Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
At 03:24 PM 2014-09-30, Howard Pattee wrote: At 08:58 PM 9/29/2014, Clark Goble wrote: HP: To get a fairer picture of how physicists think, please peruse this survey. CG: I'd seen that before. While it's a great guide to interpretations of quantum mechanics it really doesn't address the nominalism issue. HP: I'm curious how you would state the nominalism issue? In my view, in at least half the questions the answers imply a pro- or anti-nominalistic stance (Questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 12, 15). The realism-nominalism issue is a complex one with both a traditional form (pre-logicism) and a more contemporary form, championed by Goodman and Quine, originally, in this century. On the traditional view concepts are constructions of our minds, and everything that exists is a particular, and all that is real is what exists (I add the last to accommodate Peirce). It is typically associated with some form of materialism or physicalism, but Peirce also applies the notion to some idealists, arguing that their generals are not real in his sense. I will leave that aside. Proponents are Locke, Hume, Reid and the British Empiricists in general. The more contemporary nominalism is based in a view of language and thought (which is understood on a linguistic model), and pays special attention to what we can sense. Quine, for example, calls himself a physicalist because he believes that our knowledge comes from the senses, which are physical (as a pragmatist, he shares this with Peirce, except Peirce regards them as external, not physical, but that might be only a difference in terminology). Quine and Goodman believe that there are no propositions, only instances of sentences or statements, and these are related not by identity of some sort (being of the identical kind) but just by being similar. From this and the grounding of knowledge in the senses Quine argues that meaning must be limited to what he calls the ersatz version such that dispositions to assent alone determine meaning, and that translation is multiply ambiguous, even for our own language onto itself. The only meaning that remains is what withstands this transformation, but he agrees that this is not what we usually call meaning. Followers have argued that this makes truth either trivial (Paul Horwich, Huw Price), or dispensable, with assent being all that matters (Richard Rorty). This differs from the traditional view, since it accepts the existence of external objects in a well-defined way, and even having an individual essence that is real (Locke, though he thought that language usually followed the nominal essence -- for Quine this is the only way possible). For Goodman the big issue is what sort of similarity matters. He points out that all evidence that we have of emeralds is compatible both with the projection that emeralds are blue until the are observed and green afterwards (I am simplifying), so both ways of projecting all emeralds are green and all emeralds are blue until observed and then they are green are equally compatible with all evidence, so we have no evidence basis for choosing one or the other generalization. Note that this may seem odd, but it is a consequence of assuming t5hat we o0nly observe particulars and any generals are ones we freely make up. The big issue for the contemporary nominalist, as Russell pointed out, is whether similarity is sufficient first of all, and second, whether it works. He argued that similarity, to work, must be a universal, so the nominalist project, clever though it is, falls apart from the get go. He then argues that once you accept this argument, that it is obvious that similarity is not sufficient, since it raise the question, similarity of what? Everything is similar to everything else in some respect, so we need respects. (I read this argument in a mimeographed paper of Russell's at UCLA, and I am not sure that it was ever published.) The reason why I go into this is that it has some bearing on how to evaluate all of the questions. I think that it is a given that for any realist position there is a nominalist position in the contemporary sense that can fit the same assent structure. Typically one is realist about some things, but not others (for example one can be a realist about physical laws but not numbers, or vice versa). So contemporary nominalism, if it works at all, will work for all claims of reality involving a specific external existence. This isn't so for traditional nominalism, since they assume the existence external conditions that make claims about particulars, at least, true. Similarity is likewise and external condition. I think that many of the questions can be seen as about objective projections by induction that would be acceptable to the traditional nominalist who believes that everything that exists is a particular. This view can be called (and is) scientific realism about the entities science proposes. So I think the answers to many of the questions fits realism of the
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
At 08:58 PM 9/29/2014, Clark Goble wrote: HP: To get a fairer picture of how physicists think, please peruse http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.1069v1.pdfthis survey. CG: I'd seen that before. While it's a great guide to interpretations of quantum mechanics it really doesn't address the nominalism issue. HP: I'm curious how you would state the nominalism issue? In my view, in at least half the questions the answers imply a pro- or anti-nominalistic stance (Questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 12, 15). Howard - PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on Reply List or Reply All to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
Clark, list, You wrote, [CG] The line of thinking I was following was that generals, as used by Peirce, simply has much narrower application possible than universals like colors. It’s true that the universal yellow can be instantiated by a limited number of objects but is treated as an universal. However it seems like “some flowers are yellow” are different from “some men wear hats.” The distinction I was getting at, relative to Newton’s laws, was that distinction. The predicate “is wearing a hat” simply seems a different sort of thing from “is yellow.” Traditional universals within science accept the latter but tend not to apply it to the former. [End quote] Peirce makes the distinction between mechanical qualities and qualities of feeling, see CP 1.422-426, circa 1896. Particularly interesting is that here he calls qualities generals - but qualities only as reflected on. http://www.textlog.de/4282.html . I'd think that laws of physics are more general than a sensible quality like 'yellow', which is less widely applicable than the laws of physics in our known physical universe, even if one does think that sensible qualities are real. Except when discussing 'universal' as understood in physics, it might be better to stick to 'more general' and 'less general', rather than trying for a distinction between 'universal' and 'general' that (A) merely involves different degrees of generality and (B) gets tangled up in terminological history. I've avoided (A) but tripped over (B). At one time, I defined 'universal' and 'general' in the monadic case as follows: given a term H true of something, H is _/universal/_ if there is not also something of which H is false, otherwise H is _/special/_. Given a term H true of something, H is _/general/_ if there is something else of which H is true, otherwise H is _/singular/_. But that is more in keeping with everyday English than with logical and philosophical terminology, so if I need to discuss my notion of 'universal' you'll see me using an invented word for it. [CG] [...] I think realism in physics is also partially about that hope. I think when one is a realist about a particular claim that one also has a hope that a particular entity is just such a mind independent entity. So one can be a realist broadly about something we don’t know (say whether there are fundamental structures) but I take realism in practice to be claims about particular entities. If one is a realist only about things one doesn’t know, then do you think that makes one an instrumentalist about the other entities if one views such entities as simplified models and not the ultimate constituents? [End quote] Realism about particular laws etc. is just realism adjoined to the claim to have found certain entities. 'Realism about GR' or 'Realism about natural selection', etc. But philosophical realism is not the sum or generality of such realisms. Instead _/realism about particular laws etc./_ is the sum or generality of such realisms. If one is a realist _/only/_ about things that one doesn't know, then one implies that the real is not cognizable. I suppose that one could say in a loose sense that one is partly an instrumentalist about simplified models, but one may regard such models as still being close to the truth, and thus as reflecting something nearly real, and in that sense one is not an instrumentalist. In On the Logic of Drawing Ancient History from Documents, EP 2, somewhere in pages 107–9 Peirce speaks of _/incomplexity/_, that of a hypothesis that seems too simple but whose trial may give a good 'leave,' as the billiard-players say, and be instructive for the pursuit of various and conflicting hypotheses that are less simple. One could loosely call that instrumentalism, but to regard the incomplex hypothesis as offering some degree of promise of leading to a true theory about something real, is not instrumentalism. Regarding A-time and B-time, I thought that those were questions in philosophy of physics, not in physics. Do you think that they have something to do with the unification of space and time in the sense in which that unification is understood in physics - such as to modify the idea of the signal speed limit as a common yardstick of space and time? Best, Ben On 9/29/2014 2:36 PM, Clark Goble wrote: On Sep 29, 2014, at 10:38 AM, Benjamin Udell wrote: By the way, I think that we should remind or inform readers that many physicists, when they speak of 'realism', mean ideas such as that a particle has an objective, determinate state, even when unmeasured. Peirce's realism does not imply that, so far as I can see, and his realism about absolute chance doesn't clash with the denial of of such unmeasured objective determinate states either. Yes. Great point. I really should have clarified the issues of realism in physics from more broad realism vs.
