Kirsti, list,
As list moderator and co-manager I try to follow what I consider to be
the exemplary notions expressed by the founder and first manager and
moderator of peirce-l, Joseph Ransdell, concerning what he considered
to be best practices on the list. I may not always be as successful as
Joe was in this, but I try to do the best I can. For Joe's remarks,
see: HOW THE FORUM WORKS (scroll down a bit):
http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/PEIRCE-L/PEIRCE-L.HTM [1]
if you are new to the list or have not read them for some time, I
highly recommend (re)reading Joe's remarks, something I do myself from
time to time.
In the current matter I would especially recommend reading these
passages (I've inserted a very few of my own comments into these).
CAVEAT ABOUT CORRECTING OTHERS
-------------------------
It is expected that criticism will be vigorous and diligently pursued:
philosophy is understood here to be essentially a critically directed
and self-controlled conversation. But there is one important caveat in
this connection: If you feel that some messages being posted are not
to the purpose of the list or that there is something someone is doing
which should be discouraged, do NOT attempt to rectify that yourself
by posting a message to that effect to the list in general. Because
there is so little overt or formal moderation by the list manager, it
is natural to suppose that the individual members can and should take
that role as needed. But this rarely if ever produces the effect
intended, regardless of how reasonable it may seem at a particular
time. Contact me instead off-list and we will see what can or should
be done, if anything, without generating a chain reaction of protests
and counter-protests, which are the typical result of attempting to
rectify the problem on-list.
GR: Following the practice Joe advised here, I was properly
contacted by three members of the list who found especially this
passage in a message from Kirsti addressed to John problematic:
Kirsti had written:
"This time, John, I have to say: Wrong, wrong, wrong, You just don't
know what you are talking about. - just walking on very thin ice
and expecting your fame on other fields with get you through."
THESE REMARKS WERE SEEN BY ONE LISTER AS "DENIGRATING" AND BY
ANOTHER AS "UNTOWARD." I AGREED AND WROTE KIRSTI OFF-LIST.
WHY THE LIST MANAGER SHOULD DO THE CORRECTING
-------------------------
Should you contact the person yourself first, off-list, in an attempt
to rectify their way of participating rather than bothering me with
it? Although you do of course have a right—professional, moral,
legal, whatever—to do this, and it may seem best to you, let me urge
you to contact me first, nonetheless, unless there is some truly
special and urgent reason to the contrary. There are several reasons
for this:
(1) None of us really knows yet what the most humane and productive
communicational mores will turn out to be for communication of this
sort: it is continually surprising, and if anything is certain here it
is that our initial hunches tend to be unreliable. The list manager is
more likely to understand enough about the dynamics of this particular
list than anyone else, and has also had enough experience of these
things to have learned what is likely to be the most effective
response to something problematic.
(2) It is the list manager who is ultimately responsible for the list,
as regards institutional accountability. Speaking directly to this: I
need to have these things under my own control if I am to handle
judiciously the problems that can arise in such connections. I am open
to advice and counsel at all times and try not to act imperiously. But
there is no way that I can effectively delegate my responsibility to
the list members, which would be essential if the members were
themselves to participate in the management of the list other than as
informal advisors in off-list discussion.
(3) It is probably because everybody on the list understands (at least
unreflectively) that no list members as such have any special right to
regulate or moderate the conduct of others as list members that
criticisms of one another that suggest directly or indirectly that
someone is not of the proper sort to be on the list because of what
they post are highly inflammatory and are the cause of most so-called
"flame wars".
Contrary to what one might think, "flame wars" do NOT begin because
people, excited by ideas, sometimes go too far and say things they
shouldn't. Errors like this are to be expected in a new discussion
medium and they are easily corrected by apology and retraction
immediately thereafter. Anybody who participates vigorously in this
medium will make errors of judgment like this, and those familiar with
the medium do not condemn one another for it. They do expect, though,
that those who are at odds with one another in this way be both
generous in their tolerance of the other when excess occurs and in
their readiness to make verbal amends when excess is imputed to them.
