ONT Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry
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Joseph Ransdell wrote:
>
> Jon Awbrey wrote:
>
> > These are the stick-figure versions of my long-time (coming? gone?)
> > project to integrate logic and information theory, which, like all my
> > best ideas, I later discovered had "already been chewed" (ABC'd) by CSP,
> > who lectured on this topic that he called "Information Theory" at Harvard,
> > in 1865! Oh, Per Via, a recent reading of John Collier's draft article
> > on "Information" for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is tempting
> > me to start using his moniker of "distinction theory" for the whole shebang,
> > which, of course, has its echoes of Spencer-Brown's 'Laws of Form' (LOF).
> >
> > http://www.newcastle.edu.au/department/pl/Staff/JohnCollier/information/information.html
>
> Peirce also did something which looks like an adumbration of the
> beginnings of an information theory in a published work in 1867,
> "Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension," treating information
> as breadth (or extension) times depth (or comprehension), then
> following that up with definitions of various logical conceptions
> (generalization, induction, abstraction, specification, supposition,
> determination, restriction, descent) in terms of increase or decrease
> of information, the whole thing being based on the 1867 category paper.
> Okay, so who reads the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and
> Sciences, where it originally appeared. But it has been readily available
> since the early 1930's in volume 2 of the Collected Papers, and in view of
> the all the raving about Frege's discovery of the Sinn-Bedeutung distinction --
> which Peirce, in effect, traces back to Aristotle via dozens of other versions
> of what I take to be substantially the same distinction -- one would think the
> material in that paper would deserve some sort of mention by historians of logic.
I know, I know, I find it utterly shocking.
I have to admit that, dependent as I was
on 'Collected Papers' and other hacked up
anthologies, that I did not get the full
significance of Peirce's earliest work,
even before 1865, and that I had bought
this idea of a "radical staging" in his
work whereby he did not get sophisticated
until late in life -- that is, until the
'Chronological Edition' started coming out --
when I discovered, much to my edification
and surprise, that most of late work was
a kind of return, with a few twists for
sure, Möbius-like, to his first and some
of his best ideas.
> But I couldn't find any reference to it in John Collier's information article
> that you refer to, nor do I recall anybody ever referring to it for any reason.
> Is it all so far off the point as that?
Well, that was a draft that John sent out for comment,
and so I will pass on your reflections to him, but it
is our constant vigil to learn what each other knows
until one day, just maybe, it amounts to something.
> Maybe it is because it is done prior to the discovery of the notation for
> the logic of relatives, but one would think it would be adaptable to the
> latter, if there was anything promising in it. By 1867 Peirce almost
> certainly did understand that the task was to find such a notation
> and I would have thought the rationale for polyadic predicates is
> already laid out in the 1867 categories article. But maybe what
> he says about information simply is not promising enough or just
> wrong-headed. I decided long ago to devote another lifetime to
> the concept of information in order to have a little time to
> think about other things in this one, so I don't know and
> can't even hazard a guess.
What can I tell you? To my way of thinking the Big Muddy of Logic
has been flowing in regress since circa 1870. People will imagine
that I am hyperbolic, and that will give me time to demonstrate it.
Actually, Peirce's conception of information, that forms a continuing source
of amazement to me how he developed it all from purely logical considerations,
is in principle, however roughly polished, a more admantine paragon of the art
than the ones that we routinely, all too routinely use today, ab initio solving
many of the problems to which later thinkers keep on adverting, like the need to
coordinate quantitative weighs and means with qualitative measures of reasoning.
> But what do you think, Jon? Is it another case of someone later reinventing
> the wheel, so why mention Peirce -- invoking the usual principle of "Yes,
> but what has he done for us recently?" Or is it just not worth mentioning,
> or what? Does it have any relation to any of the stuff that John Collier
> talks about?
On jugera ...
Jon Awbrey
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