Re: [peirce-l] Proemial: On The Origin Of Experience
I agree with that, Steven. We forget how many bad paths Einstein went down before he relied on a friend for key input when working on General Relativity. It's all in his notebooks from the time. John Professor John Collier Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal Durban 4041 South Africa T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031 email: colli...@ukzn.ac.za>>> On 2012/03/13 at 08:38 AM, in message <5a506354-b312-4ebf-b5c9-7ee33401a...@iase.us>, Steven Ericsson-Zenith wrote: Thanks John. If the right question is asked and understood, then the answer is readily apparent if the data that confirms or denies it is accessible. In effect, the answers are all out there, we need only craft the right question. Scientific interpretation of data is but a process of question refinement and this can be generalized to all forms of "interpretation." Contrary to the common idea that interpretation is some posterior act. When we have the answer, we tend to forget the paths that either failed or were incomplete on our way to it. With respect, Steven -- Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering http://iase.info On Mar 12, 2012, at 1:58 AM, John Collier wrote: > > > > > Professor John Collier > Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal > Durban 4041 South Africa > T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 > F: +27 (31) 260 3031 > email: colli...@ukzn.ac.za>>> On 2012/03/06 at 11:03 PM, in message > <4a39e6c5-939f-49ba-bc6b-8af976028...@iase.us>, Steven Ericsson-Zenith > wrote: > > I'm not sure I would say that the Mars lander computational analysis of data > is "interpretation." It seems to me to be a further representation, although > one filtered by a machine imbued with our intelligence. Interpretation would > be the thing done by scientists on earth. > > As a former planetary scientist, I would agree in general with this, but I > also experienced new data that pretty much implied directly (along with other > well-known principles) that lunar differentiation had occurred. (Even then, > scientists had to interpret the results, but they were clear as crystal > relative to the question.) I relied on much less direct data (gravity > evidence and some general principles of physics and geochemistry) to argue > for the same conclusion. My potential paper was scooped, and I hadn't even > graduated yet. Both Harvard and MIT people in the field found my paper "very > interesting" but lost complete interest when I was retrospectively scooped by > firmer evidence. The moral is that nothing in science beats direct evidence, > even the most appealing hypothesis. Nonetheless, your book sound interesting. > > Regards, > John > > Please find our Email Disclaimer here-->: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/disclaimer > Please find our Email Disclaimer here: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/disclaimer/ - 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] Proemial: On The Origin Of Experience
Professor John Collier Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal Durban 4041 South Africa T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031 email: colli...@ukzn.ac.za>>> On 2012/03/06 at 11:03 PM, in message <4a39e6c5-939f-49ba-bc6b-8af976028...@iase.us>, Steven Ericsson-Zenith wrote: I'm not sure I would say that the Mars lander computational analysis of data is "interpretation." It seems to me to be a further representation, although one filtered by a machine imbued with our intelligence. Interpretation would be the thing done by scientists on earth. As a former planetary scientist, I would agree in general with this, but I also experienced new data that pretty much implied directly (along with other well-known principles) that lunar differentiation had occurred. (Even then, scientists had to interpret the results, but they were clear as crystal relative to the question.) I relied on much less direct data (gravity evidence and some general principles of physics and geochemistry) to argue for the same conclusion. My potential paper was scooped, and I hadn't even graduated yet. Both Harvard and MIT people in the field found my paper "very interesting" but lost complete interest when I was retrospectively scooped by firmer evidence. The moral is that nothing in science beats direct evidence, even the most appealing hypothesis. Nonetheless, your book sound interesting. Regards, John Please find our Email Disclaimer here: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/disclaimer/ - 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] "Community of Inquiry": maybe incorporated in Royce?
