Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE OF ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS
Phyllis Chiasson: Since language only has meaning within contexts, change the context and you are likely to change meaning altogether. Gary Moore: “Change” yes, sometimes even great “change”. However, one should be aware of this, and, for a varied and many times antagonistic audience that both Peirce and Deely dealt with, one should bend over backwards or nobody simply listens. Something I really do not know but suspect is a great problem with Peirce :: How many Europeans pay any attention to Peirce? Dealing with people like Russell and English linguistic analytics, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Derrida – people highly sensitive to the use and misuse of language – from their very different points of view – who have great problems themselves being understood – Peirce’s approach should have attracted great attention in the 1920s, certainly the 1930s. He was more or less available, talked about by American Pragmatists Europeans did pay some attention too – but that is just it! Peirce had things to say of much more interest than William James. They loved his psychology but that seems to be the limit. --- Gary Moore: So when you say “change meaning altogether”, that is exactly how many Europeans may have found in Peirce – in other words, incomprehensible – when in fact he was dealing with exactly their same problems and many times providing answers to their problems which they did not bother with. There still seems to be a pall over Peirce in Europe. And despite Deely’s own obscurity in the matter of “The Ethics of Terminology”, Deely in his own work has abundantly connected Peirce not only with the Latin scholastics, but to Jacques Maritain [whom I had little respect for before reading Deely] and Martin Heidegger [whom he has written one of the best books about in English]. So making one’s meaning known in the vocabularies of other philosophers dealing with the same problems has been a great accomplishment of Deely’s. However, his very off-hand treatment of other European philosophers is so emotionally tainted and stunted as to be incomprehensible and even logically contradictory when he has to change course in mid-stream when forced to admit they had something key to add to his own and Peirce’s arguments, for instance Kant’s approach to the categories. Phyllis Chiasson: Ambiguity and vagueness are the enemies of clarity; Peirce’s concept of terminological ethics is one of his main contributions to philosophy and the extension (and purpose) of his semeiotic. Torkild Thellefsen discusses meaning from a Peircean perspective in his new book. He points out that the word, X-ray, has a much deeper and more complete meaning to a physician than it does to nonprofessionals, who in their fundamental ignorance may nevertheless think they well know what X-rays mean and do. E. David Ford also explains the need for effective definitions in his book, Scientific Method for Ecological Research. Those who do not engage in so-called “ethical terminology” risk being misunderstood—or worse. Gary Moore: This is true but, in reality, physicians are forced to explain the abilities and limits of x rays to patients and their families. This had been made so because many physicians made it seem as if the patient and their families are too stupid to understand such highly intellectual concepts. This had two wonderful results. They could literally get away with murder. They could take as many x rays as they could get away changing for. And that sort of behavior is now, after so many years of terrible abuse, coming to a stop – but at the expense of everyone in general. Now, when someone comes into the emergency room, an x-ray is taken simply to say, based on some extremely remote possibility, it has been done instead of dealing with the immediate problem immediately. The extravagant rise in the price of healthcare, therefore, is raised directly linked, and abundantly documented, to just such behavior. To supposedly avoid an anticipated problem of explanation, you eliminate the problem by an action that has a physical, expensive, but irrelevant result. So bombastic obscurity is the opposite of being good and noble and is rather nasty and devious and downright treacherous. Gary Moore: You yourself do not make a direct and factual statement of what Peirce “main contributions to philosophy and the extension (and purpose) of his semeiotic” clearly is at all, but just shuffle off explanation by saying it is important and that “ambiguity and vagueness” are bad things. But just saying that or Thellefsen’s saying that or Ford’s saying that does not at all clarify what Peirce actually said that was distinctively, on his own, important – or it is just hum-bug obscurity? He means to say something important, and he has said important things in the past, but on “The Ethics of Terminology” has he really said anything substantially different from what anyone else has
Re: [peirce-l] Frege against the Booleans
