ONT Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry
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Howard Pattee wrote:
HP: Thank you for the selections from Peirce. Given the ambiguity of his language,
the best I could say is, "He may be right." But right or not, as an empiricist
I have a problem understanding the confidence both he and his disciples place in
his evidence-free propositions and assertions that appear to be only untested
abductions. Peirce talks about giving "evidence" but it turns out to be just
more "logical analysis." Obviously, one could not expect Peirce to know what
a century of cognitive sciences has demonstrated about sensation, perception,
and sensorimotor control. I might give him credit for perspicacious abductions,
but not until the empirical evidence warrants it.
I made a few selections from a course of seven lectures.
I would recommend a reading of the text that I cited,
edited by Patricia Ann Turrisi, who supplies a good
introduction and a very detailed commentary, with
many nice pointers to parallel passages in the
works of our contemporaries, like Kuhn, and
so on.
| Charles Sanders Peirce,
|'Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking',
| The 1903 Harvard 'Lectures on Pragmatism' (= LOP 1903),
| Patricia Ann Turrisi (ed.), SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 1997.
|
| Excerpts from these Lectures constitute CP 5, Bk 1, CP 5.14-212.
Here is an example of my problem.
Peirce (CSP) wrote:
| These 'cotary' propositions [that gives pragmatism its character] are as follows:
|
| 1st, 'Nihil est in intellectu quin prius fuerat in sensu'
| [nothing exists in intellect that is not first in senses].
HP: What does Peirce mean by a "proposition"?
As a logician, I would expect he meant
a statement that could be true or false,
by some test. But what kind of test?
He only talks of further logical analysis.
For a pragmatic thinker concepts are intellectual artifacts,
constructed, developed, evolved tools -- in the mind's hand,
to adopt the phrase from Aristotle's handbook of psychology
that initially set up the framework of this bit, that tells
how "feeling precedes thinking" in one of its many readings.
This means that all of our concepts might as well come with
one of those familiar disclamers about their usefulness for
any particular purpose. Concepts are contingently useful,
but they come with no absolute guarantee of their utility,
except that they seem to have worked so far so good, like
every other tool does right up until it doesn't anymore.
Concepts can be tested for their durability, flexibility,
suitability for particular purposes, and general utility,
all in all in many ways. Conceptual analysis is one way.
HP: Also, he appears to using these propositions
to sharpen up his definition of pragmatism.
So what if the proposition is false? Later
he says even if you think they are false,
pragmatism must still be believed. So is
it a definition, an experimentally testable
hypothesis, or a metaphysical assumption?
I thought pragmatism was supposed to be
a test for the meaning of statements.
The pragmatic maxim is just that, a maxim.
A maxim is what we otherwise may know as
a "heuristic", a "regulative principle".
It may be nothing more than a "hope" that
gets itself expressed in a catchy "slogan",
or it may be a very useful piece of advice.
The pragmatic maxim is a piece of advice about how
you can clear up your concepts to a maximal degree:
| 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
|
| http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03048.html
This principle, in a weakened rendition, got turned by people
like P.W. Bridgman into what we call "operational definition".
http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1946/bridgman-bio.html
A typical way to test the edge of this instrument
is to try it out on some especially hairy problem,
some concept that seems more like a misconception
in that it has so far resisted all human attempts
to cut it, to cut with it, or to cut it clean out
of our mind, as if to wash our mental hands of it.
So the relation that Peirce's analogy or metaphor of the Cos
is supposed to be posing between the pragmatic maxim and the
precept of Aristotle that says no mind without a prior sense,
is that of a bladed instrument to the paragon of a whetstone.
CSP: | I take this in a sense somewhat different from that which
| Aristotle intended. By 'intellectus' I understand the 'meaning'
| of any representation in any kind of cognition, virtual, symbolic,
| or whatever it may be.
HP: This does not sound plausible. It then implies that there are
no non-sensory (or pre-sensory) genetic constraints that construct
the sense detectors or any hard-wired feature detectors in the brain,
as well any instinctive sensorimotor control programs. I'm not positive
about humans, but it is not the case for spiders. In any case, this is
an empirical question.
