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}Matt, list:
I am unaware that 'abuction' provides any 'magical power. And I
don't think that Peirce considers that objective reality is
'independent of finite minds'. That is - what is unknowable by our
minds is unknowable. Peirce's objective reality is that it exists -
regardless of what you or I think about it - but - we can THINK about
it. I don't understand how you see abduction fitting into this
interaction.
Edwina
On Fri 16/03/18 2:02 PM , Matt Faunce matthewjohnfau...@gmail.com
sent:
Edwina,
In Margolis's philosophy, habits are bound to eventually be overcome
by the flux of life. So if he's right, everything about Margolis's own
philosophy will eventually pass into irrelevance except the rule that
flux > habit. (Flux is greater than habit.) That rule looks to me to
be his achilles heel, because it needs to stay true; whereas Peirce's
achilles heel is the magical power of abduction to bridge the
correspondence gap between a reality that's independent of finite
minds and the finite minds that inquire into reality.
"Insufferably arrogant" was a bit of an exaggeration, as I'm willing
to suffer through reading his arrogant comments in order to learn what
I can.
Matt
On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 8:41 AM Edwina Taborsky wrote:
Matt, list:
You wrote:
"He does this many other places too. It's hard to be as insufferably
arrogant as Peirce was when one's philosophy, even if it were clearly
the truest offered in a given time, is bound to eventually pass into
irrelevance."
I'm uncertain of your meaning. Are you defining Peirce as
'insufferably arrogant' and declaring that his philosophy was merely
relative to the time - and is certain [bound] to become irrelevant?
Edwina Taborsky
On Thu 15/03/18 9:39 PM , Matt Faunce matthewjohnfau...@gmail.com
[2] sent:
Yeah. Apparently Nathan Houser pointed that CP 5.555 mistake,
because Margolis apologized for it in Rethinking Peirce's
Fallibilism. (bottom of pg. 243 into the top of pg. 244 of
Transactions, vol. 43, no. 2. from 2007.)
Anyway, the only reason I brought up Margolis was as an example of
an equal competitor to Peirce's realism; and that point was merely to
highlight that fact that given the fact that empirical support for
Peirce's realism is so-far very weak, the thing that kept Peirce so
passionately driven to defending it must have been a belief in some
rationalistic support for it. The reason I brought that up was
because of his quip scoffing at rationalism in the same breath as he
scoffed political/social views that he opposed:
Peirce: "Being a convinced Pragmaticist in Semeiotic, naturally and
necessarily nothing can appear to me sillier than rationalism; and
folly in politics can go no further than English liberalism. The
people ought to be enslaved..."
Although Margolis has his moments of arrogance, e.g., calling
Peirce's experiment of dropping the stone "comical", Joseph Margolis
much more often strikes me as more humble than Peirce. For example,
at the end a short overview of one of his books, an article called
"Joseph Margolis on the Arts and the Definition of the Human", he
writes this:
"I don't pretend to determine whether the world is a flux or depends
in some ultimate invariance. I think we must decide for ourselves,
however, if the conception of a fluxive world can complete
effectively with the usual commitments to invariance."
He does this many other places too. It's hard to be as insufferably
arrogant as Peirce was when one's philosophy, even if it were clearly
the truest offered in a given time, is bound to eventually pass into
irrelevance.
I still have yet to read Parker and Hausman. I'll keep in mind your
point about Savan.
Matt
On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 7:10 PM Jon Alan Schmidt wrote:
Matt, List:
Those two articles are indeed on JSTOR--that is how I was able to
access them--and so is a 1998 one by Margolis, "Peirce's
Fallibilism." Having just finished reading the latter, I am afraid
that it includes yet another clear misinterpretation of Peirce--in
fact, a blatant misrepresentation.
JM: Let me put one paradox before you that is particularly baffling
but well worth solving. In discussing the nature and relationship
between truth and reality, Peirce says the following two things,
which strike me as required by his doctrine but incompatible with it
as well:
the act of knowing a real object alters it. (5.555)
Reality is that mode of being by virtue of which the real thing is
as it is, irrespectively of what any mind or any definite collection
of minds may represent it to be. (5.565)
It would be hard to find two brief remarks as closely juxtaposed
Peirce's texts as these that are as central to fallibilism as they
are, are as characteristically Peircean, and that are as completely
incompatible as they seem to be. (p. 549)
I was quite startled by the first quote, because elsewhere Peirce
consistently makes it very clear that Dynamic Objects are not
affected in any way by the Signs that they determine; so I checked
the Collected Papers for the context.
