RE: [PEIRCE-L] Nominalism vs. Realism -

[gnox]

Eric, this excerpt from my book (http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/cls.htm#3thought) 
may be helpful in adapting to Peirce’s usage of the word “thought”:

 

Gary f.

 

 

Peirce's concept of thought is both broader and deeper than the common usage of 
the word.

 

Peirce wrote to William James in 1902 that ‘one must not take a nominalistic 
view of Thought as if it were something that a man had in his consciousness. 
Consciousness may mean any one of the three categories. But if it is to mean 
Thought it is more without us than within. It is we that are in it, rather than 
it in any of us’ (CP 8.256; we will look further into ‘nominalism’ in Chapter 
12). Thought is thus the formal component of the Big Current, not merely the 
little current of someone's private stream of consciousness. We often call that 
inner stream ‘thinking,’ and sometimes call it ‘thought,’ in the sense defined 
by the Century Dictionary as the ‘subjective element of intellectual activity.’ 
But the specifically Peircean sense (often marked by his capitalization of the 
word) is defined in the   CD as 
‘the objective element of the intellectual product’ of thinking. To illustrate 
this exact sense of the word in the CD, Peirce cited the following quotation: 

[[Thought is, in every case, the cognition of an object, which really, 
actually, existentially out of thought, is ideally, intellectually, 
intelligibly within it; and just because within in the latter sense, is it 
known as actually without in the former.]] 

— G.J. Stokes, The Objectivity of Truth (1884), p. 53

 

Here ‘cognition’ appears as a self-bounding process, so that it has an inside 
and an outside. Indeed we can take Stokes' sentence as equivalent to the 
proposition that the world is inside out. The causal reciprocity between the 
intelligence and the reality external to it, considered as different things, is 
essential to cognition as a teleodynamic process (defined above 
 ). Deacon emphasizes this by 
contrasting cognition with computation (the italics are his): 

[[computation only transfers extrinsically imposed constraints from substrate 
to substrate, while cognition (semiosis) generates intrinsic constraints that 
have a capacity to propagate and self-organize. The difference between 
computation and mind is a difference in the source of these formal properties. 
In computation, the critical formal properties are descriptive distinctions 
based on the selected features of a given mechanism. In cognition, they are 
distinctive regularities which are generated by recursive dynamics, and which 
progressively amplify and propagate constraints to other regions of the nervous 
system.]] — Deacon 2011, 498

 

This of course refers to the dialogue within the brain, which for a symbolic 
species like ourselves is continuously informed (constrained) by participation 
in the dialogue which constitutes the community of minds. Thoughts uttered and 
interpreted in that dialogue also propagate constraints (information) from mind 
to mind, body to body and brain to brain through the circular causality of the 
meaning cycle. This is possible because thought has generality: the same 
thought can be shared by many people in many situations, just as a single law 
of nature governs (regulates) a whole range of events. It is, as Gregory 
Bateson (1979, 8) put it, the ‘pattern that connects.’ 

 

[[ Thirdness is found wherever one thing brings about a Secondness 
  between two things. In all such 
cases, it will be found that Thought plays a part. By thought is meant 
something like the meaning of a word, which may be “embodied in,” that is, may 
govern, this or that, but is not confined to any existent. Thought is often 
supposed to be something in consciousness; but on the contrary, it is 
impossible ever actually to be directly conscious of thought. It is something 
to which consciousness may conform, as a writing may conform to it. Thought is 
rather of the nature of a habit, which determines the suchness of that which 
may come into existence, when it does come into existence. Of such a habit one 
may be conscious of a symptom; but to speak of being directly conscious of a 
habit, as such, is nonsense.]] — Peirce, EP2:269

 

 

From: Eric Charles [mailto:eric.phillip.char...@gmail.com] 
Sent: 15-Feb-17 11:17
To: Peirce-L 
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Nominalism vs. Realism -

 

Jerry, Clark,

Thank you for the thoughtful replies. 