Thanks Ben. I heartily concur on dropping the thread. There is little indication that anyone is interested in the specific H. Sluga paper or the priority principle as put forth in that paper. Jim W Date: Fri, 11 May 2012 22:42:12 -0400 From: bud...@nyc.rr.com Subject: Re: [peirce-l] Frege against the Booleans To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU Jim, Sorry, I'm just getting more confused. I've actually seen a, b, etc. called constants as opposed to variables such as x, y, etc. Constant individuals and variable individuals, so to speak, anyway in keeping with the way the words constant and variable seem to be used in opposition to each other in math. But if that's not canonical, then it's not canonical. Also, I thought F was a predicate term, a dummy letter, and at any rate a (unknown or veiled) constant as I would have called it up till a few minutes ago. I thought ~ was a functor that makes a new predicate ~F out of the predicate F. If ~ and the other functors are logical constants, then isn't the predication relationship between F and x in Fx also a logical constant, though it has no separate symbol? Really, I think the case is hopeless. I need to read a book on the subject. I don't see why conceptual analysis would start with the third trichotomy of signs (rheme, dicisign, argument) and move to the first trichotomy of signs (qualisign, sinsign, legisign). Maybe you mean that conceptual analysis would start with Third in the trichotomy of rheme, dicisign, argument and move to that trichotomy's First. I.e. move from argument back to rheme. But I don't see why the conceptual-analysis approach would prefer that direction. On your P.S., I don't know whether you're making a distinction between propositions and sentences. Thanks but this all seems hopeless! Let's drop this sub-thread for at least 24 hours. Best, Ben On 5/11/2012 10:06 PM, Jim Willgoose wrote: Ben, I made it too complicated. Sorry. It didn't help that /- was brought into the discussion. You had the basic idea earlier with dicent and rheme. Fx and Fa have to be kept together. So, the interpretant side of the semiotic relation has priority. Conceptual analysis would move from the third trichotomy back to the first. Synthesis would move from the first to the third. If this is close, the priority principle would place emphasis on the whole representation. (By the way, F is a function and a is an individual, ~+-- are the logical constants.) Jim W PS If words have meaning only in sentences (context principle), does this mean that term, class, and propositional logics are meaningless? Date: Fri, 11 May 2012 20:30:53 -0400 From: bud...@nyc.rr.com Subject: Re: [peirce-l] Frege against the Booleans To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU Hi, Jim, Sorry, I'm not following you here. F and a look like logical constants in the analysis. I don't know how you're using v, and so on. I don't know why there's a question raised about taking the judgment as everything that implies it, or as everything that it implies. Beyond those things, maybe you're suggesting, that Frege didn't take judgments as mere fragments of inferences, because he wasn't aware of some confusion that would be clarified by taking judgments as mere fragments of inferences? But I'm afraid we're just going to have to admit that I'm in over my head. Best, Ben On 5/11/2012 7:36 PM, Jim Willgoose wrote: Ben, I suppose you could take the judgment as everything which implies it. (or is implied by it) In this way, you could play around with the judgment stroke and treat meaning as inferential. But, using a rule of substitution and instantiation, I could show the content of the following judgment without any logical constants /- ExFx Fa x=a ExFx But if I say vx, is v a or is it another class G? Further, vx is a logical product. The above analysis has no logical constants. I guess the point is that once you segment Fx and then talk of two interpretations; boolean classes or propositions, you create some confusion which Frege (according to Sluga) traces back to favoring concepts over judgments with resulting totalities such as
Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE OF ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS
Gary, Phyllis, list, The use of ambiguity and precision or clarity as antonyms is what I. A. Richards might have called a killer dichotomy[1] which doesn't recognize they are all on the continuum of discourse academic as well as ordinary. Before a more precise term can be used by more than one person, someone has to define and explain it in the less precise (i.e. more ambiguous) vocabulary that is already understood by others. The limited communication which ambiguity provides is a hermeneutic path toward more understanding. In other words, ambiguity is a tool for achieving greater precision. The x-ray example is a good illustration of a situation in which ambiguity and precision both have economic, health, ethical and semeiotic costs and benefits. The question isn't, Is there perfect precision? Some of the questions are, Is there enough precision for the situation or context? and when necessary, How does further inquiry increase the precision and clarity of our understanding? Regards, John [1] Berthoff, Ann E., The Mysterious Barricades: Language and Its Limits (1999), p. 15-17. The Mysterious Barricades makes the case that escaping the enthrallment of recent theory in literary criticism and the philosophy of language will be impossible so long as the meaning relationship is conceived in dyadic terms. Ann E. Berthoff examines certain dyadic misunderstandings, including the gangster theories fostered by Deconstruction and its successors, and offers triadic remedies, which are all informed by a Peircean understanding of interpretation as the logical condition of signification.