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
On Sep 30, 2014, at 7:24 AM, Howard Pattee hpat...@roadrunner.com wrote: At 08:58 PM 9/29/2014, Clark Goble wrote: HP: To get a fairer picture of how physicists think, please peruse this survey http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.1069v1.pdf. CG: I'd seen that before. While it's a great guide to interpretations of quantum mechanics it really doesn't address the nominalism issue. HP: I'm curious how you would state the nominalism issue? In my view, in at least half the questions the answers imply a pro- or anti-nominalistic stance (Questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 12, 15). To me nominalism is whether there are just particular things and not real generals. I don’t quite see how whether there’s really randomness (a property of the fundamental things), whether there are hidden variables, whether one should take a more epistemic view of QM, the role or the observer or so forth apply. Even with regards to interpretations of QM I’m not sure those get at the issue, although they are closer. For instance, within the Everett MWI what are the ultimate constituents? Likewise with information-theoretical interpretations is the information the fundamental things? If so then if that’s all there is, isn’t that nominalism? So I confess I’m a bit confused. Admittedly with regards to quantum mechanics things are odd enough that one has to unpack a lot. Further the authors note that a lot of the terms are intentionally left unpacked. So it’s not even clear how we are to take the terms. (Which I think is a bad thing in a poll like this where there may be ignorance or equivocation with regards to the terms) Since you appear to think those question imply many physicists aren’t nominalists, could you perhaps clarify why? Maybe I’m just thinking about this all wrong. - PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on Reply List or Reply All to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
On Sep 30, 2014, at 9:21 AM, Benjamin Udell bud...@nyc.rr.com mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com wrote: If one is a realist _only_ about things that one doesn't know, then one implies that the real is not cognizable. I suppose that one could say in a loose sense that one is partly an instrumentalist about simplified models, but one may regard such models as still being close to the truth, and thus as reflecting something nearly real, and in that sense one is not an instrumentalist. In On the Logic of Drawing Ancient History from Documents, EP 2, somewhere in pages 107–9 Peirce speaks of _incomplexity_, that of a hypothesis that seems too simple but whose trial may give a good 'leave,' as the billiard-players say, and be instructive for the pursuit of various and conflicting hypotheses that are less simple. One could loosely call that instrumentalism, but to regard the incomplex hypothesis as offering some degree of promise of leading to a true theory about something real, is not instrumentalism. The way this is often dealt with is via convergence - traditional scientific realism being one example. I’m not sure this implies the real is not cognizable, although that’s definitely been a position. (Wasn’t Dummett’s views on realism tied to that? A set with one uncognizable element - it’s been too long since I read him) There are other solutions of course - Heisenberg actually wrote a little book discussing objects like tables and then fundamental objects. It’s been years since I read it so I don’t want to say too much about it. I vaguely recall it being a kind of realism that allows macro-objects to be real. But I may be misrecalling that. Whether the “nearly real” is good enough is a reasonable question. Like you, I see it as good enough, but I think there are important caveats one has to make which is why I mentioned that on practical grounds for many entities they act like instrumentalists. Peirce makes the distinction between mechanical qualities and qualities of feeling, see CP 1.422-426, circa 1896. Particularly interesting is that here he calls qualities generals - but qualities only as reflected on. http://www.textlog.de/4282.html http://www.textlog.de/4282.html . Thanks. I thought he’d said something like that but I couldn’t find it. That’s closer to the distinction I was poorly making. I'd think that laws of physics are more general than a sensible quality like 'yellow', which is less widely applicable than the laws of physics in our known physical universe, even if one does think that sensible qualities are real. Except when discussing 'universal' as understood in physics, it might be better to stick to 'more general' and 'less general', rather than trying for a distinction between 'universal' and 'general' that (A) merely involves different degrees of generality and (B) gets tangled up in terminological history. It’s a subtle issue that’s hard to get terminology for. (Probably one should do a literature search and see how others have solved it - but I don’t have time for that unfortunately) I’m not sure I like more or less general either since the more or less is in different areas. Regarding A-time and B-time, I thought that those were questions in philosophy of physics, not in physics. Do you think that they have something to do with the unification of space and time in the sense in which that unification is understood in physics - such as to modify the idea of the signal speed limit as a common yardstick of space and time? I think the distinction between physics and philosophy of physics is blurry despite many physicists having a negative view of philosophy. Lee Smolin argues that it should be even blurrier and that physicists should pay more attention to philosophy. And it seems often that when physicists do philosophical thinking they often tend to jump in ignorant of what’s been done in philosophy. (I can think of a few major recent works where a little more research in philosophy would have benefited the book significantly) With regards to the A/B debate, I think if there is an absolute time ontologically and measurements just behave akin to time distortion then that implies a lot about time/space relations. I’m very skeptical about such views. I was actually surprised when I first encountered it that there was such a large philosophical literature arguing against a more literal view of GR. I do think these issues end up being pertinent for searching for a grand unified theory. I don’t think most physicists have paid much attention to such things. But then I do notice more and more are appearing at arXiv.org http://arxiv.org/ so perhaps they are having a bit of an effect. I’m not sure I’m really qualified to say how influential all this is since I’ve been out of physics for quite a few years now. - PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on Reply List or Reply All to REPLY
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
Clark, list, You wrote, [CG] It’s a subtle issue that’s hard to get terminology for. (Probably one should do a literature search and see how others have solved it - but I don’t have time for that unfortunately) I’m not sure I like more or less general either since the more or less is in different areas. [End quote] Another problem with 'general' is that 'general among' very nearly means 'universal among'. If something is general among horses or general to horses, one might mean that there could be exceptions, but the exceptions would be special cases that don't really invalidate the general rule; but the general rule might not be by definition of the class or by the essential nature of the elements of the class. That nuance is involved in 'generic', which sometimes now replaces 'general' - something generic to horses is something that they have by essential nature or as implied by (sufficiently detailed) definition, e.g., four legs, but definition and nature allow of accidental exceptions. A problem that would arise again even with an invented word to replace 'universal' in the sense of 'true in one case and exceptionless elsewhere' is that something universal to elements of a set or class is a general in the larger universe but not necessarily universal to everything in that universe. That creates a risk of confusion rooted not merely in conventional language but in logic. So the conflict of senses will recur. I think that the word translated as 'universal' in Aristotle is _/catholikon/_. Greek _/catholikon/_ , as far as I can tell, usually means 'universal' in pretty much the everyday English sense. So the use of 'a universal' without qualification to mean something true of as few as two things seems an unfortunate turn in the history of terms; such universality is relative to those as-few-as-two things. To avoid the semantic influence of cases of relative universality, one would need a special set of terms or phrases for the non-relative cases. You wrote, [CG] Whether the “nearly real” is good enough is a reasonable question. Like you, I see it as good enough, but I think there are important caveats one has to make which is why I mentioned that on practical grounds for many entities they act like instrumentalists. [End quote] I'd say that they're acting as fallibilists. They may also hold that a theory should be evaluated not for the plausibility of its assumptions but the only for the success of its predictions, and it's more tempting to call that approach instrumentalism. Some have even held that it's okay and even necessary for the assumptions to be 'descriptively false'. Now, that could mean merely seemingly false by omission of factors that one would have thought to be pertinent, and I do think that is part of it. However, sometimes the assumptions clash with things that we think that we know, and the theory's success is telling us that some of our supposed knowledge is false. So, in expectation of unknown unknowns, we shouldn't rule a theory out automatically solely because its assumptions conflict with at least one of our beliefs. Still, I'd call that fallibilism, not instrumentalism, although it reflects the spirit of some who call themselves instrumentalists. Such considerations may also be involved in reconciling the idea of plausibility above and Peirce's idea of plausibility, which I think is something a bit different. But even Peirce's idea of plausibility is more about developing a theory than about evaluating its success. Most scientific hypotheses, including quite a few highly plausible ones, get disconfirmed, and I don't think that Peirce held that hypotheses that stand up to testing generally turn out to have been the most plausible in advance. Best, Ben On 9/30/2014 12:26 PM, Clark Goble wrote: On Sep 30, 2014, at 9:21 AM, Benjamin Udell wrote: If one is a realist _/only/_ about things that one doesn't know, then one implies that the real is not cognizable. I suppose that one could say in a loose sense that one is partly an instrumentalist about simplified models, but one may regard such models as still being close to the truth, and thus as reflecting something nearly real, and in that sense one is not an instrumentalist. In On the Logic of Drawing Ancient History from Documents, EP 2, somewhere in pages 107–9, Peirce speaks of _/incomplexity/_, that of a hypothesis that seems too simple but whose trial may give a good 'leave,' as the billiard-players say, and be instructive for the pursuit of various and conflicting hypotheses that are less simple. One could loosely call that instrumentalism, but to regard the incomplex hypothesis as offering some degree of promise of leading to a true theory about something real, is not instrumentalism. The way this is often dealt with is via convergence - traditional scientific realism being one example. I’m not sure this implies the
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