 

I have great love for Peirce and his work. But there are parts that I love 
less, particularly where Peirce ... seems to me to forget the parameters of 
his own argument. Peirce tells us what clear thinking is, while fully and 
responsibly acknowledging that most people do not think clearly most of the 
time. On that basis, if anyone thinks of anyone else's thoughts as entailing at 
all 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Nominalism vs. Realism -

[Jerry Rhee]

Eric, list:



You said:

“I have great love for Peirce and his work. But there are parts that I love
less, particularly where Peirce ... seems to me to forget the
parameters of his own argument.”



If there should be inconsistencies in Peirce, my reaction is typically to
treat myself as defective, not Peirce.  That is, I treat Peirce as a
perfect writer; that if he should blunder, he blunders intentionally for
our benefit (cf., logographic necessity and Strauss’ method of interpreting
perfect writers).



You said:

“Peirce tells us what clear thinking is, while fully and responsibly
acknowledging that most people do not think clearly most of the time. On
that basis, if anyone thinks of anyone else's thoughts as entailing at all
times the third degree of clarity, something is seriously amiss.”



It would be foolish to think Peirce went around thinking that we always
think at all times with the third degree of clarity.  For instance:

*“I understand pragmatism to be a method of ascertaining the meanings, not
of all ideas, but only of what I call ‘intellectual concepts’, that is to
say, of those upon the structure of which, arguments concerning objective
fact may hinge.”* ~Pragmatism



His theory is for a community of inquirers and not specifically for the
individual, for that would be too complicated.  The method of ascertaining
the meaning of ‘intellectual concepts’, he examines in many places but also
demonstrates in the Neglected Argument.



Moreover, he divested himself of the idea that the original maxim
sufficiently treats the third grade of clearness.  He does this in many
places (cf., *What Pragmatism Is*) but for some reason, you (and many
others, including academicians) routinely ignore this.  For instance:


“Moreover, my paper of 1878 was imperfect in tacitly leaving it to appear
that the maxim of pragmatism led to the last stage of clearness. I wish now
to show that this is not the case and to find a series of categories of
clearness.”

http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/L75/ver1/l75v1-09.htm

You said:

Further, when Peirce elsewhere starts making broad pronouncements about
"thought" it oftentimes seems that he is referring solely to those rare
instances of clear thinking, but other times is referring to the typical
thinking, or all thinking?

I can’t speak to whether he, throughout greater than 40 years of writing,
maintained a single unitary definition for Thought.  Yet, he does treat
Thought in a technical sense as a theory, with the understanding that he is
constructing a philosophical definition, one that will satisfy all who
investigate. A complete logical form of thought is so given in its three
elements; the three categories, set in argument form.  It is the predicate
term, *C*, that limits Thought.

You said:

The later is particularly suspicious. Assertions regarding the nature of
*all* thinking would presumably be subject to extreme empirical scrutiny.
As we have rejected traditional metaphysics, and denied any special powers
of introspection, one would expect "thought" to be examined in the same way



I don’t find your criticism here to be well thought out.  What makes you
think that “we” have rejected “traditional metaphysics”?  Who do you even
consider as belonging to “traditional metaphysics”?  Have you ever read
Aristotle?  For he says things like:



‘The fact that he has a fever

is a sign

that he is ill’,



or,



‘The fact that she is giving milk

is a sign

that she has lately borne a child’.



Here we have the infallible kind of Sign, the only kind that constitutes a
complete proof, since it is the only kind that, if the particular statement
is true, is irrefutable.” ~Aristotle, *Rhetoric*



Compare, for instance, against Peirce:



The surprising fact, C, is observed;

But if A were true, C would be a matter of course,

Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.



As per what Peirce said on signs, in particular a Complete Sign, I will
leave for you to investigate.  For instance, if you decide to take
metaphysics (“the science of unclear thinking”) seriously, I think you will
find fruit in comparing against *Posterior Analytics* I-23.



Moreover, you shouldn’t reject traditional metaphysics until you even have
an inkling of what is meant by a syllogism addressing the discourse in the
soul.



Hth,

Jerry Rhee

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 12:36 PM, Stephen C. Rose 
wrote:

> Words are not merely psychological counters or tokens as it were. They are
> philosophical in nature because word and language occupy a crucial point in
> reality.
>
> The fundamental action of words is to massively limit the immense reality
> of the vagueness from which the word springs, somewhat as ovulation
> involves the selection of an egg or a few eggs from an unfathomable pool.
>
> The existence of language and word is theologically relevant because it
> gets at the matter of reality itself and its fundamental nature. If as I
> infer reality 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Nominalism vs. Realism -

[Benjamin Udell]

Eric, none of the statements that you quoted in your 2/14/2017 message 
originate with Peirce.