CSP: It appears that there are certain mummified pedants who have
never waked to the truth that the act of knowing a real object alters
it. They are curious specimens of humanity, and as I am one of them,
it may be amusing to see how I think. It seems that our oblivion to
this truth is due to our not having made the acquaintance of a new
analysis that the True is simply that in cognition which is
Satisfactory. As to this doctrine, if it is meant that True and
Satisfactory are synonyms, it strikes me that it is not so much a
doctrine of philosophy as it is a new contribution to English
lexicography. (CP 5.555; 1906)
The words are taken verbatim from Peirce, but they constitute a
statement that he was actually repudiating in the passage as a whole,
using characteristic sarcasm. He explicitly identified himself as one
of those "mummified pedants" and "curious specimens of humanity" who
did not hold "that the act of knowing a real object alters it,"
because he denied "that the True is simply that in cognition which
is Satisfactory," derisively calling this "a new contribution to
English lexicography." Consequently, there is no "paradox" or
"incompatibility" with CP 5.565 (1901) whatsoever.
Margolis repeats this rather egregious error several times
throughout the rest of the piece, insisting that Peirce's doctrine of
fallibilism fails--and therefore his realism and concept of 3ns also
fail--because his metaphysics of inquiry fails. Incredibly, he even
defines the latter in a way that misleadingly invokes both of the
quotes.
JM: Thus: the "real" is altered by action, in the sense of finite
human life; but the "real" is, also, what it is "irrespectively of
any mind," at the ideal limit of infinite inquiry. (p. 554)
Peirce obviously meant any individual mind in CP 5.565, since he
appended "any definite collection of minds." Such a formulation is
consistent with others going all the way back to his review of Fraser
on Berkeley (CP 8.12; 1871), "The Logic of 1873" (CP 7.336), and "How
to Make Our Ideas Clear" (CP 5.408; 1878). In trying to drive a
wedge between truth as the achievable goal of finite inquiry and
Truth as a regulative hope, Margolis seems to make the same mistake
that Kelly Parker attributed to David Savan in The Continuity of
Peirce's Thought.
KP: Savan says that this position (let us call it extreme semiotic
realism) "is of no interest to anyone who is in pursuit of
understanding. For such a realist, whatever [apparent] knowledge and
understanding human inquiry may attain, the truth may quite possibly
be otherwise. Such a possibility can not be the goal or
presupposition of science." I argue that, unsettling as the position
may be, Peirce's logical realism implies just this form of extreme
semiotic realism. (pp. 219-220)
KP: Peirce insisted that at the end of inquiry, all information
about the world would be represented in the perfect and
all-encompassing entelechy. Short of that perfect state of
information, though, we may well be ignorant or mistaken about any
given character of existence ... Savan is correct to say that this
ontology leaves the door wide open for all our present readings of
the book of nature to be exposed as mistaken ... This is hardly a
position of "no interest" to one who pursues understanding, however:
it is a direct consequence of the principle of fallibilism. (pp.
221-222)
Frankly, at this point I am not inclined to put much stock in
anything that Margolis has to say about realism in general, or
(especially) Peirce's extreme semiotic realism in particular.
Regards,
Jon S.
On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 12:39 PM, Matt Faunce wrote:
Jon,
I now see I did send that earlier post just to you. Oops, (I'm using
a new email app.) Thanks for posting the whole conversation.
I'll have to read those two articles, The Telos of Peirce's Realism,
and Contra Margolis' Peircean Constructivism. I didn't know about
them, so thanks for mentioning them. The little bit you quoted wasn't
enough for me. Hopefully they're on Jstor.
Matt
On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 9:34 AM Jon Alan Schmidt wrote:
Matt, List:
I replied to you off-List only because you replied to me off-List
first--you sent the message below that begins, "Thanks for the quote,
Jon," only to me. Since you said that you would prefer to have this
conversation on-List, and my approach is the same as yours--"I would
welcome, in fact I hope for, corrections, criticisms, or expansions
of what I write"--I am now posting our entire exchange.
Last night, I read Margolis's 1993 Transactions article, "The
Passing of Peirce's Realism," as well as the 1994 replies by Carl
Hausman and Douglas Anderson, "The Telos of Peirce's Realism: Some
Comments on Margolis's 'The Passing of Peirce's Realism'," and Kelley
J. Wells, "Contra Margolis' Peircean Constructivism: A Peircean
Pragmatic 'Logos'." I found the latter two persuasive that Margolis
fundamentally misinterprets Peirce, and it sounds like you may be
making the same mistake by imposing on him a foundationalist
criterion for metaphysics that he clearly rejected.