I would not, myself, presume on the sense that was Aristotle intent --
you may read what is generally supposed to be source of the tag in
that chapter from 'De Anima' that I supplied -- but I have read
the text over again and find Peirce's interpretation to be apt.
The very first thing to notice, I think,
is that Aristotle's axiom has two edges.
Even if you read it perfectly straight,
claiming that "there is nothing in the
mind that wasn't sooner in the senses",
it implies that whatever you do indeed
discover in your mind must be supposed
to have been in your senses, all ready.
What we are seeking here is the derivation or the source of those general essences,
those arch-typical patterns that we are supposedly able to extract from particular
entities in the cognitive processes of learning and reasoning: conceptualizations,
intellectual purports, invariants, "logical equivalence classes" (LEC's), meanings,
schemata, "semantic equivalence classes" (SEC's) -- "universals" by any other name.
CSP: | Berkeley and nominalists of his stripe deny that we have any idea at all of
| a triangle in general, which is neither equilateral, isosceles, nor scalene.
| But he cannot deny that there are propositions about triangles in general which
| propositions are either true or false; and as long as that is the case, whether
| we have an 'idea' of a triangle in some psychological sense or not, I do not,
| as a logician, care.
HP: This would be the case only if the propositions about triangles were
"formal propositions" in the mathematical or logical sense of "formal".
Unless perhaps you are a percussionist, a triangle is a form of something.
To predicate "triangle" of something is to say that it has a certain form.
CSP: | We have an 'intellectus', a meaning, of which the triangle in general is an
| element. As for the other term, 'in sensu', that I take in the sense of in
| a 'perceptual judgment', the starting point or first premiss of all critical
| and controlled thinking.
HP: A "perceptual judgement" then, is certainly not a formal judgement.
"I saw that it was a triangle."
Here, I am predicating a form.
HP: Is he contrasting the two here?
They are commonly contrasted.
He is observing a continuity.
HP: Is it the case that "all critical and controlled thinking"
about formal mathematical structures begin with perceptions?
I would say this is an empirical question not solvable by
logical analysis.
CSP: | I will state presently what I conceive to be the evidence of the truth
| of this first cotary proposition. But I prefer to begin by recalling
| to you what all three of them are.
HP: All I have read below is more logical analysis.
CSP: | The second is that perceptual judgments contain general elements, so that universal
| propositions are deducible from them in the manner in which the logic of relations
| shows that particular propositions usually, not to say invariably, allow universal
| propositions to be necessarily inferred from them. This I sufficiently argued in
| my last lecture. This evening I shall take the truth of it for granted.
HP: I can't follow this. What is a "universal proposition deducible from perceptual judgments"?
Perhaps an example of a "universal proposition" would help.
All bunnies are quick.
CSP: | The third cotary proposition is that abductive inference shades into perceptual judgment
| without any sharp line of demarcation between them; or in other words our first premisses,
| the perceptual judgments, are to be regarded as an extreme case of abductive inferences, from
| which they differ in being absolutely beyond criticism.
HP: I think he is right, but how can he be "certain" of this?
What is his evidence? Later I will try to give references
to the empirical evidence that supports the first four lines,
but that refutes the last line (unless you can explain that
"absolutely beyond criticism" doesn't mean what it says).
Here "absolutely beyond criticism" (ABC) equals "uncontrollable", not "infallible".
In the immediate framework, the issue is the relation between self-critique and
self-control. For Peirce, as he often says, it is useless to criticize those
conducts in yourself that you cannot control. Criticism of a practical sort
involves being able to reflect, to survey, to test a range of alternatives,
and to choose among them. No choice, no criticism.
CSP: | The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of 'insight',
| although of extremely fallible insight. It is true that the different elements
| of the hypothesis were in our minds before; but it is the idea of putting together
| what we had never before dreamed of putting together which flashes the new suggestion
| before our contemplation.