Peirce held that logic generally involves icons (including diagrams and 
not only graphic-looking ones), indices, and symbols, and he saw all 
three kinds of signs as needed. Remember also that Peirce so defined 
'symbol' that plenty of symbols are not words and some words are not 
symbols.


You wrote in your subsequent message:

   One can also find people with limited brain damage who (by all
   evidence) have lost their ability to coherently verbalize (i.e.,
   they cannot /do/ language), and yet those people otherwise seem to
   think perfectly well.

I remember a course on Merleau-Ponty decades ago in which the professor 
discussed patients who could no longer think about absent things. He 
said that they had lost their "symbolic function" - taking "symbol" in 
an old traditional sense as sign of something not perceived, especially 
something not perceivable, picturable, etc. I can't say off-hand whether 
those patients had completely lost their ability to think in symbols in 
Peirce's sense.


I don't know whether Peirce held that actual people usually think in 
words or in any particular kind of signs, and what basis he would have 
offered for the claim; anyway it wouldn't be a philosophical statement, 
but a psychological statement, and Peirce was as adverse to basing 
cenoscopic philosophy (including philosophical logic) on psychology as 
he was to to basing pure mathematics on psychology. When he discusses 
semiotics and logic, he is discussing how one ought to think, not how 
people actually do think.


Peirce said of himself:

   I do not think that I ever _/reflect/_ in words. I employ visual
   diagrams, firstly because this way of thinking is my natural
   language of self-communication, and secondly, because I am convinced
   that it is the best system for the purpose
   [MS 629, p. 8, quoted in _The Existential Graphs of Charles S.
   Peirce_, p. 126, by Don D. Roberts]

Google preview: 
https://books.google.com/books?id=Q4K30wCAf-gC=PA126=PA126=%22I+do+not+think+I+ever+reflect+in+words:+I+employ+visual+diagrams%22


Peirce described corollarial deduction as verbal and philosophical, and 
theorematic deduction as diagrammatic and mathematical. He seemed to 
have a higher opinion of the latter, which is not unusual for a 
mathematician.


Peirce left innumerable drawings among his papers. I somewhere read that 
a considerable percentage of his papers consisted in drawings, I seem to 
remember "60%" but I'm not sure. A project involving those drawings (and 
accumulating an archive of reproductions ofthem) resulted in the 
publication of a book:


http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/newbooks.htm#engel_queisner_viola 



   Das bildnerische Denken: Charles S. Peirce.  [Visual Thinking:
   Charles S. Peirce].Actus et Imago Volume 5. Editors: Franz Engel,
   Moritz Queisner, Tullio Viola. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, March 21,
   2012. Hardcover http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/224194

   346 pages., 82 illustrations in black & white, 31 illustrations in
   color.

Peirce, as you say, often focuses on clear thought, but he sometimes 
discusses vague thought, and says that vagueness is often needed for 
thought. For example in his critical common-sensism.


Peirce thought that there are logical conceptions of mind based not on 
empirical science of psychology nor even on metaphysics. See for example 
Memoir 11 "On the Logical Conception of Mind" in the 1902 Carnegie 
Application:


http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/l75/ver1/l75v1-05.htm 



As to how linguistic people actually are or how linguistic one needs or 
ought to be, that will depend at least partly on the definition of 
language. In the quote of him above, Peirce uses the word "language" 
more loosely than some would.


Best, Ben

On 2/15/2017 11:16 AM, Eric Charles wrote:


Jerry, Clark,

Thank you for the thoughtful replies.

I have great love for Peirce and his work. But there are parts that I 
love less, particularly where Peirce ... seems to me to forget the 
parameters of his own argument. Peirce tells us what clear thinking 
is, while fully and responsibly acknowledging that most people do not 
think clearly most of the time. On that basis, if anyone thinks of 
anyone else's thoughts as entailing at all times the third degree of 
clarity, something is seriously amiss. Further, when Peirce elsewhere 
starts making broad pronouncements about "thought" it oftentimes seems 
that he is referring solely to those rare instances of clear thinking, 
but other times is referring to the typical thinking, or all thinking?