Clark, list, sorry, a few corrections/additions in *bold red*. - Best, Ben On 9/30/2014 1:58 PM, Benjamin Udell wrote: Clark, list, You wrote, [CG] It’s a subtle issue that’s hard to get terminology for. (Probably one should do a literature search and see how others have solved it - but I don’t have time for that unfortunately) I’m not sure I like more or less general either since the more or less is in different areas. [End quote] Another problem with 'general' is that 'general among' very nearly means 'universal among'. If something is general among horses or general to horses, one might mean that there could be exceptions, but the exceptions would be special cases that don't really invalidate the general rule; but the general rule might not be by definition of the class or by the essential nature of the elements of the class. That nuance is involved in 'generic', which sometimes now replaces 'general' - something generic to horses is something that they have by essential nature or as implied by (sufficiently detailed) definition, e.g., four legs, but definition and nature allow of accidental exceptions. A problem that would arise again even with an invented word to replace 'universal' in the sense of 'true in one case and exceptionless elsewhere' is that something universal to elements of a set or class is a general in the larger universe but not necessarily universal to everything in that universe. That creates a risk of confusion rooted not merely in conventional language but in logic. So the conflict of senses will recur. I think that the word translated as 'universal' in Aristotle is _/catholikon/_. Greek _/catholikon/_ , as far as I can tell, usually means 'universal' in pretty much the everyday English sense. So the use of 'a universal' without qualification to mean something true of as few as two things *among many* seems an unfortunate turn in the history of terms; such universality is relative to *as few as two things among many*. To avoid the semantic influence of cases of relative universality, one would need a special set of terms or phrases for the non-relative cases. You wrote, [CG] Whether the “nearly real” is good enough is a reasonable question. Like you, I see it as good enough, but I think there are important caveats one has to make which is why I mentioned that on practical grounds for many entities they act like instrumentalists. [End quote] I'd say that they're acting as fallibilists. They may also hold that a theory should be evaluated not for the plausibility of its assumptions but the only for the success of its predictions, and it's more tempting to call that approach instrumentalism. Some have even held that it's okay and even necessary for the assumptions to be 'descriptively false'. Now, that could mean merely seemingly false by omission of factors that one would have thought to be pertinent, and I do think that is part of it. However, sometimes the assumptions clash with things that we think that we know, and the theory's success is telling us that some of our supposed knowledge is false. So, in expectation of unknown unknowns, we shouldn't rule a theory out automatically solely because its assumptions conflict with at least one of our beliefs. Still, I'd call that fallibilism, not instrumentalism, although it reflects the spirit of some who call themselves instrumentalists. Such considerations may also be involved in reconciling the idea of plausibility above and Peirce's idea of plausibility, which I think is something a bit different. But even Peirce's idea of plausibility is more about developing a theory than about evaluating its success. Most scientific hypotheses, including quite a few highly plausible ones, get disconfirmed, and I don't think that Peirce held that hypotheses that stand up to testing generally turn out to have been the most plausible in advance. *The case of the incomplex hypothesis which one really doesn't expect to be true is the closest, I think, to instrumentalism, but it's a case of treating a hypothesis instrumentally without embracing the view called 'instrumentalism', which holds (or originally held, according to what we find in Peirce's account of it) that theories don't affirm objective laws or norms but merely predict particular results. * *Still, insofar as fallibilism applies to our beliefs, and incomplex hypotheses aside for the moment, how does one characterize other than as 'instrumental' one's attitude _/toward/_ the tentative or experimental hypothesis or theory that conflicts with a belief that one holds? I would call it 'successiblism', the attitude that said hypothesis or theory is 'successible', i.e., it could be true, and that one could find the real through it. Even the incomplex hypothesis has to be granted some provisional credibility, as a kind of possible approximation to the truth. Of course one needs both
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
On Sep 29, 2014, at 10:38 AM, Benjamin Udell bud...@nyc.rr.com wrote: By the way, I think that we should remind or inform readers that many physicists, when they speak of 'realism', mean ideas such as that a particle has an objective, determinate state, even when unmeasured. Peirce's realism does not imply that, so far as I can see, and his realism about absolute chance doesn't clash with the denial of of such unmeasured objective determinate states either. Yes. Great point. I really should have clarified the issues of realism in physics from more broad realism vs. idealism debates such as those Dewey was involved in. On 9/28/2014 11:57 PM, Clark Goble wrote: On Sep 27, 2014, at 8:11 PM, Benjamin Udell wrote: [BU] A realist can and often enough ought to be skeptical about particular models and diagrams as representative of reality. A realist believes not that all generals are real but instead that some generals are real and some generals are figmentitious. [CG] Yes, I think this is key. I think Peirceans have more tools at our disposal because generals are broader than mere universals. (Broader in the sense of encompassing more structures) [BU] I didn't know that Peirce or Peirceans made such a distinction. Do you remember where you've found that? One finds Aristotle translated as using the noun 'universal' to mean a character that belongs, or at least could belong, to more than one thing, and even recent philosophers (E.J. Lowe, for example) call 'universals and particulars' the things that Peirce called 'generals and singulars'. (The ambiguity of 'particular' as referring the indefinite _something_ and the determinate _Socrates_ is another issue.) Peirce's usage is more congenial to everyday English, wherein the noun 'universal' instead parallels the adjective, and, unqualified, evokes unlimited generality, and the word 'general', unqualified, evokes a generality that is not necessarily universal and uninterrupted. In logic, examples of universal propositions are 'all G is H' and 'all is H'. That's where I've noticed Peirce speaking of the universal, while a general term is, roughly speaking, a non-singular term (leave plurals and polyads out of it for the moment), and thus correlates to the Aristotelian idea of a universal. Anyway, given the way that English works, I'd advise against a terminology in which the general is said to be broader than the universal. Or maybe that was a typo and you meant to say that the universal is broader than the general. I think so, given I what I re-read now in your remarks below. Hmm. That was really a bad way of expressing that on my part. I now regret I wrote that. Clearly I’m wrong in what I wrote. The line of thinking I was following was that generals, as used by Peirce, simply has much narrower application possible than universals like colors. It’s true that the universal yellow can be instantiated by a limited number of objects but is treated as an universal. However it seems like “some flowers are yellow” are different from “some men wear hats.” The distinction I was getting at, relative to Newton’s laws, was that distinction. The predicate “is wearing a hat” simply seems a different sort of thing from “is yellow.” Traditional universals within science accept the latter but tend not to apply it to the former. Probably what I should have written was more about what universals/generals one was a realist about. Especially as it relates to the reductionist issue. As you note Peirce typically uses general as non-singular. The reason I had said it was broader was more about Peirce allowing realism towards many generals that a physicist wouldn’t. So many people are open to mathematical entities being universals for instance. (Think Quine for example) However they tend not to be a realist towards statements like “is wearing a hat.” That’s fundamentally an emergent phenomena and wrapped up with individual minds, the way most nominalists think of it. But I might just simply be wrong in all this. I think I was thinking in terms of passages like the following: A particular proposition asserts the existence of something of a given description. A universal proposition merely asserts the non-existence of anything of a given description. Had I, therefore, asserted that a perceptual judgment could be a universal proposition I should have fallen into rank absurdity. For reaction is existence and the perceptual judgment is the cognitive product of a reaction. But as from the particular proposition that “There is some woman whom any Catholic you can find will adore,” we can with certainty infer the universal proposition that “Any Catholic you can find will adore some woman or other,” so if a perceptual judgment involves any general elements, as it certainly does, the presumption is that a universal proposition can be necessarily deduced from it. (EP 2:210)
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
On Sep 29, 2014, at 10:38 AM, Benjamin wrote: By the way, I think that we should remind or inform readers that many physicists, when they speak of 'realism', mean ideas such as that a particle has an objective, determinate state, even when unmeasured. Goble: I think the ultimately problem is that most physicists (like most scientists) are nominalists and thus to make a realist claim requires knowing what the singulars are. Yet most physicists donât think they know the singulars. This leads to problems for a nominalist that a scholastic realist like Peirce doesnât face. Now I think physicists would do well to jettison nominalism. HP: To get a fairer picture of how physicists think, please peruse http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.1069v1.pdfthis survey. Howard - PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on Reply List or Reply All to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
On Sep 29, 2014, at 6:28 PM, Howard Pattee hpat...@roadrunner.com wrote: Goble: I think the ultimately problem is that most physicists (like most scientists) are nominalists and thus to make a realist claim requires knowing what the singulars are. Yet most physicists donât think they know the singulars. This leads to problems for a nominalist that a scholastic realist like Peirce doesnât face. Now I think physicists would do well to jettison nominalism. HP: To get a fairer picture of how physicists think, please peruse this survey http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.1069v1.pdf. I’d seen that before. While it’s a great guide to interpretations of quantum mechanics it really doesn’t address the nominalism issue. There were some surprises when I first read it - mainly that Bohmian mechanics have completely fallen out of favor. Back when I was in school it was still a notable theory, albeit one few followed. I expected far more people to pick the Everett interpretation as well. It did touch briefly on the idealist vs realist question with question 9. However that really didn’t get at the issue of nominalism. Although as the authors noted the options weren’t well defined here. I wonder how many physicists are familiar with terms like ontic or epistemic enough to understand how they are applied. Still that’s a great link to share. I do wish there was one on nominalism. - PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on Reply List or Reply All to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
