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}List:
Additionally, as Peirce noted, in 'Some Consequences of Four
Incapacities' [1868], "to make single individuals absolute judges of
truth is most pernicious" [5.265.2].
This is a basic rejection of Cartesianism, which did indeed focus on
the singular individual alone, - which would involve therefore, only
the Categories of Firstness [feeling/emotion] and Secondness
[particularity] - and have no room for that most vital of Peircean
analysis: Thirdness, or the generalizations of commonality. And since
the 'common' is continuous, then, it is an expression of logical
organization [rather than randomness]. And therefore, this is also a
rejection of subjective relativism.
Add to that, Peirce's acceptance of objective reality - a reality to
which we must submit as factual rather than fictional - and there can
be no possibility of individual 'logics'.
Edwina
On Mon 25/09/17 10:22 PM , Thomas Gollier [email protected] sent:
List,
I've always felt no one acts irrationally. Given their beliefs, how
they perceive what's there, and their way of thinking about it, what
they do "makes sense". But I can see now that I was probably was a
little sloppy when I expressed that idea as everyone being logical.
Just using Peirce's icons we would have a lot of ways of thinking
with images (what Hegel called "picture-thinking"), many ways of
thinking with metaphors, and numerous kinds of diagrams, only a few
of which would be logics, that could be employed.
I guess that makes me one of those "relativists," but maybe we still
have a standard of "consistency' between the different elements to
separate the sheep from the goats?
Tom
That said
On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 10:18 AM, Helmut Raulien wrote:
List, I don´t know which philosophies were on vogue at that time
(1903), but about LL 1.1. and 1.2., I think they apply to later
philosophical vogues too: To most that ends with "ism" or "turn".
Somebody sees the formerly not seen importance of something (e.g.
language, construction of reality, behavior, relativity), and then
makes an "ism" or a "turn" out of it, which suggests, that the whole
reality is due to it (e.g. linguistic turn, constructivism,
behaviorism, relativism). So it is a generalization only by
assumption, instead of having looked before, how far a generalization
might go. Maybe the vogue-starters just did not have a meta-theory of
generalization, did they? Or they did/do not know it. I think the
Peircean categories- theory may be a good tool to decide, how far you
can generalize something. Best, Helmut 25. September 2017 um 15:31
Uhr
"Edwina Taborsky"
wrote:
This seems a good description of postmodern subjective relativism,
with its rejection of objective reality and its focus on the
'Fixation of Belief' that I think Peirce referred to as 'a priori'.
With a rejection of objective reality - and its concomitant
infrastructure of Mind [4.551], this also means a rejection of
Thirdness or the reality of a generality of logical relations in the
particular instantiations. So- we get subjectivism, and a world made
up of only the particular in Firstness and Secondness.
Edwina Taborsky
On Mon 25/09/17 8:04 AM , [email protected] [3] sent:
Continuing Peirce’s Lowell Lecture 1 (from EP2:243):
… I had better mention that the argument I shall criticize is open
to quite another objection than that which I notice,— and a more
obvious one. You may wonder why I pass over it. It is simply because
some forms in which the same confusion of thought occurs are not open
to this same objection. I only notice the radical objection that is
common to all forms.
But you will think it high time I told you what this tangle of ideas
of which I have said so much consists in. First let me state the
fallacious argument which embodies it. The particular argument which
I have chosen to exemplify it leads to a more extreme conclusion than
some of the others. It does so because it is less illogical than those
others. Its conclusion is that there is no distinction of good and bad
reasoning. Although, thus nakedly exhibited, this conclusion might
find few to embrace it, yet it is substantially what I might almost
say that all Germany believes in today. For example, few
nineteenth-century treatises on logic in the German language have a
word to say about fallacies. Why not? Because they hold the law of
logic to be, like a law of nature, inviolable. Or to state the matter
more exactly, enough of them hold to this opinion to set the fashion
for the others. Fashion is everything among German philosophers,
for the simple reason that the professor’s livelihood depends on
his lectures being in the favored vogue.
The fallacious argument itself runs thus: Every reasoning takes
place in some mind. It would not be that mind’s reasoning unless it
satisfied that mind’s feeling of logicality ( logisches Gefühl).
But as long as it does that, nothing can be gained by criticizing the
reasoning any further, since there is no other possible sign by which
we could know that it was good than that feeling of logicality in the
reasoner’s mind. For if the reasoning be criticized, that criticism
must be conducted by reasoning; and that reasoning, in its turn, must
either be accepted because it satisfies the reasoner’s feeling of
logicality, or else be criticized by further reasoning. He cannot
carry through an endless series of reasonings. Therefore, some final
reasoning there must be that is adopted on the assumption that a
reasoning which satisfies the feeling of logicality is as good as any
reasoning can be; and if this be not true, all reasoning is worthless.
Consequently, since every reasoning satisfies the reasoner’s feeling
of logicality, every reasoning is as good as any reasoning can be.
That is, there is no distinction of good and bad reasoning.
That is the argument which I pronounce a miserable fallacy. If we
extend to arguments a just maxim of our law, every argument must be
presumed to be sound until it is proved fallacious. Accordingly, I
will refer to this argument as the “defendant argument,” and to
the writers who adhere to it as the “defendants.”
In order to emphasize that confusion which I think so pestilent, and
to prevent your minds from being distracted from it to another fault
in the defendant argument, I put it into parallel with another
argument that involves a quite analogous confusion.
Namely, we find in some of the old writers a fallacious argument to
prove that there is no distinction of moral right and wrong. The
argument runs as follows:
The distinction between a good act and a bad one, if there be any
such distinction, lies in the motive. But the only motive a man can
have is his own pleasure. No other is thinkable. For if a man desires
to act in any way, it is because he takes pleasure in so acting.
Otherwise, his action would not be voluntary and deliberate. Thus,
there is but one possible motive for action that has any motive; and
consequently, the distinction of right and wrong, which would be a
distinction between motives, does not exist.
You see the parallelism between the two arguments. Each undertakes
to refute a distinction between good and bad; the one in reasoning,
the other in endeavor. Each does this by pronouncing something
unthinkable; the one, that a man should adopt a conclusion for any
other reason than a feeling of logicality, the other that a man
should adopt any line of conduct from any other motive than a feeling
of pleasure.
My position, in opposition to these arguments, is that it is so far
from being true that every desire necessarily desires its own
gratification, that, on the contrary, it is impossible that a desire
should desire its own gratification; and it is so far from being true
that every inference must necessarily be based upon its seeming
satisfactory, that it is, on the contrary, impossible that any
inference should be based in any degree upon its seeming
satisfactory.
I want to lead you to see clearly that the defendants confound two
disparate categories, and, having identified objects belonging to
these categories, attribute to them a nature belonging to a third
category. They confound an efficient agency, whose very existence
consists in its acting when and where it is, with a general mental
formulation; and as if this were not blunder enough, they call the
identified two a feeling. The first blunder is as if a man, being
asked what made the Campanile fall in Venice, were to reply that it
was the regularity of nature. That is a confusion tolerably
common,— the confusion of a decree of a court with the sheriff’s
strong right arm. But, after having identified these, to call them a
feeling is, I believe, a mistake peculiar to philosophers. It is
something like confusing a living man with the general idea of a man
and, having done so, saying that he was constructed of two nasal
consonants and a vowel.
To be continued
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