Gary M., list,
In the passage that you quote from EP 2: 266, what Peirce says is,
[....] This scholastic terminology has passed into English speech
more than into any other modern tongue, rendering it the most
logically exact of any. This has been accomplished at the
inconvenience that a considerable number of words and phrases have
come to be used with a laxity quite astounding. Who, for example,
among the dealers in Quincy Hall who talk of "articles of /prime
necessity/," would be able to say what that phrase "prime necessity"
strictly means? He could not have sought out a more technical
phrase. There are dozens of other loose expressions of the same
provenance.
Peirce isn't praising the phrase "prime necessity" by calling it most
technical. He's just pointing out that people use, without knowing their
meanings, phrases that are supposed to be reserved for technical senses.
That much seems clear enough from the context. Less obvious is that
"prime necessity" was no doubt in Peirce's view a good example because
he thought pretty much nobody really knew what it meant.
Still another threefold distinction, due to Aristotle (I Anal.
post., iv), is between necessity /de omni/ (/tò katà pantós/), /per
se / (/kath autó/), and /universaliter primum / (/kathólou prôton/).
The last of these, however, is unintelligible, and we may pass it
by, merely remarking that the exaggerated application of the term
has given us a phrase we hear daily in the streets, 'articles of
prime necessity.' Necessity /de omni/ is that of a predicate which
belongs to its whole subject at all times. Necessity /per se/ is one
belonging to the essence of the species, and is subdivided according
to the senses of /per se/, especially into the first and second
modes of /per se/. (Peirce, 1902, from his portion of "Necessity" in
Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, James Mark Baldwin, editor,
v. 2, p. 145 via Google Books
<http://books.google.com/books?id=Dc8YAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA145&lpg=PA145&dq=%22Still+another+threefold+distinction%22>
and via Classics in the History of Psychology
<http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/defs/N1defs.htm#Necessity>
.
I don't know what Latin word is being translated as "necessity" in that
paragraph but, given the neuter adjective in /universaliter primum/
(literally, "universally first"), if it's a word with the "necess-"
element in it, then it is /necesse/ (= /necessum/) or /necessarium/
("necessary", neuter adjectives) rather than /necessitas/ or
/necessitudo/ ("necessity", feminine abstract nouns).
Peirce can be terminologically demanding, but fortunately he defined
many terms and phrases, in the Century Dictionary and in the Dictionary
of Philosophy and Psychology. As for Peirce's own terminology, he
defines some of it in those books, but the first place to look is the
Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms
<http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/dictionary.html> , edited by
Mats Bergman and Sami Paavola, U. of Helsinki, and containing Peirce's
own definitions, often many per term across the decades.
Gary Fuhrman very helpfully took a list of Peirce entries at the DPP
that I started in "Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography" in Wikipedia,
and expanded it to include Peirce entries for letters P-W (which aren't
at the Classics in the History of Psychology).
http://www.gnusystems.ca/BaldwinPeirce.htm . Where he has not also
provided the text, he still provides the page number so that one can
find it via Google Books' edition
<http://books.google.com/books?id=Dc8YAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA145&lpg=PA145&dq=%22Still+another+threefold+distinction%22>
or via Internet Archive's edition
<http://www.archive.org/details/philopsych02balduoft> .
The Century Dictionary is online for free
<http://www.global-language.com/CENTURY/>; it's bigger and more
encyclopedic than the OED. I recommend installing the DjVu reader rather
than settling for jpg images of pages. A list of the entries written or
supervised/approved by Peirce is at
http://www.pep.uqam.ca/listsofwords.pep . Peirce's work on the Century
Dictionary will be in Writings vol. 7, now scheduled for 2013. Online
software for W 7 is now planned (Peirce Edition Project April 2012
Update <http://www.iupui.edu/%7Epeirce/PEP-Update-April%202012.pdf> ).
As regards ordinary discourse as the final cause of all intellectual
endeavors, I'd say that ordinary discourse itself can evolve and become
less vague and more specialized. Some ordinary discourse contains
hundreds of ways to characterize snow; but not ordinary discourse in
English, and most of us will not accumulate enough experience with snow
to get what those characterizations are about. Yet for some those
characterizations are very practical, often needful. Between highly
developed ideas and ordinary ideas, there will usually be some struggle,
it's a two-way street.