On Sep 28, 2014, at 2:29 PM, Benjamin Udell bud...@nyc.rr.com wrote: On 9/28/2014 11:22 AM, Jerry LR Chandler wrote: [JC] List, Ben, Clark: I am surprised by the search for such a fine -scale parsing of the concept of formal causality (telos). [BU] I'd regard formal causation generally as entelechiac causation, rather than as telic causation when _telos_ has the sense of culminal end, a working or functioning (once, sometimes, or habitually) as an end or goal. In Peirce's view, entelechy is merely more perfect realization or completion of the activity, the _energeia_ (which is a _telos_) (_Century Dictionary_ 1889 and the definition's draft from 1886 in W 5:404 https://sites.google.com/site/cspmem/terms https://sites.google.com/site/cspmem/terms), but I haven't thought so. Anyway there's parsing because there are various ways to apply the ideas. I think that’s an important point you brought up Ben. This confused me to no end when first studying Peirce as I kept thinking of teleology in Peirce more akin to how Aquinas and the medievals took it. However for Peirce it’s very much wrapped up in the discussion of entelenchy The discussion of Aristotle’s famous four causes is interesting. I’d posted this last month but I’ll repost it because I think it rather pertinent. It may be added that a part of a cause, if a part in that respect in which the cause is a cause, is also called a cause. In other respects, too, the scope of the word will be somewhat widened in the sequel. If the cause so defined is a part of the causatum, in the sense that the causatum could not logically be without the cause, it is called an internal cause; otherwise, it is called an external cause. If the cause is of the nature of an individual thing or fact, and the other factor requisite to the necessitation of the causatum is a general principle, I would call the cause a minor, or individuating, or perhaps a physical cause. If, on the other hand, it is the general principle which is regarded as the cause and the individual fact to which it is applied is taken as the understood factor, I would call the cause a major, or defining, or perhaps a psychical cause. The individuating internal cause is called the material cause. Thus the integrant parts of a subject or fact form its matter, or material cause. The individuating external cause is called the efficient, or efficient cause; and the causatum is called the effect. The defining internal cause is called the formal cause, or form. All these facts which constitute the definition of a subject or fact make up its form. The defining external cause is called the final cause, or end. It is hoped that these statements will be found to hit a little more squarely than did those of Aristotle and the scholastics the same bull’s eye at which they aimed. From scholasticism and the medieval universities, these conceptions passed in vaguer form into the common mind and vernacular of Western Europe, and especially so in England. Consequently, by the aid of these definitions I think I can make out what it is that the writer mentioned has in mind in saying that it is not the law which influences, or is the final cause of, the facts, but the facts that make up the cause of the law. (EP 315-316) He distinguishes internal from external causes. Although with regards to the entelechy there’s some connection since the ideal sign signified the very matter denoted by it united by the very form signified by it. As I understand him this gets at both the internal and external. Every sign that is sufficiently complete refers to sundry real objects. All these objects, even if we are talking of Hamlet's madness, are parts of one and the same Universe of being, the “Truth.” But so far as the “Truth” is merely the object of a sign, it is merely the Aristotelian Matter of it that is so. In addition however to denoting objects, every sign sufficiently complete signifies characters, or qualities. We have a direct knowledge of real objects in every experiential reaction, whether of Perception or of Exertion (the one theoretical, the other practical). These are directly hic et nunc. But we extend the category, and speak of numberless real objects with which we are not in direct reaction. We have also direct knowledge of qualities in feeling, peripheral and visceral. But we extend this category to numberless characters of which we have no immediate consciousness. All these characters are elements of the “Truth.” Every sign signifies the “Truth.” But it is only the Aristotelian Form of the universe that it signifies. The logician is not concerned with any metaphysical theory; still less, if possible, is the mathematician. But it is highly convenient to express ourselves in terms of a metaphysical theory; and we no more bind ourselves to an acceptance of it than we do when we use substantives such as “humanity,” “variety,” etc. and speak of
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
On Sep 27, 2014, at 6:05 PM, Stephen C. Rose stever...@gmail.com wrote: Have you read The God Problem by Harold Bloom. I have no science but it seems he is out to contradict every theory out there. He has one of his own about origins. Best, S I confess I’ve not read that one, although I’ve read some of Bloom’s other works on religion. On Sep 27, 2014, at 8:11 PM, Benjamin Udell bud...@nyc.rr.com wrote: [BU] A realist can and often enough ought to be skeptical about particular models and diagrams as representative of reality. A realist believes not that all generals are real but instead that some generals are real and some generals are figmentitious. Yes, I think this is key. I think Peirceans have more tools at our disposal because generals are broader than mere universals. (Broader in the sense of encompassing more structures) [CG] If that’s true, even if a realist appears to be appealing to Aristotle’s four causes in practice what they really think is going on is probably something different. That is on a practical basis for most physical theories even realists behave as an instrumentalist. If true, then in what way can Aristotle’s categories really be seen ontologically? So it’s really a subtle point about realism, foundational ontology and Aristotle I'm making. [BU] I'm not sure that I get you. Skepticism toward particular models, the desire that they 'do the job' (i.e., stand up to evidence) doesn't by itself seem to amount to choosing instrumentalism over realism. I’ll give it an other shot. It’s a subtle point, and one that perhaps isn’t a problem to Peirceans due to our distinctions between generals and universals. Skepticism towards model’s reality is a problem simply because most physicists are reducitonist but also don’t think they know what a final theory is like. That means any model has to be reduced to foundational laws/objects to discern what things really are. However since we don’t know what to reduce them to, we’re left not knowing how to conceive of the physics we know in terms of what they actually are. Now Peirce has a solution to this with generals. So we could say that Newton’s Laws are true generals but are not universals. They have a limited area of application. But within that application they are true. Now we can quibble about how we’re dealing with errors due to the difference between the general and what a more general law, like general relativity might give. There are obviously some complexities there we can debate. But fundamentally how Peirce approaches common sense as phenomena heavily tested in a limited area is how we approach physics. But note that this isn’t really how realists among physicists conceive of it. When they talk about realism they aren’t merely talking about structures that are mind independent but also the grounds of those structures. And those grounds just aren’t known. (Clearly a realist will accept that Newton’s laws describe mind independent structures for most phenomena though, even if they don’t quite put it into the form of generals the way Peirce might) Hope that helps. The issue is really that realism within a reductionist system is what is fundamentally real. So it’s not that the realists are the same as the instrumentalists. Simply that because they don’t know the assumed foundational laws in certain practical ways they act like an instrumentalist. [CG] The closest I could find was the more typical (even today) physicts view that we haven’t a clue what energy is beyond it’s place in an equation. We should hardly find today a man of Kirchhoff’s rank in science saying that we know exactly what energy does but what energy is we do not know in the least. For the answer would be that energy being a term in a dynamical equation, if we know how to apply that equation, we thereby know what energy is, although we may suspect that there is some more fundamental law underlying the laws of motion. (EP 2:239) Peirce here was using energy and its meaning as an analogy for relations. [BU] I like to think that Peirce would think that the equations tell us a little more now. Energy, in nearly the sense that he understood it, is a time-minus-proper-time quantity in the sense that momentum is a distance (or displacement) quantity. Energy, momementum, mass, can all be expressed in the same units, in a sense they're the same thing in terms of different reference-frame structures. I should add at some point that Peirce didn't think that energy was an cenoscopically philosophical subject, since the conservation of energy requires special experiments to establish. I won’t even try to guess what Peirce would think. I don’t feel I know his thought enough for that. I suspect you’re right in regards to energy being cenoscopic or idioscopic. It seems an experimental reduction rather something worked out philosophically. Whether they are the same
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
On Sep 26, 2014, at 12:41 PM, Benjamin Udell bud...@nyc.rr.com wrote: Clark, list, I've also noticed a difficulty of finding usefulness for the formal cause in physics, though I came at it from other directions, simpler ones for me since I'm not a physicist, but also I'd like to add a clarification of the idea of formal causation. I think there are things like formal causes in physics. For instance if you are discussing symmetries how different really is that from discussing forms? However I think there’s a huge gap within physics simply because of how physics views foundational theories. Right now there’s near universal consensus we don’t have a foundational theory and (except for the string proponents) most don’t think we have any idea what one would look like. (I’ve no idea how far string theory has fallen in favor the last few years. There’s definitely been a backlash, but how widespread it is at the moment I couldn’t say) Given that acknowledged ignorance of foundations there’s a strong sense even among realists that most of what we do in physics is model making with the models highly idealized from what’s really going on. So a realist might be a realist towards certain structures and behaviors about GR or QM but a bit of a skeptic regarding particular models. If that’s true, even if a realist appears to be appealing to Aristotle’s four causes in practice what they really think is going on is probably something different. That is on a practical basis for most physical theories even realists behave as an instrumentalist. If true, then in what way can Aristotle’s categories really be seen ontologically? So it’s really a subtle point about realism, foundational ontology and Aristotle I'm making. If I remember Peirce correctly, the ideas of force, impulse, momentum were ideas of ways to quantify (efficient) 'causativeness' or capacity to cause, impart motion, etc., while power (wattage), work, energy, were ways to quantify effect (_telos_, end, in a sense) or capacity for effect. The matter obviously was quantified as mass, and related mechanical quantities would be change of mass and the rate of it, which I guess one could call 'affluence' :-), but nowadays I guess one would say that internal work, internal power, are also mechanical counterparts to rest mass (i.e., to rest energy). It’s true that Peirce adopts telos in terms of capacity. So he says idea in the Platonic sense is “anything whose Being consists in its mere capacity for getting fully represented.” I only have the EP to search through but I couldn’t find a passage like that. I’d be interested if you know it. The closest I could find was the more typical (even today) physicts view that we haven’t a clue what energy is beyond it’s place in an equation. We should hardly find today a man of Kirchhoff’s rank in science saying that we know exactly what energy does but what energy is we do not know in the least. For the answer would be that energy being a term in a dynamical equation, if we know how to apply that equation, we thereby know what energy is, although we may suspect that there is some more fundamental law underlying the laws of motion. (EP 2:239) Peirce here was using energy and its meaning as an analogy for relations. I do think Peirce is influenced by Aristotle’s two grades of being as actuality and potentiality. But I’m not sure he put things in quite the form you suggest. I may be completely wrong here I should add - this is just coming from me scanning EP. If you have a reference I’d be very interested as I’ve honestly not even looked to see what Peirce’s theory of physics was. Partially because he wrote before the great revolutions of the early 20th century. - PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on Reply List or Reply All to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
