Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[kirstima]

CLARK GOBLE kirjoitti 4.7.2016 07:53:

On Jul 2, 2016, at 5:58 AM, kirst...@saunalahti.fi wrote:

KiM: It seems to me you evade Jerry's question, Clark. A very sensible 
question to me, well worth an answer to the question, not just beside 
it.


CG: I’m not sure I was evading it so much as explaining why I’m not 
sure

it’s easy to answer with the public phenomena we have access to. But
then I also confess to not being entirely clear what Jerry is asking
typically. Although I do try my best to answer when I have time.


Well, Jerry R. was asking whether you took what he had previously 
written to be religious or theological. So the question was about your 
view on a certain piece of text. But your answer dealt only with other, 
much more general issues. - In my comment, I was just poiting out this 
quite obvious logical problem, a basic issue in any chains of questions 
and answers. Quite a simple logical issue, if taken into consideration. 
But if and when it is not taken into deliberate consideration, any 
dialogue is bound to get into a mess & end up with more and more 
confusion. As it most often happens.


Jerry Rhee's question was a rare case met in P-list, where the question 
stated was simple and precice. (Which is why I picked it up.) - 
Explicitely stating what was the concrete, publicly available object you 
were asked to consider from your point of view. So you were asked to 
interpret that piece of writing in view of the posed question "religious 
or theological?".


Also, the scope of logically relevant answers was excplicitely limited 
to your views. How you interpret the piece of writing, was the at issue. 
- Not a host of assumptions & presumptions in general, just yours.


Of course a proper answer would have needed you to explore your mind & 
find out at least some relevant ones in relation to the question posed. 
That would have made it possible to the dialogue to proceed, not just 
scatter aroud everything, anything, nothing...


Posing clear, aswerable questions is an art. Just as well as is the art 
of searching and finding those good, at least eligible answers to the 
question. This is all about the relation between the question & answer.


In general, this is what all scientific thinking is all about. No matter 
whether you deal with humanities, social or natural sciences. Religious 
questions are no exception to this general rule.


Even though it is clearly not possible to send an opinion poll to the 
God or the angels, we do have the Gospels. And, if we do not solely 
relie on the method of authority, we can also consult our own mind and 
experiences. What weight we put on these, is for all and everyone to 
consider. IF there is consistency, THEN there may be some reason to give 
it some weight. - In any case, in order to understand something, anyhing 
on and about the Gospels, we have to engage our minds in reading it.


The excellent quote recently provided by Stephen C. Rose gives evidence 
that CSP took the Gospels under investigation & tried out where his 
method would lead us in way of logical (in his sense) conlusions. - To 
my mind, that is what NA is about. It is an argument!


With any (logical) argument, there is an IF. The IF in this case is the 
Gospels. I cannot imagine any Cristian church or sect denying that the 
Gospels are the primary texts, even if there are and have been critical 
views expressed on what has been left out & what has been included. All 
those views are on omissions & inclusions. If the Gospels were omitted, 
it would no more be a Cristian faith, but something else.


If the results Peirce's investigation shows similarities with some 
Buddhist views, it does not give any grounds to label him as 
"pseudobuddhist".


And definitely, CSP DID NOT think that the "best data" came from natural 
sciences. Abolutely not. He thought that the BEST METHOD of finding out 
reasonable beliefs came out of the FORM of experimental methods he first 
found out in chemistry laboratories.


He then went on with a host of applications of the FORM, id est: the 
logical sequence of a chemical experiment. A chemical reaction between 
chemical substances brought out something NEW. Something which at the 
first sight looks (even now, every time) as a miracle. BUT it was a 
consistent miracle. - So, a very special kind of miracle.


What are the Gospels basicly about? They are about miracles. Miracles 
believed to be consistent. - Now, this is a different question from 
whether they actually happened at the times they are told to have 
happened. Which is a very difficult historical question.

Most probably never answerable with a considerable degree of certainty.

But faith is not about believing in certain set of facts provided by the 
Gospels. Christian Faith, is one kind in the set of beliefs we may cherish, or 
then not cherish. - I personally do not believe there is much voluntary 
choice in it. The problem we as individuals are nowadays facing is in 
findind out 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[CLARK GOBLE]

> On Jul 2, 2016, at 5:58 AM, kirst...@saunalahti.fi wrote:
> 
> It seems to me you evade Jerry's question, Clark. A very sensible question to 
> me, well worth an answer to the question, not just beside it.

I’m not sure I was evading it so much as explaining why I’m not sure it’s easy 
to answer with the public phenomena we have access to. But then I also confess 
to not being entirely clear what Jerry is asking typically. Although I do try 
my best to answer when I have time.

> As we all know, CSP took himself to be a laboratory minded philosopher, in 
> contrast with seminary minded philosophers. That is, he took it as his job to 
> find out. And not just by reading what others had written & making 
> compilations out of them.
> 
> CSP did not need a laboratory with special equipments. Everyday life was his 
> laboratory. Still, his experimentations on it were very, very sophisticated.

I think for phenomenology (in any of its very guises) a lot is open to 
investigation and inquiry even if perhaps we don’t always agree. However I 
think Peirce also recognize that the best data was in the sciences. When one 
moves beyond that the data gets worse. Which is how I took his comments on 
immortality. Not that one couldn’t find out — presumably encountering a ghost 
in a testable repeatable way would do that. But rather not in the circumstances 
he found himself. 

> When you say: "Peirce’s religious views were rather idiosyncratic ...", you 
> say nothing. Everyone's views on any issue are idiosyncratic IF studied in 
> detail. In this particular context saying so sounds like you were blaming him 
> for being unique. - Which I do not take to be your intention, however.

 
I just meant relative to Christianity, nothing more. Although as I tried to 
communicate unusual beliefs closer to deism were common in his intellectual 
class of that era as well. 

> If CSP was true to himself, then it must have been that he started with some 
> doubt on the immortality of the soul, BUT he ended up with finding grounds 
> for the belief, even though in an unorthodox way.

I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Do you mean his beliefs about God or the 
individual soul?

> And, I may add, if someone would call me a "pseudo-buddhist", I would feel 
> insulted.

I’ve been called that enough I was passing along what I thought a funny 
comment. Peirce obviously isn’t Buddhist but his Christianity/deism is similar 
in many ways. While I’m not a deist I have plenty of beliefs similar to 
Buddhism in some ways as well. So the comment certainly wasn’t meant as an 
insult. Far from it. I find a great deal of truth in the cross-over between 
aspects of Buddhism and Christianity.

Further I’m rather sure my own views (which are rather tangental to a Peircean 
discussion) would have been viewed as rather abhorrent by someone of Peirce’s 
class and peer group given the age he lived in.


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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[kirstima]

Clark, Jerry R., list,

It seems to me you evade Jerry's question, Clark. A very sensible 
question to me, well worth an answer to the question, not just beside 
it.


As we all know, CSP took himself to be a laboratory minded philosopher, 
in contrast with seminary minded philosophers. That is, he took it as 
his job to find out. And not just by reading what others had written & 
making compilations out of them.


CSP did not need a laboratory with special equipments. Everyday life was 
his laboratory. Still, his experimentations on it were very, very 
sophisticated.


In NA, CSP was exploring Christian religious beliefs as a philosopher. 
Being bourn and raised as a member, he was exploring beliefs he had  
himself grown into, just as well as his community. Thus something his 
heart had already taken in - as a part, perhaps even a parcel. (How & to 
what degree, we simply do not know. NA is not a confession!)


When you say: "Peirce’s religious views were rather idiosyncratic ...", 
you say nothing. Everyone's views on any issue are idiosyncratic IF 
studied in detail. In this particular context saying so sounds like you 
were blaming him for being unique. - Which I do not take to be your 
intention, however.


CSP most probably had a certain set religious beliefs, but NA is not a 
declaration of those. Common beliefs were what he was interested in. And 
he was examining their soundness & sense. Religious beliefs formed a 
significant part of the  prevailing set common beliefs.


If CSP was true to himself, then it must have been that he started with 
some doubt on the immortality of the soul, BUT he ended up with finding 
grounds for the belief, even though in an unorthodox way.


No use in trying to fit CSP into theological classifications, whatever 
they may be.


And, I may add, if someone would call me a "pseudo-buddhist", I would 
feel insulted.


So, please accept my objections to calling CSP by that name.

With best regards, Kirsti








Clark Goble kirjoitti 1.7.2016 18:23:

On Jun 30, 2016, at 8:35 PM, Jerry Rhee  wrote:

Do you find my previous writing to be religious or theological?

For instance, if I were to ask "what would God be?",
would that question not fit neatly into the previous argumentation?


When you start talking God or Trinity there’s a lot of theological
and philosophical assumptions one brings in. Add in that Peirce’s
religious views were rather idiosyncratic - much more on the deist
side of things but maintaining a significance of the Trinity but with
an odd pseudo-Buddhist like twist - and I just don’t feel I know
enough about the assumptions to say much. I’m religious myself but
my own religious views are rather unlike Peirce’s. By and large from
what I could see Peirce couldn’t bring himself to believe in
anything like an interventionist God. (For quite reasonable
epistemological reasons I might add - he just didn’t appear to have
much by way of religious experience and distrusted the ability of the
masses to interpret their religious experiences)

When you raise the question of God it inevitably gets into whether you
see the very sense of God determined primarily by the Greek
philosophical tradition - where God is ultimate cause or even Being
itself. However there’s a strong opposing view as well that sees God
much more as a person and therefor much more at odds with Greek
absolutism tendencies. At a minimum this opposing view is driven more
by religious experience, however naively interpreted it may often be.
This tension can be found throughout Christian history as well as
Jewish history. And certainly prior to the rise of philosophy both
Greek religion and Jewish religion was far more anthropomorphic in
religious beliefs. (Zeus or Jehovah are more like people, with
emotions and involvement in various ways with humanity rather than
absolutely Other — arguably Judaism started picking up the more
absolutist conceptions during the Hellenistic conquest of the near
east by Alexander and then more so with Roman control of the region)

So the question “what would God be” brings with it a slew of
historical and theological questions and presuppositions. In
Peirce’s intellectual class of the 19th century deism, platonism
(Emerson) and Hegelianism tended to define respectable intellectual
religion. Peirce, to my admitted limited eyes, seems largely caught up
with the religious views of his peers. In the 20th century this shifts
although much of the shift is nominalistic. That is people still tend
to believe the same sorts of things about interventionist deities,
miracles, and grounds of existence but over time divorce it from
religious language. Often the distinction between a deist and an
atheist is purely over language and how much they dislike being
connected rhetorically with organized religion. This continues until
the 1980’s when there was a somewhat countermove in Continental
philosophy where typically self-avowed atheists return to religious

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Jerry Rhee]

Jon, list:

You said, "Still, I wonder--is it proper to treat CP 5.189 as THE
definitive statement of how abduction works?  Or does that risk becoming
the kind of dogmatism that Peirce typically decried?"

Great question!  It is to ask whether CP 5.189 is eternal, since at least
some things are eternal and not simply dogmatic.  More importantly, it is
to know why it is eternal and give good reasons.

For example, it has a place for Substance = C (and Being = A).

Substance has the quality of great multiplicity, so what's dogmatic about
multiplicity other than to say that it necessitates unity through naming
and constraint through Being?

