+is+a+Cthulhu
, and others, in a kind of rebellious spirit, but their 'reality'
depends too much on what actual people think of them. They are
dreams, nightmares, make-believes, etc., real in the way that dreams
and nightmares are, thoughts that take place on actual dates, classes
of such thoughts, etc.
Best, Ben
On 2/11/2017 10:44 AM, Mike Bergman wrote:
__________________________________________
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
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