Clark, list, Responses interleaved. On 9/27/2014 7:41 PM, Clark Goble wrote: On Sep 26, 2014, at 12:41 PM, Benjamin Udell wrote:/p Clark, list, I've also noticed a difficulty of finding usefulness for the formal cause in physics, though I came at it from other directions, simpler ones for me since I'm not a physicist, but also I'd like to add a clarification of the idea of formal causation. [CG] I think there are things /like / formal causes in physics. For instance if you are discussing symmetries how different really is that from discussing forms? [BU] Yes, I should have sad a difficulty of finding usefulness for formal _/causation/_ in physics, and of finding a useful kinetic quantity in the manner of momentum, mass, energy. Insofar as a thing's form is its formal cause, physics obviously has use for forms. [CG] However I think there’s a huge gap within physics simply because of how physics views foundational theories. Right now there’s near universal consensus we don’t have a foundational theory and (except for the string proponents) most don’t think we have any idea what one would look like. (I’ve no idea how far string theory has fallen in favor the last few years. There’s definitely been a backlash, but how widespread it is at the moment I couldn’t say) [BU] On _The Big Bang Theory_, Sheldon has given up on string theory. Clearly the walls have been breached. [CG] Given that acknowledged ignorance of foundations there’s a strong sense even among realists that most of what we do in physics is model making with the models highly idealized from what’s really going on. So a realist might be a realist towards certain structures and behaviors about GR or QM but a bit of a skeptic regarding particular models. [BU] A realist can and often enough ought to be skeptical about particular models and diagrams as representative of reality. A realist believes not that all generals are real but instead that some generals are real and some generals are figmentitious. [CG] If that’s true, even if a realist /appears/ to be appealing to Aristotle’s four causes in practice what they /really/ think is going on is probably something different. That is on a practical basis for most physical theories even realists behave as an instrumentalist. If true, then in what way can Aristotle’s categories really be seen ontologically? So it’s really a subtle point about realism, foundational ontology and Aristotle I'm making. [BU] I'm not sure that I get you. Skepticism toward particular models, the desire that they 'do the job' (i.e., stand up to evidence) doesn't by itself seem to amount to choosing instrumentalism over realism. [BU] If I remember Peirce correctly, the ideas of force, impulse, momentum were ideas of ways to quantify (efficient) 'causativeness' or capacity to cause, impart motion, etc., while power (wattage), work, energy, were ways to quantify effect (_telos_, end, in a sense) or capacity for effect. The matter obviously was quantified as mass, and related mechanical quantities would be change of mass and the rate of it, which I guess one could call 'affluence' :-), but nowadays I guess one would say that internal work, internal power, are also mechanical counterparts to rest mass (i.e., to rest energy). [CG] It’s true that Peirce adopts telos in terms of capacity. So he says idea in the Platonic sense is “anything whose Being consists in its mere capacity for getting fully represented.” [BU] I was talking about capacity in all cases. Momentum isn't 'casativeness' in the sense that impulse and force seem, but it is a kind of 'causative' capacity. Work is a kind of effect, energy is capacity for work, capacity for effect. [CG] I only have the EP to search through but I couldn’t find a passage like that. I’d be interested if you know it. [BU] It was a brief passage, it'd be hard to find again. Peirce was merely mentioning the history of the idea, not his philosophy of it. [CG] The closest I could find was the more typical (even today) physicts view that we haven’t a clue what energy is beyond it’s place in an equation. We should hardly find today a man of Kirchhoff’s rank in science saying that we know exactly what energy does but what energy is we do not know in the least. For the answer would be that energy being a term in a dynamical equation, if we know how to apply that equation, we thereby know what energy is, although we may suspect that there is some more fundamental law underlying the laws of motion. (EP 2:239) Peirce here was using energy and its meaning as an analogy for relations. [BU] I like to think that Peirce would think that the equations tell us a little more now. Energy, in nearly the sense that he understood it, is a time-minus-proper-time quantity in the sense that momentum is a distance (or displacement) quantity. Energy, momementum, mass, can all be expressed in the
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
Clark, list, I've also noticed a difficulty of finding usefulness for the formal cause in physics, though I came at it from other directions, simpler ones for me since I'm not a physicist, but also I'd like to add a clarification of the idea of formal causation. A thing's form is its formal cause, and the form (in the sense of structure) obviously gets involved in mechanics, where angles and directions are important from the start. So the formal cause gets involved there but not in the usual sense of formal _/causation/_, of which the old typical example was the 'beautiful idea' that guides a painter to actualize it in the painting. A structure dynamically causing into the future is traditionally regarded as an efficient cause. The Aristotelian four causes (efficient cause, matter, end, form) enter into physics in at least two ways that I can see. One is in the kinetic and mechanical quantities developed that reflect them. The other is in in the idea of stages of a process. If I remember Peirce correctly, the ideas of force, impulse, momentum were ideas of ways to quantify (efficient) 'causativeness' or capacity to cause, impart motion, etc., while power (wattage), work, energy, were ways to quantify effect (_/telos/_, end, in a sense) or capacity for effect. The matter obviously was quantified as mass, and related mechanical quantities would be change of mass and the rate of it, which I guess one could call 'affluence' :-), but nowadays I guess one would say that internal work, internal power, are also mechanical counterparts to rest mass (i.e., to rest energy). Anyway, there seems to have been no idea of quantifying of form in some kinetic or mechanical (dynamic or static) sense; it's not clear how it would have seemed useful, or how it would be useful now. Anyway, I've tried it and it doesn't seem useful for physics. If you picture the form or structure as being a kind of balancing, or more-or-less stable balance, of momenta or forces in a system, then in special relativity one can assign a related kinetic quantity to the system by considering the internal 'potential' momenta or potential impulses stored in the system's material parts and the internal kinetic momenta (that are netted out, canceled out, in the system's net momentum) all the way down through the fundamental particles. I can't imagine how to directly measure it, only how to calculate it, and it (call it 'f') is proportional to (E/c) - p, which seems useless in physical theory - sorry, Aristotle. (Basically f differs from momentum in the way that slowness differs from speed, such that f is an idea of how much potential and actual motion is tied up in the system as its arrangement or structure.) Moreover, at conventional velocities, f is proportional to rest mass (and to total mass), rendering form (structure) and matter hard to distinguish in that perspective. Given the mathematics, I don't think that there will be another candidate than f for a structure quantity directly akin to momentum 'p', rest mass 'm', and kinetic energy 'e', such that reflections of the ideas of the Four Causes are picturable neatly in a square around a central E (total relativistic mass-energy) p e E mf where, if we set lightspeed at 1, then p+f = m+e = E; p-e = m-f = sqrt(2fe); and p-m = e-f (or m-p = f-e). Another way in which the formal cause enters idioscopy including physics is as a final form, or a form that is final in the sense of being stable. The idea of a form or structure acting mechanically, dynamically, etc., into the future is traditionally regarded not as formal causation, but as efficient (a.k.a. agent) causation. An idea commonly given of formal causation was that of the 'beautiful idea' that guides a painter and is actualized in the completed painting. I recently discussed at peirce-l the idea of an entelechy as a bigger picture whereby one balances impetuses, means, and culminal ends - taking into account possible further risks and opportunities, clashes and consistencies of values, and so on. A biological-evolutionary idea of this would be a form toward which a species evolves and which, as a result of natural selection, organizes and balances the functions of the organism, taking account of significantly probable and feasible contingencies which may be encountered by organisms of the given species. At lower levels, I don't clearly see final forms, likewise of ends, acting or quasi-acting through mind or quasi-mind to shape and guide processes to lead to them. At the level of matter and multitudes of particles, the common end of a closed system, a population 'total' in that sense, seems to be decay in the sense of increasing entropy, and a final form (final at least for the time being) a stable higher-entropy state, and this is a matter of probabilities. At the level of mechanics, the end seems to be conservation of certain quantities (at least when
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
Dear Clark, lists - But aren't formal and material causes just re-baptized in physics as constants (of laws), as types of forces or particles, or as boundary conditions? Best F Den 22/09/2014 kl. 15.59 skrev Clark Goble cl...@lextek.commailto:cl...@lextek.com : On Sep 21, 2014, at 9:13 PM, Clark Goble cl...@libertypages.commailto:cl...@libertypages.com wrote: On Sep 18, 2014, at 8:49 AM, Gary Fuhrman g...@gnusystems.camailto:g...@gnusystems.ca wrote: Clark, in reference to the Peirce passage you quoted about the “community of quasi-minds”, you said that “While we could obviously and perhaps should discuss this purely as efficient causation, I love how Peirce discusses it instead in terms of signs.” But it’s not at all obvious to me how or why we could or should discuss this purely as efficient causation. To me, the material and formal (if not final) causes of the fact determined by this process appear much more prominent than the efficient causes. Typically physicists and most physical scientists avoid material and formal causes in the Aristotilean sense. They become more the properties or information that changes. Since the focus is on those changes of state the focus is really on efficient causation with little focus on material or formal changes - they are simply bracketed and left uninvestigated usually. When they are investigated by truly theoretical physicists and occasionally philosophers things get tricky. One could well argue, for instance, that most of string theory is really a theory about material and formal causes for instance. While I honestly don’t think most physicists are instrumentalists like Feynman, I do think they adhere to a certain instrumentalist ethos that says one should leap into the abyss of worrying about ultimate stuff beyond what we can empirically talk about clearly. (Which is why string theory has long been so controversial, IMO) The reason this is important is of course how physics conceives of formal and material causes tends to view them as somewhat illusionary. That is they are emergent phenomena but there’s always the assumption of a true reduction to basic physics is in theory possible. (This is different from the reductionism of description that I take Frederik was addressing a few weeks ago) So to a physicist to only real form and material are the ultimate constituents of the universe, whether they be strings, quantum fields or whatever they turn out to be. And the reason talk of formal or material causes is pointless is because we don’t know the ultimate constituents (or if people think they do, it’s merely talk about strings) I’m not saying this is the only way one could talk about this sort of thing. But I do think this is, in practice, the way physicists and to only a slightly lesser extent chemists think about all this. Biologists are a different beast of course. - PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on Reply List or Reply All to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edumailto:peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edumailto:l...@list.iupui.edu with the line UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm . - PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on Reply List or Reply All to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