_When in doubt, apologize: you are never diminished by it._
GR: AGAIN, I WROTE KIRSTI OF THE OFF-LIST CONCERNS EXPRESSED BY
SEVERAL FORUM MEMBERS INCLUDING MY OWN CONCERNS. HER RESPONSE
ON-LIST SUGGESTS TO ME THAT SHE WAS CLEARLY OFFENDED BY THAT
MESSAGE. STILL, I THOUGHT THE WAY I APPROACHED IT WAS THE CORRECT
WAY TO DO SO. AND HER APOLOGY (REFLECTING WHAT IS EMPHASIZED IN
JOE'S COMMENTS JUST ABOVE) IS CERTAINLY APPRECIATED, AT VERY LEAST
BY ME.
THE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE IN THE PROTECTION OF REPUTATION
-------------------------
Special situations do arise, though, in which someone feels aggrieved
at what someone else has said to or about them in the public forum and
feels it important to set the record straight in the forum as well,
not necessarily out of anger but as a matter of the practical need to
exercise self-defense of reputation as regards personal or
professional comportment. I will address this more fully and
adequately in an appendix below, but it should be understood that not
even the list manager has the right to deny to a person the
opportunity of rectifying, by speaking in his or her own behalf, what
he or she believes to be serious misunderstandings about themselves as
persons, private or public, that have been or are being generated in
the forum. _This right of personal self-defense must be respected,
even when the person seems to be mistaken or to be using poor judgment
in pursuing it._ See the appendix in further explanation of the reason
for this and for some procedural points and policies that are
especially important in this connection.
GR: SO, KIRSTI INDEED HAS EVERY RIGHT TO DEFEND HERSELF SINCE SHE
CLEARLY FEELS MALIGNED BY ME (BTW, NOTE THAT WHILE I CC'D BEN UDELL,
LIST CO-MANAGER, MY NOTE TO KIRSTI, HE DID NOT HIMSELF PARTICIPATE
IN THE WRITING OF IT).
THE PUBLIC AND THE PERSONAL
-------------------------
If you are new to this discussion medium you may make the common
mistake of thinking that a public forum should be impersonal. Not so.
In fact, all relationships of persons established here in virtue of
becoming a subscriber to the list are necessarily person-to-person
relationships. PEIRCE-L is not a community or a group, though it will
hopefully function to encourage community relationships. It is simply
a place where persons talk to persons in a public setting, and it is
normal to address one another personally while speaking in a public
place. The personal is not the same as the private. The question is
whether the discussion concerns matters that pertain to the purpose of
the forum in general, and when that condition is met it is quite in
order to pursue special interests in public in list-based discussions
of this sort as long as there is nothing exclusive of others in it,
either explicitly or in tone.
Best,
Gary Richmond (writing as list moderator and co-manager)
GARY RICHMOND
PHILOSOPHY AND CRITICAL THINKING
COMMUNICATION STUDIES
LAGUARDIA COLLEGE OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
C 745
718 482-5690 [2]
On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 3:30 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
Dear John,
I sincerely apologize for any negative feelings my latest mail
addressed to you may have caused.
I have been reprimanded by list managers that my tenor and tone are
not tolerated. In a democratic list, so I am told.
There have been three complaints. Off-list. So I'm told.
My rare praises have been out-of-place and unfounded too. So I have
been told as well.
Hereby I publicly apologize for both kinds of responses.
Regards,
Kirsti
[email protected] kirjoitti 10.11.2016 15:51:
John, list,
Most important points you take up, John. Time-sequences between
stories do not apply. - The big-bang is just a story,one on many
just
as possible stories.
Time-scales are just as crucial with the between - issue as are
storywise arising issues. There are no easy ways out ot the
time-scale
issues.
Best, Kirsti
John F Sowa kirjoitti 9.11.2016 21:25:
Edwina, Kirsti, list,
ET
I wish we could get into the analysis of time in more detail.
I came across a short passage by Gregory Bateson that clarifies the
issues. See the attached Bateson79.jpg, which is an excerpt from
p. 2
of a book on biosemiotics (see below). Following is the critical
point:
GB
thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds
whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones...
A story is a little knot or complex of that species of
connectedness which we call relevance.
