List,
The first paragraph of Lowell 1.9 marks the beginning of the exchange between Peirce and Welby which continued until 1911; it began when she had her publisher send him a copy of her book and Peirce wrote a very positive review of it for The Nation. In this lecture, it serves to contextualize the study of logic, which is the main subject of the Lowell Lectures, by defining the three grades of meaning. The second paragraph explains some limitations of logic. Peirce acknowledges that our reasoning is always informed by tacit assumptions, and that our logic has to leave these out of account if it is to be exact. He also says that "the logician assumes that the meaning of language is well known between himself and the person to whom he is imparting his doctrine" - an assumption that is quite unrealistic in ordinary dialogue, and in fact is a common source of miscommunication between people, as I argued in Chapter 2 of Turning Signs (http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/dlg.htm). Nevertheless, if we want to communicate, we have to hope that our dialogue partners will understand what we mean by our words, and that we understand what our partners mean by theirs, at least until it becomes clear that this is not the case. In logic as represented by existential graphs, this "hope" becomes an assumption, or rather field of assumptions, represented by the sheet of assertion on which graphs are "scribed." As Peirce says in Lowell 2, the blank sheet of assertion is already a graph, representing "the aggregate of subjects of the complexus of experience-forces well-understood between the graphist, or he who scribes the graph, and the interpreter of it." But I'm getting ahead of myself here - we still have one more paragraph of Lowell 1 to consider, and I'll post that tomorrow. Gary f. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 10-Oct-17 08:50 To: 'Peirce List' <[email protected]> Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Lowell Lecture 1.9 Continuing from Lowell 1.8 (EP2:255): A little book by Victoria Lady Welby has lately appeared entitled What is Meaning? The book has sundry merits, among them that of showing that there are three modes of meaning. But the best feature of it is that it presses home the question "What is meaning?" A word has meaning for us in so far as we are able to make use of it in communicating our knowledge to others and in getting at the knowledge that those others seek to communicate to us. That is the lowest grade of meaning. The meaning of a word is more fully the sum total of all the conditional predictions which the person who uses it intends to make himself responsible for or intends to deny. That conscious or quasi-conscious intention in using the word is the second grade of meaning. But besides the consequences to which the person who accepts a word knowingly commits himself, there is a vast ocean of unforeseen consequences which the acceptance of the word is destined to bring about, not merely consequences of knowing but perhaps revolutions of society. One cannot tell what power there may be in a word or a phrase to change the face of the world; and the sum of those consequences makes up the third grade of meaning. Let us now consider what the science of logic ought to embrace. Although whatever is true is logical whether we know it to be so or not, yet it is plain that logic cannot embrace all human knowledge. The logician endeavors to assume an attitude as if, as logician, he had no information at all except what everybody must have to reason at all. This, however, is not exactly possible. There is no exactly defined sphere of knowledge such that everybody who reasons must possess the whole of it and need know nothing else. But the logician assumes that the meaning of language is well known between himself and the person to whom he is imparting his doctrine, although that meaning may not be analyzed and all its elements distinctly recognized, but that no other facts are known. Of course, some others must be known; but they are left out of account. http://gnusystems.ca/Lowells.htm }{ Peirce's Lowell Lectures of 1903
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