ONT Fixions Of Suspended Incredulity (FOSI)
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Howard,
An extenuous aside on the three points of your mention of fiction:
HP: Evolution, life, and learning all depend on languages, the similar and different
natures of which are the subject of much of our OCA discussions. The power of
genetic language is that it allows the construction of molecules that never
existed before, and consequently also the construction of novel organisms.
The power of natural language is that it allows construction of ideas
that never existed before, and consequently also the construction of
fiction. That is, stories that do not correspond to any real
physical events.
HP: Mathematics and logic have evolved (culturally) from natural language and they both have
inherited the power to construct fictional forms, that is, novel symbolic structures that
do not correspond to any real physical structures. It is in this sense that the empiricist
is skeptical of (i.e., does not trust) any linguistic, mathematical, and logical constructions,
no matter how precise, unambiguous, elegantly, or "reasonably" constructed.
HP: The only dependable test I know for distinguishing fiction from reality
boils down to a generalized Hertzian test. In fact, that is what I would
define as an empirical test for any linguistic, mathematical or logical form
or construction. Mere pattern recognition, perception, detection, or observation
is not enough.
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Subj: Re: ification
Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 16:16:02 -0500
From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
To: Stand Up Ontology <standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>
CC: [Peirce Subgroup]
JA: Just enough time to insert a genealogical note:
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/b/bentham.htm
JA: Bentham's "Theory of Fictions" begat (paraphrastically)
Schönfinkel's "Bausteine" and this begat (independently)
Church's "Lambda Calculus" and this begat (in good time)
McCarthy's "Lisp" and all the rest is AI and IEEE ...
JA: By way of stuffing the e-lectural ballot boxes just a little bit better
I will attach here some bits of an ongoing dialectric that a few of the
denizens of the Peirce List, most especially Tom Gollier and yours truly,
have been carrying on intermittently for quite some time now, regarding
this most atmospheric of all topics of our current concern, to wit, the
question of hypostatic electricity, of how or whether it can ever stick.
JA: This will also serve to throw a new synonym into the mix: "subjectal abstraction".
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Subj: The Fixion of Belief
Date: Wed, 24 May 2000 23:26:10 -0400
From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
To: Peirce Discussion Forum <peirce-l@lyris.acs.ttu.edu>
| Well, I've been waiting, I was sure
| we'd meet between the trains we're waiting for
| I think it's time to board another
| Please understand, I never had a secret chart
| to get me to the heart of this
| or any other matter
| Well he talks like this
| you don't know what he's after
| When he speaks like this,
| you don't know what he's after.
|
| Leonard Cohen, "The Stranger Song"
Joe Ransdell wrote (JR):
Tom Gollier wrote (TG):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):
TG: We begin with the distinction between "belief" and "knowledge".
I characterized that as an exclusive disjunction (or at least an
inclusive disjunction). You could start of with an implication
in one direction or the other, but that would only shorten the
analysis, not change it. And, my objection to Jon's tack --
and what I take to be Joe's objection when he writes:
JR: Well, I don't think the reform of usage
of philosophically important terms is
a part of the task.
TG: ... is that simply doing away with the distinction will not work.
TG: Thus, when Jon writes:
JA: ... the concepts of belief and knowledge utterly collapse into one.
TG: or
JA: ... seeming, but only seeming, to put a space between belief and knowledge.
TG: or
JA: ... the "grafting" or the "grifting", of the augmented sense of authority
that just about everyone, pre-reflectively, accords to the word "knowing"
over and above the duties of the syntax granted to "believing", is due
exactly to the anticipated sense of a forthcoming assent ...
JA: You'll excuse me if I go back to what I actually said, lest I utterly forget it:
JA: In other words, for the admittedly abstract and imaginary case of a singular
"individual", prescinded away, in our all too active imaginations, from each
and every reference by and to other interpreters and other observers, including,
if you can imagine it, every one of my all too present references to that all too
detached individual, who nonetheless happens, for all of that, to be conceived as
a pragmatic thinker, the concepts of belief and knowledge utterly collapse into one.
JA: It is only when we re-introduce into our considerations what was never really absent
in the first place, the embedding and the interacting fields of one, several, or a
vast plurality of interpretive communities from which we tried, but probably failed,
to imagine the "singular" individual being extracted for the sake of this argument --
it is only then that the moment of conceptual collapse is broken up and the state
of semeiotic condensation is utterly dispersed, seeming, but only seeming, to
put a space between belief and knowledge.
JA: Thus, as I said, there arises an additional breaking of the sphereful symmetry --
whether it is spontaneous or not will be the question of another afternoon, say,
Tuesday, if I'm in the mood -- when and if there come to be at least three persons
in the room, or in the Cosmos, as the case may be. In that case, I do add something
to "X believes S" by saying to you that "X knows S", to wit, I adduce all of the
extra implications of the statement "I believe S, too".
