[peirce-l] Peirce's Law -- Now With Animated Proofs !!!
Peircers, Computations and proofs are closely related examples of semiotic processes that are well worth studying in light of what they can tell us about inquiry, reasoning, and semiosis in general. Computations, if properly directed, move from sign to sign of the same object, preserving information while increasing clarity, eventually reaching a sign so clear that we consider it the canonical sign of the object in question. Equational proofs are very similar to computations, preserving logical equivalence while increasing clarity, eventually reaching a canonical expression for the given information that requires no further processing to be understood. Implicational proofs allow for the loss of some information in the transition from sign to sign, and so they require more care to keep from losing the critical bits. With that preamble, I recommend to your attention the following blog post on Peirce's Law. It contains two examples of equational proofs in a graphical syntax derived from Peirce's alpha graphs for propositional logic. Peirce's Law http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2008/10/06/peirce-s-law/ Regards, Jon -- 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] The new issue of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy
Dear list, The new issue of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (Volume 3, Number 2, 2011) is now available online as of today. http://lnx.journalofpragmatism.eu/ I am listing the table of contents below. It involves symposia on “Pragmatism and the Social Sciences: A Century of Influences and Interactions,” as well as one dealing with Richard Bernstein's recent book The Pragmatic Turn. Plus other essays. My contribution, "Pragmatic E-Pistols," involves previously unpublished, unknown, and unarchived pragmatist letters (I say this merely as a humorous tease to archivalists out there), among other things. http://lnx.journalofpragmatism.eu/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/halton.pdf Cheers, Gene Halton European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (Volume 3, Number 2, 2011). Guest editors: Roberto Frega (IEA Paris), Filipe Carreira da Silva (University of Lisbon) Roberto Frega, Filipe Carreira da Silva, Editor’s Introduction to The Symposia (pdf) Section I. Pragmatism and the Margins of Mainstream Social Sciences Peter Manicas, American Social Science: The Irrelevance of Pragmatism (pdf) Patrick Baert, Neo-Pragmatism and Phenomenology: A Proposal (pdf) Eugene Halton, Pragmatic E-Pistols (pdf) Section II. Empowering the Margins of Society Susan Haack, Pragmatism, Law, and Morality: The Lessons of Buck v. Bell (pdf) Patricia Hill Collins, Piecing Together a Genealogical Puzzle: Intersectionality and American Pragmatism (pdf) Bill E. Lawson, Of President Barack H. Obama and Others: Public Policy, Race-talk, and Pragmatism (pdf) Section III. Pragmatist Appropriations Mitchell Aboulafia, Through the Eyes of Mad Men: Simulation, Interaction, and Ethics (pdf) Louis Quéré, Towards a social externalism: Pragmatism and ethnomethodology (pdf) James Johnson, Between Political Inquiry and Democratic Faith: A Pragmatist Approach to Visualizing Publics (pdf) Kenneth W. Stikkers, Dewey, Economic Democracy, and the Mondragon Cooperatives (pdf) David H. Brendel, Can Patients and Psychiatrists be Friends?: a Pragmatist Viewpoint (pdf) A Symposium on Richard Bernstein’s The Pragmatic Turn, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2010 Organiser: Roberto Frega (IEA Paris) Roberto Frega, Richard Bernstein and the challenges of a broadened pragmatism (pdf) James R. O’Shea, Objective Truth and the Practice Relativity of Justification in the Pragmatic Turn (pdf) Ramón del Castillo, A Pragmatic Party. On Richard Bernstein’s The Pragmatic Turn (pdf) Sarin Marchetti, Richard J. Bernstein on Ethics and Philosophy between the Linguistic and the Pragmatic Turn (pdf) Richard Bernstein, Continuing the Conversation (pdf) Essays David Ludwig, Beyond Physicalism and Dualism? Putnam’s Pragmatic Pluralism and the Philosophy of Mind (pdf) Vitaly Kiryushchenko, Logic, Ethics and Aesthetics: Some Consequences of Kant’s Critiques in Peirce’s Early Pragmatism (pdf) Giovanni Tuzet, Legal Judgment as a Philosophical Archetype: A Pragmatist Analysis of Three Theses (pdf) Book Review Rosa M. Calcaterra, New Perspectives on Pragmatism and Analytic Philosophy, Rodopi, Amsterdam-Ney York, 2001, by Anna Boncompagni (pdf) Filipe Carreira da Silva, Mead and Modernity. Science, Selfhood and Democratic Politics, Lanham MD: Lexington Books 2008. By Anna M. Nieddu (pdf) George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of Education, Paradigm Publishers, 2008, edited and introduced by Gert Biesta and Daniel Tröhler. By Filipe Carreira da Silva. (pdf) J. R. Shook and J. A. Good, John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel, Fordham University Press, New York 2010, pp. 197, by Roberto Gronda. (pdf)
[peirce-l] The Peirce house at 4 Kirkland Place
Thanks to LinkedIn, I was able to locate my fellow Brandeisian, Jan Wald, who took his Ph.D. at the same time as I (1977). Wald had written his dissertation on mass terms, which was doubly supervised by Jean van Heijenoort at Brandeis and Helen Cartwright at Tufts. After getting his doctorate, Wald taught for a while at Middlebury College in Vermont, but then dropped out of sight of academia, I believe in the early 1980s (he's now an analyst specializing in medical devices for a major investment firm). As an aside, but Peirce-relevant, van Heijenoort's "Peirce" file contained nothing more by Charles than the entries from the Baldwin Dictionary "Modality", "'Necessary' and 'Necessity'", and "Vague", photocopies from Hartshorne & Weiss, and which, one might suppose, relate directly or indirectly to Wald's dissertation. None of Peirce's major publcations on algebraic logic occur in van Heijenoort's