ONT Re: Pragmatic Maxim -- Inquiry Into Inquiry
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Note 2
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Perseans, Ontologists, Semioticians, ...
Here is the other half of that material I promised.
| Document History
|
| Subject: Inquiry Driven Systems: An Inquiry Into Inquiry
| Contact: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
| Version: Draft 8.74
| Created: 23 Jun 1996
| Revised: 30 Apr 2002
| Advisor: M.A. Zohdy
| Setting: Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA
| Excerpt: Subdivision 3.3 (Reflection on Reflection)
|
| http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/awbrey/inquiry.htm
3.3. Reflection on Reflection (cont.)
The final excerpt touches on a what can appear as a quibbling triviality
or a significant problem, depending on one's POV. It mostly arises when
sophisticated mentalities make a point of trying to apply the pragmatic
maxim in the most absurd possible ways they can think of. I apologize
for quoting such a long passage, but the full impact of Peirce's point
only develops over an extended argument.
| There can, of course, be no question that a man will act
| in accordance with his belief so far as his belief has any
| practical consequences. The only doubt is whether this is
| all that belief is, whether belief is a mere nullity so far
| as it does not influence conduct. What possible effect upon
| conduct can it have, for example, to believe that the diagonal
| of a square is incommensurable with the side? ...
|
| The proposition that the diagonal is incommensurable has stood in the textbooks
| from time immemorial without ever being assailed and I am sure that the most
| modern type of mathematician holds to it most decidedly. Yet it seems
| quite absurd to say that there is any objective practical difference
| between commensurable and incommensurable.
|
| Of course you can say if you like that the act of expressing a quantity as a
| rational fraction is a piece of conduct and that it is in itself a practical
| difference that one kind of quantity can be so expressed and the other not.
| But a thinker must be shallow indeed if he does not see that to admit a
| species of practicality that consists in one's conduct about words and
| modes of expression is at once to break down all the bars against the
| nonsense that pragmatism is designed to exclude.
|
| What the pragmatist has his pragmatism for is to be able to say: here is
| a definition and it does not differ at all from your confusedly apprehended
| conception because there is no practical difference. But what is to prevent
| his opponent from replying that there is a practical difference which consists
| in his recognizing one as his conception and not the other? That is, one is
| expressible in a way in which the other is not expressible.
|
| Pragmatism is completely volatilized if you admit that sort of practicality.
|
|(Peirce, CP 5.32-33, 1903).
Let me just state what I think are the three main issues at stake in this passage,
leaving a fuller consideration of their implications to a later stage of this work.
1. Reflective agents, as a price for their extra powers of reflection, fall prey
to a new class of errors and liabilities, any one of which might be diagnosed
as a "reflective illusion" or a "delusion of reflection" (DOR). There is one
type of DOR that is especially easy for reflective agents to fall into, and
they must constantly monitor its swings in order to guard the integrity of
their reflective processes against the variety of false images that it
admits and the diversity of misleading pathways that it leads onto.
This DOR turns on thinking that objects of a nature to be reflected
on by an agent must have a nature that is identical to the nature
of the agent that reflects on them.
An agent acts under many different kinds of constraints,
whether by choice of method, compulsion of nature, or the
mere chance of looking outward in a given direction and
henceforth taking up a fixed outlook. The fact that one
is constrained to reason in a particular manner, whether
one is predisposed to cognitive, computational, conceptual,
or creative terms, and whether one is restrained to finitary,
imaginary, rational, or transcendental expressions, does not
mean that one is bound to consider only the sorts of objects
that fall into the corresonding lot. It only forces the
issue of just how literally or figuratively one is able
to grasp the matter in view.
To imagine that the nature of the object is bound to be the same
as the nature of the sign, or to think that the law that determines
the object's matter has to be the same as the rule that codifies the
agent's manner, are tanatamount to special cases of those reflective
illusions whose form of diagnosis I just outlined. For example, it
is the delusion of a purely cognitive and rational psychology, on
seeing the necessity of proceeding in a cognitive and rational
manner, to imagine that its subject is also purely cognitive
and rational, and to think that this abstraction of the
matter has any kind of coherence when considered
against the integrity of its object.
2. The general rule of pragmatism to seek the difference that
makes a difference has its corollories in numerous principles
of indifference. Not every difference in the meantime makes
a difference in the end. That is, not every difference of
circumstance that momentarily impacts on the trajectory of
a system nor every difference of eventuality that transiently
develops within its course makes a difference in its ultimate
result, and this is true no matter whether one considers the
history of intertwined conduct and experience that belongs to
a single agent or whether it pertains to a whole community of
agents. Furthermore, not every difference makes a difference
of consequence with respect to every conception or purpose
that seeks to include it under its "sum". Finally, not
every difference makes the same sort of difference with
regard to each of the intellectual concepts or purported
outcomes that it has a bearing on.
