ONT Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry
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Howard Pattee wrote (HP):
John Collier wrote (JC):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):
JC, on a parallel thread:
| I've argued that supervenience is basically an empty concept that avoids
| the difficult issues (empty formalism of the worst kind in Jon's sense).
JA: As far as I can tell from my records, it was JC who introduced the phrase
"empty formalism" into this discussion. Perhaps it was intended to be
a para-phrase. At any rate, it seems to have served its purpose as
a straw-person and should now be considered utterly sans wit.
JC: Yeh. it was a paraphrase of meaningless formalism, which you used.
I meant it in these sense of empty of content, i.e., without a semantics.
You never objected to the paraphrase. I realize now that you may have
meant pointless formalism. My objections would still stand, but would
have less logical force, due to the fact/value gap in universally
accepted reasoning principles.
JA: Well, it may have taken me a while to recognize the strawlike character
of this particular figment of your interpretation. Then again, I might
well have acceded to the interpretant "meaningless formalism" only to
discover, further on down the Yellow Brick Road, that we meant rather
different things by "meaning". I think that a healthy exrecise might
be for us all to return to setting of Hesse's novel and ask ourselves,
"But what did he really mean by this?"
JA: After a few days of idle reflection in widely-scattered airports
I eventually arrived at the potential insight that John and I were
simply talking on totally skew lines this whole time, as I was talking
about the life of inquiry and mathematics in particular as cultural systems
and not as formal systems.
JC: That may be. In this case I do not understand your discussion of what is usually
called psychologism. Cultural systems are paradigmatic examples of the sort of
psychologism I thought Peirce was supposed to be against (I certainly read him
thus, but I think he can't, ultimately, avoid the problem within his methods).
JA: I think that you are mistaking Peirce's appreciation of the social matrix of logic
for a variety of "individual psychologism". I will give you that not a few of the
thinkers that Peirce's thinking spawned were themselves a bit confused about this,
but never, hardly ever, Peirce himself.
JC: I don't think so. Psychologism usually means exactly the social kind.
The individual kind isn't of much consequence. Certainly the proposals
Frege and Husserl were against were the social kinds, so presumably
Peirce fails to avoid the problem unless there is something else
going on in his thinking.
Peirce spoke of his "unpsychological" or "non-psychological" conception of logic.
His arguments on its behalf do not involve the sibilant clashes of isms and antis,
but are simply marking the distinction between a descriptive special science like
physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, or whatever, and
a "formal" (= "quasi-necessary") and thus normative science like logic. The matrix
of the "social" here refers to the community of deliberations and the continuity of
pragmata that are involved in culturally embodied norms of conduct, and not to any
pretension of positing a "value-free" anthropological or sociological standpoint.
JA: Remember that the "pragmatically ordered normative sciences" (PONS) have their
bases on concentric discs, with logic being a special case of ethics and ethics
being dependent on a very broad sense of aesthetics, the sense of what is good
for creatures such as ourselves.
JC: This is basically the view that Michael Stingl and I proposed
in “Evolutionary Naturalism and the Objectivity of Morality”,
John Collier and Michael Stingl, Biology and Philosophy 8 (1993):
47-60, reprinted in Paul Thompson, ed., Issues in Evolutionary Ethics,
SUNY Press, Albany, 1995, pp. 409-429. I could hardly forget it.
I regard this as an empirical and psychologistic approach.
Then you fail to understand the meaning of the word "normative".
JC: The more you say, the more convinced I am that my original
complaint about your position is right, and that Russell's
jabs at Peirce were on target.
Russell's jabs at Peirce are like a 2-dimensional target
trying to jab the arrows that the archer has aimed at it.
My current guess, based on a recent reading of Russell's early trials,
is that folks who restrict themselves to 2-adic thinking, as Russell
tried and, with Wittgenstein's deflationary help, failed to escape,
just cannot grasp subjects like meaning, belief, purpose, norms,
ethics, logic, beauty, ..., or anything else of significance.
But this is beginning to remind me of all those years that I wasted
arguing with behaviorists. One fine day all their funding dried up --
and the next day they had already changed the name of their subfield
to "animal cognition" -- such is the relative force of the rational
versus the economic form of argument.
JA: This is one of those times when I so despair of saying it any better myself
that I will resort to the words of my betters -- so here is a recent note
that Joe Ransdell posted to the Peirce List that touches on this same topic:
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Subj: Re: Perception and the Outward Clash
Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2001 09:56:27 -0500
From: Joseph Ransdell <ransdell@door.net>
To: Peirce List
Seth Sharpless wrote:
>
> > Peirce's view is that logic is based on phenomenology, which is not
> > psychology and also is not metaphysics. It is all about appearances --
> > phenomena -- which are not regarded as intrinsically either subjective
> > or objective, the idea being to be able to draw consistent and useful
> > distinctions between such things as subjective and objective, when
> > that is required.
>
> I thought that the fact that reasoning is directed to an end,
> to "truth" in Peirce's definition of "truth", was at least one
> of the "facts", and indeed, the principal fact, upon which Logic
> was based, and that is not a fact revealed by phaneroscopy, is it?
> But rather by the kind of social experience one goes through as
> in "Fixation of Belief". This is not to say that phaneroscopy
> plays no role in Peirce's Logic.
I understand why you say this, Seth, but if you do a string search in the CP
for assertion and read through what that turns up I think it will be clear
enough to you that Peirce regarded himself as developing the whole of logic
out of an analysis of the concept of assertion. The reason this does not
conflict with what you are saying is that the analysis of assertion IS the
analysis of truth, considered as a value. I have remarked here several
times that Peirce was -- at least as far as I know -- the first to realize
that the truth predicate is redundant (in the Fixation of Belief article),
which almost certainly came into the analytic tradition via Frank Ramsey,
resurfaced later with Strawson, and has resurfaced again in the past decade
or so, though by now so emasculated of its import by the formalists as to be
regarded as posing purely formalistic problems best dealt with my
metamathematicians. I exaggerate, but if you review the journal literature
in the past decade or so you will see why I describe the intellectual
situation in that way. What is missing is the connection with assertion.
But if you ask yourself when -- in ordinary non-technical discourse -- we
have the occasion to use the truth predicate you will see, I think, that the
usual use is communicational in the sense that it is, in effect, a comment
on the communication itself, and is typically used to emphasis that one is
asserting or is willing to assert something or to stand by something
asserted, whether by oneself or by others. The reason the definitions of
truth by philosophers are so unsatisfactory is that the function of the
predicate is not descriptive, except at the higher level of commentary on
the speech act force of what one is saying or what another has said, and its
primary function is what Austin called "performative". In short, "P is
true" normally functions to convey that one is willing to or does in fact
assert that p.
Now consider what it means to regard logic as being capable of being
developed by an analysis of what is implicit in asserting something.
Assertion is a communicational act, and this means that logic is conceived
of as social from the very beginning. No wonder people now cannot
understand so much of what Peirce is saying and cannot fit it in with the
frameworks currently taken for granted: logic and philosophy of science has
been developed on an essentially individualistic rather than social basis,
so that the attempt to bring in the social aspect invariably fails because
it comes along too late, after the logic has already been developed without
reference to it. But with Peirce it is there from the beginning. Thus he
is indeed "out of date", though one might also hold that the date he is out
of lies in the future rather than the past, supposing one thinks the social
dimension of human life to be of fundamental importance in it in a way that
contemporary philosophy cannot seem to accommodate without lapsing into
social relativism. (You will understand, then, why I tend to be irritated
by the arrogance of the assumption that Peirce must be "brought up to date",
in accordance with what is currently "all the rage", and particularly with
the reductivism which seems to be implicit in the exaggerated claims made
for -- though not necessarily by -- neurophysiology, which has no concern
with the social dimension. This does not excuse my own excess in response
to it, of course)
Thus the claim -- originating in antiquity with Plato and Socrates -- that
thought is what occurs first of all in conversation (dialogue) -- and that
private or personal thought is the special case, not the normal or basic
case, is fundamental in Peirce's philosophy, and is implicit in many things
he says though one is often unaware of it. For example, as I remarked not
long ago, it only occurred to me quite recently that the reason why Peirce
decided to use the word "sign" as his basic term of art is that he must have
thought that this would force our attention to the situation of dialogue as
fundamental since -- as he would naturally think or it -- the most obvious
thing about a dialogue is that something is put forth which must be
interpreted and the interpretation will itself be due, in some sense, to the
sign itself as an actualization of its own power: biologically, the sign is
a stimulus, though the conception is broader than that. The upshot of
locating the agency in the sign is, in turn, that we need not posit an
interpreting mind independent of the interpretational process.