notes. For those of you who have read my book on van Heijennort, you might recall that Wald was van Heijenoort's housemate at the former Peirce house at 4 Kirkland Place. I'm hoping that Wald might be able to definitely answer the question as to whether or not van Heijenoort was ever aware of the Peirce association of that house. I'm still fairly certain that I learned about the Peirce association of that house directly from Willard Quine, and that van Heijenoort never mentioned it to me; and that Quine must have told me about it shortly after van Heijenoort died (in 1986), but before the Peirce Sesquicentennial conference at Harvard in September 1989, when Max Fisch's "Walk a Mile in Peirce's Shoes" was distributed to conference attendees. It should be interesting to get Wald's reply. So stay tuned. Irving H. Anellis Visiting Research Associate Peirce Edition, Institute for American Thought 902 W. New York St. Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis Indianapolis, IN 46202-5159 USA URL: http://www.irvinganellis.info - 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] Emergence, semiotic, Deacon and Peirce
Jason and list, Since i've already quoted myself in reference to Deacon's book, i might as well copy here the review i posted on Amazon.ca: Incomplete Nature If you have a deep desire to understand how life emerged from a nonliving material universe, and how sentience emerged from life, and human-style consciousness from sentience, then this book is for you. Deacon deploys the full range of concepts which have already been developed by writers such as Charles S. Peirce, Gregory Bateson, Maturana and Varela, Ilya Prigogine, and Stuart Kauffman to explain how physical principles can lead to biological principles and thence to the realm of psychology and even spirituality. But rather than merely summarize these contributions and add his own, Deacon builds his account of emergence from the ground up, beginning with the basic question: How is it that we find ourselves in a universe where things and actions have meaning and value for us, where intentions can make a physical difference? In the course of rethinking this kind of question, he fills in many of the gaps left open by previous accounts, and thus tells us a more complete and lucid story of emergence than anyone has done before -- which is ironic in a way, in view of his conclusion that living beings are radically incomplete, and consciousness emerges from this incompleteness. Some of us are content to fend off this kind of question with the belief that the Creator's purposes preceded the creation, and now pervade it in some mysterious way. But taking purposefulness for granted prevents us from getting to the bottom of it. Deacon appeals to perfectly ordinary experiences, informed by the purely physical concepts of energy and work, to explain how purpose could arise unintentionally -- spontaneously, but not instantaneously. He does find it necessary to introduce some new conceptual tools along the way. The most basic and essential, i think, are the concepts of "orthograde" and "contragrade" change; based on the relations between these, Deacon identifies several clearly differentiated stages of emergence, the most crucial being "morphodynamics" (which emerges from thermodynamic or "homeodynamic" processes) and "teleodynamics" (emergent from morphodynamic processes). There is no room here to define these terms (though Deacon provides a very helpful glossary). However, i can testify that one doesn't need to be a specialist or a scientist to follow Deacon's argument from step to step. And if we do, we have a much more lucid comprehension of where life and mind are coming from. On the other hand, even though i have been following the literature on emergence for a couple of decades now (including all the writers mentioned above and many more), i did find that from Chapter 5 (out of 17) onward, following Deacon's argument required some intense concentration. I'm sure that anyone who hasn't made that kind of effort would find the last few chapters full of impenetrable jargon; but Deacon has not introduced all these new terms just for the sake of being original or esoteric. My guess is that many of them are going to spread through the scientific community engaged with these questions, just as terms like "autocatalysis" and "autopoiesis" have spread, simply because they make sense of what has not been clear before. (At least i'm sure that Deacon's new conceptual tools will find uses in my own work on progress, which deals with a closely related inquiry.) Deacon's account is not an easy read, whether the reader is acquainted with the prior literature on emergence or not; it's more difficult than his 1997 classic, The Symbolic Species. But its scope is much broader, and i can testify that it succeeds in its ultimate aim, as expressed in Deacon's Epilogue. He points out there that the progress of science has given us mastery over "much of the physical world around and within us," but at the same time "alienated us from these same realms" (with devastating consequences). If we can learn something, through Deacon's book, from the community of philosophically and scientifically reflective inquiry, we can reverse this trend, just as life itself manages to reverse the thermodynamic trend toward equilibrium. We can outgrow our history of alienation and find ourselves "at home in the universe". Gary F. -Original Message- From: Khadimir [mailto:khadi...@gmail.com] Sent: January-12-12 9:09 PM Gary, Thank you for your detailed explanation and consideration. I have not read the book, and I took the terminology as just-coined neologisms. Thank you for the explanation, and I am following it as I am familiar with basic physics; my bachelor's is in science. I am a junior Dewey scholar working my way through Peirce, and thus am grateful for these explanations. I would be delighted to read that book, given this section. Best, Jason ---
