ONT What Is Pragmatic Thinking?
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Howard,
I sense that one of our difficulties understanding each other may involve
a question of just what a pragmatic philosophy of the Peircean persuasion
actually is. For instance, I have noted, but do not yet quite understand,
a contrast that you make to pose between the way that a typical physicist
thinks, or perhaps is supposed to think, and the way that one I typically
call a "pragmatician" thinks, or ought to think. In an effort to clarify
that aspect of the problem, I will try to set out a more positive account
of what it is, as exactly as my rough and ready description can render it,
that constitutes "pragmatic thinking", that is, of this particular stripe.
If you seek the rule that a pragmatic thinker follows, then the name for
that would be the "Pragmatic Maxim". Now this maxim is an abstract rule,
and so there are, and will be more, many splintry ways of formulating it.
Peirce gave five or six among the set that I have studied most carefully,
but I think that it satisfices to begin with this, my own favorite motto:
| 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
Here is the context of this version, which also gives another variant:
| Pragmaticism was originally enounced in the form of a maxim, as follows:
| 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.
|
| I will restate this in other words, since ofttimes one can thus eliminate
| some unsuspected source of perplexity to the reader. This time it shall be
| in the indicative mood, as follows: The entire intellectual purport of any
| symbol consists in the total of all general modes of rational conduct which,
| conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances and desires,
| would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol.
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, 'Collected Papers', CP 5.438
Here is an incidental exegesis that I rendered on this maxim on another occasion:
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg00645.html
To avert a host of other potential misreadings,
it might be noted that, for Peirce, a 'concept'
or a 'conception' is a special type of 'symbol'.
I will discuss a few of the logical implications
and practical consequences of this maxim as we go.
Jon Awbrey
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