SUO: Pragmatic Maxim
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John F. Sowa wrote (Fri, 28 Jul 2000 10:41:45 EST):
> Again, I repeat a dictum by one of my favorite philosophers,
> C. S. Peirce, that the total meaning of any concept consists
> of all the implications that the concept has on our possible
> observations and actions.
Just for the record, what Peirce actually said, in one of his
more comprehensible versions of the "Pragmatic Maxim" was:
| Consider what effects that might conceivably
| have practical bearings you conceive the
| objects of your conception to have. Then,
| your conception of those effects is the
| whole of your conception of the object.
~~ Charles Sanders Peirce, 'The Maxim of Pragmatism', CP 5.438
It is common to miss the indexical character of the pronouns
in this statement, and to think that he said something about
"the conception" rather than something about "thy conception".
There is another version that speaks of "we" and "us", but it
changes only the poignancy, and not the point of this address.
Whether this currently most popular misreading arises from the
horror of relativism that most of us learned in the Academy --
a force apparently so overpowering that it leads us to deny,
formally speaking, the role of interpretive communities in the
very pictures of "what is" that they themselves will formulate --
and whether or not that was actually the lesson that any of us
was supposed to derive from obeying the dictum to "know thyself" --
I just hope that it will not be the ultimately persistent message.
The world did not go away when relativity came to physics,
and I do not believe we need to have fears about ontology.
I bring this up now, not just because it is a recurrent issue, anyway,
but because it is relevant to the nature of the interpreter that makes
judgments about category assignments in formulating and implementing
an ontology, and also to the quality of the inquiry that ensues when
there emerges a lack of consensus about them.
Jon
P.S. For this audience, it can be noted that the pragmatic maxim
is basically a "principle of representation", logically akin
to the "regular representations" and the "term models" of all
sorts of algebraic structures, from groups to lambda calculi.
My memory is dim, but I believe that theorems on the subject
of "Peirce Representations" are some of the few for which
the Peirces, B. or C., still retain credit in mathematics.
JA
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