Best,
Jerry Rhee


On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 4:34 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt 
wrote:

> Jerry R., List:
>
> JR:  *Is CP 5.189 his lanterna pedibus, the light to guide our
> researches? *
>
> JR:  Should we adopt it more consciously at the outset for discussion of
> dark questions, despite its characterization as heuristic:
>
> JR:  “This is an *imperfect view* of the application which the
> conceptions which, according to our analysis, are the most fundamental ones
> find in the sphere of logic. It is believed, however, that it is sufficient
> to show that at least something may be usefully suggested by considering
> this science in this *light*.” ~Peirce
>
> The connection suggested here seems tenuous at best.  Peirce wrote the
> quoted text in 1868, as the conclusion of "On a New List of Categories"--35
> years *before* presenting CP 5.189 in the last 1903 Harvard lecture.
>
> JR:  It is a question about whether we, as *all who investigate*, are
> willing to take seriously CP 5.189, “the form abduction ought to take”,
>
> This is also a bit misleading.  Peirce does not say that CP 5.189 is "the
> form abduction ought to take"; he begins setting forth one of the
> anticipated objections to it by saying, "even if this be the normative form
> of abduction, the form to which abduction ought to conform ..."  Granted,
> he does call this "the form of inference" for abduction, which he describes
> as having "a perfectly definite logical form."
>
> Still, I wonder--is it proper to treat CP 5.189 as THE definitive
> statement of how abduction works?  Or does that risk becoming the kind of
> dogmatism that Peirce typically decried?
>
> Regards,
>
> Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA
> Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman
> www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
>
> Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA
> Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman
> www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
>
> On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 2:03 PM, Jerry Rhee  wrote:
>
>> Hi Clark, list:
>>
>>
>>
>> Thank you for that earnest answer.  The reason why I asked whether you
>> thought what I said was religious or theological was to ask about your
>> reaction to its systematicity.  Whichever word stands for more
>> systematic, that’s what I meant.
>>
>>
>>
>> Here is my attitude:
>>
>> “The gods do not approve of man’s trying to seek out what they did not
>> wish to reveal, the things in heaven and beneath the earth.
>>
>> A pious man will therefore not investigate the divine things but only the
>> human things, *the things left to man’s investigation*.” ~Strauss
>>
>> Which is not to ignore the divine things, should they be available to
>> man’s inspection, and:
>>
>> “I hold that the method of interpreting Scripture is no different from
>> the method of interpreting Nature, and is in fact in complete accord with
>> it. For the method of interpreting Nature consists essentially in composing
>> a detailed study of Nature from which, as being the source of our assured
>> data, we can deduce the definitions of the things of Nature. “ ~Spinoza
>>
>> _
>>
>>
>>
>> I’ve said previously, and it is understood by Peirceans (not all
>> Peirceans) that pragmatism is an old way of thinking; the river of
>> pragmatism; something about which one considers oneself a link in an old,
>> venerable tradition.  So, the question of God ought to be interpreted in
>> that vein and not in the many diverse ways it can be handled.  We are
>> talking philosophy and that is how I intend the question. (I must admit,
>> despite the advantages, it is a bit strange that we should be talking
>> philosophically about the Reality of God, which can never be proved.  Then
>> again, there are also religious philosophers.  There must be room for a
>> God.)
>>
>> But there are a variety of past pragmatists with different opinions.  Things
>> are further complicated because new inquirers want to know things of which
>> they do not already know, things they ought to know…but there is so much to
>> know.  Yet, this is our repeating, natural condition as a community.
>>
>> I will not talk here about the many things one ought to know, in
>> particular the place of God and the Beautiful in moral inquiry because
>> 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Jon Alan Schmidt]

Jerry R., List:

JR:  *Is CP 5.189 his lanterna pedibus, the light to guide our researches? *

JR:  Should we adopt it more consciously at the outset for discussion of
dark questions, despite its characterization as heuristic:

JR:  “This is an *imperfect view* of the application which the conceptions
which, according to our analysis, are the most fundamental ones find in the
sphere of logic. It is believed, however, that it is sufficient to show
that at least something may be usefully suggested by considering this
science in this *light*.” ~Peirce

The connection suggested here seems tenuous at best.  Peirce wrote the
quoted text in 1868, as the conclusion of "On a New List of Categories"--35
years *before* presenting CP 5.189 in the last 1903 Harvard lecture.

JR:  It is a question about whether we, as *all who investigate*, are
willing to take seriously CP 5.189, “the form abduction ought to take”,

This is also a bit misleading.  Peirce does not say that CP 5.189 is "the
form abduction ought to take"; he begins setting forth one of the
anticipated objections to it by saying, "even if this be the normative form
of abduction, the form to which abduction ought to conform ..."  Granted,
he does call this "the form of inference" for abduction, which he describes
as having "a perfectly definite logical form."

Still, I wonder--is it proper to treat CP 5.189 as THE definitive statement
of how abduction works?  Or does that risk becoming the kind of dogmatism
that Peirce typically decried?

Regards,

Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA
Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman
www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt

Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA
Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman
www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt

On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 2:03 PM, Jerry Rhee  wrote:

> Hi Clark, list:
>
>
>
> Thank you for that earnest answer.  The reason why I asked whether you
> thought what I said was religious or theological was to ask about your
> reaction to its systematicity.  Whichever word stands for more
> systematic, that’s what I meant.
>
>
>
> Here is my attitude:
>
> “The gods do not approve of man’s trying to seek out what they did not
> wish to reveal, the things in heaven and beneath the earth.
>
> A pious man will therefore not investigate the divine things but only the
> human things, *the things left to man’s investigation*.” ~Strauss
>
> Which is not to ignore the divine things, should they be available to
> man’s inspection, and:
>
> “I hold that the method of interpreting Scripture is no different from
> the method of interpreting Nature, and is in fact in complete accord with
> it. For the method of interpreting Nature consists essentially in composing
> a detailed study of Nature from which, as being the source of our assured
> data, we can deduce the definitions of the things of Nature. “ ~Spinoza
>
> _
>
>
>
> I’ve said previously, and it is understood by Peirceans (not all
> Peirceans) that pragmatism is an old way of thinking; the river of
> pragmatism; something about which one considers oneself a link in an old,
> venerable tradition.  So, the question of God ought to be interpreted in
> that vein and not in the many diverse ways it can be handled.  We are
> talking philosophy and that is how I intend the question. (I must admit,
> despite the advantages, it is a bit strange that we should be talking
> philosophically about the Reality of God, which can never be proved.  Then
> again, there are also religious philosophers.  There must be room for a
> God.)
>
> But there are a variety of past pragmatists with different opinions.  Things
> are further complicated because new inquirers want to know things of which
> they do not already know, things they ought to know…but there is so much to
> know.  Yet, this is our repeating, natural condition as a community.
>
> I will not talk here about the many things one ought to know, in
> particular the place of God and the Beautiful in moral inquiry because
> ethics follows esthetics.  Instead, I wish to poll the Peircean community
> with a question about their belief regarding something that ought to be
> obvious:
>
> *Is CP 5.189 his lanterna pedibus, the light to guide our researches? *
>
> Should we adopt it more consciously at the outset for discussion of dark
> questions, despite its characterization as heuristic:
>
> “This is an *imperfect view* of the application which the conceptions
> which, according to our analysis, are the most fundamental ones find in the
> sphere of logic. It is believed, however, that it is sufficient to show
> that at least something may be usefully suggested by considering this
> science in this *light*.” ~Peirce
>
>
>
> That is, if not this, *which*?
>
> 
>
> The questions deal with copula and being because they participate in the
> path from multiplicity to unity.  It is a 

Aw: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Helmut Raulien]

Strauss says, that "a pious man will therefore not investigate the divine things", because "the gods do not approve..." (of that). But how does Strauss know, that the gods do not approve? He must have investigated the divine things to know that, and also, that there is more than one God, as he claims by the plural form. Performative self-contradiction? But I dont know about Strauss yet. I am wondering: Given, a computer programmer tries to make an artificially intelligent program, and suddenly the program asks about his life, how he looks like, if there are others like him, would he approve that, or be scared and pull the plug?

Best,

Helmut

 

 01. Juli 2016 um 22:52 Uhr
 "Clark Goble"  wrote:
 


 


On Jul 1, 2016, at 1:03 PM, Jerry Rhee  wrote:
 

Thank you for that earnest answer.  The reason why I asked whether you thought what I said was religious or theological was to ask about your reaction to its systematicity.  Whichever word stands for more systematic, that’s what I meant. 


 

Oh. I tend to see both those topics as orthogonal to systematicity. Certainly there’s a lot of systematic theology but I don’t think all is. (Think Anselm for instance) 

 

With regards to systemizing I think it’s quite useful when you have a lot of data for a particular area. When you don’t I think it often obscures as much as it illuminates. In those cases one should be primarily focused on inquiry — finding helpful things to measure. Although as we’ve seen in physics the past few decades sometimes you want data but can’t quite seem to find it. So one is left with a system no one is very satisfied with.

 

 


 




Here is my attitude:  

“The gods do not approve of man’s trying to seek out what they did not wish to reveal, the things in heaven and beneath the earth.  

A pious man will therefore not investigate the divine things but only the human things, the things left to man’s investigation.” ~Strauss



Yeah, my view is don’t cut off the way of inquiry. It’s just that inquiry in religion is rather difficult. We’re in a far worse position than say physicists trying to figure out what dark matter or dark energy are, or trying to reconcile quantum gravity. However that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

 

Exactly how one applies pragmatism will depend upon what experiences one is analyzing. Peirce only went as far as some very vague and broad experiences in Neglected Argument.  Perhaps that’s all available although obviously not everyone agrees. (Which doesn’t mean they’re right of course)

 

 
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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Clark Goble]

> On Jul 1, 2016, at 1:03 PM, Jerry Rhee  wrote:
> 
> Thank you for that earnest answer.  The reason why I asked whether you 
> thought what I said was religious or theological was to ask about your 
> reaction to its systematicity.  Whichever word stands for more systematic, 
> that’s what I meant. 

Oh. I tend to see both those topics as orthogonal to systematicity. Certainly 
there’s a lot of systematic theology but I don’t think all is. (Think Anselm 
for instance) 

With regards to systemizing I think it’s quite useful when you have a lot of 
data for a particular area. When you don’t I think it often obscures as much as 
it illuminates. In those cases one should be primarily focused on inquiry — 
finding helpful things to measure. Although as we’ve seen in physics the past 
few decades sometimes you want data but can’t quite seem to find it. So one is 
left with a system no one is very satisfied with.


> Here is my attitude:  
> 
> “The gods do not approve of man’s trying to seek out what they did not wish 
> to reveal, the things in heaven and beneath the earth.  
> 
> A pious man will therefore not investigate the divine things but only the 
> human things, the things left to man’s investigation.” ~Strauss
> 
Yeah, my view is don’t cut off the way of inquiry. It’s just that inquiry in 
religion is rather difficult. We’re in a far worse position than say physicists 
trying to figure out what dark matter or dark energy are, or trying to 
reconcile quantum gravity. However that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Exactly how one applies pragmatism will depend upon what experiences one is 
analyzing. Peirce only went as far as some very vague and broad experiences in 
Neglected Argument.  Perhaps that’s all available although obviously not 
everyone agrees. (Which doesn’t mean they’re right of course)



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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Martin Kettelhut]

Dear Peirce List,

Altho the distinction between immediate and dynamic object, as well as the 
theological implications (Peirce abstained from), both enrich the conversation, 
I see Peirce’s observations about the copula as iconoclastic.  That is, they 
bring closure to all of the old-school empiricist and phenomenological 
metaphysical and ontological debates, and—despite the fact that most of 
twentieth century philosophy wallowed in the oblivion of linguistics—Peirce set 
the stage for us to return to the ancients and sort out the cosmological 
implications of observing that (I’m summarizing CP1.545-9):  

Our (phenomenal) claims about the (noumenal) world as it is independent of what 
any finite group of subjects may allege, exhibit an analytically irreducible, 
and hence propositional, form, viz. the copula.  That is, they relate an at 
least supposable substance (subject) to a general character (predicate) in such 
a way that the subject and the general concept of its being can be thought of 
neither as determinately identical nor as determinately distinct.

