Aw: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Peirce's methodology

[Helmut Raulien]

List,

with regard to this thread, but also to the classification of sciences, but also all inquiry, signs, objects, I am thinking about the distinction of analysis versus synthesis. To tell, whether a science, a sign, an inquiry is analytical or synthetical, I´d say, we have to tell whether the inquirer / interpreter is part or sufferer of the object or not. If he*she is not, he*she may have theoretc control over it, and the inquiry is analytical in the sense of "divide et impera". Analysis is virtual division. If the inquirer on the other hand is part or sufferer of the object, the object controls her*him to some extent, and the inquiry has to be partly synthetical.

If a biochemist analyses some protein, it is analytic inquiry. If the climate change is the object, it is mostly synthetic inquiry. I think you can classify sciences or branches of sciences that way. Physics and chemistry are mostly analytic. Ecology, psychology, theology, metaphysics are mostly synthetic. Semiotics is kind of both, I think.

I think, it is helpful, to analytically and synthetically look at the ways analysis and synthesis are subsequentially done. I think, many possibilities for fallacies are opening up, if analysis and synthesis are alternated in the wrong way, without me knowing yet, what in this respect a wrong and a justified way would be.

I think, for example, that natural fallacy is something like that: First analysing a phenomenon, and then synthesizing the analysed parts as a rule.

In mathematics, a synthesis has to be corrobated by a proof. In other sciences, this is not so easy.

To keep my post Peirce-related, here a quote from the Commens Dictionary:

"

1906 | The Basis of Pragmaticism | EP 2:372-3

Two meanings of the term ‘philosophy’ call for our particular notice. The two meanings agree in making philosophical knowledge positive, that is in making it a knowledge of things real, in opposition to mathematical knowledge, which is knowledge of the consequences of arbitrary hypotheses; and they further agree in making philosophical truth extremely general. But in other respects they differ as widely as they well could. For one of them, which is better entitled (except by usage) to being distinguished as philosophia prima than is ontology, embraces all that positive science which rests upon familiar experience and does not search out occult or rare phenomena; while the other, which has been called philosophia ultima, embraces all that truth which is derivable by collating the results of the different special sciences, but which is too broad to be perfectly established by any one of them. The former is well named by Jeremy Bentham’s term cenoscopy […], the latter goes by the name of synthetic philosophy.

"

 

Best,

Helmut

 

 

 03. August 2020 um 18:17 Uhr
 g...@gnusystems.ca
wrote:

Jon et al.,

The basic point of my post was that the interpreter of a sign can keep its dynamic object “in view” only by means of the indexical function of the sign, which connects it to actual experience. Diagrammatic signs are not so good at that.

The relevance to John's original post, as i see it, is this: if theorematic reasoning is only a mathematical procedure, it leaves out the experiential element of Peirce's methodology and his pragmatism.

Mathematics is not a positive science, meaning that it involves no actual experience (other than the experience of doing mathematics, in which the universe of discourse is entirely imaginary). All positive sciences (including phaneroscopy, logic and semiotic) deal with what Peirce calls real relations as opposed to relations of reason (CP 1.365, for instance). A proposition in a positive science thus must employ a genuine Index, as opposed to a degenerate index such as ‘the letters attached to a geometrical or other diagram’ (EP2:172).

Gary f.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Awbrey <jawb...@att.net>
Sent: 3-Aug-20 11:35
To: Peirce List <peirce-l@list.iupui.edu>
Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Pragma, Pragmata, Pragmatitude!

 

Dear Gary, All ...

 

I was obviously having a lot more fun with words in those days ...

sigh, good times ... the point of it all being I always see the whole complex of meanings associated with the Greek root "pragma, pragmata" through the more threadbare veil of the Latin "object".

That complex contains all the senses of aims, concerns, ends, goals, intentional objects, and purposes we tend to express more obliquely through the use of "object" to mean "objective".  Still, the latter use does have some currency in cybernetics, operations research, and systems theory, so it's a handy sense to keep in mind.

 

Cf: Liddell & Scott

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dpra%3Dgma

 

Regards,

 

Jon

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