Clark, List: Your post touches on several issues which may overlap with some of our previous interventions on the pragmatic differentiation of CSP's scientific philosophy and its relations to modern physical conjectures about the nature of “truth” in its many linguistic descriptors (coherence, correspondence, consistency, concordance, …) (I published a paper on this topic about the turn of the Century. I will look for the reference.)
> On Mar 24, 2017, at 9:34 AM, Clark Goble <[email protected]> wrote: > It seems to me the starting point for thinking about truth for Peirce ought > be externalism. I concur. And add that the externalism is necessary to unfold the historical development of his philosophy in parallel to the historical development of chemistry in the second half of the 19 th Century. A priori, externalism infers part-whole relations and ampliative logical operations, does it not?. This is a major differentiation from mathematic physics, which prides itself on the virginity of its abstractions and the infallibility of continuous mathematics. Obviously, I fully concur with this abstract description of the logical terms of qualisign, sinsign and legisign as three of the many possible descriptors of the external. In the long-range context, the external dynamics was in motion before man arrived on the scene. My reading of John Sowa and Frederick Sjernfelt’s writings is that the notion of the natural logics of external truths is not foundational in the sense that you propose. I believe that CSP’s central perspective of realism originates in externalism and chemical analysis of external objects and enumerable relations among external chemical objects. > That is are we talking about a knower who is roughly a human individual at a > specific time or are we talking about truth in semiotic broader than any one > individual. While Peirce occasionally talks of epistemology along a more > traditional Cartesian conception by and large when he speaks of truth he’s > speaking of this broader conception. Unless we keep that in mind I think > we’ll always go astray. I concur. Naturalism is one of the foundations of CSP’s “universal” ordering of arguments that depend on the discrete mapping of terms from icons to rhema in relation to indices. (Chemical indices include the molecular formula of a chemical sin-sign). > > An individual then ‘has’ truth to the degree that the sign within them is the > same as this final interpretant. In this context, is the final interpretant a legi-sign? > > The next thing to keep in mind is that Peirce still maintains the traditional > conception of proposition or statement as carriers of truth. By which he > means they are signs that signify this interpretant. As the quotes Jon put up > on wikipedia indicate we thus have a sort of correspondence but not a > Cartesian sort. It’s not the correspondence of an internal image with an > external object. Rather it’s the correspondence of the object signified > through a sign with an interpretant that is the same as the final > interpretant. The odd feature of Peirce’s conception of truth is that this > sign need not be in a particular knowing subject. (I’m not sure of the > implications of that since it gets into the question of intentionality in > Peircean semiotics) > > The biggest difference between Peirce and more traditional conceptions of > truth in the loose Cartesian tradition (including Kant) would be that truth > is essentially wrapped up with signs. Does it go beyond this? Do the Cartesian coordinates become axis for mathematical terms representing physical units representing signs? > It is triadic whereas for most philosophy correspondence and even coherence > is merely dualistic. Does the Cartesian correspondence constrain signs to three dimensions? > > I’ve been thinking of my original question I posed a month or two ago. That > is what is the status of truth. To the degree an object signifies a stable > interpretant it seems to me that truth is fated or necessary regardless of > whether one adopts modal realism. In chemical logic, the constraints of the table of elements, physical electro-neutrality (valence), and mereology (molecular weight, molecular formula, molecular structure) are necessarily “parts of the logical whole”. > I’ve come around to the idea that fundamentally what’s at stake with my > question is less the question of truth than the question of time. I disagree. A chemical sentence usually is written a-temporally under the conservative laws of physics (for mass and electricity). Simple example: Hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water. The temporal dimension has further dependencies on the thermodynamic context in a specific EXTERNAL context. > That is to ask if truth exists is to ask when a sign is complete. I disagree. Physically, mathematically and chemically, the completeness of a chemical sentence is a very different (linguistic?) issue. Indeed, what does this sentence infer to you? > If one adopts presentism or some related ontological conception of time then > this seems to play havoc with Peirce’s semiotic. (Maybe others will disagree > with me there) The way out of this problem is either to embrace a four > dimensional theory of time in which case there is already a truth about the > future or else to embrace the later Peirce’s modal realism and simply talk > about truth as those signs that are in all possible universes. That is to > embrace the kind of robust talk of possibilities we see in contemporary modal > realism. Are these merely philosophical issue or do they have substance? These quick responses are merely “off the top of my head” - just to stimulate further thought and perhaps meaningful discussion. Cheers Jerry > > ----------------------------- > PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON > PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] > . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] > 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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