>From this point on, we can only talk about Erfahrung and Wirklichkeit as 
>Zeichenprozess (to use Helmut Pape’s terms).  This means—among other 
>things--that matter and Geist are also neither determinately identical nor 
>distinct, that there must (of a priori synthetic necessity) be a third element 
>(besides subject and predicate) in every phenomenon, and that space, time, 
>ideas and feelings are real continua. (The definition of a continuum changed 
>in Peirce’s development, but seems to have always meant that of which there 
>are no ultimate parts; see Jerome Havenel’s “Peirce’s Clarifications of 
>Continuity.")

Martin Kettelhut, PhD
www.listeningisthekey.com
303 747 4449



> On Jul 1, 2016, at 9:23 AM, Clark Goble  wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jun 30, 2016, at 8:35 PM, Jerry Rhee > > wrote:
>> 
>> Do you find my previous writing to be religious or theological?
>> 
>> For instance, if I were to ask "what would God be?", 
>> would that question not fit neatly into the previous argumentation?
> 
> When you start talking God or Trinity there’s a lot of theological and 
> philosophical assumptions one brings in. Add in that Peirce’s religious views 
> were rather idiosyncratic - much more on the deist side of things but 
> maintaining a significance of the Trinity but with an odd pseudo-Buddhist 
> like twist - and I just don’t feel I know enough about the assumptions to say 
> much. I’m religious myself but my own religious views are rather unlike 
> Peirce’s. By and large from what I could see Peirce couldn’t bring himself to 
> believe in anything like an interventionist God. (For quite reasonable 
> epistemological reasons I might add - he just didn’t appear to have much by 
> way of religious experience and distrusted the ability of the masses to 
> interpret their religious experiences)
> 
> When you raise the question of God it inevitably gets into whether you see 
> the very sense of God determined primarily by the Greek philosophical 
> tradition - where God is ultimate cause or even Being itself. However there’s 
> a strong opposing view as well that sees God much more as a person and 
> therefor much more at odds with Greek absolutism tendencies. At a minimum 
> this opposing view is driven more by religious experience, however naively 
> interpreted it may often be. This tension can be found throughout Christian 
> history as well as Jewish history. And certainly prior to the rise of 
> philosophy both Greek religion and Jewish religion was far more 
> anthropomorphic in religious beliefs. (Zeus or Jehovah are more like people, 
> with emotions and involvement in various ways with humanity rather than 
> absolutely Other — arguably Judaism started picking up the more absolutist 
> conceptions during the Hellenistic conquest of the near east by Alexander and 
> then more so with Roman control of the region)
> 
> So the question “what would God be” brings with it a slew of historical and 
> theological questions and presuppositions. In Peirce’s intellectual class of 
> the 19th century deism, platonism (Emerson) and Hegelianism tended to define 
> respectable intellectual religion. Peirce, to my admitted limited eyes, seems 
> largely caught up with the religious views of his peers. In the 20th century 
> this shifts although much of the shift is nominalistic. That is people still 
> tend to believe the same sorts of things about interventionist deities, 
> miracles, and grounds of existence but over time divorce it from religious 
> language. Often the distinction between a deist and an atheist is purely over 
> language and how much they dislike being connected rhetorically with 
> organized religion. This continues until the 1980’s when there was a somewhat 
> countermove in Continental philosophy where typically self-avowed atheists 
> return to religious language. But 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Jerry Rhee]

Hi Clark,

I'm mainly curious.

Do you find my previous writing to be religious or theological?

For instance, if I were to ask "what would God be?",
would that question not fit neatly into the previous argumentation?

Thanks,
Jerry R

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 9:29 PM, CLARK GOBLE  wrote:

>
> On Jun 30, 2016, at 2:22 PM, Jerry Rhee  wrote:
>
> Copula is the Holy Spirit or, copula is the network that connects the
> subject with the predicate in unity in the form of a symbol that gives
> meaning/understanding.
>
> I’ll leave the religious discussions for others. I assume you mean in some
> more neoplatonic sense ala how Augustine described the Trinity?
>
> To me I confess I don’t see the relationship between the Holy Ghost and
> Being.
>
>
>
>
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>
>
>
>
>

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[CLARK GOBLE]

> On Jun 30, 2016, at 2:22 PM, Jerry Rhee  wrote:
> 
> Copula is the Holy Spirit or, copula is the network that connects the subject 
> with the predicate in unity in the form of a symbol that gives 
> meaning/understanding.  
> 
I’ll leave the religious discussions for others. I assume you mean in some more 
neoplatonic sense ala how Augustine described the Trinity? 

To me I confess I don’t see the relationship between the Holy Ghost and Being.



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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Clark Goble]

> On Jun 30, 2016, at 10:19 AM, Benjamin Udell  wrote:
> 
> [BU] On averageness as a background needed to make communication (and 
> informative difference) possible, you wrote, 
> 
> >[CG] At which point the term “average” has become rather distorted. 
> 
> [BU] I think that you're getting to the point where you might as well be 
> talking simply about generality.
> 

It’s different from generality though, although clearly it is tied to 
generality. Again though I think it’s one of those phenomena so close to us 
it’s hard to get words right for it. But you’re right once you get down to the 
person and their future self as in internal communication it’s basically just 
become generality. In larger groups though I think the difference is worth 
keeping in mind.

> [BU] Note that at one point he calls the immediate object a kind of "image or 
> notion." Peirce had already come to define an image as kind of hypoicon, an 
> icon without an attached index, or as considered apart from an attached 
> index. I think that Peirce is saying in your quote of him not that the 
> immediate object needs an indexical _component_ but instead that the 
> experience of blueness cannot be conveyed by any sign or signs alone without 
> an experience of blueness, and also that the experience of the Sun's 
> actuality cannot be conveyed by any sign or signs alone without an experience 
> of the Sun's actuality. All the icons, indices, and symbols will not 
> experientially acquaint you with the Sun, which you yourself need to pick out 
> and acquaint yourself with; the signs can help you do that but they can't do 
> it for you.
> 

Hmm. Perhaps, although isn’t that wrapped up in the fact that indexes are 
always communicated via icons and the index part we get at only with a gap we 
cross? (Typically via abduction) That is it seems to me indexes are always 
indirect in experience and function via the recognition of what’s missing.

> I suspect that Peirce grasped the potential amount of complication in the 
> process, but he was doing a phaneroscopic analysis (that's why, for example, 
> he calls the immediate object an object rather than a sign). But he's also 
> focusing on the phaneroscopy of a theorist's viewpoint in explaining 
> semiosis, wherein the immediate object seems a consequence of an interaction 
> between the mind and something beyond, so I think that you're right there.

Right. So much depends upon what kind of analysis one is doing. This is why I 
think people sometimes get confused. There’s a big difference between a logical 
analysis and a phenomenological analysis. (I really don’t like Peirce’s 
neologism) In particular how indexes get analyzed is quite different.

> [BU] But then Harvard put MS 831 online, and almost a year ago I transcribed 
> it and posted the transcription at 
> Arisbehttp://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/ms831/ms831.htm 
>  .

Thanks. I don’t think I’d read that in its fulness.

Kind of interesting given how computers developed. The machines in the late 
19th century were so primitive yet at the same time open up so much in people’s 
thinking. It’s worth considering that passage, particularly that on page 9, to 
contemporary discussions of deeping learning with neural nets or genetic 
algorithms. While Peirce wasn’t quite there, it’s interesting how far he got 
given the technology of his time.






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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Benjamin Udell]

Clark, list,

[BU] On averageness as a background needed to make communication (and 
informative difference) possible, you wrote,


>[CG] At which point the term “average” has become rather distorted.

[BU] I think that you're getting to the point where you might as well be 
talking simply about generality.


>[CG] While averageness in the sense of everydayness is part of
   what makes the immediate object, there’s also an essential indexical
   component that goes beyond what icons or symbols can convey. (At
   least that’s what I take Peirce to be meaning in the experience by
   what is inexpressible by sign)

[BU] Note that at one point he calls the immediate object a kind of 
"image or notion." Peirce had already come to define an image as kind of 
hypoicon, an icon without an attached index, or as considered apart from 
an attached index. I think that Peirce is saying in your quote of him 
not that the immediate object needs an indexical _/component/_ but 
instead that the experience of blueness cannot be conveyed by *any* sign 
or signs alone without an experience of blueness, and also that the 
experience of the Sun's actuality cannot be conveyed by *any* sign or 
signs alone without an experience of the Sun's actuality. All the icons, 
indices, and symbols will not experientially acquaint you with the Sun, 
which you yourself need to pick out and acquaint yourself with; the 
signs can help you do that but they can't do it for you.


>[CG] It’s common to see people taking Peirce in terms of Frege
   (not that anyone here is doing that). But I think the scholastic
   sense gives us an idea of what he’s grasping at with the
   distinction. The immediate object is what gets produced by it’s
   reaction with the dynamic object /in an essentially mediated way/.
   As such it’s the /result/ of all those prior indirect encounters.
   While we can loosely talk about that as a kind of averageness it
   seems to me that it’s a fairly unpredictable consequence of how
   individual brains interact with their environment. To talk about
   average to think of it in terms of the common features of the causes
   (usually with the arbitrary boundary of “outside the body”) whereas
   I /think/ Peirce means it more as the consequence of such causes.

   Peirce of course was largely ignorant of contemporary cognitive
   science. And the psychology of the era was rudimentary. So I’m not
   sure he really grasped just how complicated that process was.

[BU] I suspect that Peirce grasped the potential amount of complication 
in the process, but he was doing a phaneroscopic analysis (that's why, 
for example, he calls the immediate object an object rather than a 
sign). But he's also focusing on the phaneroscopy of a theorist's 
viewpoint in explaining semiosis, wherein the immediate object seems a 
consequence of an interaction between the mind and something beyond, so 
I think that you're right there.


>[CG] Think of how the brain handles memories where there are
   traces of the original experience which the brain fills in the gap.
   Presumably for any experience what “comes to mind” is already highly
   processed and tied to other signs in our brain. That is the
   immediate object to mind is the object in terms of what we’ve
   already encountered. “Of the same virtue as that already examined"

[BU] That reminds me that Peirce finds all three inference modes in the 
operations of the senses, filling gaps in and so one, except that the 
best case of deduction that he can find he ends up classing as "on the 
borderline between deduction and hypothesis." (The term "hypothesis" for 
abductive inference suggests pre-1900). It is from pages 19-29 of the 
undated manuscript MS 831, of which I've quoted the Robin Catalogue 
description a number of times in the past at peirce-l (lamenting that MS 
831's text was unavailable):


   [Robin Catalog] 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.

[BU] But then Harvard put MS 831 online, and almost a year ago I 
transcribed it and posted the transcription at Arisbe 
http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/ms831/ms831.htm .


Best, Ben

On 6/29/2016 2:00 PM, Clark Goble wrote:

On Jun 29, 2016, at 10:37 AM, Benjamin Udell  > wrote:


Immediate objects may have averageness but the averageness seems not 
definitive of them, and Peirce never makes it so.


>[CG] It seems to me (perhaps incorrectly) that Peirce raises 
everydayness for similar reasons to his common sensism. It’s the 
background of what makes communication possible. He makes an argument 
somewhere (I can’t find it right now) that most of our beliefs have 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Jerry Rhee]

Dear list:


Side by side with others:

Can we label immediate interpretant, sign, object, coming to agreement,
idea, truth, final interpretant, copula, etc., in this sequence?


"The “what is” questions point to “essences,” to “essential” differences-
to the fact that the whole consists of parts which are heterogeneous, not
merely sensibly but noetically: to understand the whole means to understand
the “What” of each of these parts, of these classes of beings, and how they
are linked with one another.  Such understanding cannot be the reduction of
one heterogeneous class to others or to any cause or causes other than the
class itself; the class, or the class character, is the cause par
excellence.  Socrates conceived of his turn to the “what is” questions as a
turn, or a return, to sanity, to “common sense”: while the roots of the
whole are hidden, the whole manifestly consists of heterogeneous parts.

