[peirce-l] Re: Until later (was Re: The roots of speech-act theory in the New List)
Ben I've been there, even if for different reasons. You'll be welcome when you return. Cheers and all the best Arnold On 9/13/06, Jim Piat [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I know the feeling, Ben. I look forward to your return. All the best! Let me know if I can be of any practical help. Jim Piat - Original Message - From: Benjamin Udell To: Peirce Discussion Forum Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2006 4:14 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Until later (was Re: The roots of speech-act theory in the New List) Jim, list, This remains interesting, but, generally, this forum is too addictive for me! I have to get on with practical matters which are, at this point, getting over my head. So I'm unsubscribing for a few months. Thanks for people's interest, Gary, Joe, Jim P., Jim W.,Bernard, and any others, fordiscussing/arguing with me. More generally, keep peirce-l bustling. Best, Ben Udell http://tetrast.blogspot.com/ - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2006 3:50 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: The roots of speech-act theory in the New List Ben, You say, Saying that the NLC 'theory' of cognition (which seems to me no more a cognition theory than Peircean truth theory is an inquiry theory even though it references inquiry) is sufficient except when we talk about possibility, feasibility, etc., is -- especially if that list includes negation (you don't say) --to deny that there is an issue of cognizing in terms of alternatives to the actual and apparent, etc., even though then logical conceptions of meaning and implication become unattainable. (END) It is not asufficient theory. I see it as askingwhat are the most general elements ina process by which the mind forms propositions. The example is a simple case ofperceptual data. But, it is not a complete theory of knowledge. In fact, it is more of a chapter in the history of cognitive psychology. It is a logical description of a psychological process;some parts of which may be empirically established. (For instance, Peirce thinks it is questionable what the then current results of empirical psychology have established with respect to acts of comparison and contrast.) If the paper is coupled with some theses from the JSP series, itseems clear to me that a theory of cognition emerges that could be of interest to psycholinguists and cognitive scientists working in language formation and even speech-act theory. Does it handle all epistemic interests, propositional attitudes, modalities? No. But it is not a special science since the results uncovered are precisely the most general elements used in any inquiry.It is more nearly what the 1901 Baldwin entry suggests, namely, erkenntnislehre, a doctrine of elements. Peirce struggled with where to assign this study. Is it a part of logic or pre-logical? There doesn't seem to bemuch of the normative concern that later demarcates logic proper. But there is a law-like element that is presupposed in so far as one can only discover unity by introducing it. That transcendental point could easily mark a historical divide between naturalists such as Quine and static modelists such as Chomsky. In some sense, grammar is the issue, although generalized to the utmost. Both could take the spirit of the paper and do things, Chomsky in the specialized application to syntactic structures and transformational grammar, and Quine, in so far as the theory is empirically testable, as shedding some light on know Modern epistemology cannot even get off the ground with this NLC paper unless the enterprise is so naturalized that the theory (historical curiosity or not) is used to guide research in the relevant special sciences. The specific perceptual cognition and cognitive assertion under discussion meet none of the criteria for knowledge in the classical picture. The assertion this stove is black need neither be justified, true, or even believed. The paper, at least in part, is merely explanatory, if only insufficiently, of what is required to even begin the classical assessment. You say, But the point in philosophy is not rephrasability, but instead to understand the result and end of such procedures, in which the description of signs is a _means_ to _transformations_ of extension and intension, transformations which themselves are a means to represent real relationships. The research interest of smoothing and smoothly encoding cognitions into common convenient keys ormodes guides deductive maths of propositions, predicates, etc.; but does not guide philosophy, which is more interested in the corresponding decoding. Philosophy applies deductive formalisms but is no more merely applied deductive theory of logic than statistical theory were merely applied probability theory. (END) Well, I agree. It is not for nothing that normative science is structured the way it is in Peirce's architecture. The purpose of logical analysis, linguistic analysis, theory
[peirce-l] Re: reduction of the manifold to unity
Joe, Jim What Joe has said in his response to Jim of Sept 12, seems to reflect something that may have arisen from Peirce's early exposure to philosophy: his reading of Schiller's _Aesthetic Letters_. In writing up a report on cultural impacts in occupational health and safety, I found myself reading Schiller in order to get a grasp on the origins of the modern concept of culture, and recalled that Peirce had written something on Schiller during his early Harvard days (or before: I don't have acces to the _Writings_ right now, but I recall seeing something in one of the early volumes, and at Arisbe). In any case: perhaps what Joe has said here has to do with the relationship between learning, play, and (maybe?) what Peirce called Musement? Schiller, J.C.F. Von (1794/1910). Letters Upon The Aesthetic Education of Man. In Literary and philosophical essays: French, German and Italian. With introductions and notes . New York , Collier [c1910] Series: The Harvard classics, 32. It's also available on the Web, with a few minor typos.Just flying a kite, folks ... Cheers Arnold Shepperson --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Pragmatic inquiry == the love of learning