The later is particularly suspicious. Assertions regarding the nature 
of /all/ thinking would presumably be subject to extreme empirical 
scrutiny. As we have rejected 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Nominalism vs. Realism -

[Clark Goble]

Whoops, neglected the end.

> On Feb 15, 2017, at 9:16 AM, Eric Charles  
> wrote:
> 
> One can readily, for example, find individuals who (by all evidence) seem to 
> think more readily and more commonly in words than in "images and diagrams". 
> One can also find people with limited brain damage who (by all evidence) have 
> lost their ability to coherently verbalize (i.e., they cannot do language), 
> and yet those people otherwise seem to think perfectly well. 
> 

Yes. I think that’s a good criticism of Peirce who I think is biased towards 
thinking through questions in terms of people with a bias toward logic or the 
hard sciences. While ultimately I think that a plus in his writing rather than 
a negative, it does mean that his generalizations can be problematic. 

While I don’t think this ultimately affects his argument I’d say that people 
often have a bias towards either linguistic or visual thinking. The way a 
logician thinks will typically be different from a musician or a sculptor, 
broadly speaking. At least that has been my experience. That said I think most 
people think some of the time in wide range of styles.

A fun experiment to illustrate this I used to use in college classes was to 
count to 100 and try to do something else at the same time. Depending upon the 
method you use mentally to count you’ll find that some things you can do while 
others you can’t. You’ll find that some people think visually with a number 
line to count and are able to speak while counting. Most people count 
linguistically and thus can’t easily speak or listen to words at the same time.

I would dispute the limited brain damage example though. We have to be really 
careful there since ones cognitive linguistic systems may be functional yet key 
parts of the brain necessary for expression may be damaged. So we have to be 
very careful how we draw inferences from this. However that said we know of 
examples where children were not exposed to language and reach a point where 
they appear to be unable to develop those skills. Clearly they are still 
thinking but their brain simply hasn’t developed in a normal way.

Peirce I think avoids the problems some models of the mind by philosophers end 
up with. (Of course most contemporary philosophers of the mind are at least 
somewhat familiar with the science of the brain and avoid a lot of these older 
problems) Peirce simply doesn’t think that thinking is only conscious 
deliberation the way that especially in early modernism many philosophers 
assumed. 
-
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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Nominalism vs. Realism -

[Clark Goble]

> On Feb 15, 2017, at 9:16 AM, Eric Charles  
> wrote:
> 
> Further, when Peirce elsewhere starts making broad pronouncements about 
> "thought" it oftentimes seems that he is referring solely to those rare 
> instances of clear thinking, but other times is referring to the typical 
> thinking, or all thinking?

I think in places Peirce does wax dogmatic at times. At least rhetorically. But 
I think the better way to read him typically when making broad pronouncements 
is that he’s postulating a theory and is more than happy to see it critiqued. 
That his own views changed as he continues to think about the ideas is a good 
indication that this is how he himself takes such views. 

I’d add that I think the style of late 19th century writing is just alien to 
us. We expect that when reading early 19th or 18th century German idealists but 
I think we expect Americans writing in English to write in a style we’re more 
familiar with. However I tend to think most philosophers, especially the great 
ones, are pretty bad writers. Of all the great writers probably only Mill and 
Peirce are the ones I enjoy reading the most. Yet even with Peirce we have huge 
paragraphs and examples of annoying writing and neologisms. 

Part of the problem is often that it’s simply hard. Many philosophers invent 
neologisms because they want to avoid the habits of thinking that older words 
invoke. They want to break us out of those habits to rethink the issues without 
that baggage. This leads to difficulty especially when talking about broad 
foundational ideas. The ideas and words closest to us are often the hardest to 
examine closely. (Thus the traditional problem of “to be” in philosophy)
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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Nominalism vs. Realism -

[Eric Charles]

Jerry, Clark,
Thank you for the thoughtful replies.