One may say that according to Socrates the things which are “first in
themselves” are somehow “first for us”; the things which are “first in
themselves” are in a manner, but necessarily, revealed in men’s opinions.
Those opinions have as opinions a certain order…” ~Strauss, On Aristotle’s
Politics

On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 1:18 PM, Clark Goble  wrote:

> So "being" seems to be a quite boiled-down concept. "Truth" on the other
> hand is a concept, that should not be boiled down like that in my opinion.
>
>
> I’m not sure I agree with that. It seems to me being for Peirce (and what
> I tend to think) being is tied to this relation of the dynamic object
> whereas truth is tied to the hope of the final interpretant. Yet the very
> notion of the final interpretant is the final stable representation of the
> dynamic object where being is what leads to that.
>
> To the degree that being/copula functions in semiotics it expresses the
> relation of the general term to the universe itself. The copula brings
> together the replicas of the subject and rheme but also the dynamic and
> immediate objects. It seems very difficult to separate that from truth
> except to say it is what makes truth possible.
>
> So, one person or one observer, maybe one impersonal sign recipient, a
> molecule or a particle, can be "all who investigate", like an electron
> saying "ouch, this photon has really hit me", so any sufferer of any
> interaction may be sufficient to make something be.
>
>
> I’d say the presentations of generals as tied to subjects is always a
> manifestation of being. It’s true that this also is what enables error. (To
> be wrong is to be still) If by “boiled down” you mean simply that being can
> present erroneously then I fully agree.
>
> Truth in this universal sense is not a product of perfect statistics or
> final interpretants, but the earth was a ball already before there were any
> interpreters.
>
>
> I think you may be confusing truth with dynamic objects.
>
> This also gets into the question of whether Peirce’s notion of truth is
> merely a regulative notion (what we mean by the term) or whether it has to
> be possible rather than merely something we hope for. This is a common
> critique of Peirce since given contemporary science it’s not hard to
> conceive of ways information is lost and the final interpretant broken. I
> think taking it as regulative avoids this problem, although I still think
> this problem of information loss is a bigger one than many Peirceans do.
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>
>
>

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Clark Goble]

> So "being" seems to be a quite boiled-down concept. "Truth" on the other hand 
> is a concept, that should not be boiled down like that in my opinion. 

I’m not sure I agree with that. It seems to me being for Peirce (and what I 
tend to think) being is tied to this relation of the dynamic object whereas 
truth is tied to the hope of the final interpretant. Yet the very notion of the 
final interpretant is the final stable representation of the dynamic object 
where being is what leads to that.

To the degree that being/copula functions in semiotics it expresses the 
relation of the general term to the universe itself. The copula brings together 
the replicas of the subject and rheme but also the dynamic and immediate 
objects. It seems very difficult to separate that from truth except to say it 
is what makes truth possible.

> So, one person or one observer, maybe one impersonal sign recipient, a 
> molecule or a particle, can be "all who investigate", like an electron saying 
> "ouch, this photon has really hit me", so any sufferer of any interaction may 
> be sufficient to make something be.

I’d say the presentations of generals as tied to subjects is always a 
manifestation of being. It’s true that this also is what enables error. (To be 
wrong is to be still) If by “boiled down” you mean simply that being can 
present erroneously then I fully agree.

> Truth in this universal sense is not a product of perfect statistics or final 
> interpretants, but the earth was a ball already before there were any 
> interpreters.

I think you may be confusing truth with dynamic objects. 

This also gets into the question of whether Peirce’s notion of truth is merely 
a regulative notion (what we mean by the term) or whether it has to be possible 
rather than merely something we hope for. This is a common critique of Peirce 
since given contemporary science it’s not hard to conceive of ways information 
is lost and the final interpretant broken. I think taking it as regulative 
avoids this problem, although I still think this problem of information loss is 
a bigger one than many Peirceans do.




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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Clark Goble]

> On Jun 29, 2016, at 10:37 AM, Benjamin Udell  wrote:
> 
> Immediate objects may have averageness but the averageness seems not 
> definitive of them, and Peirce never makes it so.

It seems to me (perhaps incorrectly) that Peirce raises everydayness for 
similar reasons to his common sensism. It’s the background of what makes 
communication possible. He makes an argument somewhere (I can’t find it right 
now) that most of our beliefs have to be true for communication to work. 
(Donald Davidson makes a very similar argument in his writing on communication)

Yet this averageness or everydayness is always indexed to particular groups 
with communication codes. But that also means that for us to think in terms of 
signs/language (as we all do privately) that there must be an averageness tied 
to just us for our private thoughts. At which point the term “average” has 
become rather distorted.

> They may also have distinctiveness; an unusual characteristic, perhaps 
> displayed at an unusual moment, might be a prominent part of the immediate 
> object, as a result of a single prior experience.

Signs will often have a distinctive characteristic yet it seems for it to be 
understood as a distinctive characteristic it must be repeated in some sense so 
we can make sense of it. This is both a characteristic of thirdness but also 
just the requirements that thought be in terms of repeated signs.

This gets one back to Kelly Parker’s work on Peirce’s ontological cosmology. 
Even if we reject it as foundational ontology, it seems that something similar 
must be going on in any originary experience. For the originary experience to 
be comprehensible we have to give it meaning. In terms of the Pragmatic Maxim 
that entails a set of practices to verify it. And the very meaning of 
verification practice again entails repeatability and (for Peirce) generals for 
scholastic realism.

> Also, immediate objects may be both simplified, e.g., a practical "essence" 
> consisting in a rule for mentally re-constructing the object, and complicated

Santayana definitely ties immediate objects to essences. I’m not sure Peirce 
does although clearly there’s a similarity with Aristotle.

The other thing to keep in mind is again that the experience of the immediate 
object can be broken down into components. The following example by Peirce in 
his later period is helpful here. 

Take for example, the sentence the Sun is blue. “Its Objects are “the Sun” and 
“blueness.” If by “blueness” be meant the Immediate Object, which is the 
quality of the sensation, it can only be known by Feeling. But if it means that 
“Real,” existential condition, which causes the emitted light to have short 
mean wave-length, Langley has already proved that the proposition is true. So 
the “Sun” may mean the occasion of sundry sensations, and so is Immediate 
Object, or it may mean our usual interpretation of such sensations in terms of 
place, of mass, etc., when it is the Dynamical Object. It is true of both 
Immediate and Dynamical Object that acquaintance cannot be given by a Picture 
or a Description, nor by any other sign which has the Sun for its Object. (CP 
8.183)

While averageness in the sense of everydayness is part of what makes the 
immediate object, there’s also an essential indexical component that goes 
beyond what icons or symbols can convey. (At least that’s what I take Peirce to 
be meaning in the experience by what is inexpressible by sign)

We should also recognize that Peirce’s primary influence in all this is the 
scholastics.

That the common use of the word “object” to mean a thing, is altogether 
incorrect. The noun objectum came into use in the XIIIth century, as a term of 
psychology. It means primarily that creation of the mind in its reaction with a 
more or less real something, which creation becomes that upon which cognition 
is directed; and secondarily, an object is that upon which an exertion acts; 
also that which a purpose seeks to bring about; also, that which is coupled 
with something else in a relation, and more especially is represented as so 
coupled; also, that to which any sign corresponds. (MS 693A, 33, 1904)

It’s common to see people taking Peirce in terms of Frege (not that anyone here 
is doing that). But I think the scholastic sense gives us an idea of what he’s 
grasping at with the distinction. The immediate object is what gets produced by 
it’s reaction with the dynamic object in an essentially mediated way. As such 
it’s the result of all those prior indirect encounters. While we can loosely 
talk about that as a kind of averageness it seems to me that it’s a fairly 
unpredictable consequence of how individual brains interact with their 
environment. To talk about average to think of it in terms of the common 
features of the causes (usually with the arbitrary boundary of “outside the 
body”) whereas I think Peirce means it more as the consequence of such causes. 

Peirce of course 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Benjamin Udell]

Clark, list,

Sorry, I got busy for a while.

Immediate objects may have averageness but the averageness seems not 
definitive of them, and Peirce never makes it so. They may also have 
distinctiveness; an unusual characteristic, perhaps displayed at an 
unusual moment, might be a prominent part of the immediate object, as a 
result of a single prior experience. Also, immediate objects may be both 
simplified, e.g., a practical "essence" consisting in a rule for 
mentally re-constructing the object, and complicated, as in the way that 
Tom Wyrick discussed or as, when one hears the word "copula," one may 
think of a vaguely structured jumble of things such as a copula 
instanced in a grammar book, the copula as an abstract conceptual 
relation, and so on. Consider what are immediate objects of "animal" and 
"triangle" in universal statements about them. "Every animal is a 
eukaryote." "Every (Euclidean) triangle's angles sum to 360 degrees." In 
each case it can seem as if there were a horde of objects competing to 
serve as the immediate object.


If, as you consider doing, we take "average" loosely in the sense of 
"truth in the main" and use that idea of the average to distinguish the 
cenoscopic (philosophical) inquirial goal from the idioscopic (physical, 
psychological, etc.) inquirial goal, it brings us back to Peirce's 
definitions of cenoscopy, e.g., in his 1904 intellectual autobiography 
wherein he defines (cenoscopic) philosophy as logical analysis (by which 
Peirce in other writings indicates he means _/phaneroscopic/_ analysis) 
of that sort of common experience that people cannot seriously doubt. 
The truth of such experience is not even a question (or serious 
question) for (cenoscopic) philosophy, since, after all, one cannot 
seriously doubt it. Peirce wrote:


   Philosophy merely analyzes the experience common to all men. The
   truth of this experience is not an object of any science because it
   cannot really be doubted. All so-called 'logical' analysis, which is
   the method of philosophy, ought to be regarded as philosophy, pure
   or applied.
   [End quote]

I don't think that an immediate object _/automatically/_ has either that 
undoubtability of such common experience or the kind of 
truth-in-the-main (figured as averageness or otherwise) that is based 
upon it.


Furthermore, if such truth-in-the-main as goal distinctive of cenoscopy 
is a kind of _/average/_, but is not a deductive probability, or even a 
deductive fuzzy probability, then it seems to consist in a 
_/verisimilitude/_, in Peirce's sense, a likeness to experience as 
embodied in premisses of an inductive inference. 
http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/verisimilitude .


   1910 | Note (Notes on Art. III) [R] | ILS 123-4; CP 2.663

   I will now give an idea of what I mean by _/likely/_ or
   _/verisimilar/_ . [—] I call that theory _/likely/_ which is not yet
   proved but is supported by such evidence, that if the rest of the
   conceivably possible evidence _/should/_ turn out upon examination
   to be of a _/similar/_ character, the theory would be conclusively
   proved. Strictly speaking, matters of fact never can be demonstrably
   proved, since it will always remain conceivable that there should be
   some mistake about it.
   [End quote]

There's another quote at the link, and that second quote is part of a 
longer passage (c. 1910, Letters to Paul Carus, ILS 274-5; CP 8.222-4) 
in which he elsewhere ascribes verisimilitude to induction. Peirce means 
that a good induction, one with verisimilitude, is that which is 
commonly called an inductive generalization; Peirce doesn't call it 
that, because by "generalization" Peirce means a notably selective 
generalization, decreasing the comprehension while increasing the 
extension, whereas (at least in the early years, in the JSP papers) 
induction keeps the comprehension the same while increasing the extension.


Using such an idea of _/verisimilitude/_ to _/distinguish/_ cenoscopy 
rather suggests that cenoscopy would be the science that draws inductive 
conclusions, and that inductive inference in idioscopy would ipso facto 
be applied cenoscopy - things that Peirce never (so far as I know) said, 
and that I think he would not say, although I would say them.