Jim, Gary, List Great comments, responses, and remarks all round. One of the great disappointments in my somewhat oddball academic career has been the experience of `teachers' who treat their work and their students as a sort of occupational hazard. I have found that there is an enormous wellspring of willingness, both learn and to get on with the _work_ of learning, when both the `teacher' and the `learner' (not post-modernist scare-quotes, BTW) find an area of new study in common. My experience was with the whole logical exposition of welfare economics (mentioned in a thread a few months back), which, although it's been around for half a centrury or more, has indicated that findings like Kenneth Arrow's are more than just a formal curiosity. To get the point, though: Peirce would understand, I believe, that it is the independence of the sunject-matter of what either the teacher or the learner may think about it, that makes learning a necessarily collective endeavour. When one faces a class that has been brought up to understand learning as mere means to an end (getting a job, getting a wife or husband, making a zillion Dollars, etc), then the teacher can only engage the students' interest in the subject-matter if the latter can demonstrably be shown to accomplish those kinds of ends. When Peirce decried the tendency for Universities to set themselves up as centres of teaching a research (_Reasoning and the Logic of Things_), he clearly saw that the distinction between teaching and learning had much to do with the nature of Truth: Truth is essntially the _task_ of bringing reality (of whatever grade) to light such that our reasoning about it can stand the test of becoming conduct. Unfortunately, much of the anticipated conduct that informs the contemporary university student has to with careers, marriage, wealth, and so on, and the `teacher' who can't make these wishes come true is doomed to find another career (or, as I have found to my dismay, a dyed-in-the-wool cynicism about learning in general). Enough for now. At least the few students I was able to work with in a form of co-operative learning, all got distinctions for their dissertations! Cheers Arnold Shepperson --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Epistemological Primacy in Peirce NLC
Steven On 9/8/06, you wrote: ... I will have to get myself an electronic version of the CP. AS: I got myself a copy from Intelex a few years back, and I am convinced that it's a product that, while not as indispensible as sliced bread, comes pretty close to that in the field of Peirce study. It's always good to have the printed CP available (and, thank Heavens, our University Library has the complete set, not very frequently borrowed, except by John Collier and myself, but THERE never the less), but the electronic version has the huge advatage of all such texts: when you need to cite, it's as easy as slicing bread! By all means get the Intelex edition - you'll not regret it. Cheers Arnold Shepperson --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Doctoral Defense
Vinicius What a fabulous group of scholars you have for your thesis defense!! Wish I could be there; just thinking of these and all the other names mentioned makes my mouth water. I look forward to subsequent discussion on the List ... Cheers Arnold Shepperson --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: MS 403 available at Arisbe
Joe, Wilfred I had a quick squizz at MS 403, and agree that it could be quite an important document in getting an idea of the combined continuity and growth of Peirce's thought. Thanks for doing this: I am at this moment taking a break from preparing an article on the contributions to social inquiry that Peirce's philosophical, semeiotic,and logical possible inquiries make possible, and this document (even if I don't cite it directly) does seem to clarify ways of showing reader only partly familiar with Peirce that he is definitely worth the further effort in the reading. BTW: the article in question is for a relatively new journal, _The Journal of Multicultural Discourses_, based at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. An earlier version by Keyan Tomaselli and I was sent back with a referee's request that the article say less about what Africans purportedly think about GW Bush's America, and a lot more about Peirce. I have been giving this a full go for the last week, and expect to be busy for another week or two yet: anybody who wants more Peirce, can have as much as I can give, and whatever else they can get from all the resources!! Hence the rather peculiarly personal relevance of your posting MS 403 to Arisbe, because this is a source I can pass on as part of the article's review of the change in peirce Scholarship resources as a result of the Internet. I had asked the journal's editor whether his university had had any contact with Charls Pearson's project, but haven't had a respone yet. Cheers Arnold Shepperson --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Whitehead Conference, Biosemiotics Gathering web addresses