I have great love for Peirce and his work. But there are parts that I love
less, particularly where Peirce ... seems to me to forget the
parameters of his own argument. Peirce tells us what clear thinking is,
while fully and responsibly acknowledging that most people do not think
clearly most of the time. On that basis, if anyone thinks of anyone else's
thoughts as entailing at all times the third degree of clarity, something
is seriously amiss. Further, when Peirce elsewhere starts making broad
pronouncements about "thought" it oftentimes seems that he is referring
solely to those rare instances of clear thinking, but other times is
referring to the typical thinking, or all thinking?

The later is particularly suspicious. Assertions regarding the nature of
*all* thinking would presumably be subject to extreme empirical scrutiny.
As we have rejected traditional metaphysics, and denied any special powers
of introspection, one would expect "thought" to be examined in the same way
Peirce's exemplars, the early bench chemists, examined their subject
matter. All the same challenges and limitations, and the same potential for
novel triumph. Thus when Peirce talks about clear thinking he seems on
steady ground, and when he talks about how a scientist-qua-scientists
thinks about the world he seems on steady ground, but when there are no
caveats regarding what "thinking" he is referring to, I get nervous.

To Clark's question: While one could certainly find people who would find
those assertions uncontroversial, there are problems. One can readily, for
example, find individuals who (by all evidence) seem to think more readily
and more commonly in words than in "images and diagrams". One can also find
people with limited brain damage who (by all evidence) have lost their
ability to coherently verbalize (i.e., they cannot *do* language), and yet
those people otherwise seem to think perfectly well.






---
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician
U.S. Marine Corps


On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 3:24 PM, Jerry Rhee  wrote:

> Eric, list:
>
>
>
> Here is how I understand the nature of your thought:
>
>
>
> You consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings,
> you conceive the object of claiming about the nature of other people’s
> thoughts to have.  Then your conception of these effects, which makes you
> raise your eyebrow and get twitchy, is the whole of your conception of the
> object.
>
>
>
> And so, now what?  What does the Jamesian maxim and not Peircean
> recommend?
>
>
>
> For a Peircean would recognize that some “perversity of thought of whole
> generations may cause the postponement of the ultimate fixation”.
>
> ~*What Pragmatism Is  *
>
>
>
> “Nevertheless in the nature of the case the essential elements of
> demonstration are three: the subject, the attributes, and the basic
> premisses.
>
>
>
> I say ‘must believe’, because *all syllogism*, and therefore a fortiori
> demonstration, *is* *addressed* *not to the spoken word, but to the
> discourse within the soul*, and though we can always raise objections to
> the spoken word, to the inward discourse we cannot always object.
>
>
>
> That which is capable of proof but assumed by the teacher without proof
> is, if the pupil believes and accepts it, hypothesis, though only in a
> limited sense hypothesis-that is, relatively to the pupil; if the pupil has
> no opinion or a contrary opinion on the matter, the same assumption is an
> illegitimate postulate. Therein lies the distinction between hypothesis and
> illegitimate postulate: the latter is the contrary of the pupil’s opinion,
> demonstrable, but assumed and used without demonstration (*Post. An*.
> I-10).
>
>
> And therefore, “I have long ago come to be guided by this maxim: that as
> long as it is practically certain that we cannot directly, nor with much
> accuracy even indirectly, observe what passes in the consciousness of any
> other person, while it is far from certain that we can do so (and
> accurately record what [we] can even glimpse at best but very glibberly)
> even in the case of what shoots through our own minds, it is much safer to
> define all mental characters as far as possible in terms of their outward
> manifestations.”
>
> *~An Essay toward Reasoning in Security and Uberty*
>
>
> That is,
>
> What is C?
>
> What is A?
>
> What is B?
>
>
>
> Hth,
>
> Jerry R
>
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 10:20 AM, Clark Goble  wrote:
>
>>
>> On Feb 14, 2017, at 8:41 AM, Eric Charles 
>> wrote:
>>
>> Yikes! My inner William James just raised an eyebrow. This is probably a
>> separate thread... but how did we suddenly start making claims about the
>> nature of other people's thoughts?
>>
>> "People think, not so much in words, but in images and diagrams..." They
>> do? How many people's thoughts have we interrogated