ONT Re: Logic As Semiotic -- Still Quasi After All These Years
¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
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.
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.
On second reading, I see that there is much more to discuss here,
but I will need to wait until I have some more definite thoughts.
JA: 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.
JC: I thought that might be it. Peirce was evidently well ahead of his time here,
though he wasn't alone. Peirce makes reference to Plato when discussing what
I would call ideas in a passage I cite in my 1999 paper on semiosis. It was
much later than this quote, which seems to me to be closer to contemporary
analytic views, at least as taken out of context. I am thinking not so
much of the empiricists, but of the ordinary language philosophers and
their intellectual offspring. There is some confusion between that
line and the empiricist line in any case (e.g., Strawson, to mention
a prominent case, and to a lesser degree some followers of Sellars,
and of Wittgenstein).
JA: 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.
JC: I take it that the distinction is between performance and competence,
in Chomsky's terms, which is often confused with descriptive versus
explanatory (Chomsky's earlier work doesn't make the distinction clear).
One can explain performance with a psychological theory, but some sort of
formal theory (in the weaker sense Peirce seems to have been using, and which
I use myself when I don't want to force a dynamically unsupportable distinction
between semantics and syntax) is required for competence, and the explanation of
competence. So "why" is ambiguous without further discrimination, as you suggest.
JA: 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.
JC: Right. We do this in informal logic as well.
I understand the caution against prematurely petrified formalism --
we certainly have all the evidence we need for the ills of that! --
but, just in the way that Peirce used the word, where we have the
equation "'formal' = 'quasi-necessary'", any study that examines
forms and observes norms is already formal to some degree.
As it happens, I only recently noticed what a coup that
Peirce had pulled off with this formula, bringing the
formal clan and the normal tribe of semiotics to
conspire in a single breath:
¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~ARCHIVE~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
| Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe I have shown, only another name for
|'semiotic' ([Greek: semeiotike]), the quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs.
| By describing the doctrine as "quasi-necessary", or formal, I mean that we observe the
| characters of such signs as we know, and from such an observation, by a process which
| I will not object to naming Abstraction, we are led to statements, eminently fallible,
| and therefore in one sense by no means necessary, as to what 'must be' the characters
| of all signs used by a "scientific" intelligence, that is to say, by an intelligence
| capable of learning by experience. As to that process of abstraction, it is itself
| a sort of observation. The faculty which I call abstractive observation is one which
| ordinary people perfectly recognize, but for which the theories of philosophers sometimes
| hardly leave room. It is a familiar experience to every human being to wish for something
| quite beyond his present means, and to follow that wish by the question, "Should I wish for
| that thing just the same, if I had ample means to gratify it?" To answer that question, he
| searches his heart, and in doing so makes what I term an abstractive observation. He makes
| in his imagination a sort of skeleton diagram, or outline sketch, of himself, considers what
| modifications the hypothetical state of things would require to be made in that picture, and
| then examines it, that is, 'observes' what he has imagined, to see whether the same ardent
| desire is there to be discerned. By such a process, which is at bottom very much like
| mathematical reasoning, we can reach conclusions as to what 'would be' true of signs
| in all cases, so long as the intelligence using them was scientific. (CP 2.227).
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, 'Collected Papers', CP 2.227,
| Editors' Note: From An Unidentified Fragment, c. 1897.
¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~EVIHCRA~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
JA: 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.
JC: Quite.
JA: 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.
JC: I am just using the terms historically as names, not as descriptions.
Much as the Impressionists are a particular tradition in art,
but impressionistic is a style of art. Perhaps I should
have capitalized the terms.
JA: I interpreted your last few sentences as referring
to either one or both of two things:
JA: 1. The limits of exact reasoning to deduction versus
the demand for non-apodictic inference in science.
JA: 2. The limits of formalization, even when operating within the bounds
of its own home grounds, a putatively circumscribed logical syntax.
JA: Are any of these guesses correct?
JC: The Phenomenological tradition and its descendents pay attention to
the former, mostly, while the Analytic tradition focuses on the latter,
primarily. Husserl's 'Crisis in the European Sciences' is very much
about 1, whereas, e.g., Frege and Russell's work investigates 2.
Nonetheless, both 1 and 2 are of importance to both traditions.
Philosophy was a bit schizophrenic in the last century, to say
the least. "Reason" and "Feeling" or "Intuition" got split,
and thought disappeared. Kant warned about that in an oft
quoted phrase.
JA: I am still in the middle of trying to sort out how Peirce viewed
the relation between truth and validity in these formative years.
JC: Current logic has proven that neither notion can be formalized in
the syntax sense, which implies that neither can be formalized
in the formal semantics sense (which many of my benighted
colleagues take to be the only sense of semantics).
I do not think that the young Peirce, or even very many of his mid-century
contemporaries, would have been terribly surprised to hear about our late
blooming discovery that our fantasy ache for syntactic sole sufficiency
has turned out to be a hysterical pragnanz -- from the classical POV
of Pythagoras and Plato, this is simply understood from the get-go.
As to the fact that science outpaces ab-ante-cedental inference,
that most notorious empiric/physic Aristotle already knew that.
I have never understood how we post*moderns manage to acquire
so much credit for remembering what we had, just a moment ago,
forgot.
Still, by posing things in all-or-none terms,
saying "X cannot be formalized" when we need
to say "X cannot be exhaustively formalized",
we characteristically miss the whole point
of the exercise, partially to formalize X,
and deny ourselves the practical benefits
of doing just that. I see a certain type
of psychodynamic here that needs to be
interpreted in a therapeutic remedium.
JA: 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.
JA: This appears to be what Peirce at other times calls the "ground" of
this particular mode of being, namely, the being of a representation.
JC: Right. I would agree with this, but I would also claim that the form exists
without the prescintion, as an abstractum. These abstracta, however, can be
causal significant when one thing interacts with another (partially, of course,
since completely involved interaction would mean no clear distinction between
the interactants). I see representation as an especially interesting case,
perhaps paradigmatic, but not foundational.
Not sure, as some of these words have too few or too many meanings for me.
I had not previously taken much interest in this side of things -- I only
remember that the rider "in the same respect" is needed to keep classical
logic from crashing to hash -- but I am getting the fuzzy impression from
what I am reading now that Peirce takes "ground" as generic and "form" as
specific to the being of a representation. Of course, all is flux during
this phase of the development.
Jon Awbrey
¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