This observation is compatible with Peirce, but CSP used the term
'quasi-mind' to accommodate the species-bias of most humans:
CP 4.551
Admitting that connected Signs must have a Quasi-mind, it may
further
be declared that there can be no isolated sign. Moreover, signs
require at least two Quasi-minds; a Quasi-utterer and a Quasi-
interpreter; and although these two are at one (i.e., are one mind)
in the sign itself, they must nevertheless be distinct. In the
Sign
they are, so to say, welded. Accordingly, it is not merely a fact
of human Psychology, but a necessity of Logic, that every logical
evolution of thought should be dialogic.
Re time: We have to distinguish (1) time as it is in reality
(whatever that may be); (2) time in our stories (which include the
formalized stories called physics); (3) the mental sequence of
thought; and (4) the logical sequence (dialogic) of connected
signs.
ET
The question is: Are the Platonic worlds BEFORE or AFTER the
so-called
Big Bang? I read them as AFTER while Gary R and Jon S [not John S]
read them as BEFORE. In my reading, before the Big Bang, there was
Nothing, not even Platonic worlds.
This question is about time sequences in different kinds of
stories:
the Big Bang story about what reality may be; and Platonic stories
about ideal, mathematical forms.
The time sequence of a mathematical story is independent of the
time
sequence of a physical story. We may apply the math (for example,
the definitions, axioms, and proofs of a Platonic form) to the
construction of a physical story.
But that application is a mapping between two stories. The term
'prior to' is meaningful only *within* a story, not between
stories.
In short, our "commonsense" notion of time is an abstraction from
the stories we tell about our experience. The time sequences in
two
different stories may have some similarities, but we must
distinguish
three distinct sequences: the time sequences of each story, and
the
time sequence of the mapping, which is a kind of meta-story.
JFS
Does anyone know if [Peirce] had written anything about embedding
our universe in a hypothetical space of higher dimension?
KM
I am most interested in knowing more on this.
David Finkelstein, p. 277 of the reference below:
Peirce seems to have included geometry in his evolutionism, at least
in principle... [He] seems not to have responded to the
continuously-
evolving physical geometry of Riemann and Clifford... nor to
Einstein's
conceptual unification of space and time.
In any case, I think that the notion of time as an abstraction from
stories -- imaginary, factual, or theoretical -- provides a way of
relating different views. It also allows for metalevel reasoning
that can distinguish and relate different kinds of stories that
have independent time scales and sequences.
John
____________________________________________________________________
From Google books:
_A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor
to Biosemiotics_ edited by Jesper Hoffmeyer, Springer, 2008:
https://books.google.com/books?id=dcHqVpZ97pUC&pg=PA246&lpg=PA246&dq=Order+is+simply+thought+embodied+in+arrangement&source=bl&ots=DQUnZlvOYu&sig=X8bH0YAG597uwjyedB4dSf2BuC0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwizyZD88JrQAhVENxQKHeEeBwoQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=Order%20is%20simply%20thought%20embodied%20in%20arrangement&f=false
[3]
David R. Finkelstein, _Quantum Relativity: A Synthesis of the Ideas
of Heisenberg and Einstein_, Springer, 1996.
https://books.google.com/books?id=OvjsCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA277&lpg=PA277&dq=peirce+relativity&source=bl&ots=0rc7kjxqIJ&sig=Hsgtu9_LwZAoDxH7kbVgvWmAfiI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwihk4SzpZzQAhWF3YMKHR1kA5wQ6AEIHzAA#v=onepage&q=peirce%20relativity&f=false
[4]
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[1] http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/PEIRCE-L/PEIRCE-L.HTM
[2] tel:(718)%20482-5690
[3]
https://books.google.com/books?id=dcHqVpZ97pUC&pg=PA246&lpg=PA246&dq=Order+is+simply+thought+embodied+in+arrangement&source=bl&ots=DQUnZlvOYu&sig=X8bH0YAG597uwjyedB4dSf2BuC0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwizyZD88JrQAhVENxQKHeEeBwoQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=Order%20is%20simply%20thought%20embodied%20in%20arrangement&f=false
[4]
https://books.google.com/books?id=OvjsCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA277&lpg=PA277&dq=peirce+relativity&source=bl&ots=0rc7kjxqIJ&sig=Hsgtu9_LwZAoDxH7kbVgvWmAfiI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwihk4SzpZzQAhWF3YMKHR1kA5wQ6AEIHzAA#v=onepage&q=peirce%20relativity&f=false
[5] http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm
