[peirce-l] Re: "What is nothiing?" (was, Introduction)

[Clark Goble]

Sorry for an other hit and run post.  Gary quoted CP 6.211 on nothing.It is true that there is another sort of zero which is a limit. Such is the vague zero of indeterminacy. But a limit involves Secondness prominently, and besides that, Thirdness. In fact, the generality of indeterminacy marks its Thirdness. Accordingly, zero being an idea of Secondness, we find, as we should expect, that any continuum whose intermediate Listing numbers are zero is equivalent to a pair of continua whose Listing numbers are 1.  (CP 6.211)This goes along with Kelly Parker's discussion of Peirce's thought on Being and Substance in "The Ascent of Soul to Noûs: Charles S. Peirce as Neoplatonist."  Parker quotes that particular paragraph along with a few others that are of interest.http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/But this is not the nothing of negation. . . . The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom.Now the question arises, what necessarily resulted from that state of things? But the only sane answer is that where freedom was boundless nothing in particular necessarily resulted.. . .I say that nothing necessarily resulted from the Nothing of boundless freedom. That is, nothing according to deductive logic. But such is not the logic of freedom or possibility. The logic of freedom, or potentiality, is that it shall annul itself. For if it does not annul itself, it remains a completely idle and do-nothing potentiality; and a completely idle potentiality is annulled by its complete idleness. ...I do not mean that potentiality immediately results in actuality. Mediately perhaps it does; but what immediately resulted was that unbounded potentiality became potentiality of this or that sort -- that is, of some quality.Thus the zero of bare possibility, by evolutionary logic, leapt into the unit of some quality. (CP 6.220)I should add that I think this goes along with Heidegger as well.  Heidegger famously discusses Being as nothing primarily due to a notion of hiddenness.  Basically the idea that in any phenomena other beings are hidden from us.  Thus as I type on my keyboard I don't have given to my awareness a perception of the bookshelf beside me.  For Heidegger this gets into a discussion of phenomenological distance.  I'll skip that discussion, but roughly it's the idea how how close to our awareness entities are as they give themselves to consciousness.  (Usual caveat - consciousness isn't the real way to think of this, but it'll do to avoid getting into a discussion of Dasein.  Sartre appropriated Heidegger's idea and treated it as consciousness though)The idea is though that Being is a nothing and a very important nothing.  The nothing might better be stated as not-a-thing.  This gets at Heidegger's notion of transcendence.  Once again very roughly (with an emphasis on very) the idea of transcendent categories akin to Kant's transcendent categories.  This obviously brings one to Peirce and his own relationship to Kant as well as to nothing.Anyway, those interested in Peirce and nothing ought read Kelly Parker's paper.  I recognize that neoPlatonism is a bad word for most philosophers today.  (Nearly as bad as Derrida)  And once shouldn't obscure the important differences between Peirce and most neoPlatonists.  But there are some interesting and helpful similarities.Clark Goble
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[peirce-l] Re: [Fwd: [Fis] Søren Brier, Department of Management, Politics and Phi losophy, Copenhagen Business School is defend ing his doctoral thesis: "Cybersemiotics - Why information is not e

[Gary Richmond]

  <>Excerpt perhaps summarizing a 15 page abstract in English of
Brier’s Cybersemiotics: Why information is not enough!
   http://www.cbs.dk/content/download/36989/554713/file/doctoralsummary.pdf
  
  The Cybersemiotic paradigm combines a
non-mechanistic
universal evolutionary semiotic approach to epistemology, ontology, and
signification with a systemic and cybernetic approach to
self-organization,
drawing on Luhmann’s theories of social communication. This combines a
semiotics of nature with pragmatic linguistics in a second-order
approach,
reflecting the role of the observer as the producer of meaningful
contexts that
makes processes and differences information. Bateson claimed that
information
is a difference that makes a difference, whereas Maturana and Verela
clarified
that structurally coupled autopoiesis is necessary for any cognition to
take
place. Like Peirce I will claim that an interpretant, and therefore a
sign
process, must be established to create signification, which differs
from
objective information because of its meaning content. 
  <>A short version of how integration between the different
approaches can be made could be the following: Individuals [sic]
interpreters
see differences in their world that make a difference to them as
information.
Thus “the world” is the world of Heidegger (1962) in which the observer
is
thrown among things “ready at hand”, through which a “breakdown” of the
original
unconscious unity become [sic] “present at hand”. This situation is
possible
only by assigning signs to differences and interpreting them against a
general
non-reducible context. Living autopoietic systems do this by producing
signs as
parts of life forms. Signs can thus be said to obtain meanings through
sign
games. In the human social spheres forms of life give rise to language
games.
This part of social autopoiesis is what Luhmann calls social
communication,
employing what Peirce calls genuine triadic signs. Thus cognition and
communication are self-organizing phenomena on all three levels:
biological,
psychological, and sociological/cultural. They produce meaningful
information
by brining forth an Umwelt, which in Cybersemiotics is called a
signification
sphere, connected to specific life practices such as mating, hunting,
tending
the young, defending etc. These characteristics distinguish cognition
and
communication in living systems from the simulations of these processes
by
computers. The forces and regularities of nature influence and
constrain our
perceptions and spark evolution. This process can be explained
scientifically
to some degree, but probably never in any absolute or classical
scientific
conception of the word, as Laplace thought. In
my opinion,
meaning cannot be defined independently from an observer and a world.
Meaning
is only created when a difference makes such a difference to the living
system
that it must make signs, join a group of communicating observers, and
produce a
meaningful world.