JA: Thus, I would be willing to speculate that the "derivation", as they say,
the "grafting" or the "grifting", of the augmented sense of authority that
just about everyone, pre-reflectively, accords to the word "knowing" over
and above the duties of the syntax granted to "believing", is due exactly
to the anticipated sense of a forthcoming assent, in other words, to the
introjected security of a promisory pre-confirmation, that comes from
thinking that another person is almost bound to second your motion,
and thereby to confer on one the status of a testimonial witness,
in etymology, a middle third party, whose grasping is the essence
of wit, as the Old Joker Aristotle says.
JA: Okay, I know that I tend to write overly extended and extenuated sentences,
hedged with thickets of prefatory qualifications, if I think that they are due,
but, really!, merely clipping off the first few twigs or the last few flourishes
is no way to render the prefatory fat into a clarified sop or a pragmatic SOP,
and, hey!, that's no way to get down to the upshot of this or any other matter!
JA: Let me try to express what I think is "essential" here in another way, even if
I have to use a language that is not really my personal favorite medium, namely,
the language of Peirce's Categories.
JA: Digression. The reason why I am not so comfortable using these concepts is that
I've seen so many bad effects come of their use in the years since Peirce wrote.
In the hands of their Old Master, Peirce's Categories are a deft tool indeed --
I will not contest that -- but in the workshops of people who are not by nature
or training relational thinkers, they can lend themselves to a brand of rampant,
wanton essentialism gone wild. Now, e-ist or anti-e-ist, neither am I. It is
likely that there are many genuine essences that are involved in the make-up of
the Cosmos -- I just don't happen to know of any for sure, though I have seriously,
if a little bit serially, entertained the possibility of many different ingredients
of this basic kind. By the way, I am personally more likely to use the mathematical
term "invariant" or the Platonic terms "form" and "idea" when I do contemplate any
such candidate essences, but never mind all that now.
JA: With those reservations in mind -- and more if I stop to think about it,
so let me not stop, just yet -- I might say that what I'm after here is
the "Quality" or the "Firstness" of the states of mind that are commonly
and un-self-consciously described by the dual terms, "doubt" and "belief".
One way of approaching, in one's imagination of ideal possibilities, such
purified and rarefied qualities as these, is to entertain, before the mind's
eyes only, the normally ridiculous fiction of an "isolated individual" --
at least I, for one, have always considered it, since out of my sophomoric
solipsist days, "a risible fixion", even if there be others who do not.
JA: Now, the exploitation of fictions like these, even if toward a respectable purpose,
makes me feel just a little bit nervous, if not actually guilty -- if you say that
this renders both my anxieties and my conscience purely imaginary, then I have no
actual evidence to contradict it -- but I can alleviate my burden to some degree
by pointing to the faults of others, so much more respectable than me. Indeed,
the reputed "hard sciences", along with logic, math, and computer science are
as rife as they can be with whole species and diverse populations of fictive
entities. In physics, for example, there is an entire class of frequently
employed strategies for analyzing complex phenomena into series of components,
that turn on positing ideal entities, like chargeless or massless point particles,
so-called "bare constituents" or "naked elementals", then successively adding more
realism to them on account of their quantum interactions and relativistic relations
with all the other entities in the universe, until one arrives, by this layered look
manner of fashion, at the "fully dressed" particle, with "effective attributes" that,
mirabile dictu, correspond more or less closely to those that are observed under the
natural conditions. Now, everybody in the field pretty well understands that this
whole genre of likely stories, of "how the e-le-phantom got its mass", for example,
is all just one big put-up job, a conceptual tool for "analysis by reconstruction
and synthesis", but as long as everybody understands that, and realizes the near
necessity of alternative forms of reconstruction, it appears to serve them well.
I do not think that I have to belabor the role of ideal entities in mathematics,
and I do not even want to go into how much of Bentham's "theory of fictions",
and its modern cousins, the technologies of "paraphrasis" and the logics of
"combinators", are currently of rather avid interest in computer science.
JA: So I guess I can be excused -- at least, I excuse myself -- for daring to
speak of the "isolated individual", at least, so guardedly, as a "fixion".
And it is for this fixion, and this fixion only, that a state of belief
and a state of knowledge, that is, a state of minimal uncertainty as to
whether a given predicate applies to a given subject, collapse into one.
Beyond that, all bets are off. Maybe I should say that all bets are on,
in the sense of being uniformly equally likely, until such time as new
information comes in, as to how other observant interpreters, including
one's subsequent reflective selves, happen to see the issue in question.
TG: ... my impression is that "knowledge" as anything more than or other than "belief" is simply
being denied. Perhaps that's not a correct interpretation, and I certainly think it would
be a mistake on the order of saying science has proven the sun doesn't come up in the east.