--BOOK JACKET. The remedies come from a logician, the inventor of semiotics (Peirce); a rhetorician who reclaimed practical criticism (I.A. Richards); a philologist who became the first to develop a general theory of hermeneutics (Schleiermacher); a linguist - some would say the greatest of the century (Sapir); a philosophical anthropologist who sought to define what we need to discover if we are to appreciate the role of symbols in building the human world (Susanne K. Langer); and an amateur semiotician novelist, and religious man who defined the capacity for symbolization as the power which sets the human being apart from the rest of Creation (Kleist). All have seen that pragmatism is the chief consequence of a triadic view of the sign. All have seen that the powers of language are contingent on its limits, whether linguistic or discursive. All recognize the heuristic power of limits, seeing them as mysterious barricades. In a concluding section, Professor Berthoff turns to the idea of a fall into language by way of a discussion of Kleist's essays on marionette theatre and the shaping of thought at the point of utterance. - 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] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE OF ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS
Dear John Harvey, Gary Moore: Absolutely excellent! Before a more precise term can be used by more than one person, someone has to define and explain it in the less precise (i.e. more ambiguous) vocabulary that is already understood by others. The limited communication which ambiguity provides is a hermeneutic path toward more understanding. In other words, ambiguity is a tool for achieving greater precision. This is perfect! Ambiguity, established within a locating context, is therefore necessary for communication per se. Establish the context precisely and you sizably decrease, but never eliminate, the ambiguity. If what you say is important enough, at some time you must enunciate your thoughts to a wider, broader community. Peirce uses the term “prime necessity” as if it were a very precise scholastic logical term. And yet an explanation for “prime necessity” is not to be found anywhere in the Peirce sites nor in any major philosophy resource like the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy. If, on the other hand as I advocated, we had the literal Latin phrase he was referring to, I would have no problem locating at least a context in which it is used as “prime necessity”. Peirce praises it by saying, “He could not have sought out a more technical phrase” as it “strictly means”. And yet it is impossible to find except in this paragraph in “The Ethics of Terminology” (EP volume 2, page266). So it is hardly a model of intelligibility considering its lack of context and its near total lack of use.¶ Gary Moore: I. A. Richards I am mainly familiar with as a literary critic, obviously with a command of philosophy and logic. However one communicates in English, one uses literary or, better, rhetorical tropes that, while not necessarily being precisely logical (but not hindering it either), none the less state the existential fact a human being who is in a certain situation is making a statement. If done well, all parties, with their appropriate usage of ambiguity, can more or less correctly understand each other. Abuse the ambiguity as Peirce can do in a purely arbitrary fashion, people think, because he has said something extremely obscure, that it is extremely brilliant because either no one understands it or everyone is afraid of saying “The emperor has no clothes on,” that the great ‘truths’ are merely very ordinary pedestrian sideswipes.¶ - Gary Moore: “The x-ray example is a good illustration of a situation in which ambiguity and precision both have economic, health, ethical and semeiotic costs and benefits.” The doctor is now being legally forced to explain why an x-ray is necessary and what it can and cannot do in common, though un-precise, terms. Instead of what? Instead of just doing the x-ray to legally say he did an x-ray to cover himself from legal suits without necessarily being of any use to the patient even from the most outlandish of possibilities, while at the same time economically harming the patient with a needless very expensive charge. As Churchill said of politics, “America and England are divided by a common language.” Well, he had to break down and learn American context if he was going to get American money and weapons, did he not? No one was going to give those things to him simply because he wanted them.¶ --- Gary Moore: Herein perfectly fits the following, “The question isn't, Is there perfect precision? Some of the questions are, Is there enough precision for the situation or context? and when necessary, How does further inquiry increase the precision and clarity of our understanding? “Further inquiry”, though, can only proceed from ambiguity as what is at hand to any possible precision.¶ -- Gary Moore: “In a concluding section, Professor Berthoff turns to the idea of a fall into language by way of a discussion of Kleist's essays on marionette theatre and the shaping of thought at the point of utterance. It has been a while since I have dealt with Kleist’s essays on marionettes and Immanuel Kant. Has a better format and treatment of his essays occurred I do not know about? Regards, Gary Moore From: John Harvey johnhar...@earthlink.net To: Peirce-L peirce-l@listserv.iupui.edu Sent: Saturday, May 12, 2012 10:28 AM Subject: Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE OF ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS Gary, Phyllis, list, The use of ambiguity and precision or clarity as antonyms is what I. A. Richards might have called a killer dichotomy[1] which doesn't recognize they are all on the continuum of discourse academic as well as ordinary. Before a more precise term can be used by more than one person, someone has to define and explain it in the less precise (i.e. more ambiguous) vocabulary that is already understood by others. The limited communication which ambiguity provides is a hermeneutic path toward more understanding. In other
Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE OF ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS
Gary M., list, In the passage that you quote from EP 2: 266, what Peirce says is, [] This scholastic terminology has passed into English speech more than into any other modern tongue, rendering it the most logically exact of any. This has been accomplished at the inconvenience that a considerable number of words and phrases have come to be used with a laxity quite astounding. Who, for example, among the dealers in Quincy Hall who talk of articles of /prime necessity/, would be able to say what that phrase prime necessity strictly means? He could not have sought out a more technical phrase. There are dozens of other loose expressions of the same provenance. Peirce isn't praising the phrase prime necessity by calling it most technical. He's just pointing out that people use, without knowing their meanings, phrases that are supposed to be reserved for technical senses. That much seems clear enough from the context. Less obvious is that prime necessity was no doubt in Peirce's view a good example because he thought pretty much nobody really knew what it meant. Still another threefold distinction, due to Aristotle (I Anal. post., iv), is between necessity /de omni/ (/tò katà pantós/), /per se / (/kath autó/), and /universaliter primum / (/kathólou prôton/). The last of these, however, is unintelligible, and we may pass it by, merely remarking that the exaggerated application of the term has given us a phrase we hear daily in the streets, 'articles of prime necessity.' Necessity /de omni/ is that of a predicate which belongs to its whole subject at all times. Necessity /per se/ is one belonging to the essence of the species, and is subdivided according to the senses of /per se/, especially into the first and second modes of /per se/. (Peirce, 1902, from his portion of Necessity in Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, James Mark Baldwin, editor, v. 2, p. 145 via Google Books http://books.google.com/books?id=Dc8YIAAJpg=PA145lpg=PA145dq=%22Still+another+threefold+distinction%22 and via Classics in the History of Psychology http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/defs/N1defs.htm#Necessity . I don't know what Latin word is being translated as necessity in that paragraph but, given the neuter adjective in /universaliter primum/ (literally, universally first), if it's a word with the necess- element in it, then it is /necesse/ (= /necessum/) or /necessarium/ (necessary, neuter adjectives) rather than /necessitas/ or /necessitudo/ (necessity, feminine abstract nouns). Peirce can be terminologically demanding, but fortunately he defined many terms and phrases, in the Century Dictionary and in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. As for Peirce's own terminology, he defines some of it in those books, but the first place to look is the Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/dictionary.html , edited by Mats Bergman and Sami Paavola, U. of Helsinki, and containing Peirce's own definitions, often many per term across the decades. Gary Fuhrman very helpfully took a list of Peirce entries at the DPP that I started in Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography in Wikipedia, and expanded it to include Peirce entries for letters P-W (which aren't at the Classics in the History of Psychology). http://www.gnusystems.ca/BaldwinPeirce.htm . Where he has not also provided the text, he still provides the page number so that one can find it via Google Books' edition http://books.google.com/books?id=Dc8YIAAJpg=PA145lpg=PA145dq=%22Still+another+threefold+distinction%22 or via Internet Archive's edition http://www.archive.org/details/philopsych02balduoft . The Century Dictionary is online for free http://www.global-language.com/CENTURY/; it's bigger and more encyclopedic than the OED. I recommend installing the DjVu reader rather than settling for jpg images of pages. A list of the entries written or supervised/approved by Peirce is at http://www.pep.uqam.ca/listsofwords.pep . Peirce's work on the Century Dictionary will be in Writings vol. 7, now scheduled for 2013. Online software for W 7 is now planned (Peirce Edition Project April 2012 Update http://www.iupui.edu/%7Epeirce/PEP-Update-April%202012.pdf ). As regards ordinary discourse as the final cause of all intellectual endeavors, I'd say that ordinary discourse itself can evolve and become less vague and more specialized. Some ordinary discourse contains hundreds of ways to characterize snow; but not ordinary discourse in English, and most of us will not accumulate enough experience with snow to get what those characterizations are about. Yet for some those characterizations are very practical, often needful. Between highly developed ideas and ordinary ideas, there will usually be some struggle, it's a two-way street. Best, Ben On 5/12/2012 12:25 PM, Gary Moore wrote: Dear John