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[peirce-l] Re: [Fwd: [Fis] Søren Brier, Department of Management, Politics and Philos ophy, Copenhagen Business School is defending his doctoral thesis: "Cybersemiotics - Why information is not e

[Gary Richmond]

Steven, List,

Posting links relating to Søren Brier's doctoral thesis: "Cybersemiotics 
- Why information is not enough!" Steven Ericsson Zenith wrote:



Because I think it relevant to Peirce-l ... :-)


I'll say! It is gratifying to see a towering synoptic intellect like 
Soren Brier's moving ever closer to Peirce's triadic semeiotic as 
essential towards the resolution of formidable problems in relating  
information, cognition and communication science, so that his most 
recent work exactly means to do this by integrating especially Niklas 
Luhmann's communicative theory with Peirce's semeiotic.  Thank you  for 
posting links to this work as it got me quickly to the 15 page summary 
in English (which I just read and found most stimulating).of his 
dissertation.

http://www.cbs.dk/content/download/36989/554713/file/doctoralsummary.pdf

I first became familiar with second (and third) order semiotics through 
the work of Bruce Buchanan:

http://www.ceptualinstitute.com/genre/buchanan/homepageBB.htm
which then took me to so much of the work of theorists which I see Brier 
attempting to develop and integrate in his own work of the last several 
years , the most important of several theoretical threads (including 
cybernetics, biosemiiotics, an expansion of Maturana and Varela's 
autopoetic theory, a semiotic version of van Uexkull's Umwelt, 
Wittgenstein's language games developed by Brier as "sign games," 
:Lakoff & Johnson's cognitive semantics, But perhaps especially Peirce's 
triadic semeiotic) which taken together (along with much else, I think) 
might eventually evolve into the cybersemiotics of his title or 
something like it, to me a most interesting abduction and indeed a 
desideratum as I see it.


I hope to be discussing these ideas with you and others on the list in 
the near future.


Best,

Gary Richmond

---
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[peirce-l] Re: "What is nothiing?" (was, Introduction)

[Gary Richmond]

Bill, Darrel, List,

Bill Bailey wrote:
I'm reminded
of the saying:  "Nothing never happens." Appropriate to that
observation, the "Great Nothing," presumably to come in the form of
entropy, won't be a nothing but an absolute something, a totally
homogeneous distribution of whatever the basic matter/energy is
throughout space.  Informationally,  infinite continuity of substance
is as much a "nothing" as infinitely random variance. In either case,
we won't know nothing.
  

There's nothing to know and no one to know it also in the Tohu Bohu
before the world was created (discussed on this list several times),
what the ancient Egyptians called the Nun, the dark waters of
protouniverse before the stirrings of Tum in Nun had even become the
great Creator force, Atum. But it is kind of--I'm not sure what the
exact word should be, but perhaps something close to--"consoling" to
contemplate that "Nothing never happens" and that even this dreary
notion of the "Great Nothing" of a cold eternity of entropic sameness
might itself finally be seen to be a naive reduction, that even then
there remains the continuous creative potential that out of the Tohu
Bohu there again begins a striving to come into being (One
myth of this, the Egyptian: In the Nun, again, sleeping Tum begins to
be a stirring of the Waters so that the Power of Atum might arise to
begin to create those lesser powers, the neteru--mistranslated,
"gods"--of Egyptian cosmology, so that Khepri, the scarab symbolizing
'becoming' might "evolve" a Universe). 

This was I see meant as an answer to a famous question attributed to
Kant but which I believe has an earlier origin: "Why is there something
rather than nothing?"

Gary

Darrel Summers wrote:
  
  Gary,

 

One the best parts of sharing with a child is the unique childhood
ability of absolute belief. Although I see doubt creeping in on a daily
basis (I am afraid the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, etc have a short
window of opportunity in our modern times), she still can see the
absolute possibility / plausibility in anything (something, nothing,
everything).

 

That being said, tangent control may be an issue:

 

So we discussed the word first. When she says she has "nothing" to play
with she knows that she actually has more toys gadgets & gizmos
than any child really needs but is not currently interested in any of
them. So there are different kinds of nothing. Now we are getting
somewhere until she breaks my straight line approach with a wrinkle

 

Below, explained carefully, answered the wrinkled question, "why do
people even care about what nothing is?"

 

"Well someone cares, such as you my Dear, because didn't you ask me?
Others ask too. When a lot of people ask we can get closer to the
answer and do some amazing things along the way."

 

Specifically as stated by Pierce below,

 

"Who would have said, a few years ago, that we could ever know of what
substances stars are made whose light may have been longer in reaching
us than the human race has existed?"

 

AND

 

"And if it were to go on for a million, or a billion, or any number of
years you please, how is it possible to say that there is any question
which might not ultimately be solved? "

 

And here not much more than 100 years later what have we accomplished -
walks on the moon, pictures from the far reaches of our Solar System.

 



From:



    How to Make Our Ideas Clear 


Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878), 286-302.

 

Do these things not really exist because they are hopelessly beyond the
reach of our knowledge? And then, after the universe is dead (according
to the prediction of some scientists), and all life has ceased forever,
will not the shock of atoms continue though there will be no mind to
know it? To this I reply that, though in no possible state of knowledge
can any number be great enough to express the relation between the
amount of what rests unknown to the amount of the known, yet it is
unphilosophical to suppose that, with regard to any given question
(which has any clear meaning), investigation would not bring forth a
solution of it, if it were carried far enough. Who would have said, a
few years ago, that we could ever know of what substances stars are
made whose light may have been longer in reaching us than the human
race has existed? Who can be sure of what we shall not know in a few
hundred years? Who can guess what would be the result of continuing the
pursuit of science for ten thousand years, with the activity of the
last hundred? And if it were to go on for a million, or a billion, or
any number of years you please, how is it possible to say that there is
any question which might not ultimately be solved?



 

 

So

[peirce-l] Re: "What is nothiing?" (was, Introduction)

[Gary Richmond]

David, Darrel, List,

Thanks for the Century Dictionary entry on nothing,  David. You wrote:
Nothing truly is something peculiar.

Even before I became acquainted with Peirce's writings I remember
taking long "thinking on my feet" nature walks which I characterized as
contemplating "nothing in particular and everything in general," maybe
my approach to Peircean musement before I knew that that was
what I was doing. How delighted I was years later to find Peirce
characterizing the protocosmos as "nothing in particular and everything
in general."

Darrel, thanks for sharing your wonderfully astute answer to your
daughter's subsequent question, "Why do people even care about what nothing is?"
You answered

"Well someone cares, such as you my Dear, because didn't you
ask me? Others ask too. When a lot of people ask we can get closer to
the answer and do some amazing things along the way."
Again, this strikes me as being very close to the principle and purpose
of pragmatic inquiry. 