What does this have to do with phenomenology? Forget Husserl in this
connection. It can only be misleading since Husserl does indeed subjectify
phenomenology and does so, moreover, precisely by identifying the mental
with the intentional. Peirce did not derive his idea of phenomenology from
Husserl, whom he regarded as a typical psychologizing German logician,
justly or unjustly. (Husserl did not regard himself as a phenomenologist in
the writings Peirce was acquainted with, this being a later development of
his thought. It was rather Hegel's usage in The Phenomenology of Mind (i.e.
Geist) that Peirce was emulating, and when he changed the name to
"phaneroscopy" it was not to differentiate his view from Husserl's but
rather to distinguish it from Hegel's understanding of what phenomenology
is.) Peirce does not resort to intention as a fundamental conception in the
way Husserl does. Intention is certainly of philosophical interest, but it
is something to be explicated in more fundamental terms, such as,
particularly, the concept of tendency toward an end, which is a working
synonym for habit or habitus, thirdness, law, etc., since he regarded a case
of complete perfection of law as the ideal limit of a tendency, which is
expressible in terms of probability. (Compare the frequency of occurrence
of "intention" with that of "tendency" and you will see how little Peirce
relies on the concept of intention.) In short, we read him as speaking
subjectively because that is what our a priori conception of phenomenology
naturally disposes us to, but we have to recognize that phenomenology is not
about a private and subjective domain, as you seem to understand it, but
rather about what appears to us in our ordinary life as human beings, and
the social dimension is already there at the phenomenological level.
I have to stop at this point to run an errand, but you see what I am getting at,
I think.
Joe Ransdell
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JC: Peirce would argue that formalization in this sense leads
to loss of meaningfulness, and is intrinsically impossible.
Wittgenstein, in his later work, held out for a similar
position. Barwise and Perry, in Situations and Attitudes,
take a similar position to Peirce and Wittgenstein on
formalizability, but they conceal this for practical
reasons (most analytic philosophers reject the position
a fortiori -- it is incompatible with their methodology).
Hertz is a nice example, since he is not as positivistic
as some of his cohorts, but as Stan pointed out, the strict
distinction between syntax and semantics and interpretation
of signs is not supported by Peirce. The reason is that to
be a sign in the fullest sense requires all three, and one
without the other can only be separated in abstraction
(meaning simply that we consider partially by focusing
on one aspect or another).
JA: I do not think that Peirce used the words "formal" and "formalizable"
in this way, at least not much, and so I am guessing that this is yet
another interpolation that will only add to the confusion over form.
JC: The use of the words as Peirce would use them is hardly the relevant issue here.
I am focusing on the meaning of the arguments.
JA: One of the most stunning features of the Twentieth Century Limited
train of thought had to have been its sheer temporal parochialism.
I think that the meaning of what we are trying to talk about here,
whatever it is, would be better revealed if other words were used,
and "formal" were left to its prior and perfectly good senses that
meant "having a reference to form". There never was before the 20th
Century such a perverted sense that "having a reference to form" had
to mean anything like "having such a reference to form that all other
references are excluded".
JC: Sorry. I simply think that this criticism is unfounded. I've given my
reasons in some detail previously. I don't think that your equivocation
in the last sentence was ever made by anyone of any significance.
I will tell them you said so.
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