As far as I know it still does, and I think there's still a distinction to be drawn between
"belief" and "knowledge".
JA: Well, I won't bring up that nasty business about Copernicus and all --
that would probably be judged almost as impertinent as Galileo was ...
TG: Thus, in trying lay the argument out logically, I took Jon as saying "knowledge"
was somehow subordinate to or contained in, a claim appended to, what is actually
"belief." And, my argument in that regard is that the opposite implication is true
as well, that "belief" is subordinate to or contained in, a claim appended to, what
is actually "knowledge." We are not talking about two things which are actually
just one of them (the light which is both light and darkness). It is fine to talk
about the "knowledge" claims being grafted onto what is "belief" (although I think
that rather dead-looking horse has been beaten on for sometime now) as long as we
also talk about the "belief" claims being grafted onto what is "knowledge."
The two are the same, while the distinction remains.
TG: To come at it another way, I would say "belief" or the "fixing of beliefs" as
Peirce discusses them is not given enough credit. In the "Fixation of Belief"
Peirce writes with regard to the method of authority:
TG, quoting CP 5.380:
CSP: | In judging this method of fixing belief, which may be called the method of authority,
| we must, in the first place, allow its immeasurable mental and moral superiority to
| the method of tenacity. Its success is proportionately greater; and, in fact, it
| has over and over again worked the most majestic results. The mere structures of
| stone which it has caused to be put together -- in Siam, for example, in Egypt,
| and in Europe -- have many of them a sublimity hardly more than rivaled by
| the greatest works of Nature. And, except the geological epochs, there
| are no periods of time so vast as those which are measured by some
| of these organized faiths. If we scrutinize the matter closely,
| we shall find that there has not been one of their creeds which
| has remained always the same; yet the change is so slow as to
| be imperceptible during one person's life, so that individual
| belief remains sensibly fixed. For the mass of mankind, then,
| there is perhaps no better method than this. If it is their
| highest impulse to be intellectual slaves, then slaves they
| ought to remain.
TG: This says to me that "fixing beliefs" is at least a matter of fixing them for
a person's lifetime, if not for a civilization's entire existence, and who knows,
perhaps eventually for all time. Granted science has a different method of fixing
beliefs, but I assume it does not thereby answer to a different standard of what
it is to fix beliefs. If that's what we're talking about, then to preface any
assertion of such a thing with an air or hint of tentativeness about it is ...
Well, I don't know, how could I put the discrepancy involved politely?
It may start off that way, but that's about as far as it goes.
TG: On a personal level -- and I really dislike, not being a scientist, saying
anything about science -- there just isn't this world of things I just believe,
small as it might be, and a world of things I know. There is only one world.
Beyond that is darkness, or perhaps it fades into darkness. This is not to
say that what I know doesn't or hasn't changed, but it is an attempt to give
a reasonable expression to the difficulties involved with such changes, to
the havoc they can wreak on a person's life and the total transformations
they can create. In unifying the distinction we must express what makes
"knowledge belief" in the sense it can change as well as "belief knowledge"
in the sense of just how fixed it is, and there's a serious deception involved
in saying I only "believe" or "accept" such things as if they were anything less
than the only kind of objective reality I will ever know.
JA: I had as lief get some dormitive virtu now.
I accept, I believe, I know that I need it.
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Subj: Varieties of Abstraction
Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2000 01:23:31 -0400
From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
To: Tom Gollier <TGollier@aol.com>
Tom Gollier wrote (TG):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):
TG: I knew there was no sense getting carried away until
you'd had a chance to straighten out the context, and
your mathematical orientation, which is not foreign to
Peirce's either, was clear in our previous exchanges on
the list. But I don't think mathematicians are to be
trusted in this regard; not from any moral flaw in
their characters but because they're treating this
subject of generalization within an abstract realm,
and hence they feel no need or compulsion to make
a distinction between the two.
JA: For me, generalization begins in a fairly concrete realm --
I take "concrete" to mean "grown together", suggesting the
concrescence of attributes or the fusion of features that
go to constitute a definite, particulate, and vivid object --
the action passes through a series of mental affections or
cognitive impressions -- the only place where such a passage
is possible without actually destroying the original object --
toward a conceptual symbol that has a more abstract reference,
to wit, a selection of the attributes, characters, features,
marks, or properties that were initially conceived to make up
the object. There is a common form to this general direction
of thought, whether the objects are apples and oranges being
generalized under the nomen of fruits, or whether the objects
are numbers under addition and numbers under multiplication
being generalized under the the nomen of groups.
JA: Generalization is a relative notion, and there is no more need
for an absolute ground here than there is for a non-inferential
perception at the origin of thought. But the distinction between
precisive (or prescindive) abstraction and hypostatic (or subjectal)
abstraction is independent of how abstracted already, how far along
the continuum or the spectrum of abstraction, happens to be the object
of thought with which one begins.