Maybe the immediate object usually has some sort of verisimilitude, if 
not always of a pure cenoscopic kind (if one accepts that idea of 
cenoscopy at all), insofar as, even if deduced as an average (or a 
distribution of probabilities, or whatever), it is not merely that 
deductive result but instead is its inductive extension to stand as the 
object as represented in a new sign. An immediate object that focuses on 
the distinctiveness of the object might have a verisimilar 
distinctiveness, and so on. Still, if one does not have previous 
experience with the object of the sign, the immediate object might be 
marked more by (attempted) plausibility, in Peirce's sense of natural 
simplicity, 

Aw: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Helmut Raulien]

I think, what is (being), as far as I have understood it from this thread, is about "all who investigate", as a subject is a being, when it has a predicate added. So, one person or one observer, maybe one impersonal sign recipient, a molecule or a particle, can be "all who investigate", like an electron saying "ouch, this photon has really hit me", so any sufferer of any interaction may be sufficient to make something be. So "being" seems to be a quite boiled-down concept. "Truth" on the other hand is a concept, that should not be boiled down like that in my opinion. If the members of a sect all agree, that the earth is a disc with a snake around, saying, that this is the truth for them, would be a parody of "truth", I think. This has to do with systems, I guess: "common sense", and "truth for them" is restricted (constrained) to certain (social) systems (communities). But "truth", I guess, is a universal term, so the system in which truth occurs, is the universe (our one). That does not mean, that there might not be another universe, in which there is an earth that is a disc with a snake around. Truth in this universal sense is not a product of perfect statistics or final interpretants, but the earth was a ball already before there were any interpreters. So approaching a truth is not constructing it, but reconstructing or investigating it. so, while "being" and "reality" is constructed, I think, "truth" is not. But common sense suggests, that nothing is but for a reason, so either truth is constructed by God , or it has always been there, is the timeless, reasonless, though necessary (contradiction?) nature of nature, or whatever.

Best,

Helmut

 

 29. Juni 2016 um 01:59 Uhr
 "Jerry Rhee" 
 


If you're talking about common, you shouldn't ignore Socrates and Plato.
 

To ask the "what is..." question is to do common sense.

 

Consider the following, however:

 

"Only everybody can know the truth".  ~Goethe (kinda)

"The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality." ~Peirce (for real).

 

So, what's common sense is different for "everybody" and "all who investigate" and even "ultimately all who investigate".  So, when you approach a group we accuse of exercising "common sense", then are they everybody, all who investigate or ultimately all who investigate?

 

There is also the additional complication of those who are vulgar, vulgar only for now and the learned/philosophers.  But this is how things are.

 

Best,
Jerry Rhee


 
On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 6:54 PM, CLARK GOBLE  wrote:


 


On Jun 28, 2016, at 4:56 PM, Helmut Raulien  wrote:
 

I think, your posts have made the problem of the term "average" clear. Am I right with understanding it like: "Average" usually suggests a completed statistical calculation, and statistics is mathematics, therefore exact logic. But in our context, "average" is not meant for an exact, but an "imperfect" general, so in our case it is about fuzzy logic with the remainder (and so the general) being not something clearly defined or known, but being some sort of suggestion of collusion/agreement, due to change, and itself subject of the communication- not articulated with terms, but conveyed by their connotations ? Connotations though donot stick to terms, but rather are a function of how much the communication partners, esp. the recipient, know about the history of terms, or whatever they have had internalized along with them each time they have heard, read, or thought them before.


 

That’s how I understand it. 

 

I confess I have some trouble relating the coenoscopic and idioscopic senses (as Peirce terms them) If I have Peirce right then the term cenoscopic (which he picks up from Bentham) is common experience and presumably by association common but vague terminology. Idioscopy is more technical in language and focuses in on new phenomena.

 

The problem is the it would seem common experience need not use loose or vague terms. Likewise common experience often leads to things like folk physics and folk psychology which aren’t just vague but often error ridden. (Which leads us to discount them and turn to science for the topics)

 

Given that I’m still not quite sure what to make of “average.” It’s fine to talk about it as “common experience” (Peirce) or everydayness (Heidegger). But what does that get us ultimately?

 

 



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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[CLARK GOBLE]

> On Jun 28, 2016, at 4:56 PM, Helmut Raulien  wrote:
> 
> I think, your posts have made the problem of the term "average" clear. Am I 
> right with understanding it like: "Average" usually suggests a completed 
> statistical calculation, and statistics is mathematics, therefore exact 
> logic. But in our context, "average" is not meant for an exact, but an 
> "imperfect" general, so in our case it is about fuzzy logic with the 
> remainder (and so the general) being not something clearly defined or known, 
> but being some sort of suggestion of collusion/agreement, due to change, and 
> itself subject of the communication- not articulated with terms, but conveyed 
> by their connotations ? Connotations though donot stick to terms, but rather 
> are a function of how much the communication partners, esp. the recipient, 
> know about the history of terms, or whatever they have had internalized along 
> with them each time they have heard, read, or thought them before.

That’s how I understand it. 

I confess I have some trouble relating the coenoscopic and idioscopic senses 
(as Peirce terms them) If I have Peirce right then the term cenoscopic (which 
he picks up from Bentham) is common experience and presumably by association 
common but vague terminology. Idioscopy is more technical in language and 
focuses in on new phenomena.

The problem is the it would seem common experience need not use loose or vague 
terms. Likewise common experience often leads to things like folk physics and 
folk psychology which aren’t just vague but often error ridden. (Which leads us 
to discount them and turn to science for the topics)

Given that I’m still not quite sure what to make of “average.” It’s fine to 
talk about it as “common experience” (Peirce) or everydayness (Heidegger). But 
what does that get us ultimately?



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Aw: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Helmut Raulien]

Jerry, Clark, All,

I think, your posts have made the problem of the term "average" clear. Am I right with understanding it like: "Average" usually suggests a completed statistical calculation, and statistics is mathematics, therefore exact logic. But in our context, "average" is not meant for an exact, but an "imperfect" general, so in our case it is about fuzzy logic with the remainder (and so the general) being not something clearly defined or known, but being some sort of suggestion of collusion/agreement, due to change, and itself subject of the communication- not articulated with terms, but conveyed by their connotations ? Connotations though donot stick to terms, but rather are a function of how much the communication partners, esp. the recipient, know about the history of terms, or whatever they have had internalized along with them each time they have heard, read, or thought them before.

Best,

Helmut

 

28. Juni 2016 um 21:07 Uhr
"Jerry Rhee"  wrote:
 


Hi all,
 

How about entering into inquiry of a situation, a particular situation.  That situation will have a set of communications associated with it.  

But that situation is only one situation of many possible situations. 

And what we want to know is how it will play out in the next instance.

That would involve knowing the generals of the situation.

The general of the situation is to know what would be expected in the next situation

The next situation is not known.  It may be a next situation that copies the present situation perfectly.  That would be an average with no remainder.

But most likely, that next situation will be not exactly the same, that is, with remainder.

Therefore, what we seek is to know an imperfect general, some "average".

But there is no consonance between the "average" and the next situation.

So, to know the general is also to know the particular; and the general is not the particular but is defined by particulars.  It's not an average but has quality of average.

 

hth,

Jerry R


 
On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 1:48 PM, Clark Goble  wrote:


 


On Jun 24, 2016, at 3:30 PM, Helmut Raulien  wrote:
 

I understand it like "mean", "average" and "normal" are necessary traits of any predicate, and there is no predicate but within communication, and "mean" is the common aspect of the communicated subject, "average" is the agreed-about aspect of it, and "normal" is the standardising aspect. 


 

Sorry for the delay answering. Got busy.

 

While I get the idea your after, I’m not sure it’s really that correct. If we’re talking about predicates (rhemes?) then there’s a set of communications (broadly defined) tied to it. (Both in terms of past and future) There’s a certain shape to those communications that I think exceeds terms like average or mode. Which is why I originally objected to the term. Average often reduces something fairly complex to a single value conceptually which is misleading.

 

That said, as I argued, I still think there’s something to the word. Just not in any statistical sense ultimately even by analogy.

 

To demonstrate what I’m talking about think a graph like the following. (Obviously meant just as analogy - obviously communication of a predicate can’t be reduced to a graph like this) 

 





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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Jerry Rhee]

Hi all,

How about entering into inquiry of a situation, a particular situation.
That situation will have a set of communications associated with it.
But that situation is only one situation of many possible situations.
And what we want to know is how it will play out in the next instance.
That would involve knowing the generals of the situation.
The general of the situation is to know what would be expected in the next
situation
The next situation is not known.  It may be a next situation that copies
the present situation perfectly.  That would be an average with no
remainder.
But most likely, that next situation will be not exactly the same, that is,
with remainder.
Therefore, what we seek is to know an imperfect general, some "average".
But there is no consonance between the "average" and the next situation.
So, to know the general is also to know the particular; and the general is
not the particular but is defined by particulars.  It's not an average but
has quality of average.

hth,
Jerry R

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 1:48 PM, Clark Goble  wrote:

>
> On Jun 24, 2016, at 3:30 PM, Helmut Raulien  wrote:
>
> I understand it like "mean", "average" and "normal" are necessary traits
> of any predicate, and there is no predicate but within communication, and
> "mean" is the common aspect of the communicated subject, "average" is the
> agreed-about aspect of it, and "normal" is the standardising aspect.
>
>
> Sorry for the delay answering. Got busy.
>
> While I get the idea your after, I’m not sure it’s really that correct. If
> we’re talking about predicates (rhemes?) then there’s a set of
> communications (broadly defined) tied to it. (Both in terms of past and
> future) There’s a certain shape to those communications that I think
> exceeds terms like average or mode. Which is why I originally objected to
> the term. Average often reduces something fairly complex to a single value
> conceptually which is misleading.
>
> That said, as I argued, I still think there’s something to the word. Just
> not in any statistical sense ultimately even by analogy.
>
> To demonstrate what I’m talking about think a graph like the following.
> (Obviously meant just as analogy - obviously communication of a predicate
> can’t be reduced to a graph like this)
>
>
>
> -
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>
>
>
>
>
>

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Aw: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Helmut Raulien]

 
 

supplement:

assuming that the definition of "average" as "agreed-about aspect" is viable, then it would be appliable for information flow in the technical sense as well, like, the technically achieved agrrement for example might be, that a voltage between zero and one volt is agreed to be a "0", and a voltage between one and five volts to be a  "1" (Im sure it is different, I have not much of an idea about electronics). Information flow reqires some agreements first, thats what i wanted to say. Ok, and to say that "average" has to do with "agreement": I dont know. It might press some terms together, but does it go with common sense...

 

List,




I guess, what is meant by "average", can be explained with what Jeffrey wrote three or four posts before:

"

What role, if any, does the conception of a mean, or an average, or a normal, play in the account of being when he says: "We do not obtain the conception of Being, in the sense implied in the copula, by observing that all the things which we can think of have something in common, for there is no such thing to be observed. We get it by reflecting upon signs -- words or thoughts; we observe that different predicates may be attached to the same subject, and that each makes some conception applicable to the subject; then we imagine that a subject has something true of it merely because a predicate (no matter what) is attached to it -- and that we call Being."

 

"

I understand it like "mean", "average" and "normal" are necessary traits of any predicate, and there is no predicate but within communication, and "mean" is the common aspect of the communicated subject, "average" is the agreed-about aspect of it, and "normal" is the standardising aspect. Communication is what a sign is part of, the immediate object is within the sign, so within communication, so within the predicate, so within that what turns a subject into a being. This is what I think is the connection between "average" and "immediate object", though at first glance it seems odd, because "average" makes one think of a higher instance, but it is only the averageness of the subject between two communicating partners, same like it is with "mean", "normal", "truth", and "being": Terms that seem like meant universally, but really are just meant in the sense, that something (a predicate) is shared by two partners in communication. Is that so?