Inna Great to have your input again. Were you off the list, or just lurking? cheers Arnold Shepperson On 7/17/06, Inna Semetsky [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello Jerry and Listlong time...to add to Jerry's post: Peirce was referenced at the Whitehead conference not only in philosophical papersbut also in the Physicssection--especially with regard to the sign's triadic nature and its valuefor quantum mechanics based on the logic of included middle.regards innaAt 08:23 AM 16/07/2006 -0400, Jerry LR Chandler wrote:To the list:In response to the query, the Whitehead Conference index is at www.sbg.ac.at/whiteheadconference/index2.htmlIt should be noted that I tried to access the site before composing thispost with out success.I presume that it is a temporary problem. The Biosemiotics site is:www.biosemiotics2006.orgCheersJerry---Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED]--No virus found in this incoming message.Checked by AVG Free Edition.Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.10.1 /389 - Release Date: 14/07/2006---Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] RE: The Age of Fallibility
Peter Nice to hear from you. I guess almost anybody who regularly reads English media will have heard of Soros. It seems that the servers at Google also have plenty of links to Soros-related stuff: my G-mail browser has supplied a whole lot of links! Cheers Arnold Shepperson --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Neuroquantology Journal
Ben, Patrck, List BU = Ben Udell AS = Arnold Shepperson BU: Peirce said that mathematics is the science which _draws_ necessary conclusions, as opposed to its being a science _of_ necessary conclusions. The science _of_ reasoning, necessary and otherwise, he called logic and placed it in philosophy. Peirce says that the science which _draws_ necessary conclusions is mathematics and includes (indeed begins with) mathematics _of_ logic. AS: Thanks for the correction, Ben. AS: Looks like I got to blathering a bit sooner than I had thought! Ben's quite right, of course, but I think that the corection does a lot to clarify what I was trying to get at, anyway. Cheers Arnold Shepperson --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Sinsign, Legisign, Qualisign - help!
Jean-Marc, Patrick Patrick has a point in that Peirce's categories are such that in representation the higher-order presupposes the lower (is that the way to use `presuppose, by the way?). Jean-Marc equally has a point in noting that Peirce became a `Three-Category Realist' in his later thinking. Both points seem to highlight the role of transitivity in Peirce's thought, and perhaps the more solid sources for understanding this may be found in his mathematical writings, I would guess. Also, the Logic Notebook perhaps has more pertinent material than the CP, the editorial dismemebrment of which is well enough known. Cheers Arnold Shepperson --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Peirce and Prigogine
Jerry, List JC: Jerry Chandler AS: Arnold Shepperson On 4/22/06, Jerry Chandler wrote: JC: Ipresuppose that most readers of this list will find these statements to clash with their philosophy of physics, the philosophy of genera. I can merely add that the symbol system of physics is not the sole symbol system and that the philosophy of physics is not the sole philosophy of science. The philosophy of the chemical sciences is vastly more complex than the philosophy of physics because it must posit quantitative relations among individuals, species and genera. It must provide a source of generative grammars, not merely genera. Such is Life Itself. AS: My reading of Peirce suggests that he was aware of the distinctions between such `grammars' and how much confusion arose among the philosophers of his time because they tended to take one of them (whether physical, chemical, biological, or whatever) as `defining' all the others. In Vol IV of the Collected Papers (and, I would guess, throughout the New Elements of Mathematics, a copy of Eisele's edition of which I would dearly love to get!) he goes to considerable lengths in exploring the role that the mathematics of transitive phenomena plays in grounding higher-order mathematical systems. Indeed, the importance of transitive phenomena in Peirce has recently been discussed briefly on the list. In short, we may well find that the very notion of a Symbol System involves transitivities, and that Peirce very thoroughly investigated this relation (as, of course, a species of the Logic of Relations!!). Cheers Arnold --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: beware of gmail filter
Joe I also discovered this a few days ago, but didn't say anything because I figured I was just being dumb ... Anyway: the G-mail spam filter is pretty powerful, so I'm making it a habit of checking it 2-3 times a week from now on, because it's easier to get the right stuff back from the spam box, than to spend whole hours at a time deleting spam from the inbox. Cheers Arnold On 3/12/06, Joseph Ransdell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you use Gmail beware of the spam filter.I just discovered that itmisrouted about a dozen peirce-l messages to the spam folder in the last month, and presumably a bunch more from before that time (which it hasalready deleted permanently)..I had not checked it before.Joe Ransdell--No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition.Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 268.2.1/278 - Release Date: 3/9/2006---Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: What is nothiing? (was, Introduction)
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 / shared knowledge and experiences. Best
[peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about?