JA: Again, hypostatic abstraction is a two-edged sword -- a "subject"
is now and henceforth "supposed" to "stand its own ground beneath"
the flight of sorcery of the nominal property that is prescinded
by the flightier fancy of generalization.
JA: This occurs in concrete domains and in vivid realms as much as in the
other sort, if there is any other sort. For instance, I do not know
you as a person, in person, and all I know of you are these signs
that issue from my computer under your name. Naturally, I suppose
that there is a person who stands behind them, someone who is indeed
responsible for their generation, as their hypothetical perpetrator --
this is my act of "hypostation", or abstractive hypostasis -- in one of
its senses, and this is no accident, "hypostasis" = "person", and anyone
can look it up! The supposition of a person, an interpretive performer,
who generates the signs that one passively interprets, indeed, the very
supposition that there is a person called onself who affords the medium,
gives a local habitation and a name, and lends a substance to all of the
signs that constitute the experiences that one calls one's own, well,
those are acts of "drawing away to stand under" that are fundamental
to our "under-standing" of ourselves, however fallible, malfeasant,
and self-deceptive this form of understanding often is.
JA: Four short paragraphs and I have already put myself to sleep --
you can supply your own joke about dormitive virtues here --
I pity the person who finds this stuff in his morning post --
warning: do not drive or operate heavy machinery while under
the influence of this philosophy, or any such stuff as these
dreams are made on!
JA: And with that, I bid you adieu ~~~
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ...
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Subj: Varieties of Abstraction
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 23:07:04 -0400
From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
To: Tom Gollier <TGollier@aol.com>
JA, quoting CP 4.332 [Subjectal Abstraction = Hypostatic Abstraction]:
CSP: | ... The logical term 'subjectal abstraction' here requires a word
| of explanation; for there are few treatises on logic which notice
| subjectal abstraction under any name, except so far as to confuse
| it with precisive abstraction which is an entirely different logical
| function. When we say that the Columbia library building is 'large',
| this remark is a result of precisive abstraction by which the man who
| makes the remark leaves out of account all the other features of his
| image of the building, and takes [to represent the size] the word
| "large" which is entirely unlike that image -- and when I say the
| word is unlike the image, I mean that the general signification
| of the word is utterly disparate from the image, which involves
| no predicates at all. Such is 'precisive abstraction'. But now
| if this man goes on to remark that the largeness of the building is
| very impressive, he converts the applicability of that predicate from
| being a way of thinking about the building to being itself a subject
| of thought, and that operation is 'subjectal abstraction'. (CP 4.332).
JA: I think that the relation between 'hypostation', that mode of mental operation
that passes from a verb in action to a noun in stasis, that turn or that style
of thoughtful conduct that converts a "way of thinking" (WOT) about some thing
into a "subject of thought" (SOT) itself, and 'reflection', that "bending back"
and "folding over" of thought on itself, is strikingly clear in this depiction.
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Subj: Re: Varieties of Abstraction
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 00:24:07 -0400
From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
To: Tom Gollier <TGollier@aol.com>
JA: Now, this is where I came in -- that is, it is just the point that I had reached
in my thinking at the end of last year when I decided to take a little break from
my day to day mental grind to see what sorts of diversion I might find on the web.
Little did I know how the play would play out! But the place in question, where
a peculiar form of reflexive complication found itself tied and once again begins
to tighten, is the place where one rises from an ongoing activity, whatever it is,
to reflect on what one is doing, perhaps with a critical eye, and this is where the
activity that one was cast into, thrown into, willy nilly, and not entirely awarely,
begins to appear, by virtue of the reflective image that is formed by the reflection,
like an object, that is, an objective form of conduct, like a chess game, that one
can choose to play or not, and even consider how to generalize and how to transform.
JA: Not too coincidentally, this is the place where the mental operations that implement
precisive and subjectal abstraction, namely, selection and reflection, respectively,
begin to highlight the importance that Dewey placed on a favorite couple of words of
his, namely, "activity" and "reflection". An ongoing activity gradually acquires an
activity of reflection as a parallel rider, then the activity of reflection is turned,
chiasmatically, into a reflection on activity. As far as I am concerned, this is the
true significance of hypostatic abstraction, that takes us from a point in medias res,
of an action that engages us, to a stance that is just a little bit outside the action,
a change of attitude or a shift of status toward the activity that is marked by our
ability to name the action or the state of becoming by means of an abstract noun.
JA: In my case, it is the activity of inquiry that I am wondering how and thus beginning
to reflect on, and this reflection is a critical component of the inquiry into inquiry.
That is a very nice description, I think, so far as it goes, but how can I teach this
skill of reflection to a rock, of the sort that we mine from silicon valley?
JA: Like I said, this is where I came in, and I seem
to be leaving by the very same door that I entered.
JA: And so it goes ...
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