Gary R, list, In support of the important points you’ve said here, Gary, I’d like to submit this excerpt from Peirce’s Harvard Lecture 7 (1903, EP2:532):
[[ the good of abduction, as such, that is, its adaptation to its end, will consist of its being of such a character that its deductive consequences may be experimentally tested. … It is plain that a man cannot consistently engage in this discussion or in any discussion unless he admits that there is a distinction between truth and falsity. It is also plain that to admit this distinction is to admit that there is something whose characters are what they are independently of what he may think that they are; and further the words “truth” and “falsity” are not appropriate unless he wishes to make his opinions conform to that object and thinks that in some measure he can do so. Neither is it what we mean to wish to satisfy some man, or body of men, or other being or beings with his opinions. We must mean by the real that which has such characters as it has independently of what any particular mind or minds may think those characters may be. At the same time, these characters of the real must be of the nature of thoughts or sufficiently so to impart some sense to our talking of thoughts conforming to those characters. But this thought or quasi-thought in which the characters of the real consist cannot be any existential happening or being. Thus suppose we were to say that the real is what men will ultimately come to think. Then the real fact that they will so come to think would have to consist in their coming to think that they would come so to think and this again would consist in their coming to think that they would come to think that so they would come to think, and so on ad infinitum, and it is plain that this would not be making the reality consist in the existential coming to pass of anything. I am forced to say that that which thought conforms to has a representational mode of being which does not consist in any reactional existence. At the same time, it will be too manifestly false for me to say that the redness of a red thing consists in anything but the immediate positive quality itself. Neither can I deny that when I make an effort it is then and there that the event takes place, however it is represented. I must thus acknowledge the distinctness of the three categories, and at the same time that Thirdness is continuous up to the other two as limits before I can have any clear notion of truth and falsity; and without such clear notion I have no basis for any discussion of the maxim of abduction. ]] Gary f. From: Gary Richmond <[email protected]> Sent: 1-Aug-18 19:05 To: Peirce-L <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Logical Depth and Signification Edwina, list, Edwina wrote: "This doesn't mean relativism; it doesn't mean nominalism; it means instead that our 'intellectual conceptions' must be offered as open interpretations by one person, open to questions and different views and not defined as 'the truth'." But it does, at least to me, sound like relativism. I don't agree that all "'intellectual conceptions' must be offered as open interpretations by one person. . ." Peirce valorizes the scientific community well over the individual. Within a given community (recalling that the entirety of Peirce's cenoscopic philosophy, including logic as semeiotic, is pure theoretical science), within such a community the final 'truth' of the matters under consideration will never be reached; but it can be asymptotically approached--and a given scientific community can get very 'close' to the truth inquired into. In addition, there is clearly falsity and error so that not all "interpretations by one person" are equally valid. Some are downright wrong in consideration of the commens of the informed community. In Peirce's view the primary source of error is the individual who would seem to have value in a given scientific community either as (1) a member of that research community or (2) the generator of a testable hypothesis--and that is all. [I would add to these those practitioners of what Peirce calls science of review ("arranging the results of discovery, beginning with digests, and going on to endeavor to form a philosophy of science. . ." (1903). But the possibility--and, historically speaking, the fact--of personal error in formulating such a philosophy is very great, in my opinion the error not infrequently brought about by egoism and arrogance in not adequately researching and representing the work of the scientific community. In the first of the 1898 Cambridge Lectures in the context of inquiry, Peirce comments that "there is nothing which distinguished my personal identify except my faults and my limitations--or if you please, my blind will, which it is my highest endeavor to annihilate" (CP 1.673). In short, Peirce saw a valuable (see 1. and 2. above) but limited place for the individual in science. Still, according to Peirce, one ought do what s/he can do to make the world a more reasonable place. Best, Gary
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