Jon S, List,
The illustration I offer can be made clearer by examining Newton's interpretation of Galileo's experiments involving the acceleration of balls rolling down inclined planes as compared to the parabolic motion of a projectile. If you are interested in reading Newton's works and examining his methods for formulating and testing hypotheses, then I recommend the Newton Project, which has the aim of transcribing all of his written works including his notebooks: http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/texts/newtons-works/scientific?n=25&cat=Science&name=1&tr=1&sort=date&order=asc The Newton project has been a model for the SPIN project--the main difference is that the latter is crowdsourcing the transcription of Peirce's manuscriptions. --Jeff Jeffrey Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy Northern Arizona University (o) 928 523-8354 ________________________________ From: Jeffrey Brian Downard Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2020 8:20:10 PM To: Jon Alan Schmidt Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: The Logic of Interpretation Jon S, List How does the method you are employing compare to the methods articulated in "The Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents"? If you substitute "texts" for "facts", as you have suggested, how does that constrain the inquiries? Let me offer an example. If my aim is to interpret Peirce's writings on the study of gravity, then one thing I might do is to recreate his experiments by going out and swinging pendulums in the same locations--and then comparing my data, calculations and inferences to his. This approach to reading important texts in the history of science has been adopted by schools such as St. John's, where students learn to understand Newton's inquiries and theories by building an experimental apparatus--such as the one Galileo used for rolling balls down an inclined plane--and by then making the measurements for themselves. Having done so, they then draw out the conclusions from those measurements and compare their results to Newton's. In a number of places, Peirce says that something similar must be done to understand his inquiries in philosophy. Readers need to carry out the inquiries themselves and then check to see if they arrive at the same result. Carrying out these inquiries seems to involve facts that go beyond the words written on the pages. --Jeff Jeffrey Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy Northern Arizona University (o) 928 523-8354 ________________________________ From: Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2020 5:45:46 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: The Logic of Interpretation List: As outlined in my previous post, my method of interpreting Peirce's writings is retroductive rather than deductive, producing fallible but plausible hypotheses that attempt to explain the accompanying excerpts. How should we go about assessing whether they are successful? Consider another passage from the same discarded draft of his seventh 1903 Harvard Lecture, "Pragmatism as the Logic of Abduction," that I quoted last time. CSP: If it is to be good as an abduction it must subserve the end of abduction. Now the end of abduction is that the deductive consequences of it may be tested by induction. So alone is any application made of its essential anticipatory character. Consequently 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. (EP 2:532n12) As I have said before, inductive evaluation of a proposed interpretation can only proceed by explicating its "deductive consequences" and then comparing them with what Peirce actually wrote in the texts themselves, including (wherever possible) others that were not part of the particular "mass" that prompted the initial flash of insight. I do not stop reading and studying once I have come up with an interpretation, treating it as if it were a settled matter. On the contrary, I keep looking for both confirming and disconfirming evidence, especially as additional texts come to light--in manuscript<https://rs.cms.hu-berlin.de/peircearchive/pages/home.php> images<https://fromthepage.com/collection/show?collection_id=16>, in new volumes like Pietarinen's<https://books.google.com/books?id=IUnSDwAAQBAJ> and Bellucci's<https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/539483>, and in the secondary literature. For me, the overall goal of interpretation is discerning the author's intended meaning as expressed in the text. The second part of this is key, since the text itself is often the only objective basis for discerning what the author had in mind when composing it. In semeiotic terms, we aim to translate the immediate interpretant (as written) into a dynamical interpretant (as actually understood) that closely approximates the final interpretant (as ideally understood). Notice that these are all correlates of the sign, not independent determinations of its utterer. As Peirce wrote in his Logic Notebook ... CSP: The Immediate Interpretant is the Interpretant represented, explicitly or implicitly, in the sign itself. I have thus omitted the intended Interpretant. So far as the intention is betrayed in the Sign, it belongs to the Immediate Interpretant. So far as it is not so betrayed, it may be the Interpretant of another sign, but it is in no sense the Interpretant of that sign. (R 339:414[276r], SWS 167, 1906 Apr 2) I agree accordingly with the following comments<https://place.asburyseminary.