Re: [peirce-l] Doctrine Of Individuals
Gary, Jim W., Ben, List: Upon awakening this morning, I recognized that I should have been more explicit in my comment last evening. Your prompt response eases my task. The question is one of the distinction between semantics and syntax and arithmetic operations on logical terms as well as the distinction between arithmetic division and logical division. The logical point is one of the distinction between division as a separation of a number into EQUAL parts and the separation of a logical term into components. The quote from CSP is: In reference to the doctrine of individuals, two distinctions should be | borne in mind. The logical atom, or term not capable of logical division, | must be one of which every predicate may be universally affirmed or denied. | For, let 'A' be such a term. Then, if it is neither true that all 'A' is 'X' | nor that no 'A' is 'X', it must be true that some 'A' is 'X' and some 'A' is | not 'X'; and therefore 'A' may be divided into 'A' that is 'X' and 'A' that | is not 'X', which is contrary to its nature as a logical atom. | For example, consider the the term of my memory. I hope this illustrates the grounding of feelings on this notion of the usage of the term individual. :-) BTW, this quote of CSP brings to my mind Bertrum Russell's famous paper On denotation which, even though it has been twenty years since I first read it, continues to give me a good chuckle. Oh, how human it is to follow the herd, philosophically or otherwise. I would be delighted to learn of your rhetorical clarification of the practical distinction between a logical atom, a mathematical atom and a chemical atom; only the latter can be separated into parts (nucleus and electrons - non-equal parts.) The natural antecedence of unequal parts of chemical atoms was either not known to or not accepted by CSP. Consequently, he sought to use the logic of chemistry to found a critical component of the over-all structure of his pragmaticism. (see EP2, #26, especially p362-363.) This mistaken judgment (either from ignorance or intent) killed the notion of phaneroscopy within the natural sciences BECAUSE chemical valences of four, five, six,... are not the same as the chemical valence of three and the things with higher valence are not the logical equivalence of things with valence three. In other words, CSP's principle of Thing-representation-form as represented in the diagrams of EP2, #26 FAILS for chemical valence. In so far as the logic of chemistry founded CSP's logic of phaneroscopy, it is not supported by the perplexity of the mathematics of modern chemistry. The modern concept of chemical relations, such as between two strands of a DNA molecule, is vastly richer than CSP's diagrams of p. 364 of EP2. Indeed, exactly the contrary exists in nature. As the number of relations within a chemical molecule increases, the information content increases as a consequence of the different sorts of parts. It is this increase in information that becomes the natural source of DNA as the genetic material and a component of our uniqueness as individual human beings. Jim Willgoose find this line of reasoning to be picturesque. In fact, it is among the central concepts of molecular biology and the neurosciences. Gary, you comment on an earlier post wrt to the usage of the term special sciences by Ben. I went on a business trip shortly after the posting and, upon my return, decided that it was not worth re-opening the cold thread. Ben does a very fine job of articulating historical ideas; my interests reside in projecting historical concepts onto the present and hopefully, into the future. So, I am glad you brought it up. I feel it is analogous to the exchange of usage you and I had concerning the nature of community / communication / communism / communion / and common. Your argument of convention as a standard of usage is applicable to Ben's usage. I persist in maintaining that one should, in professional discussions, use words in the sense of their Greek and Latin roots so as to enhance the possibility of being understood and to diminish the possibility of being miss-understood. Pragmatically, it is simply my experience that the rapid expansion of applications of the mathematically-grounded sciences has blurred the boundaries that CSP was so fond of classifying. If you go to your physician (a practitioner of the clinical sciences), he may request a glucose test (a chemical test) and a Cat scan (a physical machine) to obtain information about your feeling (a biological state.) In what sense are the clinical sciences a special science? So, practically, the terminology that I am accustomed to classifies the various manifestations of the mathematical sciences based on current usage and the hierarchical (categorical?) structures and scalings (size) of things. As for Deacon's usage, the social sciences are what they are - they deal
Re: [peirce-l] Doctrine Of Individuals
Peircers, Here's one gloss on what Peirce meant by the term division -- CSP: The moment, then, that we pass from nothing and the vacuity of being to any content or sphere, we come at once to a composite content and sphere. In fact, extension and comprehension — like space and time — are quantities which are not composed of ultimate elements; but every part however small is divisible. CSP: The consequence of this fact is that when we wish to enumerate the sphere of a term — a process termed division — or when we wish to run over the content of a term — a process called definition — since we cannot take the elements of our enumeration singly but must take them in groups, there is danger that we shall take some element twice over, or that we shall omit some. Hence the extension and comprehension which we know will be somewhat indeterminate. But we must distinguish two kinds of these quantities. If we were to subtilize we might make other distinctions but I shall be content with two. They are the extension and comprehension relatively to our actual knowledge, and what these would be were our knowledge perfect. CSP: Logicians