On Sep 21, 2014, at 9:13 PM, Clark Goble cl...@libertypages.com wrote: On Sep 18, 2014, at 8:49 AM, Gary Fuhrman g...@gnusystems.ca mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca wrote: Clark, in reference to the Peirce passage you quoted about the “community of quasi-minds”, you said that “While we could obviously and perhaps should discuss this purely as efficient causation, I love how Peirce discusses it instead in terms of signs.” But it’s not at all obvious to me how or why we could or should discuss this purely as efficient causation. To me, the material and formal (if not final) causes of the fact determined by this process appear much more prominent than the efficient causes. Typically physicists and most physical scientists avoid material and formal causes in the Aristotilean sense. They become more the properties or information that changes. Since the focus is on those changes of state the focus is really on efficient causation with little focus on material or formal changes - they are simply bracketed and left uninvestigated usually. When they are investigated by truly theoretical physicists and occasionally philosophers things get tricky. One could well argue, for instance, that most of string theory is really a theory about material and formal causes for instance. While I honestly don’t think most physicists are instrumentalists like Feynman, I do think they adhere to a certain instrumentalist ethos that says one should leap into the abyss of worrying about ultimate stuff beyond what we can empirically talk about clearly. (Which is why string theory has long been so controversial, IMO) The reason this is important is of course how physics conceives of formal and material causes tends to view them as somewhat illusionary. That is they are emergent phenomena but there’s always the assumption of a true reduction to basic physics is in theory possible. (This is different from the reductionism of description that I take Frederik was addressing a few weeks ago) So to a physicist to only real form and material are the ultimate constituents of the universe, whether they be strings, quantum fields or whatever they turn out to be. And the reason talk of formal or material causes is pointless is because we don’t know the ultimate constituents (or if people think they do, it’s merely talk about strings) I’m not saying this is the only way one could talk about this sort of thing. But I do think this is, in practice, the way physicists and to only a slightly lesser extent chemists think about all this. Biologists are a different beast of course. - PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on Reply List or Reply All to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
Dear Ben, lists, I think you are right in proposing that quasi-inferences are inferences with less than full self-control. But self-control comes in many degrees ( I address this a bit in ch. 6 I think). A very low degree of self-control may be the slow change over evolutionary adaption - with the lineage as the self-controlling entity able to learn, rather than the single organism. You're right about the vague sense of Peirce's different quasis - maybe an intended vagueness. But I think it is right that, as a tendency, P would regard learning (ever so slowly) as essential for his mind concept (of course the famous crystals-and-bees quote may be marshaled as a counter-quote). Best F Den 16/09/2014 kl. 20.09 skrev Benjamin Udell bud...@nyc.rr.commailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com : Clark, list, In regard to the Peirce quote from 1907 that you provided, it's also pertinent to the discussion of biosemiosis, physiosemiosis, etc., taking place lately here. It was in the 1906 Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism that he discusses quasi-mind, quasi-utterer, quasi-interpreterhttp://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/quasi-mind . In the 1907 passage that you quote, mentioning the Jacquard loom, he doesn't mention the quasi-s although they seem pertinent. But in another 1907 from the same MS 318, published in CP 5.473 (the famous semeiosy passage), he says that a Jacquard loom should be regarded as a quasi-sign, because the action is that of automatic regulation, which he distinguishes from semeiosy (semiosis). [Quote] In these cases, however, a mental representation of the index is produced, which mental representation is called the _immediate object_ of the sign; and this object does triadically produce the intended, or proper, effect of the sign strictly by means of another mental sign; and that this triadic character of the action is regarded as essential is shown by the fact that if the thermometer is dynamically connected with the heating and cooling apparatus, so as to check either effect, we do not, in ordinary parlance speak of there being any _semeiosy_, or action of a sign, but, on the contrary, say that there is an automatic regulation, an idea opposed, in our minds, to that of _semeiosy_. For the proper significate outcome of a sign, I propose the name, the interpretant of the sign. The example of the imperative command shows that it need not be of a mental mode of being. Whether the interpretant be necessarily a triadic result is a question of words, that is, of how we limit the extension of the term sign; but it seems to me convenient to make the triadic production of the interpretant essential to a sign, calling the wider concept like a Jacquard loom, for example, a quasi-sign. [End quote] I tend to see this distinction as allied a distinction that he makes in an unpublished MS which the Robin Catalogue describes as follows: 831. [Reasoning and Instinct] A. MS., n.p., n.d., pp. 2-29, incomplete. The fine gradations between subconscious or instinctive mind and conscious, controlled reason. Logical machines are not strictly reasoning machines because they lack the ability of self-criticism and the ability to correct defects which may crop up. Three kinds of reasoning: inductive, deductive, hypothetical. Quasi-inferences. Well, I don't know what to make of quasi-inferences - I'd have thought that he would regard instinctive or automatic inferences as quasi-reasonings. I'll be very interested to read MS 831 if it ever becomes available. Anyway I've tended to think of genuine semiosis as involving the capacity to learn, capacity for self-correction etc. (and I've heard that this is De Tienne's view) - I mean not merely self-correction to maintain homeostasis or balance while walking etc. (which could be done by automatic regulation), but 'design-level' self-correction, correction of one's own methods, correction of one's own semiosic habits, etc. But one finds inferences embodied in vegetable-level and physical phenomena, are they not semioses? Are they quasi-semioses? The prefix quasi- starts to seem too vague to capture the possible senses. I also don't have too firm an idea of all the things that Peirce means by mind. Does mind, in Peirce's sense, always involve the capacity to learn? If I call something a quasi-mind, should that mean like a mind but not learning? Or could it mean learning like a mind without being a mind capable of consciousness (I've thought of biological evolution as having a 'quasi-mind'). Vegetable-level (quasi-)semiosis seems like we ought to strongly distinguish it from whatever strictly dynamic or material/chemical (quasi-) semiosis we think there is, because at the vegetable level, signs or signals are 'interpreted' in terms of highly specific kinds of pertinence to the organism for the end of the thriving of the species. It indeed _seems_ rather like semiosis as we ordinarily think of it because, although
RE: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
Clark, in reference to the Peirce passage you quoted about the “community of quasi-minds”, you said that “While we could obviously and perhaps should discuss this purely as efficient causation, I love how Peirce discusses it instead in terms of signs.” But it’s not at all obvious to me how or why we could or should discuss this purely as efficient causation. To me, the material and formal (if not final) causes of the fact determined by this process appear much more prominent than the efficient causes. gary f. From: Clark Goble [mailto:cl...@lextek.com] Sent: 16-Sep-14 9:01 PM To: Peirce List Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2 On Sep 16, 2014, at 12:09 PM, Benjamin Udell bud...@nyc.rr.com wrote: In regard to the Peirce quote from 1907 that you provided, it's also pertinent to the discussion of biosemiosis, physiosemiosis, etc., taking place lately here. It was in the 1906 Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism that he discusses quasi-mind, quasi-utterer, quasi-interpreter http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/quasi-mind . Yes, when I came upon it I noticed that connection. (Thank heavens for Kindle and having at least EP2 available - if only a cheap CP collection was around that worked on Macs iPads) And the 1906 Prolegomena definitely is one of my favorite of Peirce’s texts - second probably only to some of the Lady Welby texts. It seems to me that quasi-mind, quasi-utterer, quasi-interpreter and even quasi-signs are very important for the discussion. That’s not to say that I disagree with Frederik once caveats are made. Just that I think Peirce sees this very much as a continuum in complexity. While I’m dubious the continuum works quite as broadly as Peirce sometimes suggests, the notion as a regulatory concept is amazingly productive. That quote you gave gets very much at the issue I initially brought up. As Peirce says, we don’t ordinarily call this a sign but clearly there are some resemblances. 831. [Reasoning and Instinct] A. MS., n.p., n.d., pp. 2-29, incomplete. The fine gradations between subconscious or instinctive mind and conscious, controlled reason. Logical machines are not strictly reasoning machines because they lack the ability of self-criticism and the ability to correct defects which may crop up. Three kinds of reasoning: inductive, deductive, hypothetical. Quasi-inferences. That’s a fantastic little quote I’d not seen before. It also points to levels of complexity. Obviously some complex phenomena do self-correct. The recent advent of self-healing materials are but one example. This suggests that the continuum is one of complexity in many ways. My favorite discussion of these “quasi” aspects of the sign. (BTW one of my favorite Peircean uses of “quasi” was in quasi-self when talking about secondness and how we attribute the causes of secondness to objects despite the same thing never happening twice in secondness. (This was in “Sundry Logical Conceptions”) While I may be overly generalizing I’ve long seen Peirce’s use of “quasi” as tied to his notion of continuity but also recognizing where we sense differences from the ideal definition but for which there is a strong resemblance. Since any sign function can itself be typically broken down into parts, the role of quasi-mind becomes more clear. Peirce uses quasi-mind to deal with these sub-parts of the sign but must also recognize there is something more fundamental than what we call mind. Today we’d recognize this as a notion of complexity and emergence. However it also avoids some of the messiness that Continental philosophy took when it recognized mind, as conceived of by Descartes, just wouldn’t work. There had to be something lower level going on. This led to all number of excesses of metaphor and performance while Peirce had a much more fruitful approach to describing all this. I like to think that had people embraced Peirce’s later mature thought more seriously a lot of the problems of philosophy in the second half of the 20th century could have been avoided. I should note also, getting back to the Prolegomena, the following passage that I should have quoted in my response to Sungchul. Let a community of quasi-minds consist of the liquid in a number of bottles which are in intricate connexion by tubes filled with the liquid. This liquid is of complex and somewhat unstable mixed chemical composition. It also has so strong a cohesion and consequent surface-tension that the contents of each bottle take on a self-determined form. Accident may cause one or another kind of decomposition to start at a point of one bottle producing a molecule of peculiar form, and this action may spread through a tube to another bottle. This new molecule will be a determination of the contents of the first bottle which will thus act upon the contents of the second bottle