Gary Richmond

David Lachance wrote:
Darrel, Gary, all those who find nothing interesting,
List,
  
  
I looked up what Peirce wrote in the Century Dictionary for "nothing";
here is the most interesting part:
  
_
  
  1.
No thing; not anything; not something; something that is not anything. The
conception of nothing is reached
by reflecting that a noun, or name, in form, may fail to have any
corresponding object; and
  nothing is
the noun which by its very definition is of that sort.
  
(a)
The non-existent.  
  (b)
A non-existent something, spoken of positively, so that the literal
meaning is absurd. 
  
  The poet's pen
  
. . . gives to airy nothing
  
   A local habitation and a name.
  
  Shak., M. N. D., v. 1. 16.
  
  
    Oh
Life, thou
  Nothing's younger Brother!
  
So like, that one might take one for the other!
  
  Cowley, Pindaric Odes, ix. 1.
  
  
  (c)
Not something. In this sense the word is more distinctly
  no
thing; and the sentence
containing
  nothing merely
contradicts a corresponding sentence containing
  something
in place of
  nothing.
  
__
  
  
Nothing truly is something peculiar.
  
Best,
  
David
  
  
  
  


---
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[peirce-l] Re: "What is nothiing?" (was, Introduction)

[David Lachance]

Darrel, Gary, all those who find nothing interesting, List,

I looked up what Peirce wrote in the Century Dictionary for "nothing"; here is the most interesting part:
_
1. No thing; not anything; not something; something that is not anything.  The conception of nothing is reached by reflecting that a noun, or name, in form, may fail to have any corresponding object; and nothing is the noun which by its very definition is of that sort.
(a) The non-existent.  
(b) A non-existent something, spoken of positively, so that the literal meaning is absurd. 

  The poet's pen
. . . gives to airy nothing
 A local habitation and a name.
Shak., M. N. D., v. 1. 16.

  Oh Life, thou Nothing's younger Brother!
So like, that one might take one for the other!
Cowley, Pindaric Odes, ix. 1.

(c) Not something. In this sense the word is more distinctly no thing; and the sentence containing nothing merely contradicts a corresponding sentence containing something in place of nothing.
__

Nothing truly is something peculiar.
Best,
David

Gary,
 
One the best parts of sharing with a child is the unique childhood ability of absolute belief. Although I see doubt creeping in on a daily basis (I am afraid the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, etc have a short window of opportunity in our modern times), she still can see the absolute possibility / plausibility in anything (something, nothing, everything).
 
That being said, tangent control may be an issue:
 
So we discussed the word first. When she says she has "nothing" to play with she knows that she actually has more toys gadgets & gizmos than any child really needs but is not currently interested in any of them. So there are different kinds of nothing. Now we are getting somewhere until she breaks my straight line approach with a wrinkle
 
Below, explained carefully, answered the wrinkled question, "why do people even care about what nothing is?"
 
"Well someone cares, such as you my Dear, because didn't you ask me? Others ask too. When a lot of people ask we can get closer to the answer and do some amazing things along the way."
 
Specifically as stated by Pierce below,
 
"Who would have said, a few years ago, that we could ever know of what substances stars are made whose light may have been longer in reaching us than the human race has existed?"
 
AND
 
"And if it were to go on for a million, or a billion, or any number of years you please, how is it possible to say that there is any question which might not ultimately be solved? "
 
And here not much more than 100 years later what have we accomplished - walks on the moon, pictures from the far reaches of our Solar System.
 
From:

How to Make Our Ideas Clear

Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878), 286-302.
 
Do these things not really exist because they are hopelessly beyond the reach of our knowledge? And then, after the universe is dead (according to the prediction of some scientists), and all life has ceased forever, will not the shock of atoms continue though there will be no mind to know it? To this I reply that, though in no possible state of knowledge can any number be great enough to express the relation between the amount of what rests unknown to the amount of the known, yet it is unphilosophical to suppose that, with regard to any given question (which has any clear meaning), investigation would not bring forth a solution of it, if it were carried far enough. Who would have said, a few years ago, that we could ever know of what substances stars are made whose light may have been longer in reaching us than the human race has existed? Who can be sure of what we shall not know in a few hundred years? Who can guess what would be the result of continuing the pursuit of science for ten thousand years, with the activity of the last hundred? And if it were to go on for a million, or a billion, or any number of years you please, how is it possible to say that there is any question which might not ultimately be solved?
 
 
So we can get back to the original question, maybe for a few minutes anyway, while she has "nothing" to do.
 
 
Regards,
 
Darrel Summers
- Original Message -
From: Gary Richmond 
To: Peirce Discussion Forum 
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 9:06 AM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: "What is nothiing?" (was, Introduction)

Darrel, 

You wrote that:  Grace thinks it is quite amusing that so many "smart grown-ups are worried about nothing..."  (I think when she says worried she means fascinated)
"From the mouths of babes. . ." Sometimes I worry  too that grown-ups are "fascinated about nothing" by which I mean that they haven't necessarily got their values straight and so worry about the wrong things (such as keeping up with the Joneses, defending their egos, being "entertained," grabbing as much stuff as they can because "the guy who has the most stuff when he dies wins the game,' etc.) Of course when people prioritize such "nothings" then they've limited the time 

[peirce-l] Re: "What is nothiing?" (was, Introduction)

[Bill Bailey]

Darrel, Gary, list:
I'm reminded of the saying:  "Nothing never happens." 
Appropriate to that observation, the "Great Nothing," 
presumably to come in the form of entropy, won't be a 
nothing but an absolute something, a totally homogeneous 
distribution of whatever the basic matter/energy is 
throughout space.  Informationally,  infinite continuity of 
substance is as much a "nothing" as infinitely random 
variance. In either case, we won't know nothing.


Darrel Summers wrote:

Gary,
 
One the best parts of sharing with a child is the unique childhood 
ability of absolute belief. Although I see doubt creeping in on a daily 
basis (I am afraid the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, etc have a short 
window of opportunity in our modern times), she still can see the 
absolute possibility / plausibility in anything (something, nothing, 
everything).
 