HP: I suspect Peirce is using introspection (which Jon does not trust)
to describe abduction. I tend to trust it because it agrees with
the introspections of many other creative thinkers. At least it
is a form of empirical evidence!
In Peirce's time, and in some circles today, "introspection" and "intuition"
were technical terms in Cartesian and Kantian traditions. Both had airs of
infallibility, any presumption of which a scientific mind ought to view in
a skeptical light. My statements about these spections and tuitions were
finely honed. You have blunted them, not I.
CSP: | On its side, the perceptive judgment is the result of a process, although of a process
| not sufficiently conscious to be controlled, or to state it more truly not controllable
| and therefore not fully conscious. If we were to subject this subconscious process
| to logical analysis we should find that it terminated in what that analysis would
| represent as an abductive inference resting on the result of a similar process
| which a similar logical analysis would represent to be terminated by a similar
| abductive inference, and so on 'ad infinitum'.
HP: What does he mean by "subjecting subconscious processes to logical analysis"?
It is what we commonly call today a "rational reconstruction".
HP: What does he know about the brain's subconscious
activity that allows a logical analysis?
He is experientially familiar, in a personalistic sort of way,
if nothing else, with the prior and posterior distributions of
the events that are relevant to the investigation in question --
although in the case of Peirce, by the way, who is recognized
to have given William James the idea that psychology could be
rendered an experimental science, and who carried out studies
of what we would call "receiver operating characteristics" in
part in conncetion with his extended studies of observational
error in spectroscopic and gravimetric measurements -- well,
he had a bit beyond the merely personalistic familiarity,
if he thought that it came to an empirical question.
HP: Isn't that one reason empirical study of the unconscious
activity of human and animal brains is necessary?
Nothing here blocks those inquiries.
CSP: | This analysis would be precisely analogous to that which the sophism
| of Achilles and the tortoise applies to the chase of the tortoise by
| Achilles, and it would fail to represent the real process for the same
| reason. Namely just as Achilles does not have to make the series of
| distinct endeavors which he is represented as making, so this process
| of forming the perceptual judgment because it is subconscious and so
| not amenable to logical criticism does not have to make separate acts
| of inference but performs its act in one continuous process.
HP: My advice here is that when you find yourself in a logical hole, stop digging.
Sometimes actual experiments are the only way out of a hole. One must learn
more about how brains work. He sounds like, and even says, he "is certain"
of so many unsupported claims that I lose confidence in his judgement.
Even when he tries to sound like an empiricist, he is amazingly naive
or careless:
CSP: | Any hypothesis,therefore, may be admissible,
| in the absence of any special reasons to the
| contrary, provided it be capable of experimental
| verification and only in so far as it is capable
| of such verification.
HP: What about concepts that are not experimentally verifiable,
but are the metaphysical bases of verifiable theories (e.g.,
symmetry principles)?
Peirce does not see mathematics or metaphysics that way.
Inquiries of all sorts appear to have a common pattern.
If the proceeding is not to be futile, then you might
as well throw out hypotheses that are not contingent.
HP: I'm too tired to continue commenting. I have read it all with much effort to comprehend,
and much irritation at his inscrutable constructions. I now understand why Eco calls
Peirce's English "dreadful". Anyway, I'm afraid I would just be repeating my
empirical criticisms: He may be right, but where is the evidence?
Part of what is going on here is diagnosis of conceptual impasses.
It has a bearing on how well we can even think about what we see
in front of our faces in any area of experience that we ponder.
You could think of the "wave versus particle" problem. Those
notions of "wave" and "particle" are intellectual constructs,
contingent for their structure on long and tangled histories
of accidental influences. Nature does not care about them.
There is no logical contradiction between the two concepts,
that is to say, Necessity does not dictate the propositions
"Wave = Not Particle" and "Particle = Not Wave", and yet
people just could not conceive that the two concepts
were not contradictory. Reconstructing in new ways
our old conceptual frameworks is one part of what
it takes to see the data that's given. There's
a couple o' Einstein quotes here, too, y'know.
Jon Awbrey
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