CH&DA: According to the evolutionism affirmed by Peirce, then,
there is no independent, pre-established structured reality. Thus,
what is commonly said to be the Peircean notion of a convergence of
thought toward a final, true opinion is not toward a pre-fixed
structure to be matched, but toward a reality that is dynamic. And as
this reality constrains inquiry, it suggests the hypothesis that it is
developmental. Experience presents inquiry with laws or regularities,
many of which tend to be rigid while at the same time undergoing
divergences sometimes followed by the origination of new
regularities, the general drift seeming to be toward what would be a
[sic] in final harmony if inquiry were to continue into the infinite
future. (p. 833)
KJW: Since we cannot escape some sort of ontological commitment
either by doubting or not doubting, Peirce argues that we are
pragmatically justified in believing that there exists independently
"some active general principle" whose discontinuance would be a cause
for surprise ... The nub of the matter is that, for Peirce, scholastic
realism is never justified by an appeal to an indubitable metaphysical
insight, but by an appeal to pragmatic likelihood. Furthermore, Peirce
is saying not only pragmatically speaking we are all realists, but
also that the realism/anti-realism debate should be recast. The
dispute between the realist and the nonrealist must be determined
exclusively on a pragmatic basis. Peirce denies the certainty of
both positive and negative metaphysical insights regarding the real.
Within the context of pragmatism and Critical Common-Sensism, he
argues that there exists good grounds for a belief in the independent
reality of universal generals. (p. 844)
Of course, Peirce would have no problem acknowledging that both the
hypothesis that reality is developmental and the pragmatically
justified belief in the independent reality of universal generals are
eminently fallible.
Regards,
Jon S.
On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 12:15 AM, Matt Faunce wrote:
Jon,
(I just realized you sent that response just to me. I actually
prefer to keep all Peirce-related stuff on the list because I would
welcome, in fact I hope for, corrections, criticisms, or expansions
of what I write. But, I don't want to post anything you wrote
exclusively to me to the list, so this is to just you.)
Here's a short definition of 'rationalism' from James's article,
Hegel and his Method:
"Rationalism, you remember, is what I called the way of thinking
that methodically subordinates parts to wholes, so Hegel here is
rationalistic through and through. The only whole by which all
contradictions are reconciled is for him the absolute whole of
wholes, the all-inclusive reason to which Hegel gave the name of the
absolute Idea…"
Rationalism, which subordinates parts to wholes, is contrasted with
Empiricism, which subordinates wholes to parts.
In my posts yesterday, instead of saying "major premise" I'm not
sure if I should have said "general rule which acts as an 'extraneous
trans-empirical connective support'", since maybe the parts need not
be necessary consequences of the whole; maybe they just need to be
compatible with the whole and in harmony with the whole. I think that
in extreme rationalism the parts would be necessary consequences, but
in a philosophy that has a balance of rationalism and empiricism...?
(I don't know. It's getting late here.)
"Why is it pejorative?"
It's because rationalism rests on an untestable, untested, or a very
weakly tested major premise, i.e., an overarching visionary rule or
whatever it should be called.
As far as Margolis's realism, where Peirce explains the
correspondence between reality and inquiry with abduction, Margolis
does it through constructivism. Peirce says the real is independent
of any number of minds. Constructivism entails a form of
psychologism.
(Hopefully that wasn't way too short to make much of, but I didn't
want to leave you hanging for another day or two.)
My point stands with even a hypothetical competitor: if they're
equal but incompatible with each other then what could possibly
convince you that one philosophy is right and the other is wrong?
Even if Margolis's philosophy is shown, after years of inquiring, to
be weaker, what gives you the confidence that Peirce's explanation is
the one that will last in the long-run when there is an infinity of
new conceptions yet to be discovered, many of which are too exotic
for our 21st century mind to grasp, which may offer the key to a
better philosophy which is incompatible with Peirce's? Maybe several
centuries from now we'll have the ability to satisfactorily test the
overarching General Rule that presides over our accepted philosophy.
Maybe. In the meantime it appears to me that people decide their
philosophy largely by choosing one that has the overarching visionary
rule that feels best to them.
Matt
On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 9:03 AM Jon Alan Schmidt wrote:
Matt:
I confess that I am having some trouble following you here, perhaps
because I am only vaguely familiar with James and Hegel, and not at
all with Margolis. What exactly do you find incompatible between the
latter's realism and that of Peirce? How do you define "rationalism"
in this context, and why is it pejorative?
Thanks,
Jon S.