Helmut

 

 Freitag, 24. Juni 2016 um 22:14 Uhr

"Clark Goble"  wrote:
 


 


On Jun 24, 2016, at 1:42 PM, John Collier  wrote:
 


OK, this seems better to me, especially in communication among people, but I still resist the idea that the immediate object is generally an average in any sense. My problem is trying to fit that idea into my understanding of information flow (using Barwise and Seligman’s technical approach to make sense of Dretske’s Knowledge and the Flow of Information). David Lewis’s work on the conventionality of meanings in communication does seem to require something like what you identify.




I should add it’s really hard to quantify this notion into something more technically accurate. I don’t think this is just a problem with the immediate object but besets a lot of Peirce’s thought relative to common sensism. He makes use of the idea of “true in the main” quite regularly but honestly I can’t quite figure out what that actually means when I think about it more. I’m not sure brushing aside this issue by coenoscopic and idioscopic distinctions solves the problem. So I definitely tend to agree with you.
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Aw: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Helmut Raulien]

List,

I guess, what is meant by "average", can be explained with what Jeffrey wrote three or four posts before:

"

What role, if any, does the conception of a mean, or an average, or a normal, play in the account of being when he says: "We do not obtain the conception of Being, in the sense implied in the copula, by observing that all the things which we can think of have something in common, for there is no such thing to be observed. We get it by reflecting upon signs -- words or thoughts; we observe that different predicates may be attached to the same subject, and that each makes some conception applicable to the subject; then we imagine that a subject has something true of it merely because a predicate (no matter what) is attached to it -- and that we call Being."

 

"

I understand it like "mean", "average" and "normal" are necessary traits of any predicate, and there is no predicate but within communication, and "mean" is the common aspect of the communicated subject, "average" is the agreed-about aspect of it, and "normal" is the standardising aspect. Communication is what a sign is part of, the immediate object is within the sign, so within communication, so within the predicate, so within that what turns a subject into a being. This is what I think is the connection between "average" and "immediate object", though at first glance it seems odd, because "average" makes one think of a higher instance, but it is only the averageness of the subject between two communicating partners, same like it is with "mean", "normal", "truth", and "being": Terms that seem like meant universally, but really are just meant in the sense, that something (a predicate) is shared by two partners in communication. Is that so?

Helmut

 

 Freitag, 24. Juni 2016 um 22:14 Uhr

"Clark Goble"  wrote:
 


 


On Jun 24, 2016, at 1:42 PM, John Collier  wrote:
 


OK, this seems better to me, especially in communication among people, but I still resist the idea that the immediate object is generally an average in any sense. My problem is trying to fit that idea into my understanding of information flow (using Barwise and Seligman’s technical approach to make sense of Dretske’s Knowledge and the Flow of Information). David Lewis’s work on the conventionality of meanings in communication does seem to require something like what you identify.




I should add it’s really hard to quantify this notion into something more technically accurate. I don’t think this is just a problem with the immediate object but besets a lot of Peirce’s thought relative to common sensism. He makes use of the idea of “true in the main” quite regularly but honestly I can’t quite figure out what that actually means when I think about it more. I’m not sure brushing aside this issue by coenoscopic and idioscopic distinctions solves the problem. So I definitely tend to agree with you.
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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Clark Goble]

> On Jun 24, 2016, at 1:42 PM, John Collier  wrote:
> 
> OK, this seems better to me, especially in communication among people, but I 
> still resist the idea that the immediate object is generally an average in 
> any sense. My problem is trying to fit that idea into my understanding of 
> information flow (using Barwise and Seligman’s technical approach to make 
> sense of Dretske’s Knowledge and the Flow of Information). David Lewis’s work 
> on the conventionality of meanings in communication does seem to require 
> something like what you identify. <>
I should add it’s really hard to quantify this notion into something more 
technically accurate. I don’t think this is just a problem with the immediate 
object but besets a lot of Peirce’s thought relative to common sensism. He 
makes use of the idea of “true in the main” quite regularly but honestly I 
can’t quite figure out what that actually means when I think about it more. I’m 
not sure brushing aside this issue by coenoscopic and idioscopic distinctions 
solves the problem. So I definitely tend to agree with you.
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RE: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[John Collier]

OK, this seems better to me, especially in communication among people, but I 
still resist the idea that the immediate object is generally an average in any 
sense. My problem is trying to fit that idea into my understanding of 
information flow (using Barwise and Seligman’s technical approach to make sense 
of Dretske’s Knowledge and the Flow of Information). David Lewis’s work on the 
conventionality of meanings in communication does seem to require something 
like what you identify.

John Collier
Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Associate
University of KwaZulu-Natal
http://web.ncf.ca/collier

From: Clark Goble [mailto:cl...@lextek.com]
Sent: Friday, 24 June 2016 8:48 PM
To: Peirce-L <PEIRCE-L@LIST.IUPUI.EDU>
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being
I think this notion of “true in the main” is more or less what average means 
relative to the immediate object. It’s not really average in the sense of mean 
in its strict mathematical sense. Rather it’s the distinction between what 
Peirce calls the coenoscopic and idioscopic senses of such terms.

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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Clark Goble]

> On Jun 23, 2016, at 12:14 PM, Benjamin Udell  > wrote:
> 
> Peirce somewhere talks about taking a companion's experience as one's own, 
> say, if the companion has better eyesight. The companion reports discerning a 
> ship on the horizon, while one sees just a blurry patch there, which one lets 
> count as the object in question. There's an idea of the commind floating 
> around there. Anyway, Peirce didn't always use the narrowest interpretation 
> of the word "experience." Still, the less direct an experience, the less 
> experiential it seems.

It’s worth going even farther than that. All experiences are themselves 
mediated. The phenomena you present above is just one example of a mediated 
experience. Yet mediation is always occurring and mediation entails 
transformation in various ways. An obvious example is memory where my 
experience during the events is always different from my memory of the events 
as an experience of the original events. History itself is a classic example of 
that kind of mediation.

The example of everydayness I gave from Peirce the other day of erroneous views 
of Richard III really is just this. A kind of low level often extremely 
fallible kind of indirect experience we draw upon for intelligibility in 
communication. It’s an average not in the sense of mean but in the sense of 
including quite a lot in a more kind of sea of chaos as a source of meanings to 
draw from.


> I remember years ago Joe Ransdell posted a message "What 'fundamenal 
> psychological laws' is Peirce referring to?" (22 Sept. 
> 2006)https://www.mail-archive.com/peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu/msg01394.html 
>  . Joe 
> wrote:
> 
> In "The Fixation of Belief" Peirce says that
> 
> "a man may go through life, systematically keeping out of view all that might 
> cause a change n his opinions, and if he only succeeds -- basing his method, 
> as he does, on two fundamental psychologicl laws -- I do not see what can be 
> said against his doing so". 
> 
> [End quote of Joe & Peirce]
> 
> As I recall, people in reply agreed that one of the laws that Peirce had in 
> mind must have been the law of association, but then what would the other law 
> be? 
> 
I just reread part of that thread. That’s fascinating and I somehow had zero 
memory of it. One of Joe's initial thoughts is worth quoting.

I was thinking of the argument one might make that social consciousness is 
prior to consciousness of self, and the method of tenacity seems to me to be 
motivated by the value of self-integrity, the instinctive tendency not to give 
up on any part of oneself, and one's beliefs are an important aspect of what 
one tends to think of when one thinks of one's identity.  Losing some beliefs 
e.g. in religion, in one's parents, in the worthiness of one's country, etc., 
can be experienced as a kind of self-destruction and people often seem to 
demonstrate great fear of that happening to them.  But this sense of 
self-identity could be argued to be a later construct than one's idea of the 
social entity of which one is a part.   (Joe Ransdell 9/23/06)

Something else that came up in that discussion is what Peirce means by 
psychologizing here. Again let me quote from Joe, as I think it has direct 
bearing on the notion of “average” or “everydayness.”

In the terminology Peirce adopted from Jeremy Bentham, we should distinguish 
between a COENOSCOPIC  sense of "mind" or "thought" or other mentalistic term 
and an  IDIOSCOPIC sense of such terms..  The former is the sense of "mind" or 
"thought" which we have in mind [!!] when we say something like "What are you 
thinking about?",  "What's on you mind?", "He spoke his mind", and so forth, as 
distinct from the sense which is appropriate for use in the context of some 
special scientific study of mind. 

To understand what is meant by the word "mind" as used in scientific 
psychology, let us say, we have to find out what people who have established or 
mastered something in that field understand by such terms since the meaning of 
such terms in that context is a matter of what the course of special study of 
its subject matter has resulted in up to this point. That is the idioscopic 
sense of "mind", "thought", etc.  But long before there was anything like a 
science of psychology and long before we were old enough to understand that 
there is any such thing as psychology we had already learned in the course of 
our ordinary dealings with people something about the nature of mind in the 
"coenoscopic" sense of the term.  For we all learn early on, as small children, 
 that we have to figure out what people are thinking in order to understand 
what they are wanting to say, for example; we learn that people can be sincere 
or insincere, saying one thing and thinking another; we learn that they 
sometimes lie, pretending to think what what they do not actually think or 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Clark Goble]

> On Jun 23, 2016, at 5:18 PM, Jeffrey Brian Downard  
> wrote:
> 
> Wouldn't it make things clearer if we, like Peirce, made a distinction 
> between the immediate object conceived of as a possibility, or as an 
> actuality, or as a necessity? On the basis of this modal division between the 
> the three ways in which the immediate object of thought may serve as a 
> presentation in mind, he makes a distinction between signs that are 
> descriptive, those that are designative, and those that are copulative.

I think that’s a very helpful way to think of it. Thank you for bringing it up. 
It seems to me that Peirce ties all this to the different modalities of being. 
That is to which of the three universes it belongs.

It’s worth noting for list members who might not be as familiar with the 
terminology that Peirce ties the possible to the notion of idea. Likewise while 
Peirce calls necessity habit, his notion of habit doesn’t entail absolute 
necessity the way it sometimes is conceived of in philosophy. More a tendency.

> 2) Two qualities can be in two different sorts of relations to each other:  
> a) independent (somewhat resemble and somewhat differ); b)  one a mere 
> determination of the other, where the order differs in evolution or synthesis 
> versus involution or analysis.

It’s worth noting that this is what in later semiotic terminology became 
diachronic and synchronic.

Requoting part of your Perice quote:

We do not obtain the conception of Being, in the sense implied in the copula, 
by observing that all the things which we can think of have something in 
common, for there is no such thing to be observed. We get it by reflecting upon 
signs -- words or thoughts; we observe that different predicates may be 
attached to the same subject, and that each makes some conception applicable to 
the subject; then we imagine that a subject has something true of it merely 
because a predicate (no matter what) is attached to it -- and that we call 
Being. The conception of being is, therefore, a conception about a sign -- a 
thought, or word; and since it is not applicable to every sign, it is not 
primarily universal, although it is so in its mediate application to things. 
Being, therefore, may be defined; it may be defined, for example, as that which 
is common to the objects included in any class, and to the objects not included 
in the same class. But it is nothing new to say that metaphysical conceptions 
are primarily and at bottom thoughts about words, or thoughts about thoughts; 
it is the doctrine both of Aristotle (whose categories are parts of speech) and 
of Kant (whose categories are the characters of different kinds of 
propositions).  (CP 5.294)

This is a remarkably dense passage. In particular he cautions about treating 
being as a being (what is common to the things) The second part “that we call 
Being” is a bit trickier. He seems to be saying that it is the “attaching to 
the same subject” that is being. That is being is what enables us to make that 
attachment such that something is true. In 20th century phenomenology this is 
the idea of a subject having an “as structure.” That is I am able to treat 
something as something. The latter part seems at first glance to contradict the 
first sentence. But what I think he’s saying is that what is not common to 
objects but what is common to objects in a class (or objects excluded from the 
class) is being. That is being is what enables objects to be in the class but 
is not a common property of objects.