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
Clark, list, You wrote, 831. [Reasoning and Instinct] A. MS., n.p., n.d., pp. 2-29, incomplete. The fine gradations between subconscious or instinctive mind and conscious, controlled reason. Logical machines are not strictly reasoning machines because they lack the ability of self-criticism and the ability to correct defects which may crop up. Three kinds of reasoning: inductive, deductive, hypothetical. Quasi-infIerences. [CG] That’s a fantastic little quote I’d not seen before. To be sure, that's not a direct quote of Peirce, instead it's a quote of Richard Robin's summary of MS 831 http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/robin/robin_fm/toc_frm.htm http://www.iupui.edu/%7Epeirce/robin/robin_fm/toc_frm.htm . I'm still wondering how to sort out these quasi's. Semiosis dependent on learning or on the capacity to learn: Learning in a concentrated mind. *Mathetic* semiosis? Learning in a dispersed commind. *Symmathetic* semiosis? Quasi-learning by, e.g., large-scale social (without individuals commentally aware) or biological evolution, a quasi-mind or quasi-commind. *Mathoidic* semiosis? Any and all of them: *Mathinic* semiosis? Maybe somebody has already sorted out these or similar distinctions and suggested terms for them. Then I'd make similar distinctions at the level of (quasi-)semiosis for systems that don't learn but still regulate themselves automatically. It involves ideas of communication and control, and the idea that the system arose from a mathinic process even though the system (e.g., a vegetable organism) is not itself mathinic. A Jacquard loom seems actually a weak example of this, although a mathinic process is required for the Jacquard loom to be set up. A pheromone is very like an indexical instance of a symbol. Something has to know the 'lingo' or the code in order to 'understand' it. It has its 'meaning' because of how it _/will/_ be interpreted by certain organisms, and the whole thing depends on its purpose, to which congenial underlying material and dynamic processes were adapted. I'd make a distinction between life and quasi-life (e.g., quasi-life would include the hypothetical Gaia, self-regulative climate systems, etc.). I suppose the idea of quasi-life could be extended like that of quasi-mind to even lower phenomena, the liquids that Peirce mentions in your quote of him. These start to seem like quasi-quasi-life and quasi-quasi-mind to me. I'm used to thinking of mind as both capable of learning _/and/_, in Peirce's excellent phrase, theater of consciousness. I'm thinking that Peirce sees both as essential to genuine mind, if we take 'learning' as 'habit-taking'. But I'm not sure of this. Then there are also stochastic processes (material or quasi-material causation, large numbers of particles; or behaving probabilistically as if randomly selected from swarm of particles, or something like that, my background is very limited here) and more-or-less deterministic physical/dynamic processes (efficient causation), some of which will be complex decision processes in some sense, following and affecting rules and constraints. It gets pretty murky for me here. A 'quasi-dynamic' actual process won't be a lower form if there's nothing lower physically, it could only be a higher form. Best, Ben On 9/16/2014 9:00 PM, Clark Goble wrote: On Sep 16, 2014, at 12:09 PM, Benjamin Udell bud...@nyc.rr.com mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com wrote: In regard to the Peirce quote from 1907 that you provided, it's also pertinent to the discussion of biosemiosis, physiosemiosis, etc., taking place lately here. It was in the 1906 Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism that he discusses quasi-mind, quasi-utterer, quasi-interpreter http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/quasi-mind . Yes, when I came upon it I noticed that connection. (Thank heavens for Kindle and having at least EP2 available - if only a cheap CP collection was around that worked on Macs iPads) And the 1906 Prolegomena definitely is one of my favorite of Peirce’s texts - second probably only to some of the Lady Welby texts. It seems to me that quasi-mind, quasi-utterer, quasi-interpreter and even quasi-signs are very important for the discussion. That’s not to say that I disagree with Frederik once caveats are made. Just that I think Peirce sees this very much as a continuum in complexity. While I’m dubious the continuum works quite as broadly as Peirce sometimes suggests, the notion as a regulatory concept is amazingly productive. That quote you gave gets very much at the issue I initially brought up. As Peirce says, we don’t ordinarily call this a sign but clearly there are some resemblances. 831. [Reasoning and Instinct] A. MS., n.p., n.d., pp. 2-29, incomplete. The fine gradations between subconscious or instinctive mind and conscious, controlled reason. Logical machines are not
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
On Sep 15, 2014, at 9:23 AM, Benjamin Udell bud...@nyc.rr.com mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com wrote: (He came to regard philosophy as consisting of so-called logical analysis (intellectual autobiography, 1904, Ketner editor), and to regarding such logical analysis as really being phaneroscopic analysis (Peirce to James, 1909, CP 8.305); obviously by logical analysis in that context Peirce did not mean the study of logic _per se_.) What do you think he meant by that term broadly speaking? (“so called logical analysis”) I ask, not because I don’t have some vague sense of the term, but because that seems to be my limit. Earlier on he seemed to speak of three degrees of clarity with the second degree logical analysis and the third degree to be the pragmatic maxim. However later on he seems to accord “logical analysis” as much more finding accurate definitions for concepts. (He suggests this for instance in the letters to Lady Welby but also the Neglected Argument) It’s tempting to see it as somewhat akin to what happened to analytic philosophy. However I’ve long found many elements of analytic philosophy rather tepid relative to what I find in Peirce. I think his logic of vagueness and generals is rather key to a difference with how analytic philosophy developed in the 20th century. In particular his MS 318 is a great example of how he uses this term (I’m not sure I could easily define it) Everybody recognizes that it is no inconsiderable art, this business of “phaneroscopic” analysis by which one frames a scientific definition. As I practice it, in those cases, like the present, in which I am debarred from a direct appeal to the principle of pragmatism, I begin by seizing upon that predicate which appears to be most characteristic of the definitum, even if it does not quite apply to the entire extension of the definitum. If the predicate be too narrow, I afterward seek for some ingredient of it which shall be broad enough for an amended definitum and, at the same time, be still more scientifically characteristic of it. Proceeding in that way with our definitum, “sign,” we note, as highly characteristic, that signs mostly function each between two minds, or theatres of consciousness, of which the one is the agent that utters the sign (whether acoustically, optically, or otherwise), while the other is the patient mind that interprets the sign. Going on with my account of what is characteristic of a sign, without taking the least account of exceptional cases, for the present, I remark that, before the sign was uttered, it already was virtually present to the consciousness of the utterer, in the form of a thought. But, as already remarked, a thought is itself a sign, and should itself have an utterer (namely , the ego of a previous moment), to whose consciousness it must have been already virtually present, and so back. Likewise, after a sign has been interpreted, it will virtually remain in the consciousness of its interpreter, where it will be a sign,— perhaps, a resolution to apply the burden of the communicated sign,— and, as a sign should, in its turn have an interpreter, and so on forward. Now it is undeniably conceivable that a beginningless series of successive utterers should all do their work in a brief interval of time, and that so should an endless series of interpreters. Still, it is not likely to be denied that , in some cases, neither the series of utterers nor that of interpreters forms an infinite collection. When this is the case, there must be a sign without an utterer and a sign without an interpreter. Indeed, there are two pretty conclusive arguments on these points that are likely to occur to the reader. But why argue, when signs without utterers are often employed? I mean such signs as symptoms of disease, signs of the weather, groups of experiences serving as premisses, etc . Signs without interpreters less manifestly, but perhaps not less certainly, exist. Let the cards for a Jacquard loom be prepared and inserted, so that the loom shall weave a picture. Are not those cards signs? They convey intelligence,— intelligence that, considering its spirit and pictorial effect, cannot otherwise be conveyed. Yet the woven pictures may take fire and be consumed before anybody sees them. A set of those models that the designers of vessels drag through the water may have been prepared; and with the set a complete series of experiments may have been made; and their conditions and results may have been automatically recorded. There, then, is a perfect representation of the behavior of a certain range of forms. Yet if nobody takes the trouble to study the record, there will be no interpreter. So the books of a bank may furnish a complete account of the state of the bank. It remains only to draw up a balance sheet. But if this be not done, while the sign is complete, the human interpreter is wanting. Rather different from what we
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
Maybe there is a mental Higgs Boson that no one can quite describe. *@stephencrose https://twitter.com/stephencrose* On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 2:27 AM, Clark Goble cl...@lextek.com wrote: On Sep 15, 2014, at 9:23 AM, Benjamin Udell bud...