Best, Ben
On 5/12/2012 12:25 PM, Gary Moore wrote:
Dear John Harvey,
Gary Moore: Absolutely excellent! "Before a more precise term can be
used by more than one person, someone has to define and explain it in
the less precise (i.e. more ambiguous) vocabulary that is already
understood by others. The limited communication which ambiguity
provides is a hermeneutic path toward more understanding. In other
words, ambiguity is a tool for achieving greater precision." This is
perfect! Ambiguity, established within a locating context, is
therefore necessary for communication per se. Establish the context
precisely and you sizably decrease, but never eliminate, the
ambiguity. If what you say is important enough, at some time you must
enunciate your thoughts to a wider, broader community. Peirce uses the
term “prime necessity” as if it were a very precise scholastic logical
term. And yet an explanation for “prime necessity” is not to be found
anywhere in the Peirce sites nor in any major philosophy resource like
the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy. If, on the other
hand as I advocated, we had the literal Latin phrase he was referring
to, I would have no problem locating at least a context in which it is
used as “prime necessity”. Peirce praises it by saying, “He could not
have sought out a more technical phrase” as it “strictly means”. And
yet it is impossible to find except in this paragraph in “The Ethics
of Terminology” (EP volume 2, page266). So it is hardly a model of
intelligibility considering its lack of context and its near total
lack of use.¶
--------------------------------
Gary Moore: I. A. Richards I am mainly familiar with as a literary
critic, obviously with a command of philosophy and logic. However one
communicates in English, one uses literary or, better, rhetorical
tropes that, while not necessarily being precisely logical (but not
hindering it either), none the less state the existential fact a human
being who is in a certain situation is making a statement. If done
well, all parties, with their appropriate usage of ambiguity, can more
or less correctly understand each other. Abuse the ambiguity as Peirce
can do in a purely arbitrary fashion, people think, because he has
said something extremely obscure, that it is extremely brilliant
because either no one understands it or everyone is afraid of saying
“The emperor has no clothes on,” that the great ‘truths’ are merely
very ordinary pedestrian sideswipes.¶
-------------------------
Gary Moore: “The x-ray example is a good illustration of a situation
in which "ambiguity" and "precision" both have economic, health,
ethical and semeiotic costs and benefits.” The doctor is now being
legally forced to explain why an x-ray is necessary and what it can
and cannot do in common, though un-precise, terms. Instead of what?
Instead of just doing the x-ray to legally say he did an x-ray to
cover himself from legal suits without necessarily being of any use to
the patient even from the most outlandish of possibilities, while at
the same time economically harming the patient with a needless very
expensive charge. As Churchill said of politics, “America and England
are divided by a common language.” Well, he had to break down and
learn American context if he was going to get American money and
weapons, did he not? No one was going to give those things to him
simply because he wanted them.¶
---------------
Gary Moore: Herein perfectly fits the following, “The question isn't,
"Is there perfect precision?" Some of the questions are, "Is there
enough precision for the situation or context?" and when necessary,
"How does further inquiry increase the precision and clarity of our
understanding?" “Further inquiry”, though, can only proceed from
ambiguity as what is at hand to any possible precision.¶
------
Gary Moore: “"In a concluding section, Professor Berthoff turns to the
idea of a "fall" into language by way of a discussion of Kleist's
essays on marionette theatre and the shaping of thought at the point
of utterance." It has been a while since I have dealt with Kleist’s
essays on marionettes and Immanuel Kant. Has a better format and
treatment of his essays occurred I do not know about?
Regards,
Gary Moore
*From:* John Harvey <johnhar...@earthlink.net>
*To:* Peirce-L <peirce-l@listserv.iupui.edu>
*Sent:* Saturday, May 12, 2012 10:28 AM
*Subject:* Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE OF ALL
INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS
Gary, Phyllis, list,
The use of "ambiguity" and "precision" or "clarity" as antonyms is
what I. A. Richards might have called a "killer dichotomy"[1] which
doesn't recognize they are all on the continuum of discourse academic
as well as ordinary. Before a more precise term can be used by more
than one person, someone has to define and explain it in the less
precise (i.e. more ambiguous) vocabulary that is already understood by
others. The limited communication which ambiguity provides is a
hermeneutic path toward more understanding. In other words, ambiguity
is a tool for achieving greater precision.
The x-ray example is a good illustration of a situation in which
"ambiguity" and "precision" both have economic, health, ethical and
semeiotic costs and benefits.
The question isn't, "Is there perfect precision?" Some of the
questions are, "Is there enough precision for the situation or
context?" and when necessary, "How does further inquiry increase the
precision and clarity of our understanding?"
Regards, John
[1] Berthoff, Ann E., "The Mysterious Barricades: Language and Its
Limits" (1999), p. 15-17.
"The Mysterious Barricades makes the case that escaping the
enthrallment of recent theory in literary criticism and the philosophy
of language will be impossible so long as the meaning relationship is
conceived in dyadic terms. Ann E. Berthoff examines certain "dyadic
misunderstandings," including the "gangster theories" fostered by
Deconstruction and its successors, and offers "triadic remedies,"
which are all informed by a Peircean understanding of interpretation
as the logical condition of signification."--BOOK JACKET.
"The remedies come from a logician, the inventor of semiotics
(Peirce); a rhetorician who reclaimed practical criticism (I.A.
Richards); a philologist who became the first to develop a general
theory of hermeneutics (Schleiermacher); a linguist - some would say
the greatest of the century (Sapir); a philosophical anthropologist
who sought to define what we need to discover if we are to appreciate
the role of symbols in building the human world (Susanne K. Langer);
and an amateur semiotician novelist, and religious man who defined the
capacity for symbolization as the power which sets the human being
apart from the rest of Creation (Kleist). All have seen that
pragmatism is the chief consequence of a triadic view of the sign. All
have seen that the powers of language are contingent on its limits,
whether linguistic or discursive. All recognize the heuristic power of
limits, seeing them as "mysterious barricades."
"In a concluding section, Professor Berthoff turns to the idea of a
"fall" into language by way of a discussion of Kleist's essays on
marionette theatre and the shaping of thought at the point of utterance."
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