> What role, if any, does the conception of a mean, or an average, or a normal, 
> play in the account of  being when he says: [Peirce quote as above]

I can’t see mean having any play except perhaps indirectly as immediate objects 
for signs that act as a collective to produce an interpretant that is the 
immediate object that we are concerned with. That is we might think of say for 
example quantum mechanics. In QED we calculate all possible paths to determine 
the measured phenomena. Ignoring for a moment the metaphysics behind Feynman’s 
approach (he certainly did) we can see this as the experienced phenomena 
(immediate object) being a kind of mean of signs. I suspect we can come up with 
many more examples of this.


Tying this to the quote I already commented on, the immediate object in this 
case is not “in” the prior signs but is a result of them. I don’t think that’s 
what Peirce is getting at though — I think his point is more a point about 
being as a being. However his point about reflection is more that the property 
we attribute a subject is a kind of judgment or interpretation (following the 
more Kantian take) attributed to the subject rather than necessarily something 
“in” it.

Since you bring up Kant I should note that Heidegger draws upon Kant for a 
pretty similar analysis of understand to what Peirce is doing with being above. 
Heidegger’s concern is quite different and I think his 

RE: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Jeffrey Brian Downard]

thing new 
to say that metaphysical conceptions are primarily and at bottom thoughts about 
words, or thoughts about thoughts; it is the doctrine both of Aristotle (whose 
categories are parts of speech) and of Kant (whose categories are the 
characters of different kinds of propositions).  (CP 5.294)

What role, if any, does the conception of a mean, or an average, or a normal, 
play in the account of  being when he says:  "We do not obtain the conception 
of Being, in the sense implied in the copula, by observing that all the things 
which we can think of have something in common, for there is no such thing to 
be observed. We get it by reflecting upon signs -- words or thoughts; we 
observe that different predicates may be attached to the same subject, and that 
each makes some conception applicable to the subject; then we imagine that a 
subject has something true of it merely because a predicate (no matter what) is 
attached to it -- and that we call Being."

Kant has a rather pregnant account of the role of a mean in what is 
aesthetically presented in sensation and/or imagination in his analysis of the 
experience of the sublime. (see Critique of Judgment, On the Analysis of the 
Sublime)  I have a hunch that Peirce may be drawing on the Kantian account of 
the conditions that pertain to the aesthetic estimation of what is normal under 
some estimate of a mean when he says these sorts of things about the conception 
of Being.  After all, we get a very different account of the aesthetic 
conditions of unity, infinity and totality in the 3rd Critique than the account 
of the logical conditions of unity, infinity and totality that is found in the 
1st and 2nd Critiques.  The relationship between these aesthetic and logical 
conditions for cognition are nicely tied together in the Jäsche Lectures on 
Logic, which we know Peirce read with considerable care.

--Jeff


Jeffrey Downard
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
Northern Arizona University
(o) 928 523-8354

From: Benjamin Udell [baud...@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2016 11:14 AM
To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

Ozzie, John, Clark, list,

Yes, I've noticed the problem with the word "the" in the past. Peirce often 
uses the definite article, but there are places where I used the indefinite 
article instead, although I never became thoroughgoing about it.

Much of what you and Clark have just said seems rather thoughtful to me.

Tom, you wrote,

Second, however, the immediate object in one's mind may actually be an 
'average' version of the object described in textbooks or by a parent, teacher 
or boss.  If the individual has no relevant prior experience upon which to 
draw, the immediate object that appears in his/her mind will correspond 
(more-or-less) to this average.   It is a generalization, or stereotype.

That seems true to me. There are some further perspectives perhaps worth 
considering.

Peirce somewhere talks about taking a companion's experience as one's own, say, 
if the companion has better eyesight. The companion reports discerning a ship 
on the horizon, while one sees just a blurry patch there, which one lets count 
as the object in question. There's an idea of the commind floating around 
there. Anyway, Peirce didn't always use the narrowest interpretation of the 
word "experience." Still, the less direct an experience, the less experiential 
it seems.

(Even a physical object of experience turn out on analysis to be statistical in 
some sense, even when there is no practical prospect of calculating such 
object's specific statistics. The table as one sees it with all 
human-perceptual clarity is compatible with innumerable alternate microstates.)

I'd say that the immediate object does sometimes seem an average, but also 
sometimes a simplification. In the cases that you discuss, in which it becomes 
complicated, it still seems to involve some simplification from that which one 
would think if one could be more deliberate about it, notwithstanding that it 
may also be more complicated than it would be if one were learn enough about 
the object.

I remember years ago Joe Ransdell posted a message "What 'fundamenal 
psychological laws' is Peirce referring to?" (22 Sept. 2006) 
https://www.mail-archive.com/peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu/msg01394.html . Joe wrote:

In "The Fixation of Belief" Peirce says that

"a man may go through life, systematically keeping out of view all that might 
cause a change n his opinions, and if he only succeeds -- basing his method, as 
he does, on two fundamental psychologicl laws -- I do not see what can be said 
against his doing so".

[End quote of Joe & Peirce]

As I recall, people in reply agreed that one of the laws that Peirce had in 
mind must have been the law of association, but then what would the other law 
be? At some point in the last two y

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Clark Goble]

> On Jun 23, 2016, at 2:16 AM, John Collier  wrote:
> 
> The “average” notion is distinctly misleading. Suggests an external averager 
> that does not exist. It is an abstraction at best, and typically ignores 
> aspects of the dynamics object (but I think could even get it entirely wrong 
> and still be the immediate object – it depends on context for this to happen) 
> <>
Part of the problem with the word “average” is which sense of average we mean. 
There are a few places where Peirce uses it but it’s clear from context he 
means “most of the time” or a notion closer the modal average. 

i.e.

The truth is that induction is reasoning from a sample taken at random to the 
whole lot sampled. A sample is a random one, provided it is drawn by such 
machinery, artificial or physiological, that in the long run any one individual 
of the whole lot would get taken as often as any other. Therefore, judging of 
the statistical composition of a whole lot from a sample is judging by a method 
which will be right on the average in the long run, and, by the reasoning of 
the doctrine of chances, will be nearly right oftener than it will be far from 
right. (CP 1.93)

I get what Ben was originally doing in that quote I offered. I feel bad I 
brought it up uncritically from not reading through the rest of the thread. I 
primarily brought it up as a quick list of the structure of a sign for Jerry 
Rhee. I’m glad Ben mentioned he’d quickly fixed it.

That said, the distinction between the dynamic and immediate object and how the 
immediate object becomes the immediate object is quite interesting. It gets at 
some of the key issues in the move to a more externalist type of phenomenology 
in the Continental tradition. (Largely due to the shift by Heidegger in Being 
and Time away from Husserl’s somewhat more Cartesian approach) If you have an 
externalist phenomenology you have to deal with the difference between the real 
object as it is and how it presents itself to a person. Heidegger takes a 
somewhat poetic approach with the metaphor of “unveiling” making use of a lot 
of Greek etymology. (Some good, some clearly fanciful) However the emphasis is 
always that somehow it’s the objects themselves given to us phenomenologically 
in a stronger sense than how Husserl has the objects themselves. 

The distinction itself of course goes back to Descartes but was given a 
particular form by Kant in the noumenal/phenomenal distinction. Peirce famously 
gets rid of noumenal as an unavailable thing in itself. Although I think how to 
read Peirce carefully here is still somewhat controversial. Peirce recognizes 
what after Quine we’d call the theory laden nature of observation. If Quine is 
moving away from the naive approach of the Vienna positivists then Peirce’s own 
verification principle also ought be examined carefully. I think Peirce avoids 
the positivist problems both due to the pragmatic maxim being far broader but 
also because it’s only a criterion of meaning, not truth.

While Peirce’s maxim isn’t quite unpacked the same way, it ends up making 
meaning tied to a set of background practices of verification. So his diamond 
example of hardness is tied to the ways we’d test hardness. Those in turn are 
practices that are theory laden. I don’t recall off the top of my head if 
Peirce makes the theory ladenness of the maxim explicit anywhere. But it seems 
straightforward to understand how it is even if he never gives quite the same 
sort of analysis of say Heidegger’s tool-use.

I bring all of this up as a round about way of getting at the notion of 
averageness. It’s the notion that I think Heideggarians sometimes call 
everydayness. In Heideggarian phenomenology this is often looked at negatively 
because it’s how we’re caught up in social practices that hide the object from 
us phenomenologically. We don’t pay attention to how the object exceeds our 
expectations given to us culturally. Interestingly in the 21st century 
Heideggarians often influenced by pragmatism then took a more careful look at 
everydayness and appreciated it in a more positive sense. (Here meaning 
pragmatism in a broad sense as much influenced by Dewey and James as Peirce) 

Why I actually like averageness, despite it’s problems, is that as a term it 
communicates well the idea of exceptions from the typical (in the sense of 
either mode or mean). As such it gets at the gap between the immediate object 
and dynamic object. The dynamic object can only determine the immediate object 
through what is common or typical for the interpreter that is current in their 
environment before the sign is uttered. This is key. This aspect of the 
immediate object has to be in the environment and must be there before the sign 
becomes a sign. 

A few quotes (emphasis mine):

…philosophists are in the habit of distinguishing two objects of many signs, 
the immediate and the real. The former is an image, or notion, which the 
interpreter is 

RE: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[John Collier]

The “average” notion is distinctly misleading. Suggests an external averager 
that does not exist. It is an abstraction at best, and typically ignores 
aspects of the dynamics object (but I think could even get it entirely wrong 
and still be the immediate object – it depends on context for this to happen)

John Collier
Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Associate
University of KwaZulu-Natal
http://web.ncf.ca/collier

From: Clark Goble [mailto:cl...@lextek.com]
Sent: Thursday, 23 June 2016 12:07 AM
To: Peirce-L <PEIRCE-L@LIST.IUPUI.EDU>
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being


On Jun 22, 2016, at 1:10 PM, Benjamin Udell 
<baud...@gmail.com<mailto:baud...@gmail.com>> wrote:

   i. Immediate object: the object as represented in the sign [DELETE], a kind 
of statistical, "average" version of the given object [END DELETE. Gary 
Richmond, as I recall, convinced me that my text there was mistaken].

Yes, I’m not sure I’d agree with the “average” notion either.

At the Wikipedia articles there are footnotes with references to primary 
sources, often with links to the primary sources.

I have to confess I don’t check Wikipedia on technical topics often due to most 
being a mix of good and egregious. But I think you and others are to be praised 
for trying to improve the Peirce related areas.

-
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 
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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Clark Goble]

> On Jun 22, 2016, at 1:10 PM, Benjamin Udell  wrote:
> 
>i. Immediate object: the object as represented in the sign [DELETE], a 
> kind of statistical, "average" version of the given object [END DELETE. Gary 
> Richmond, as I recall, convinced me that my text there was mistaken]. 

Yes, I’m not sure I’d agree with the “average” notion either. 

> At the Wikipedia articles there are footnotes with references to primary 
> sources, often with links to the primary sources.

I have to confess I don’t check Wikipedia on technical topics often due to most 
being a mix of good and egregious. But I think you and others are to be praised 
for trying to improve the Peirce related areas. 
-
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] Copula and Being

[Benjamin Udell]

Clark, list,

Those seem to be passages from the Wikipedia Charles Sanders Peirce 
article or the Wikipedia Semiotic elements and classes of signs article 
in the form that they had some years ago as a result of my edits. Two of 
the paragraphs were already there, written by I don't know who, maybe 
Jon Awbrey.