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1421&context=asburyjournal> by William J. Abraham. WJA: Hermeneutics is not so much the study of what an author intended as the study of what the author achieved. If meaning has an equivalence, it is to be located less in intention and more in achievement. What is achieved may be more or less than what the author intended; happily we can be generous and charitable in our initial judgments and trust that intention and achievement may coincide more often than not. In any case, the old proverb holds; actions speak louder than words; so it is the actions which should get our full attention. ("Intentions and the Logic of Interpretation," p. 20) I have never claimed that Peirce intended any of my retroductive interpretations, nor that he would have endorsed them. I have merely recognized his achievements, sought to make sense of them to the best of my ability, and attempted to build on them further. I plan to continue doing so, always acknowledging when I deviate from or go beyond his own words. I hope that others will do likewise. Peirce once said, "One generation collects premises in order that a distant generation may discover what they mean" (CP 7.87, 1902). How might we work together as a community of inquirers to collaborate further in discovering the meaning of the vast and remarkable body of premisses that he collected for us? What additional methods of interpretation should we include in the mix? Regards, Jon S. On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 8:09 PM Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: List: While refraining from posting over the last couple of weeks, I have been reflecting on my overall approach to Peirce's writings. Some participants seem to contend that the only valid interpretations of them are those that follow deductively from his verbatim statements. By contrast, I generally formulate interpretative hypotheses and then assess whether and how well they hold up in light of Peirce's actual words. After all, consider the following passage from a discarded draft of his seventh 1903 Harvard Lecture, "Pragmatism as the Logic of Abduction." CSP: A mass of facts is before us. We go through them. We examine them. We find them a confused snarl, an impenetrable jungle. We are unable to hold them in our minds. We endeavor to set them down upon paper; but they seem to be so multiplex intricate that we can neither satisfy ourselves that what we have set down represents the facts, nor can we get any clear idea of what it is that we have set down. But suddenly, while we are poring over our digest of the facts and are endeavoring to set them into order, it occurs to us that if we were to assume something to be true that we do not know to be true, these facts would arrange themselves luminously. (EP 2:531-532n12) Peirce adds, "That is abduction." Now substitute "texts" (here in bold) for each instance of "facts." A mass of texts is before us. We go through them. We examine them. We find them a confused snarl, an impenetrable jungle. We are unable to hold them in our minds. We endeavor to set them down upon paper; but they seem to be so multiplex intricate that we can neither satisfy ourselves that what we have set down represents the texts, nor can we get any clear idea of what it is that we have set down. But suddenly, while we are poring over our digest of the texts and are endeavoring to set them into order, it occurs to us that if we were to assume something to be true that we do not know to be true, these texts would arrange themselves luminously. I add, that is interpretation. As Umberto Eco puts<https://books.google.com/books?id=H4q8ZosSvB8C&pg=PA59> it, "The logic of interpretation is the Peircean logic of abduction" (The Limits of Interpretation, p. 59). This is especially true when reading a prolific author who never assembled a magnum opus providing his own comprehensive exposition of his entire system of thought. Instead we have "a confused snarl, an impenetrable jungle" of various published articles, personal letters, and tens of thousands of manuscript pages, many of which are "multiplex intricate" and none of which can be considered definitive or final. As a result, my conclusions are not deductive implications of the extensive quotations that I routinely provide; rather, they purport to be retroductive explanations of those quotations. They are by no means certain, but they are plausible. As Peirce observes during the actual lecture ... CSP: The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight, although of extremely fallible insight. It is true that the different elements of the hypothesis were in our minds before; but it is the idea of putting together what we had never before dreamed of putting together which flashes the new suggestion before our contemplation. (CP 5.181, EP 2:227) He twice uses the word "suggestion" here, and for more than a year now I have been trying--although admittedly not always succeeding--to be more conscientious about prefacing my hypotheses with "I suggest that ..." rather than presenting them in a way that makes them sound (misleadingly) like definitive assertions. Moreover, I do not consider myself to be an original thinker in the sense of coming up with new ideas. The tendency that I do seem to have is "putting together" someone else's ideas in a new way--what I have variously called "harmonizing," "regularizing," "synthesizing," or "systematizing." As Peirce states plainly, this kind of insight is "extremely fallible" and must be put to the test. I will elaborate on that in another post. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Structural Engineer, Synechist Philosopher, Lutheran Christian www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt<http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt> - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt<http://twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt>
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