ONT Logic Of Vague Expressions (What's LOVE got to do with it?)
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Stan Salthe wrote (SS):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):
JA: By "autonomous external system", I mean an object system that is being regarded,
and to a pertinent approximation usefully so, as a system in which we ourselves,
as "agents of construal" (interpreters & observers) are negligible participants.
Is that what you mean by "system modeled externally"?
SS: Yes.
SS: I would say that you are taking an internalist perspective, trying to get at
generativity, which is in general not accessible to typical externalist (global,
fully explicit, totalizing, atemporal) discourse.
JA: Not sure. I always tend to become a bit suspicious of any discourse, whether my own
or others, that becomes too littered with these insuperable suffixes "-ism" and "-ist",
and I do not think that any tried and true pragmatician such as I keep trying to be would
rush to accept any such label as either "externalist" or "internalist".
SS: Well, I am just (as one interested in probing the internalist predicament) roughly
classifying what you are saying into the exo/endo dichotomy. Internalism is very
broad, with many previous threads leading into it, so there can be more than one
position concerning it. Basically, it is the attempt to model systems as if the
modeler were inside them, and so is prohibited many of the usual scientific tricks,
like measuements from several instances or locales, or global models (as in classical
thermodynamics).
I guess that I just don't get it. We commonly assume a cosmos that all of us are "inside",
but in practice we very often have to work with isolated systems that are "outside" of us,
but inside the universe, the same universe that we are inside. The "in"teresting question
for me is how do we come to construe these "ex"ternal systems from out of our "ex"perience.
JA: Side question: Are you using "generativity" in the sense of Chomsky?
SS: You decide -- I mean by a generative system or situation
one from which new, unpredictable situations may arise.
I call this "reality".
SS: So, I think it is likely more general than Chomsky
because, I suppose, he thinks he knows all the rules.
No, I cannot imagine that he would aver this,
even about the rules of any natural language.
Humorous hyperbole?
SS: A truly generative system generates new rules
along with new permutations on the old ones.
Well, there is always this distinction to be made between
the rules that reality really follows, that may have been
fixed from the beginning, for all we know, and the rules
that we know that explain some portion of our ration of
reality, that are generally forever de-&-re-generating.
SS: It is not, I think, clear that in this discourse the kind of choice you refer to can be
represented. Different choices would not, I think, be available to the system AS choices.
"Hints of forms", OK, "confusion", OK, "conception" and "birth", yes, "hints" perhaps. So,
"distinction" -- definitely not. No distinctions would be available internally in my view.
Perhaps I just do not understand this way of talking.
We are born into experience and borne into experience.
There are so many distinctions that arise in experience,
pain and pleasure, and so on, and so on, ..., and sooner
or later some of us will construe or derive these other
distinctions, like external and internal, and who knows
what all, for who knows what purpose within experience.
SS: Distinctions are pre-eminently externalist things. They are too crisp for vague internality.
Vague groping guided by tendencies, OK. Fuzzy distinctions might be more believable.
JA: Again, I am not sure what all is being suggested here -- I was hoping
to give up the discussion of fuzzy concepts to a more disentangled thread,
as I threaded to do with that old post on "Fuzzy Stuff" -- but I think that
these issues are what drives me to use various families and sundry samples
of triadic sign relations as my conceptual framework of choice. Here, the
"object domain" contains any old thing that we purport to make an object of
"discussion and thought" (DAT), the domains of signs and interpretant signs
contain the signs and mental ideas that we use to talk about and to think
about the objects of the object domain.
SS: Well, I am suggesting that we do not yet have a vague logic
with which to deal with generative situations.
I am supposed to ask "who's we?"
JA: What is NPI?
SS: The negentropy theory of information. That is, information is a reduction
in possibilities ontologically, or of uncertainty epistemologically.
JA: Gosh, I feel so dense! "What the heck is the 'P' for?", asked Princess Principia.
Negative Probability Integral?
SS: Oh! Sorry again! -- negentropy Principle of information.
SS: I note further that 'general' can only extend its hegemony IF
'vagueness' differentiated more plentifully into a bigger tree.
So it is not so dichotomous with 'vagueness' as one might think.
It is its backward projection.
JA: I am not sure if we are talking about the same things by means of these words.
Is backward projection the same thing as inverse projection, id est, a fiber?
SS: What I mean is that generality is constructed from particular instances,
gradually uniting fewer and fewer properties of more and more instances.
But instances themselves were developed out of a vague precursor, by
differentiation among them during their development. Thus, as Peirce
suggests (somewhere) generality is a kind of explicit model of vagueness.
So, what I was saying is that if a given vagueness developed into a greater
tree of definite descendents, then the generality that can be constructed
with respect to these will have greater hegemony.
JA: Give me some more clues and I will try to find this. I do not have the CD of CP yet --
maybe some party on the Arisbe list will perk up and help us find it?
SS: I was afraid you wuld ask for chapter and verse. Peirce was discussing different ways
things can be indeterminate (this is the keyword, I suppose). The discussion was cited
in one or more of six different books -- Almeder, 1980; Buchler, 1951; Esposito, 1980;
Merrell, 1991; Wiener, 1958; and/or Raposa, 1989. I am sure you know most of these (any
you don't I will cite in more detail). I should say also, that the developmental twist is my
own contribution (Development and Evolution: Complexity and Change in Biology, 1993, MIT Press.)
Did you look at the quotes I posted on the "Determination" thread about "general" and "vague"?
Jon Awbrey
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