@nyc.rr.com wrote: (He came to regard philosophy as consisting of so-called logical analysis (intellectual autobiography, 1904, Ketner editor), and to regarding such logical analysis as really being phaneroscopic analysis (Peirce to James, 1909, CP 8.305); obviously by logical analysis in that context Peirce did not mean the study of logic _*per se*_.) What do you think he meant by that term broadly speaking? (so called logical analysis) I ask, not because I don't have some vague sense of the term, but because that seems to be my limit. Earlier on he seemed to speak of three degrees of clarity with the second degree logical analysis and the third degree to be the pragmatic maxim. However later on he seems to accord logical analysis as much more finding accurate definitions for concepts. (He suggests this for instance in the letters to Lady Welby but also the Neglected Argument) It's tempting to see it as somewhat akin to what happened to analytic philosophy. However I've long found many elements of analytic philosophy rather tepid relative to what I find in Peirce. I think his logic of vagueness and generals is rather key to a difference with how analytic philosophy developed in the 20th century. In particular his MS 318 is a great example of how he uses this term (I'm not sure I could easily define it) Everybody recognizes that it is no inconsiderable art, this business of phaneroscopic analysis by which one frames a scientific definition. As I practice it, in those cases, like the present, in which I am debarred from a direct appeal to the principle of pragmatism, I begin by seizing upon that predicate which appears to be most characteristic of the definitum, even if it does not quite apply to the entire extension of the definitum. If the predicate be too narrow, I afterward seek for some ingredient of it which shall be broad enough for an amended definitum and, at the same time, be still more scientifically characteristic of it. Proceeding in that way with our definitum, sign, we note, as highly characteristic, that signs mostly function each between two minds, or theatres of consciousness, of which the one is the agent that utters the sign (whether acoustically, optically, or otherwise), while the other is the patient mind that interprets the sign. Going on with my account of what is characteristic of a sign, without taking the least account of exceptional cases, for the present, I remark that, before the sign was uttered, it already was virtually present to the consciousness of the utterer, in the form of a thought. But, as already remarked, a thought is itself a sign, and should itself have an utterer (namely , the ego of a previous moment), to whose consciousness it must have been already virtually present, and so back. Likewise, after a sign has been interpreted, it will virtually remain in the consciousness of its interpreter, where it will be a sign,-- perhaps, a resolution to apply the burden of the communicated sign,-- and, as a sign should, in its turn have an interpreter, and so on forward. Now it is undeniably conceivable that a beginningless series of successive utterers should all do their work in a brief interval of time, and that so should an endless series of interpreters. Still, it is not likely to be denied that , in some cases, neither the series of utterers nor that of interpreters forms an infinite collection. When this is the case, there must be a sign without an utterer and a sign without an interpreter. Indeed, there are two pretty conclusive arguments on these points that are likely to occur to the reader. But why argue, when signs without utterers are often employed? I mean such signs as symptoms of disease, signs of the weather, groups of experiences serving as premisses, etc . Signs without interpreters less manifestly, but perhaps not less certainly, exist. Let the cards for a Jacquard loom be prepared and inserted, so that the loom shall weave a picture. Are not those cards signs? They convey intelligence,-- intelligence that, considering its spirit and pictorial effect, cannot otherwise be conveyed. Yet the woven pictures may take fire and be consumed before anybody sees them. A set of those models that the designers of vessels drag through the water may have been prepared; and with the set a complete series of experiments may have been made; and their conditions and results may have been automatically recorded. There, then, is a perfect representation of the behavior of a certain range of forms. Yet if nobody takes the trouble to study the record, there will be no interpreter. So the books of a bank may furnish a complete account of the state of the bank. It
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
Clark, list, In regard to the Peirce quote from 1907 that you provided, it's also pertinent to the discussion of biosemiosis, physiosemiosis, etc., taking place lately here. It was in the 1906 Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism that he discusses quasi-mind, quasi-utterer, quasi-interpreter http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/quasi-mind . In the 1907 passage that you quote, mentioning the Jacquard loom, he doesn't mention the quasi-s although they seem pertinent. But in another 1907 from the same MS 318, published in CP 5.473 (the famous semeiosy passage), he says that a Jacquard loom should be regarded as a quasi-sign, because the action is that of automatic regulation, which he distinguishes from semeiosy (semiosis). [Quote] In these cases, however, a mental representation of the index is produced, which mental representation is called the _immediate object_ of the sign; and this object does triadically produce the intended, or proper, effect of the sign strictly by means of another mental sign; and that this triadic character of the action is regarded as essential is shown by the fact that if the thermometer is dynamically connected with the heating and cooling apparatus, so as to check either effect, we do not, in ordinary parlance speak of there being any _semeiosy_, or action of a sign, but, on the contrary, say that there is an automatic regulation, an idea opposed, in our minds, to that of _semeiosy_. For the proper significate outcome of a sign, I propose the name, the interpretant of the sign. The example of the imperative command shows that it need not be of a mental mode of being. Whether the interpretant be necessarily a triadic result is a question of words, that is, of how we limit the extension of the term sign; but it seems to me convenient to make the triadic production of the interpretant essential to a sign, calling the wider concept like a Jacquard loom, for example, a quasi-sign. [End quote] I tend to see this distinction as allied a distinction that he makes in an unpublished MS which the Robin Catalogue describes as follows: 831. [Reasoning and Instinct] A. MS., n.p., n.d., pp. 2-29, incomplete. The fine gradations between subconscious or instinctive mind and conscious, controlled reason. Logical machines are not strictly reasoning machines because they lack the ability of self-criticism and the ability to correct defects which may crop up. Three kinds of reasoning: inductive, deductive, hypothetical. Quasi-inferences. Well, I don't know what to make of quasi-inferences - I'd have thought that he would regard instinctive or automatic inferences as quasi-reasonings. I'll be very interested to read MS 831 if it ever becomes available. Anyway I've tended to think of genuine semiosis as involving the capacity to learn, capacity for self-correction etc. (and I've heard that this is De Tienne's view) - I mean not merely self-correction to maintain homeostasis or balance while walking etc. (which could be done by automatic regulation), but 'design-level' self-correction, correction of one's own methods, correction of one's own semiosic habits, etc. But one finds inferences embodied in vegetable-level and physical phenomena, are they not semioses? Are they quasi-semioses? The prefix quasi- starts to seem too vague to capture the possible senses. I also don't have too firm an idea of all the things that Peirce means by mind. Does mind, in Peirce's sense, always involve the capacity to learn? If I call something a quasi-mind, should that mean like a mind but not learning? Or could it mean learning like a mind without being a mind capable of consciousness (I've thought of biological evolution as having a 'quasi-mind'). Vegetable-level (quasi-)semiosis seems like we ought to strongly distinguish it from whatever strictly dynamic or material/chemical (quasi-) semiosis we think there is, because at the vegetable level, signs or signals are 'interpreted' in terms of highly specific kinds of pertinence to the organism for the end of the thriving of the species. It indeed _/seems/_ rather like semiosis as we ordinarily think of it because, although vegetable-level organisms don't learn (at least last that I heard of), they behave by seemingly specific-purposeful interpretants, thanks to the trial-and-error (quasi-)learning by evolution that made them that way. People set up the Jacquard loom, put its cards in place, etc., evolution sets up (vastly more complex) vegetable organisms. The hypothetical Gaia seems like another case. One might say that it is 'quasi-alive'. I guess it also has a 'quasi-mind'. Evolving over time, it has 'quasi-mind' in the (quasi-)learning sense. We need more prefixes, this is turning into mush. Best, Ben On 9/16/2014 12:32 PM, Benjamin Udell wrote: Clark, list I thought that Cornelis de Waal had found another passage
Re: [PEIRCE-L] [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2
On Sep 16, 2014, at 10:32 AM, Benjamin Udell bud...@nyc.rr.com wrote: Yes, analytic philosophy seems tepid next to Peirce. I hardly know what analytic philosophers mean by 'analysis' or, more importantly, by 'philosophy'. Decades ago I got a similar vagueness from continental philosophy. I think the roll of intuitions are key here. However as you might recall this is also the place I have most of my trouble with logical analysis within analytic philosophy. It seems too tied to intuitions (i.e. conclusions to thought experiments) attempting to create clearly defined definitions. The problem is that often the intuitions of philosophers differ greatly from other groups. Experimental philosophy attempts to reconcile this but I think it still rests on the idea that it’s somehow clear judgments that get a definitions and thus analysis. (This gets at Frederik’s comments on Peirce and Husserl too) The key problem is that it misses the logic of absence. Peirce’s conception of the sign and the difference between object and interpretant avoids that error. Continental philosophy, especially the brief period of Heideggarian inspired post-structuralism, seems to recognize the importance of that absence but instead of going to a clear logic of absences the way Peirce’s signs allow instead went to an overly metaphoric language where the words were intentionally exemplifying the gaps but which in the process lost clarity. (Nothing was more frustrating to me than philosophers who I know could write clearly, concisely and insightfully aping Derrida’s demonstrative period) The problem is that both get at part of the problem, and both recognize the other misses something important. But neither seem able to reconcile. (Although to be fair that’s been changing a lot the past 10 years or so - but it has a long ways to go) In the preface to his _Phenomenology of Perception_, Merleau-Ponty mentioned that his own kind of philosophy cannot define its own scope, at least not yet, insofar as it has existed as a movement before arriving at complete awareness of itself as a philosophy”. To be fair, when one considers how broad Peirce’s approach to signs is and (my own belief) that the post-Husserlian phenomenologists were touching on this, it makes sense that they recognized the problem. They were working from the much more restrictive approach of Husserl but recognizing there was much more. (This is made explicit in Derrida’s approach to Husserl where he explicitly says Peirce comes closest to what he sees as beyond) While I think there was a method in the madness of Derrida’s demonstrative period, I confess as I get older I prefer his older works best. Every thing after seems the same idea expressed different ways via an immanent critique that seems designed to annoy people. To me Derrida’s play is very much Peirce’s musement but perhaps done in a less than ultimately fashion. (Of course I think that of most of the “revolutions” of the 60’s - it seemed like people could revolt only through a process of excess) Anyways, I raise this due to your quote from Baldwin Dictionary. Analysis (in logic): Ger. logische Analyse; Fr. analyse logique; Ital. analisi logica. Literally a resolution, an unloosening of that which has been combined. (Emphasis mine) That is explicitly the meaning of deconstruction too so that as we deconstruct what is combined we can start to see it. This is a kind of backwards working through a genealogy. For Peirce, especially in that quote from MS 318 I gave, is doing that very kind of analysis. Now thankfully he avoids the excesses of Derrida as well as usually the aporias that characterize many Socratic dialogs and even at times Aristotle. (The place of aporias in Derrida is interesting but tangental here) Still he approaches that at times, such as when he says, When this is the case, there must be a sign without an utterer and a sign without an interpreter. Indeed, there are two pretty conclusive arguments on these points that are likely to occur to the reader. But why argue, when signs without utterers are often employed? I mean such signs as symptoms of disease, signs of the weather, groups of experiences serving as premisses, etc . To my ears, this is very much a productive use of aporia. In Peirce’s case (as I’d argue in Derrida, although it’s more confusing there) this leads to all interesting expansions of the notion of the sign into the various “quasi” elements we’ve discussed. Sorry for the tangent, but I think the path of the post-Husserlian philosophers is interesting relative to Frederik’s book. - PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on Reply List or Reply All to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L in the BODY of the message. More at