At 06:20 PM 2011/11/02, Terry Bristol wrote: Greg I take your point. The difficulty that needs to be resolved is, given that we can and do disagree, how is it that we come to tentative consensus and as Peirce and Royce both project that we can eventually come to a common understanding of the universe. The Kuhnian argument which should not be taken to preclude either a local or global consensus simply presents the difficulty. What is most important in Kuhn's version (and it is prominent in (pragmatist) Quine as well) is that there are no 'basic statements' evidence that is neutral between perspectives. The existence/reality of neutral basic statements was central to the positivist representation of the scientific process in other words that 'the evidence' would 'speak for itself' and adjudicate between alternative hypotheses (and perspectives). The current display of republicans and democrats 'talking past each other' is a common display of the lack of neutral evidence. One way this has been discussed is in terms of how to compare different hypotheses, different theories. If theories and the evidence that they 'see' (can make sense of) are incommensurable then we have an apparently unsolvable problem in accounting for agreement. This difficulty leads many back to a positivist attitude a sort of naive realism where everything that we see is common and neutral. But this doesn't work and is certainty not helpful in the actual process, in the trenches of debate. It leads to characterizations of those with whom you disagree as being ignorant, irrational disingenuous and so forth. I think that the pragmatic theory of knowledge/understanding resolves the question, but it would be inappropriate to try to lay it out here. My soon to be completed book 'supposedly' deals with all this and lays out the implications of the pragmatic resolution. Anyone want to critique the readers draft in December? Hi Terry, I argued in my dissertation, Revolutionary Progress in Science: The Problem of Semantic Commensurability (1984) that Kuhnian problems are typically, if not always, pragmatic (Pragmatic incommensurability, PSA 84, P. D. Asquith and P. Kitcher (eds) (East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association, 1984): 146-153.). The different meanings come from different expectations different sides have, and there evaluation of the results of experiments allow these to be maintained. The differing evaluations depend on implicit (tacit) presuppositions. The route to resolution is to tease out where these presuppositions differ, make them explicit, and render them into a common language (e.g., affine geometry in the case of relativity versus Newtonian mechanics). It is basically a Peircean work, but in 1984 I did not want to embroil myself in the widely differing interpretations of Peirce that were prevalent but inimical to my treatment (e.g., Putnam and Rescher in their idiosyncratic ways). I've been returning to some of the technical aspects of the required underlying continuity between differing paradigms treating the same phenomena that "float" on tacit presuppositions recently, but it isn't my most urgent interest right now. I only published one chapter of my dissertation as I got side-tracked by applications of information theory and statistical mechanics in biology in 1981, and this has been my main focus since then. John Professor John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031 - 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] community of inquiry
At 07:13 AM 2011/11/02, Terry Bristol wrote: I think that it might be helpful to explore the meanings of: Community of inquiry and Community of interpretation I think that these are very close if not the same. The aim of inquiry in pragmatism is no longer knowledge in the mechanical sense logic-mathematical, where there are no real qualitative differences or advances in HOW we understand reality. The logico-mathematical model of the Logical Positivists saw each advance in knowledge as a generalization over the previous knowledge. This was codified as the Correspondence Principle but understood alternatively as 'advance as generalization' versus 'advance as a qualitative improvement in our understanding' (viz the latter being qualitatively better was logic-mathematically incommensurable with the former). So the eventual end of the community of inquiry would be the fully agreed upon understanding or interpretation of reality. In Peirce, at least, I am pretty sure that this is an ideal that may well not be reached "eventually". Peirce, of course, ties the notion of truth to this ideal. Joe Ransdell argued (convincingly for me) that this notion of truth serves as a regulative principle, not a definition. In my opinion Putnam (among others, but perhaps most famously) takes the definition side, and rejects metaphysical realism as a consequence. Peirce, of course, was a metaphysical realist, so either he committed a philosophical howler, or else he did not mean the convergent point of inquiry to define truth. I also think it is too weak, in the case of Peirce, to limit the convergence to an agreed upon understanding or interpretation. It is crucial that the advance is qualitative, since as Dewey emphasized, the search/inquiry was for the 'better' understanding of 'how we should live' and that was an advance in an understanding of the good. Real, meaningful knowledge in the pragmatist program was always 'potentially beneficial' to someone's life, and for Dewey potentially beneficial in 'the construction of the good.' (Viz We being the little beavers bringing forth the large structures of the universe.) Peirce doesn't talk much about the good, but he does think that inquiry should be guided by practical consequences. That doesn't mean that we have to like them, even if we revise our theories so that we accept them as following from our theories. I think it is overly optimistic to think that the world is good, ultimately. Regards, John -- Professor John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031 - 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