That being said, tangent control may be an issue:
 
So we discussed the word first. When she says she has "nothing" to play 
with she knows that she actually has more toys gadgets & gizmos than any 
child really needs but is not currently interested in any of them. So 
there are different kinds of nothing. Now we are getting somewhere until 
she breaks my straight line approach with a wrinkle
 
Below, explained carefully, answered the wrinkled question, "why do 
people even care about what nothing is?"
 
"Well someone cares, such as you my Dear, because didn't you ask me? 
Others ask too. When a lot of people ask we can get closer to the answer 
and do some amazing things along the way."
 
Specifically as stated by Pierce below,
 
"Who would have said, a few years ago, that we could ever know of what 
substances stars are made whose light may have been longer in reaching 
us than the human race has existed?"
 
AND
 
"And if it were to go on for a million, or a billion, or any number of 
years you please, how is it possible to say that there is any question 
which might not ultimately be solved? "
 
And here not much more than 100 years later what have we accomplished - 
walks on the moon, pictures from the far reaches of our Solar System.
 


From:


How to Make Our Ideas Clear 

Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878), 286-302.
 
Do these things not really exist because they are hopelessly beyond the 
reach of our knowledge? And then, after the universe is dead (according 
to the prediction of some scientists), and all life has ceased forever, 
will not the shock of atoms continue though there will be no mind to 
know it? To this I reply that, though in no possible state of knowledge 
can any number be great enough to express the relation between the 
amount of what rests unknown to the amount of the known, yet it is 
unphilosophical to suppose that, with regard to any given question 
(which has any clear meaning), investigation would not bring forth a 
solution of it, if it were carried far enough. Who would have said, a 
few years ago, that we could ever know of what substances stars are made 
whose light may have been longer in reaching us than the human race has 
existed? Who can be sure of what we shall not know in a few hundred 
years? Who can guess what would be the result of continuing the pursuit 
of science for ten thousand years, with the activity of the last 
hundred? And if it were to go on for a million, or a billion, or any 
number of years you please, how is it possible to say that there is any 
question which might not ultimately be solved?


 
 
So we can get back to the original question, maybe for a few minutes 
anyway, while she has "nothing" to do.
 
 
Regards,
 
Darrel Summers


- Original Message -
*From:* Gary Richmond 
*To:* Peirce Discussion Forum 
*Sent:* Monday, February 13, 2006 9:06 AM
*Subject:* [peirce-l] Re: "What is nothiing?" (was, Introduction)

Darrel,

You wrote that: 


 Grace thinks it is quite amusing that so many "smart grown-ups
are worried about nothing..."  (I think when she says worried she
means fascinated)


"From the mouths of babes. . ." Sometimes I worry  too that
grown-ups are "fascinated about nothing" by which I mean that they
haven't necessarily got their values straight and so worry about the
wrong things (such as keeping up with the Joneses, defending their
egos, being "entertained," grabbing as much stuff as they can
because "the guy who has the most stuff when he dies wins the game,'
etc.) Of course when people prioritize such "nothings" then they've
limited the time and energy that might be deployed for the
development of "somethings," that is, some things of value, raising
children properly, contributing to more Truth and Justice occurring
in the world, promoting truly independent inq

[peirce-l] [Fwd: [Fis] Søren Brier, Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copen hagen Business School is defending his doctor al thesis: "Cybersemiotics - Why informa tion is not enoug

[Steven Ericsson Zenith]

Because I think it relevant to Peirce-l ... :-)
--- Begin Message ---








Associated professor PhD, Søren Brier, Department of
Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen
 Business School
is defending his doctoral thesis 

 

"Cybersemiotics - Why information is not
enough!” 

 

A Trans-Disciplinary Approach to Information, Cognition
and Communication Studies, through an Integration of Niklas Luhmann’s
Communication Theory with C. S. Peirce’s Semiotics. 

 

What information, cognition, communication,
intelligence and meaning are, is a very old philosophical problem. But today
these questions, since Shannon’s
information theory and Wiener’s cybernetics, are formulated in the
trans-disciplinary context of computers, information systems, and ultimately
the Internet demanding a framework encompassing the complex area of
information, cognition and communication science. The current cognitive science
information processing paradigm is criticized from a phenomenological and
ethological point of view as being an insufficient foundation of information
science because it lacks an evolutionary theory of embodied first person
experience and signification. 

 

As a constructive alternative is formulated a new
trans-disciplinary framework (Cybersemiotics). This is based on an integration
of a modernized version of Peirce’s semiotics in the form of biosemiotics,
which is integrated with Luhmann’s communicational systems theory.
elements from embodied cognitive semantics, ethology and language game theory
are also used. The theory development is embedded in an ongoing philosophy of
"science" reflection on the possibility of a non-reductionistic
Transdisciplinarity. Opting for a transdisciplinary framework, after ALL
postulates a sort of unity of sciences at a metalevel distinguishing the
natural and social sciences as well has humanities from other symbolic
generalized media such as politics, art and religion. 

 

Cybersemiotic provides a framework contributing to
information and knowledge management systems design as well as for a general
theory of cognition and communication.

 

A long Danish and a shorter English summary can be
read at cbs.dk

.

 

Assessment Committee

Professor, Ole Fogh Kirkeby, CBS (Chairman)

Professor, Dick Baecker, Universität Witten/Herdecke

Professor, John Deely, University of St. Thomas,
Houston

 

Official opponents

Professor, John Deely, University of St. Thomas,
Houston

Professor, Dr.rer.soc. Dick Baecker, Universität
Witten/Herdecke 

 

Best Regards 

 

Jens Aaris Thisted

Dean, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

 

Time and place:

6. March 2006 

Time 13.00

 

Copenhagen Business School

Tuborg Lecture Hall 2.02

Solbjerg Plads 3

2000 Frederiksberg

 

Directions:

Click here
  to
see a map of the area. 

 

Registration:

Everyone is welcome to participate at the public defense.
No registration is needed.

 

Arranged by:

Faculty of Economics and Business Administration 

 

Cand. Scient. PhD in Philosophy of Science Søren Brier, holds a master
in biology from University
 of Copenhagen from 1979
and a PhD in philosophy of Science from Roskilde University (RUC). He has since
august 2003 been an associate professor in the department for Management, Politics
and Philosophy. 