have hitherto left the doctrine of extension and comprehension in a very imperfect state owing to the blinding influence of a psychological treatment of the matter. They have, therefore, not made this distinction and have reduced the comprehension of a term to what it would be if we had no knowledge of fact at all. I mention this because if you should come across the matter I am now discussing in any book, you would find the matter left in quite a different state. CSP: Peirce 1866, Lowell Lecture 7, Chron. Ed. 1, p. 462. Cf: http://mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey/Papers/Information_%3D_Comprehension_%C3%97_Extension#Selection_12 -- facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ mwb: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey knol profile: http://knol.google.com/k/Jon-Awbrey# oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey polmic: www.policymic.com/profiles/1110/Jon-Awbrey - You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Re: [peirce-l] SLOW READ: THE RELEVANCE OF PEIRCEAN SEMIOTIC TO COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION
Sorry, one major error: in the 4th paragraph beginning, For example, I wrote those non-constraints on matter which Peirce calls 'habits'. The non- shouldn't be there. GR Gary Richmond 12/11/11 3:05 PM Peter, Gary F., Jon, List, I'm sorry it took a little while to respond to your message, Peter--the end of the college term and personal matters took over (and continue to dominate my time)--which succinctly clarified your position. I agree with you that the analogy [re: Peirce/Turing] is that Peirce articulated a model of the mind which [. . .] is tacitly presupposed by much of IA research. I hope we can discuss this model on the list, if not this December, perhaps in the new year when the holidays have passed and we, hopefully, all have a bit more time. As to this Peircean model of mind, I would like to note in passing (for now) that it seems to me that the self-same model of mind presupposing IA research also influenced certain biosemioticians (for example, Eliseo Fernandez, Soren Brier, and Terrence Deacon), this essentially semiotic model being employed in their respective theories of emergence. For example, Fernandez argues that a top-down semiotic theory is needed to complement the bottom up one of dominant biological theory, and Brier that triadic semiotic theory complements and completes the dyadic code semiotics of traditional scientific theory. Similarly, Deacon argues in Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, that a robust theory of emergence will be frustrated until it rids itself of its residual quasi-homuncular notions (while some biosemioticians simply ignore anything smacking of 'teleology') and begins to deeply consider those non-constraints on matter which Peirce calls 'habits'. The sub-title of Deacon's new book, Incomplete Nature--again, highly recommended--might more accurately be given as How Mind Emerged from CONSTRAINTS on Matter, the very Peircean Chapter 6 taking this up explicitly. But, again, that's a discussion for another day. I'm pleased to learn, Gary F., that you're reading Incomplete Nature and are interested in our discussing it on list. I've sent copies as holiday gifts to several friends, two of whom are members of peirce-l, and I'm hoping that they too will want to participate in a discussion of some of the themes of what I consider to be a most important work. Kalevi Kull, one of the founders of biosemiotics, wrote that Incomplete Nature demonstrates how some systems can be alive and meaning making (I'm not sure, yet, whether or not he's overstating the case to say that with this inquiry the crux of life--and meaning--is solved so that with it the twenty-first century can now really start). On the related theme taken up in your second paragraph, you wrote: PS: Engelbart's work - what I have read of it - deals primarily with the machine side of the equation, and while Peirce anticipated some of what Engelbart said, my chief claim is that Peirce's model of the mind complements Engelbart's work. I discussed this with Engelbart fifteen years ago, and he had never heard of Peirce before, but was not at all dismissive of my claim. It is interesting, by the way, that Engelbart's chief interest at that time - mid-nineteen-nineties - was to augment group intelligence, reflecting an understanding of IA very much like that articulated by Joe. I do not know whether he ever completed his projected book on the subject. GR: I met Engelbart about 5 or 6 year after you did, Peter, at the 9th ICCS conference held at Stanford in 2001 (I was to attend all the subsequent conferences through 2007). Several Peirce-influenced researchers were involved in the conference: mathematicians, including Rudolf Wille (Formal Concept Analysis) and Karl Erich Wolff, several logicians, such as Joachim Hereth Correia (a principal contributor to the recent strict mathematical proof of Peirce's 'reduction thesis') and including specialists in Peirce's Existential Graphs (EGs) such as Frithjof Dau, and, of course, a large group, which included my good friends Aldo de Moor, Harry Delugah, and Simon Polovina, centered around the work of the logician John Sowa, the inventor of Conceptual Graphs (CGs) which transmutes Peirce's EGs for contemporary, especially electronic uses. I fondly remember having lunch with several of those just mentioned, including Engelbart, which definitely left me with a sense that he'd come to know Peirce's model of mind fairly well in those years since you'd met him, and agree with you that he definitely felt it complemented his own work in IA. (Btw, several Peirce-influenced scholars--such as Terrence Deacon, Frederik Stjernfelt, Kelly Parker, Christopher Hookway and myself included--were invited speakers at subsequent ICCS conferences and, for a time at least, ICCS had, in part, a decidedly Peircean flavor.) You concluded: PS: Engelbart's work - what I have read of it - deals primarily with the machine side of the equation, and while Peirce anticipated
