[PEIRCE-L] the logic of vagueness

[gnox]

List,

After so much striving for precision, perhaps a shift to the subject of 
indeterminacy would be in order. The following is excerpted from Content and 
Context (TS ·15) (gnusystems.ca)  , where 
it includes a dozen or so links to its larger context (omitted below). I don’t 
think it says anything controversial among Peircean specialists, but it does 
make a salient point about ordinary everyday communication.  — gary f.

_

According to Peirce, ‘No concept, not even those of mathematics, is absolutely 
precise; and some of the most important for everyday use are extremely vague’ 
(CP 6.496, c. 1906). Genuinely informative communication depends on taking this 
necessary vagueness into account. Properly understanding any utterance requires 
us to interpret it with the degree of vagueness appropriate to the situational 
context. To meet this requirement, every language user has to develop a 
sensitivity to context at an early age, though few are conscious of it.

[[ The perspectival nature of linguistic systems means that as children learn 
to use words and linguistic constructions in the manner of adults, they come to 
see that the exact same phenomenon may be construed in many different ways for 
different communicative purposes depending on many factors in the communicative 
context. ]]  (Tomasello 1999, 213)

To construe is to simplify, and to simplify is to generalize: a symbol, by 
referring to a type of experience, can thus refer to many tokens of it on 
various occasions, including future occasions. Even proper nouns (names of 
specific things, places, people etc.) are general signs insofar as each implies 
the continuity of its object through time: each momentary manifestation of the 
object is a token of that type, and some features of it may vary from one 
occurrence to another – especially if the object is a complex adaptive system.

Things we talk about, whether we perceive them to be in the external or the 
internal world, are already construed, categorized and “framed” by the time we 
mention them. But each actual reference to them can affect our framing habits; 
and these in turn affect our way of talking about them, or hearing others talk 
about them. Since everyone has a history of cycling through such loops 
countless times, and this history determines for each a “natural” idiom, 
synchronizing reference between speakers is not always easy.

The upshot of this in communication is that in trying to connect words with 
referents or experiences, ‘all sorts of risks are taken, assumptions and 
guesses made’ (Sperber and Wilson 1995, 19). This is the only practical way to 
reduce the many possible ‘construals’ of phenomena – or meanings of words – to 
the simplicity required for the maintenance of a conversation.

Sperber and Wilson take this as an argument against what they call ‘the 
mutual-knowledge hypothesis,’ but they are using the word knowledge here in an 
absolute sense, as equivalent to objective certainty (Sperber and Wilson 1995, 
19-20). In reality, the common ground that people must have in order to carry 
on a conversation is a network of rather vague default assumptions. Actual 
conversation often consists of attempts to render some of the ‘mutual 
knowledge’ more precise, but in the actual context, there are pragmatic limits 
to this precision.

William James, in typically elegant fashion, gives a more psychologically 
realistic account of cognition as ‘virtual knowing’:

[[ Now the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond this 
virtual stage. It never is completed or nailed down. … To continue thinking 
unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, our practical substitute 
for knowing in the completed sense. As each experience runs by cognitive 
transition into the next one, and we nowhere feel a collision with what we 
elsewhere count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to the current as if the 
port were sure. We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing 
wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all 
we cover of the future of our path. ]] (James, ‘A World of Pure Experience’)

Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception takes a slightly different 
perspective:

[[ My set of experiences is presented as a concordant whole, and the synthesis 
takes place not in so far as they all express a certain invariant, and in the 
identity of the object, but in that they are all collected together, by the 
last of their number, in the ipseity of the thing. The ipseity is, of course, 
never reached: each aspect of the thing which falls to our perception is still 
only an invitation to perceive beyond it, still only a momentary halt in the 
perceptual process. If the thing itself were reached, it would be from that 
moment arrayed before us and stripped of its mystery. It would cease to exist 
as a thing at the very moment when we thought 

[PEIRCE-L] CfP - Workshop Diagrams and Mathematical Practice - Part of DIAGRAMS 2024 - Münster, Germany, Sept 27 - Oct 1st, 2024

[jean-yves beziau]

Organizers: Jean-Yves Beziau, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Andrei Rodin,
Nancy, France
Send a 300/500 words abstract by May 15 to  diamapra2...@protonmail.com
https://diagrams-2024.diagrams-conference.org/workshops/diagrams-and-mathematical-practice/
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