 

He is the founder and ed. in chief of the
interdisciplinary quarterly journal Cybernetics & Human Knowing, 1992- ,
co-founder of The International Association for Biosemiotic Studies in 2005, a trustee for the
American Society for Cybernetics. member of the board for the Sociocybernetics
Group (ISA) and Foundation of Information Science (FIS)group. He is on the
editorial board of Systems Research and Behavioral Science, J. of Biosemiotic
and TripleC (Cognition, Communication and Cooperation.

 

Home page with CV, publication list and full text
electronic articles can be found here
 .

 

Venlig hilsen / Best wishes

 

Søren
 Brier  

 

Copenhagen Business School , Management, Politics and Philosophy, 
Porcelænshaven 18 A
, DK-2000 Frederiksberg.


 

Office-phone +45 3815 2208   Cell  28564282

Ed. in Chief of  Cybernetics & Human Knowing :
home page: 

http://www.imprint-academic.com/C&HK

 

 

 

 

 






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Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com

[peirce-l] Re: "What is nothiing?" (was, Introduction)

[Darrel Summers]

Gary,
 
One the best parts of sharing with a child is the 
unique childhood ability of absolute belief. Although I see doubt creeping in on 
a daily basis (I am afraid the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, etc have a short 
window of opportunity in our modern times), she still can see the absolute 
possibility / plausibility in anything (something, nothing, everything). 

 
That being said, tangent control may be an 
issue:
 
So we discussed the word first. When she says she 
has "nothing" to play with she knows that she actually has more toys gadgets 
& gizmos than any child really needs but is not currently interested in any 
of them. So there are different kinds of nothing. Now we are getting 
somewhere until she breaks my straight line approach with a 
wrinkle
 

Below, explained carefully, answered 
the wrinkled question, "why do people even care about what nothing 
is?"
 
"Well someone cares, such as you my Dear, because 
didn't you ask me? Others ask too. When a lot of people ask we can get closer to 
the answer and do some amazing things along the way."
 
Specifically as stated by Pierce 
below,
 
"Who would have 
said, a few years ago, that we could ever know of what substances stars are made 
whose light may have been longer in reaching us than the human race has 
existed?" 
 
AND
 
"And if it were 
to go on for a million, or a billion, or any number of years you please, how is 
it possible to say that there is any question which might not ultimately be 
solved? "
 
And here not much more than 100 years later what have we 
accomplished - walks on the moon, pictures from the far reaches of our Solar 
System.
 





From:

How to Make Our Ideas Clear
Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878), 
286-302. 
 
Do these things not really exist because they are hopelessly beyond the 
reach of our knowledge? And then, after the universe is dead (according to the 
prediction of some scientists), and all life has ceased forever, will not the 
shock of atoms continue though there will be no mind to know it? To this I reply 
that, though in no possible state of knowledge can any number be great enough to 
express the relation between the amount of what rests unknown to the amount of 
the known, yet it is unphilosophical to suppose that, with regard to any given 
question (which has any clear meaning), investigation would not bring forth a 
solution of it, if it were carried far enough. Who would have said, a few years 
ago, that we could ever know of what substances stars are made whose light may 
have been longer in reaching us than the human race has existed? Who can be sure 
of what we shall not know in a few hundred years? Who can guess what would be 
the result of continuing the pursuit of science for ten thousand years, with the 
activity of the last hundred? And if it were to go on for a million, or a 
billion, or any number of years you please, how is it possible to say that there 
is any question which might not ultimately be solved? 



 
 
So we can get back to the original question, maybe 
for a few minutes anyway, while she has "nothing" to do.
 
 
Regards,
 
Darrel Summers

  - Original Message - 
  From: 
  Gary 
  Richmond 
  To: Peirce Discussion Forum 
  Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 9:06 
  AM
  Subject: [peirce-l] Re: "What is 
  nothiing?" (was, Introduction)
  Darrel, You wrote that:  
  
 Grace thinks it is quite amusing that so 
many "smart grown-ups are worried about nothing..."  (I think when 
she says worried she means fascinated) "From the 
  mouths of babes. . ." Sometimes I worry  too that grown-ups are 
  "fascinated about nothing" by which I mean that they haven't necessarily got 
  their values straight and so worry about the wrong things (such as keeping up 
  with the Joneses, defending their egos, being "entertained," grabbing as much 
  stuff as they can because "the guy who has the most stuff when he dies wins 
  the game,' etc.) Of course when people prioritize such "nothings" then they've 
  limited the time and energy that might be deployed for the development of 
  "somethings," that is, some things of value, raising children properly, 
  contributing to more Truth and Justice occurring in the world, promoting truly 
  independent inquiry and journalism, promoting peace in the world (a point Maya 
  Angelou stressed in her remarks at Coretta Scott King's funeral), etc., 
  etc.
  
We will be following with inthusiasm the forum 
and finding applicable writings where we can.We'll 
  be looking forward to hearing from you (and Grace) as well. In your initial 
  message to the forum you wrote of "posting in my own 
  non-acedemic style" which suggests a refreshing aspect of this forum. One of 
  the things that make it such a vibrant list, something that many have 
  commented on over the years,  is its wholly democratic nature such that 
  all manner of folk read and post to the list,  sharing only an interest 
  in the philosophy of Peirce. 

[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?

[Thomas Riese]

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 14:32:22 +0100, Joseph Ransdell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  
wrote:


What I am especially concerned with at present is the distinction he is  
often more or less consciously working with between expressedthought and  
thought which occurs "silently".  In general, he is as muchconcerned to  
establish something about unexpressed thought as he is aboutexpressed  
thought, though we usually content ourselves with regarding
him as being concerned only with the latter.  The philosophical movehe  
is making is not merely to establish that expressed thought --taking the  
form of word-signs -- has all of the features which arerequired for the  
purposes of logic, so that logic can proceed on thebasis of verbal  
expressions of thought  -- things that appear on blackboards
or pieces of paper -- without being defeated by the inability to access 
invisible -- or, more generally, imperceptible -- thought, but also to 
establish that unexpressed thought, though often non-linguistic because 
it makes do with a person's personal and unshared symbolically  
functioningnotation, is nevertheless capable of being regarded AS being  
symbolicjust as a word is. In other words, he seems to regard the  
introductionof the conception of the symbol as a way of getting past the  
limitationsimplicit both in the word "thought" but also implicit in the  
word "word". On can thus talk indifferently of words OR thoughts.