On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 9:49 PM, Matt Faunce wrote:
Thanks for the quote, Jon. When the 'perfect sign' thread started I
was reading William James's article, Hegel and his Method. Peirce's
semiotics which lead outward to the 'perfect sign' struck me as a
new-and-impoved version of Hegel's dialectical method which reaches
outwardly to the "absolute Idea". James convincingly accused Hegel of
rationalism, and I wondered if Peirce's method is susceptible to the
same criticism. I can't say 'yes' yet, but I'm leaning that way. I've
still got a few pages to go on that article. I recommend reading it.
Peirce's semiotics is based on his version of realism which is both
internally coherent and compatible with our most well established
ideas of this world. As far as I can tell Joseph Margolis's
alternative version of realism is equally coherent in itself and
compatible with the most well established ideas of this world, as
well. But, the two versions are incompatible. I'm not yet sure if
Peirce's semiotics can be plugged into Magolis's realism without
making changes so drastic that you could no longer call the semiotics
'Peircean'. Let's say it can't be, then what sways a person toward one
version of realism or the other except this or that preconceived, and
so-far practically untestable, major premise standing over them? If
the answer is 'nothing else could sway us one way or the other' then
Peirce's semiotics, because it's based on his version of realism, is
thoroughly based on rationalism.
I wish these assumed major premises were brought to light better or
more often by Peircean scholars, and by Peirce-L list members. I fell
totally in love with John Venn's scholarship not long after seeing he
opened his book on inductive logic with a list of postulates on which
inductive logic depends! Bring them out, front and center.
Anyway, I do see Peirce's views of political order, as well as
anyone's view of political order, as almost completely based on
rationalism. In fact, I think all inquiry on the big questions of
life are, so far, based mostly on rationalism.
Matt
On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 9:24 PM Jon Alan Schmidt wrote:
Matt, List:
Your first and last comments (quoted below) tie in with something
that Peirce wrote around the same time as EP 2:304, where he
discussed "the ideal sign which would be quite perfect."
CSP: There is a science of semeiotics whose results no more afford
room for differences of opinion than do those of mathematics, and one
of its theorems increases the aptness of that simile. It is that if
any signs are connected, no matter how, the resulting system
constitutes one sign; so that, most connections resulting from
successive pairings, a sign frequently interprets a second in so far
as this is "married" to a third. Thus, the conclusion of a syllogism
is the interpretation of either premiss as married to the other, and
of this sort are all the principal translation-processes of thought.
In the light of the above theorem, we see that the entire thought-life
of any one person is a sign; and a considerable part of its
interpretation will result from marriages with the thoughts of other
persons. So the thought-life of a social group is a sign; and the
entire body of all thought is a sign, supposing all thought to be
more or less connected. The entire interpretation of thought must
consist in the results of thought's action outside of thought; either
in all these results or in some of them. (R 1476:36[5-1/2]; c. 1904)
I only discovered this passage within the last couple of days,
thanks to Gary Fuhrman quoting one sentence from it--the statement of
the theorem--in his online book (
[3]http://gnusystems.ca/TS/bgn.htm#Aufg [4]), Gary Richmond sending
me an off-List message calling that citation to my attention, and
Jeff Downard making all of the scanned Peirce manuscripts available
on the SPIN Project website (
https://fromthepage.com/collection/show?collection_id=16 [5]). What
better demonstration of its truth could there be than this very chain
of events, which now results in its much wider dissemination?
Regards,
Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USAProfessional Engineer, Amateur
Philosopher, Lutheran Laymanwww.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt [6] -
twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt [7]
On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 5:54 PM, Matt Faunce wrote:
First, Hi to everyone! I've missed a lot of the conversations in
the past year or so, but the concept of 'perfect sign' in the other
thread caught my attention and pulled me in for the moment ...
Just like a hive of bees has a collective intelligence, humans do
too; and this is the type of intelligence that will lead us toward
the right social order in the long run, that is, if the leveraging of
elite individual will from elite individual intelligence doesn't drive
the human race into extinction.
Matt
Links:
------
[1]
http://webmail.primus.ca/javascript:top.opencompose(\'tabor...@primus.ca\',\'\',\'\',\'\')
[2]
http://webmail.primus.ca/javascript:top.opencompose(\'matthewjohnfau...@gmail.com\',\'\',\'\',\'\')
[3] http://gnusystems.ca/TS/bgn.htm#Aufg
[4] http://gnusystems.ca/TS/bgn.htm#Aufg
[5] https://fromthepage.com/collection/show?collection_id=16
[6] http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt
[7] http://twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
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