ONT Re: Logic As Semiotic
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John Collier wrote (JC):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):
JA, quoting CSP:
| Logic is an analysis of forms not a study of the mind.
| It tells 'why' an inference follows not 'how' it arises
| in the mind. It is the business therefore of the logician
| to break up complicated inferences from numerous premisses
| into the simplest possible parts and not to leave them
| as they are.
|
| CSP, CE 1, page 217.
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, "Harvard Lectures 'On the Logic of Science'", (1865),
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 1, 1857-1866',
| Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.
JC: This is a rather loose notion of form, which is used in "informal logic" courses
like the ones I used to teach, which became popular in the seventies, and now are
less popular. The distinction between the how and the why of logic is old, but in
the 1800s it was popular to confuse the two issues until Frege and Husserl took their
distinctive approaches and split Philosophy into the phenomenological and analytic
branches. Both developed a more restrictive notion of the form of an argument,
such that logical relations could be seen to hold even if the form was not or
could not be fully known. An argument is a good one if it has no fallacies.
That requires that its premises are true, and that its premises support its
conclusion. There is no general and formal way to express this notion of
support, or the notion of true. Peirce may have mistakenly believed that
there was, but the quote above does not require that.
This remark was torn from the pages of Peirce's "Lecture on Whewell, Mill, Compte",
in the context of discussing John Stuart Mill's 'System of Logic'. Its purpose is
just to emphasize the concern of logic with inference in the light of formal laws
rather than with inference as a psychological matter. As a general rule, I think
that we have to interpret Peirce's indications of a dimension from matter to form
as being tossed into the circles of a problematic charted by Kant, Aristotle, and
even Plato, rather than pointing to our modern notions of syntactic logical form.
The phrase "how we think", both then and now, has served well enough as a motto
of cognitive psychology, but even John Dewey, who wrote the book on it, did not
write a book on psychology but explained to us how we ought to think if we want
to achieve the aims that are inherent in that form of conduct called "thinking".
But the phrase "why we think" would not work as a motto of logic, unless one
tells that the "why" means the "reason why" inferences go the way they do.
Still, the point of Peirce's remark is just to stress the formal analytic role
that logic has in reconstructing arguments and inferences in a clearer light.
The job of description is done just as soon as one has described well enough
what actually happens, but the job of logic, to be critical, reflective, and
reconstructive, in both senses of that term, has only just taken the baton
at that point.
I would need a further explanation of the rest of your remarks.
It seems to me that there is a rather wide gulf to be charted
between the analytic and the phenomenological, especially if
one takes Frege as staking out the bounds of the former.
I interpreted your last few sentences as referring to either one or both of two things:
1. The limits of exact reasoning to deduction versus
the demand for non-apodictic inference in science.
2. The limits of formalization, even when operating within the bounds
of its own home grounds, a putatively circumscribed logical syntax.
Are any of these guesses correct?
I am still in the middle of trying to sort out how Peirce viewed
the relation between truth and validity in these formative years.
As to "form", there are some more enlightening quotations that
I strung on this same thread later on -- to excerpt an excerpt:
CSP: | The 'form' is the respect in which
| a representation might stand for
| a thing, prescinded from both
| thing and representation.
This appears to be what Peirce at other times calls the "ground" of
this particular mode of being, namely, the being of a representation.
Jon Awbrey
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