The so-called "linguistic turn" is the turn to expressed thought -- the
internal dialogue is just the externally observable dialogue imagined to  
be what also transpires imperceptibly because it really makes no  
difference

what occurred imperceptibly, anyway -- but Peirce didn't merely make the
linguistic turn but also re-turned to the unexpressed to reclaim it, as  
it were, on the basis of its presumed equivalence to what he has  
established

about linguistically expressed thought.   The linguistic turn replaces
"thought" by "word"; the semiotic turn and return replaces both "word"  
and "thought" by "symbol" (though also of course by "icon" and "index" as
appropriate, too).  Maybe that is not an important further step but only  
a gratuitous addition that really has no logical significance, but I  
think

Peirce did regard it as a significant move.


Dear Joe,

I am delighted that you have written the above and I appreciate very much  
that
you put Jerry Dozoretz' paper on "The Internally Real, The Fictitious, And  
The
Indubitable" on the Arisbe website.  Jerry Dozoretz' paper is most  
admirable in
its insightfulness and clearness. Now we are really beginning to "bring  
things

down to earth". We have here a new aspect of Peirce's work, though it is
certainly not another aspect in the sense of being remote from the main  
body or
in any way detached. It, on the contrary, touches the very heart, the  
kernel of

it all.

Let me please start with the distinction between a mere fiction and a
mathematical hypothesis, which latter is partly fictious too. Structurally  
this
is exactly the difference between the relatives "-- is lover whatever is  
loved
by --" and "-- is both lover of and lover of everything loved by --" as  
Peirce

compares them in L 224 which I cited in my recent paper that I sent you off
list. The first one amounts to simple transitivity, the second one  
embodies what
I sometimes call "super-transitivity" or "general transitivity" (when I  
speak

to myself).

There is a most beautiful example for the very keen sense mathematicians  
have

for this distinction. Richard Dedekind's epochal work on "Was sind und was
sollen die Zahlen?", where he derives the structure of the natural and real
numbers, though admired for the construction of the real numbers by the
"Dedekindscher Schnitt" (Dedekind Cut), has always been regarded by
mathematicians as dubious concerning his founding of the natural numbers:  
The

central element in Dedekind's derivation is "Dies ist ein Gedanke meiner
Gedankenwelt" which exactly amounts to the first relative above, i.e.  
simple

transitivity.

So far some very "real world" historical background.

Joe, you write: "What I am especially concerned with at present is the
distinction he is often more or less consciously working with between  
expressed
thought and thought which occurs "silently"" and later "...Peirce didn't  
merely
make the linguistic turn but also re-turned to the unexpressed to reclaim  
it...".


It is at this point perhaps best, if I refer to Jerry Dozoretz' paper in  
order
to answer to you as directly as possible, since we have both read the  
paper.


I would like to make three points:

The first is, that Jerry Dozoretz' "ground" is the very same "ground"  
Peirce
refers to in the New List of 1867.  Jerry Dozoretz writes: "there is for  
Peirce

a kind of middle ground, as it were, which is neither fictional and thereby
unreal nor yet real in the aforementioned sense. In what follows I shall
endeavor to show that in order to isolate

[peirce-l] Re: "What is nothiing?" (was, Introduction)

[Gary Richmond]

Darrel, 

You wrote that: 

   Grace thinks it is quite amusing
that so many "smart grown-ups are worried about nothing..."  (I think
when she says worried she means fascinated) 
  

"From the mouths of babes. . ." Sometimes I worry  too that grown-ups
are "fascinated about nothing" by which I mean that they haven't
necessarily got their values straight and so worry about the wrong
things (such as keeping up with the Joneses, defending their egos,
being "entertained," grabbing as much stuff as they can because "the
guy who has the most stuff when he dies wins the game,' etc.) Of course
when people prioritize such "nothings" then they've limited the time
and energy that might be deployed for the development of "somethings,"
that is, some things of value, raising children properly, contributing
to more Truth and Justice occurring in the world, promoting truly
independent inquiry and journalism, promoting peace in the world (a
point Maya Angelou stressed in her remarks at Coretta Scott King's
funeral), etc., etc.

   We will be following with
inthusiasm the forum and finding applicable writings where we can.

We'll be looking forward to hearing from you (and Grace) as well. In
your initial message to the forum you wrote of "posting in my own non-acedemic style" which suggests a
refreshing aspect of this forum. One of the things that make it such a
vibrant list, something that many have commented on over the years,  is
its wholly democratic nature such that all manner of folk read and post
to the list,  sharing only an interest in the philosophy of Peirce.
While folk on the list can be quite appropriately critical of other's
ideas here, there's not much inappropriate judging of others, their
styles, etc. so that when it does occur there's usually a quick
reaction against it and defending the person attacked. So I hope you'll
feel very free posting in any style you feel comfortable with.


   
  Hoping you own a sled dog or two...

Yesterday I went to a concert at The Town Hall near Times Square in
Manhattan. While because of the blizzard there wasn't much vehicular
traffic--including very few dog sleds as far as I could tell--it seemed
that all of New York was out of doors on foot to enjoy the snow
storm--the mood was definitely elevated. The friend I was to have
attended the concert couldn't make it in from Brooklyn (another New
York borough) because of the weather, and when I got to Town Hall I,
along with a somewhat unexpectedly large audience, learned that the
scheduled performers were stranded somewhere outside of Philly. But
some young New York musicians stood in at the last minute to give what
was certainly one of the most delightful musical performances I've
attended in many years. 

Send my best wishes to Grace.

Gary R


---
Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com

[peirce-l] Re: "What is nothiing?" (was, Introduction)

[Darrel Summers]

Gary,
 
I appreciate your plunge! I spent the weekend 
reading with great interest the posts related to Grace's question, and Grace 
thinks it is quite amusing that so many "smart grown-ups are worried about 
nothing..."  (I think when she says worried she means fascinated)  We 
will be following with inthusiasm the forum and finding applicable writings 
where we can. 
Hoping you own a sled dog or two...
 