Whoops! A small correction: I should have concluded by saying that I am UNABLE to say whether the students followed my example any better than before! AS --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Peircean prayer, was: Re: one list archive now working
Gary, List It's actually quite amusing to see how people are speaking of a `papradigm shift' in the universities, when the very concept of a `paradigm' is rooted in the question of what exemplars (i.e. paradigms) to employ in teaching the public about science. My take on this topic comes from understanding TS Kuhn (or more likely, the bandwagoners who liked to assume the label `Kuhnians') as not taking account of the distinction between teaching, research, and inquiry: Peirce definitely distinguishes between teaching and inquiry (the settlement of real doubt, learning) in the passage you followed up (okay, I got the mired bit wrong but it's the passage I had in mind: thanks) whereas the paradigm model doesn't. There is also a draft in the 1902 Carnegie Proposal where Peirce explicates on this in relation to the Economy of Research, that is worth looking up. In some respects, establishing universities as teaching institutions actually does a major disfavour to the institutions that are supposed to teach, the schools. My experience here has been that more and more of the responsibility for teaching the basics of intellectual life is being left to universities, while the schools become more and more focused on `life skills' and `vocational training'. The ability, and discipline required, to write clearly, which naturally entails a comparable ability and discipline to read clearly, is all but absent amongst the annual intake of freshers. Ever greater slices of the budget are being poured into Bridging Programmes and the like so that new students can at least begin to follow what their lecturers are showing them. We become a sort of follow-up school that tries to tidy up the mess left behind by a public schooling system that just does not seem to accomplish its mission. In this light, one can appreciate Peirce's ongoing attempts to get some public form of logic learning going, both in his trials at correspondence learning and through his association with the Lowell Institute. Teaching is based in logica utens; learning requires both a familiarity with, and the ability to extend, the logica docens of the subject-matter about which our doubts have arisen. By all means let the universities take on the paradigm model: long may the resistance flourish!! But to talk of this as a `paradigm shift' is, to me, already to hand the victory to one's opponents before the battle lines have even been drawn. Cheers Arnold On 1/23/06, Gary Richmond [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Arnold,Thanks for the reference. It reminded me that I wanted to look up exactly where Peirce had made the distinction between 'institutions of learning' and 'institutions for teaching' and found it here. CP 5.5833. . . . [I]t is necessary to note what is essentially involved in the Will to Learn. The first thing that the Will to Learn supposes is a dissatisfaction with one's present state of opinion. There lies the secret of why it is that our American universities are so miserably insignificant. What have they done for the advance of civilization? What is the great idea or where is [the] single great man who can truly be said to be the product of an American university? The English universities, rotting with sloth as they always have, have nevertheless in the past given birth to Locke and to Newton, and in our time to Cayley, Sylvester, and Clifford. The German universities have been the light of the whole world. The medieval University of Bologna gave Europe its system of law. The University of Paris and that despised scholasticism took Abelard and made him into Descartes. The reason was that they were institutions of learning while ours are institutions for teaching. In order that a man's whole heart may be in teaching he must be thoroughly imbued with the vital importance and absolute truth of what he has to teach; while in order that he may have any measure of success in learning he must be penetrated with a sense of the unsatisfactoriness of his present condition of knowledge. The two attitudes are almost irreconcilable [emphasis added] I assume this is the same passage you had in mind (you wrote mired in sloth whereas the above has it as rotting with sloth but it seems to refer to the same matter). So this shows Peirce once again to have analyzed an issue which is only now beginning to get adequate attention. As Richard Hake wrote a few days ago: In their [Barr and Tagg (1995)] landmark wake-up call to higher education From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education, they wrote: A paradigm shift is occurring in American higher education. Under the traditional, dominant 'Instruction Paradigm' colleges are institutions that exist to *provide instruction. Subtly but profoundly, however, a 'Learning Paradigm' is taking hold, whereby colleges are institutions that exist to *produce learning*. This shift is both needed and wanted, and it changes everything. If only the President of Harvard, or the trustees of the
