ONT Re: The Clear Rhetoric of Democracy
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JA: There is an inalienable rite of association between "fictive" and "formal".
HC: I think there is some such association.
But even the fictive and the formal may be
more or less clear, and it is the intention
which matters centrally, of course. I would
suggest our avoiding giving the impression
of playing with the subject-matter or of
unnecessary complications. We owe some
considerable efforts at clarity to the
reader, if we hope to communicate.
Here is the theme from Peirce that came to mind in this connection:
| 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.
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, 'Collected Papers', CP 2.227,
| Editors' Note: From An Unidentified Fragment, c. 1897.
|
| http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg03070.html
I detect yet another incapacity, to tell the difference
between playing with the subject and being played by it.
The fixion of belief -- a meek genealogy:
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 ...
Incidental Muesments:
http://suo.ieee.org/ontology/msg04067.html
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/b/bentham.htm
Jon Awbrey
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