Regards,
Darrel

  - Original Message - 
  From: 
  Gary 
  Richmond 
  To: Peirce Discussion Forum 
  Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 6:05 
  PM
  Subject: [peirce-l] "What is nothing?" 
  (was, Introduction)
  David,Welcome to the list. Your reasons for joining it 
  seem to me the very best for doing philosophy, to offer a child of a new 
  generation an approach to answering the profound philosophical (cenoscopic) 
  questions she may have about life's meaning, and that perhaps the most 
  promising method for arriving at true answers (or the closest we can get to 
  this) is a communal inquiry having the value of coming out of "shared 
  knowledge and experiences," as you phrased it. You may have come to just the 
  right philosophical forum as this seems to me to be exactly  the thrust 
  of Peirce's pragmatism and approach to inquiry.May I plunge  
  right in with a challenge to your answer to your child's question, "what is 
  nothing?" You answered: ""the stuff left when you take 
  away everything..."  Now I'm taking it that perhaps you came here because 
  you  thought (or felt) somehow that your answer needed to be validated, 
  or further explicated, or was insufficient in some way, say only partially 
  right or partially satisfactory, or some such thought. Now I would hazard the 
  guess that Peirce would have suggested that your answer defines a certain kind 
  of nothing, namely the nothing or zero of subtraction, but that subtraction is 
  not a first process...
   CP 6.211   [T]ake the continuum of 
all possible sense qualities after this has been so far restricted that the 
dimensions are distinct. This is a continuum in which firstness is the 
prevailing character. It is also highly primitive. . . . For zero is 
distinctly a dualistic idea. It is mathematically A - A, i.e. the result of 
the inverse process of subtraction. Now an inverse process is a Second 
process.But Peirce continues by commenting on "another sort of 
  zero which is a limit." 
  It is true that there is another sort of zero which 
is a limit. Such is the vague zero of indeterminacy. But a limit involves 
Secondness prominently, and besides that, Thirdness. In fact, the generality 
of indeterminacy marks its Thirdness. Accordingly, zero being an idea of 
Secondness, we find, as we should expect, that any continuum whose 
intermediate Listing numbers are zero is equivalent to a pair of continua 
whose Listing numbers are 1. He illustrates these 
  categorial ideas and relations upon which he bases his theory of continuity 
  by means of  a famous blackboard example 
  (to be found in the last of the 
  1898 Cambridge Conferences lectures, published as Reasoning and the Logic of 
  Things, edited by Kenneth Lane Ketner and with an introduction by Ketner and 
  Hillary Putnam)..Well, to cut to the chase, out of this move comes all of 
  Peirce's synechastic and evolutionary philosophy, his theory of the generation of the early cosmos (what I've 
  called Peirce's alternative to the Big Bang),  evolutionary love and agapasm, etc. But it is also 
  undoubtedly true that this original zero can be analyzed as chaos, as Peirce 
  does at one point  in the New Elements fragment currently being discussed 
  on the list. Since his topic seems to me to  be logic as semeiotic, this 
  is  represented by the blank sheet of assertion in his system of 
  existential graphs--which, however, finally becomes the living symbol of an 
  evolutionary cosmos within which we participate (more or less creatively, I 
  would add).Well, my analysis might be quite flawed, and if it is I 
  hope it'll be corrected. Well, that is just  fallibilism, and every 
  honest seeker benefits from it. Today I simply wanted to suggest that this 
  sort of thinking (or whatever the truer, "corrected" form of it might be), the 
  kind of thinking that leads to a philosophy of evolutionary love might prove 
  to be a valuable supplement to your answer to Grace's question--and perhaps 
  even some of the questions she's yet to ask!  Again, welcome!  
  Best,Gary RichmondDarrel Summers 
  wrote:
  



As the List Manager suggested I am introducing 
myself to the forum. My purpose for subscribing was in response to a 
question posed to me by my daughter Grace, age 5 years. Her question; "what 
is nothing?" and my answer "the stuff left when you take away everything..." 
led me to think more about the process of getting to nothing and the concept 
of beginning and end. I

[peirce-l] Re: "What is nothiing?" (was, Introduction)

[Gary Richmond]

Arnold, Darrel, list,

Arnold wrote:
In many respects, though, I think that there
was something kind of
childish about Peirce, right to the end (see the Essay on Reasoning in
Uberty and Security in EP2), to the point that the likes of Simon
Newcomb could blind him with sophistication.  

Would you comment a bit more on 1) what in the late Essay on Reasoning
in Uberty and Security--and apparently elsewhere-- you find that
suggest this childish character in Peirce (I think I would tend to
agree with you) and 2) what exactly do you mean by "the likes of Simon
Newcomb" being able to "blind him with sophistication"? (Btw, this last
_expression_ got me thinking about how both 'sophisticated' and 'naive'
can suggest either positive or negative qualities when referring to
adults.)

Also, your comment, Arnold, that Agnes Heller said philosophy wasn't
afraid to ask "childish questions" made me think that for the most part
(although certainly not as Heller used it) in English "childish" used
in relation to adults and adult activity is typically (although not
always) used pejoratively, while "childlike" has positive connotations
(cf. a "childish prank" = with a "childlike spirit" the first thought
"infantile" the second "innocent"). 

And all of this brings me back to thinking about the Peirce quote which
helped bring Darrel to the list in the first place, namely:
We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But
this is not the nothing of negation. For not means other
than, and other is merely a synonym of the ordinal numeral second.
As such it implies a first; while the present pure zero is prior to
every first. The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which
comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is
the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no
compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in
which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed.
As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility --
boundless
possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless
freedom. CSP

Both "unlimited possibility" as well as "boundless freedom" suggest to
me aspects of the childlike and potentially creative spirit.

Gary Richmond


Arnold Shepperson wrote:

  Darrel, Gary
   
  First to Darrel:  welcome.
   
  To both:  one wouldn't call Agnes Heller a Peircean, but in her
A Radical Philosophy of 1985, she characterises philosophy as the
intellectual activity that is afraid neither ask nor to confront
`childish questions'.  In many respects, though, I think that there was
something kind of childish about Peirce, right to the end (see the
Essay on Reasoning in Uberty and Security in EP2), to the point that
the likes of Simon Newcomb could blind him with sophistication.  So
what is `nothing'?  I'll keep a close watch on this thread!
  