Since that time I made two significant edits:

 2. Object:
   i. Immediate object: the object as represented in the sign [DELETE], 
a kind of statistical, "average" version of the given object [END 
DELETE. Gary Richmond, as I recall, convinced me that my text there was 
mistaken].
   ii. Dynamic object: the object as it really is [INSERT], on which 
the immediate object is founded "as on bedrock" [END INSERT]. Also 
called the dynamoid object, the dynamical object.


At the Wikipedia articles there are footnotes with references to primary 
sources, often with links to the primary sources.


Best, Ben

On 6/21/2016 9:31 PM, Clark Goble wrote:


On Jun 21, 2016, at 1:55 PM, Gary Richmond > wrote:


One interesting think in Parker’s book is the cosmological element in 
the development of the categories.


Whoops. One interesting /thing/…  LOL. Sorry for all the typos. I 
wrote that quickly. Hopefully I don’t make an embarrassing mistake in it.


One addition is this explanation of the sign that Ben put together 
some years ago.


 1. Sign: always immediate to itself.
 2. Object:
   i. Immediate object: the object as represented in the sign, a
kind of statistical, "average" version of the given object.
   ii. Dynamic object: the object as it really is. Also called the
dynamoid object, the dynamical object.
 3. Interpretant:
   i. Immediate interpretant: total unanalyzed effect of the
interpretant on a mind or quasimind, a kind of starting point of
the dynamic and final interpretants, a feeling or idea which the
sign carries with it even before there is an interpreter or
quasi-interpreter.
   ii. Dynamic interpretant: the actual effect (apart from the
feeling) of the sign on a mind or quasi-mind, for instance the
agitation of the feeling.
   iii. Final interpretant: the effect which the sign _would_ have
on any mind or quasi-mind if circumstances allowed that effect to
be fully achieved. The final interpretant of a response about the
weather about which one has inquired may consist in the effect
which the true response would have one's plans for the day which
were the inquiry's purpose. The final interpretant of a line of
investigation is truth and _would_ be reached sooner or later but
still inevitably by investigation adequately prolonged, though the
truth remains independent of that which "you or I" or any finite
community of investigators believe.

The immediate object is, from the viewpoint of a theorist, really
a kind of sign of the dynamic object; but phenomenologically it is
the object until there is reason to go beyond it, and somebody
analyzing (critically but not theoretically) a given semiosis will
consider it to be the object until there is reason to do otherwise.

 To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant, but 
requires a time, is but another way of saying that every thought must 
be interpreted in another, or that all thought is in signs. (C.S. 
Peirce, CP 5.254).


Peirce referred to his general study of signs, based on the concept of 
a triadic sign relation, as semiotic or semeiotic, either of which 
terms are currently used in either singular of plural form. Peirce 
began writing on semeiotic in the 1860s, around the time that he 
devised his system of three categories. He eventually defined semiosis 
as an "action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of 
_three_ subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, 
this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into 
actions between pairs". (Peirce 1907, in Houser 1998, 411).


 1.. A _sign_ (also called a _representamen_) represents, in the 
broadest possible sense of "represents". It is something interpretable 
as saying something about something. It is not necessarily symbolic, 
linguistic, or artificial.
 2.. An _object_ (also called a _semiotic object_) is a subject matter 
of a sign and an interpretant. It can be anything discussable or 
thinkable, a thing, event, relationship, quality, law, argument, etc., 
and can even be fictional, for instance Hamlet. All of those are 
special or partial objects. The object most accurately is the universe 
of discourse to which the partial or special object belongs. For 
instance, a perturbation of Pluto's orbit is a sign about Pluto but 
ultimately not only about Pluto.
 3.. An _interpretant_ (also called an _interpretant sign_) is the 
sign's more or less clarified meaning or ramification, a kind of form 
or idea of the difference which the sign's being 

Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Clark Goble]

> On Jun 21, 2016, at 1:55 PM, Gary Richmond  wrote:
> 
> One interesting think in Parker’s book is the cosmological element in the 
> development of the categories.

Whoops. One interesting thing…  LOL. Sorry for all the typos. I wrote that 
quickly. Hopefully I don’t make an embarrassing mistake in it.

One addition is this explanation of the sign that Ben put together some years 
ago.

 1. Sign: always immediate to itself. 
 2. Object: 
   i. Immediate object: the object as represented in the sign, a kind of 
statistical, "average" version of the given object. 
   ii. Dynamic object: the object as it really is. Also called the dynamoid 
object, the dynamical object. 
 3. Interpretant: 
   i. Immediate interpretant: total unanalyzed effect of the interpretant on a 
mind or quasimind, a kind of starting point of the dynamic and final 
interpretants, a feeling or idea which the sign carries with it even before 
there is an interpreter or quasi-interpreter. 
   ii. Dynamic interpretant: the actual effect (apart from the feeling) of the 
sign on a mind or quasi-mind, for instance the agitation of the feeling. 
   iii. Final interpretant: the effect which the sign _would_ have on any mind 
or quasi-mind if circumstances allowed that effect to be fully achieved. The 
final interpretant of a response about the weather about which one has inquired 
may consist in the effect which the true response would have one's plans for 
the day which were the inquiry's purpose. The final interpretant of a line of 
investigation is truth and _would_ be reached sooner or later but still 
inevitably by investigation adequately prolonged, though the truth remains 
independent of that which "you or I" or any finite community of investigators 
believe. 

The immediate object is, from the viewpoint of a theorist, really a kind of 
sign of the dynamic object; but phenomenologically it is the object until there 
is reason to go beyond it, and somebody analyzing (critically but not 
theoretically) a given semiosis will consider it to be the object until there 
is reason to do otherwise.

 To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant, but requires a 
time, is but another way of saying that every thought must be interpreted in 
another, or that all thought is in signs. (C.S. Peirce, CP 5.254).

Peirce referred to his general study of signs, based on the concept of a 
triadic sign relation, as semiotic or semeiotic, either of which terms are 
currently used in either singular of plural form. Peirce began writing on 
semeiotic in the 1860s, around the time that he devised his system of three 
categories. He eventually defined semiosis as an "action, or influence, which 
is, or involves, a cooperation of _three_ subjects, such as a sign, its object, 
and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way 
resolvable into actions between pairs". (Peirce 1907, in Houser 1998, 411).

 1.. A _sign_ (also called a _representamen_) represents, in the broadest 
possible sense of "represents". It is something interpretable as saying 
something about something. It is not necessarily symbolic, linguistic, or 
artificial. 
 2.. An _object_ (also called a _semiotic object_) is a subject matter of a 
sign and an interpretant. It can be anything discussable or thinkable, a thing, 
event, relationship, quality, law, argument, etc., and can even be fictional, 
for instance Hamlet. All of those are special or partial objects. The object 
most accurately is the universe of discourse to which the partial or special 
object belongs. For instance, a perturbation of Pluto's orbit is a sign about 
Pluto but ultimately not only about Pluto. 
 3.. An _interpretant_ (also called an _interpretant sign_) is the sign's more 
or less clarified meaning or ramification, a kind of form or idea of the 
difference which the sign's being true would make. (Peirce's sign theory 
concerns meaning in the broadest sense, including logical implication, not just 
the meanings of words as properly clarified by a dictionary.) The interpretant 
is a sign (a) of the object and (b) of the interpretant's "predecessor" (the 
interpreted sign) as being a sign of the same object. The interpretant is an 
_interpretation_ in the sense of a _product_ of an interpretive process or a 
_content_ in which an interpretive relation culminates, though this product or 
content may itself be an act or conduct of some kind. Another way to say these 
things is that the sign stands for the object to the interpretant. 
Some of the understanding needed by the mind depends on familiarity with the 
object. In order to know for what a given sign stands, the mind needs some 
experience of that sign's object collaterally to that sign or sign system, and 
in this context Peirce speaks of collateral experience, collateral observation, 
etc.
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Re: [PEIRCE-L] Copula and Being

[Clark Goble]

(Hope you don’t mind — since this is primarily related to the copula I put it 
under the other thread)

> On Jun 21, 2016, at 2:46 PM, Jerry Rhee  wrote:
> 
> In your response, there's no mention of the object that is outside of us, and 
> in my opinion, no respect for what that object can teach us.  

Yes there was. The dynamic/immediate object discussion was all about that.

> We point but we point at an object.  Moreover, we argue over what is involved 
> in that object, which is outside us.  The goal is to come to a complete 
> agreement about what we say that object is and whether our conception is 
> actually that object.

To say “outside us” seems to buy into the kind of internal/external distinction 
that Descartes introduced into philosophy. I see Peirce fundamentally as an 
Externalist. To try and make sense of Peirce in the Cartesian paradigm is 
doomed to failure and fundamentally misrepresents his thought. Rather than 
talking about inside/outside us we can only talk dynamic object and immediate 
object. In saying that I recognize Peirce doesn’t always use that terminology. 
Sometimes he’ll talk about what is internal or external to the sign.

The object is something external to and independent of the sign which 
determines in the sign an element corresponding to itself; so that we have to 
distinguish the quasi-real object from the presented object; or as we may say, 
the external from the internal object. And the external object as it is in 
itself is to be distinguished from the feature of the external object that is 
represented. (MS 145 — 1905)


Also to say “whether our conception is actually that object” is to adopt a kind 
of idealism that I think is at odds with the objective idealism of Peirce. The 
final interpretant is what the universe is fated to arrive at which is the idea 
of the object. But we have to distinguish the dynamic object from the final 
interpretant. They’re obviously closely related but to say “whether our 
conception is actually that object” confuses Peirce’s notion of truth. Peirce 
wants to compare like to like. So for him we are seeing whether our conception 
is actually the final interpretant. Now we can loosely talk about that as the 
object of course but we shouldn’t paper over what’s going on semiotically.

Phenomenologically the immediate object is of course the only object we can 
deal with but semiotically it is a sign (both an index and icon) of the 
original object(s). (For fictional objects its the properties of real objects 
that are brought together) The final interpretant is the effects (conceived 
through continuity) the sign has upon the universe (or quasi-mind) if the 
effect were completed.

Whether the final interpretant is merely a regulative concept needed to make 
sense of the notion of truth or something truly fated through continuity (sort 
of the opposite of the Stoic eternal recurrance) seems unclear. I’ve been 
convinced here over the years that it’s merely regulative after long defending 
it as an ontological claim. I still suspect it’s an ontological belief of 
Peirce he took from the medievals but I think it functions philosophically 
better as a regulative notion.

Either way the notions of the dynamic object, immediate object, sign, immediate 
interpretant, dynamic interpretant and final interpretant really solve a myriad 
of problems in traditional analytic philosophy. (Particularly speech act theory)

The issue of things (object) as they relate to signs is complex. Again this is 
an important part of Kelly Parker’s book. Around page 219 (which I think I 
pasted into the list last week) he discusses Peirce as a mild or extreme 
semiotic idealist. (That is in what senses objects “exist” outside of signs)

> How about the case of the copula, then.  If it is simply that the 
> copula = Being, then what constitutes that moment, that absolute moment, when 
> we all agree that the concept = the real;  
> when ens necessarium = ens realissimum?

Again, could you unpack this a little farther? You’re still assuming a lot of 
common assumptions that I don’t think are clear. In particular how Peirce uses 
“real” and how it was often used even at his time isn’t quite the same. See for 
instance the following:

That thing which causes a sign as such is called the object (according to the 
usage of speech, the “real,” but more accurately, the existent object) 
represented by the sign: the sign is determined to some species of 
correspondence with that object. (CP 5.473 — 1907)

With regards to the real I think this quote is helpful.

The commodious and compact representation in our minds, or icon of our hopes 
about beliefs[,] is that there is something fixed and not subject to our wills 
called the reality, and that our beliefs come to shape themselves more and more 
under experience in conformity to that reality. So far as they accord with it 
we call them true. This is a handy ideal –. this of reality; – but it