   
  Cheers
   
  Arnold
  
 
  On 2/11/06, Gary Richmond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
  David,

Welcome to the list. Your reasons for joining it seem to me the very
best for doing philosophy, to offer a child of a new generation an
approach to answering the profound philosophical (cenoscopic) questions
she may have about life's meaning, and that perhaps the most promising
method for arriving at true answers (or the closest we can get to this)
is a communal inquiry having the value of coming out of "shared
knowledge and experiences," as you phrased it. You may have come to
just the right philosophical forum as this seems to me to be exactly 
the thrust of Peirce's pragmatism and approach to inquiry.


May I plunge  right in with a challenge to your answer to your child's
question, "what is nothing?" You answered: ""the
stuff left when you take away everything..."  Now I'm taking it that
perhaps you came here because you  thought (or felt) somehow that your
answer needed to be validated, or further explicated, or was
insufficient in some way, say only partially right or partially
satisfactory, or some such thought. Now I would hazard the guess that
Peirce would have suggested that your answer defines a certain kind of
nothing, namely the nothing or zero of subtraction, but that
subtraction is not a first process...

 CP 6.211   [T]ake the continuum of all
possible sense qualities after this has been so far restricted that the
dimensions are distinct. This is a continuum in which firstness is the
prevailing character. It is also highly primitive. . . . For zero is
distinctly a dualistic idea. It is mathematically A - A, i.e. the
result of the inverse process of subtraction. Now an inverse process is
a Second process.
But Peirce continues by commenting on "another sort of zero which is a
limit." 
It is true that there is another sort of
zero which is a limit. Such is the vague zero of indeterminacy. But a
limit involves Secondness prominently, and besides that, Thirdness. In
fact, the generality of indeterminacy marks its Thirdness. Accordingly,
zero being an idea of Secondness, we find

[peirce-l] Re: "What is nothiing?" (was, Introduction)

[Arnold Shepperson]

Darrel, Gary
 
First to Darrel:  welcome.
 
To both:  one wouldn't call Agnes Heller a Peircean, but in her A Radical Philosophy of 1985, she characterises philosophy as the intellectual activity that is afraid neither ask nor to confront `childish questions'.  In many respects, though, I think that there was something kind of childish about Peirce, right to the end (see the Essay on Reasoning in Uberty and Security in EP2), to the point that the likes of Simon Newcomb could blind him with sophistication.  So what is `nothing'?  I'll keep a close watch on this thread!

 
Cheers
 
Arnold 
On 2/11/06, Gary Richmond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
David,Welcome to the list. Your reasons for joining it seem to me the very best for doing philosophy, to offer a child of a new generation an approach to answering the profound philosophical (cenoscopic) questions she may have about life's meaning, and that perhaps the most promising method for arriving at true answers (or the closest we can get to this) is a communal inquiry having the value of coming out of "shared knowledge and experiences," as you phrased it. You may have come to just the right philosophical forum as this seems to me to be exactly  the thrust of Peirce's pragmatism and approach to inquiry.
May I plunge  right in with a challenge to your answer to your child's question, "what is nothing?" You answered: ""the stuff left when you take away everything..."  Now I'm taking it that perhaps you came here because you  thought (or felt) somehow that your answer needed to be validated, or further explicated, or was insufficient in some way, say only partially right or partially satisfactory, or some such thought. Now I would hazard the guess that Peirce would have suggested that your answer defines a certain kind of nothing, namely the nothing or zero of subtraction, but that subtraction is not a first process...

 CP 6.211   [T]ake the continuum of all possible sense qualities after this has been so far restricted that the dimensions are distinct. This is a continuum in which firstness is the prevailing character. It is also highly primitive. . . . For zero is distinctly a dualistic idea. It is mathematically A - A, 
i.e. the result of the inverse process of subtraction. Now an inverse process is a Second process.But Peirce continues by commenting on "another sort of zero which is a limit." 
It is true that there is another sort of zero which is a limit. Such is the vague zero of indeterminacy. But a limit involves Secondness prominently, and besides that, Thirdness. In fact, the generality of indeterminacy marks its Thirdness. Accordingly, zero being an idea of Secondness, we find, as we should expect, that any continuum whose intermediate Listing numbers are zero is equivalent to a pair of continua whose Listing numbers are 1. 
He illustrates these categorial ideas and relations upon which he bases his theory of continuity by means of  a famous blackboard example (to be found 
in the last of the 1898 Cambridge Conferences lectures, published as Reasoning and the Logic of Things, edited by Kenneth Lane Ketner and with an introduction by Ketner and Hillary Putnam)..Well, to cut to the chase, out of this move comes all of Peirce's synechastic and evolutionary philosophy, his 
theory of the generation of the early cosmos (what I've called Peirce's alternative to the Big Bang),  evolutionary love and agapasm, etc. 
But it is also undoubtedly true that this original zero can be analyzed as chaos, as Peirce does at one point  in the New Elements fragment currently being discussed on the list. Since his topic seems to me to  be logic as semeiotic, this is  represented by the blank sheet of assertion in his system of existential graphs--which, however, finally becomes the living symbol of an evolutionary cosmos within which we participate (more or less creatively, I would add).
Well, my analysis might be quite flawed, and if it is I hope it'll be corrected. Well, that is just  fallibilism, and every honest seeker benefits from it. Today I simply wanted to suggest that this sort of thinking (or whatever the truer, "corrected" form of it might be), the kind of thinking that leads to a philosophy of evolutionary love might prove to be a valuable supplement to your answer to Grace's question--and perhaps even some of the questions she's yet to ask!  Again, welcome!  
Best,Gary RichmondDarrel Summers wrote:

As the List Manager suggested I am introducing myself to the forum. My purpose for subscribing was in response to a question posed to me by my daughter Grace, age 5 years. Her question; "what is nothing?" and my answer "the stuff left when you take away everything..." led me to think more about the process of getting to nothing and the concept of beginning and end. I hope by monitoring these posts, and posting in my own non-acedemic style I might be better able to offer Grace a meaningful answer. I also would like Grace to be familiar with the value of communal / shar