To express the issue in a modern idiom, this is the question of whether
a concept has a definition that is "path-dependent" or "path-invariant",
that is, when the essence of that abstract conception is reduced to a
construct that employs only operational terms. It is because of this
issue that most notions of much import, like mass, meaning, momentum,
and number, are defined in terms of the appropriate equivalence classes
and operationalized relative to their proper frames of reference.
3. The persistent application of the pragmatic maxim, especially in mathematics,
eventually brings it to bear on one rather ancient question. The issue is
over the reality of conceptual objects, including mathematical "objects"
and Platonic "forms" or "ideas". In this context, the adjective "real"
means nothing other than "having properties", but the import of this
"having" has to be grasped in the same moment of understanding that
this old schematic of thought loads the verb "to have" with one of
its strongest connotations, namely, that nothing has a property in
the proper sense of the word unless it has that property in its own
right, without regard to what anybody thinks about it. In other words,
to say that an object has a property is to say that it has that property
independently, if not of necessity exclusively, of what anybody may think
about the matter. But what can it mean for one to say that a mathematical
object is "real", that it has the properties that it has independently of
what anybody thinks of it, when all that one has of this object are but
signs of it, and when the only access that one has to this object is
by means of thinking, a process of shuffling, sifting, and sorting
through nothing more real or more ideal than signs in the mind?
The acuteness of this question can be made clear if one pursues the
accountability of the pragmatic maxim into higher orders of infinity.
Consider the number of "effects" that form the "whole" of a conception
in PM1, or else the number of "consequences" that fall under the "sum"
in PM2. What happens when it is possible to conceive of an infinity of
practical consequences as falling among the consequential effects or the
effective consequences of an intellectual conception? The point of this
question is not to require that all of the items of practical bearing be
surveyed in a single glance, that all of these effects and consequences
be enumerated at once, but only that the cardinal number of conceivable
practical bearings, or effects and consequences, be infinite.
Recognizing the fact that "conception" is an "-ionized" term, and so can
denote an ongoing process as well as a finished result, it is possible
to ask the cardinal question of conceptual accountability in another way:
What is one's conception of the practical consequences that result by
necessity from a case where the "conception" of practical consequences
that result by necessity from the truth of a conception constitutes an
infinite process, that is, from a case where the conceptual process of
generating these consequences is capable of exceeding any finite bound
that one can conceive?
It is may be helpful to append at this point a few additional comments
that Peirce made with respect to the concept of reality in general.
| And what do we mean by the real? It is a conception
| which we must first have had when we discovered that
| there was an unreal, an illusion; that is, when we
| first corrected ourselves. Now the distinction for
| which alone this fact logically called, was between
| an 'ens' relative to private inward determinations,
| to the negations belonging to idiosyncrasy, and
| an 'ens' such as would stand in the long run.
| The real, then, is that which, sooner or later,
| information and reasoning would finally result
| in, and which is therefore independent of the
| vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin
| of the conception of reality shows that this
| conception essentially involves the notion
| of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and
| capable of a definite increase of knowledge.
|
| (Peirce, CP 5.311, 1868).
| The real is that which is not whatever we
| happen to think it, but is unaffected by
| what we may think of it.
|
|(Peirce, CE 2:467, 1871).
| Thus we may define the real as that whose characters
| are independent of what anybody may think them to be.
|
|(Peirce, CP 5.405, 1878).
Having read these exhibits into evidence, if not yet to the
point of self-evidence, and considered them to some degree
for the individual lights they throw on the subject, let me
now examine the relationships that can be found among them.
These excerpts are significant not only for what they say, but for how
they say it. What they say, their matter, is crucial to the whole course
the present inquiry. How they say it, their manner, is itself the matter
of numerous further discussions, a few of which, carried out by Peirce
himself, are already included in the sample presented.
Depending on the reader's POV, this sequence of excerpts can appear to
reflect anything from a radical change and a serious correction of the
underlying POV to a mere clarification and a natural development of it,
all maintaining the very same spirit as the original expression of it.
Whatever the case, let these three groups of excerpts be recognized as
forming three successive "levels of reflection" (LOR's) on the series of
POV's in question, regardless of whether one sees them as disconnected,
as ostensibly related, or else as inherently the very same POV in spirit.
From my own POV, that strives to share this spirit in some measure,
it appears that the whole variety of statements, no matter what their
dates of original composition, initial publication, or subsequent revision,
only serve to illustrate different LOR's on what is essentially and practically
a single and coherent POV, one that can be drawn on as a unified frame of reference
and henceforward referred to as the "pragmatic" POV or as just plain "pragmatism".
There is a case to be made for the ultimate inseparability of all of the issues
that are brought up in the foregoing sample of excerpts, but an interval of time
and a tide of text are likely to come and go before there can be any sense of an
end to the period of questioning, before all of the issues that these texts betide
can begin to be settled, before there can be a due measure of conviction on what
they charge inquiry with, and before the repercussions of the whole sequence of
reflections they lead into can be brought to a point of closure. If one accepts
the idea that all of these excerpts are expressions of one and the same POV, but
considered at different points of development, as enunciated, as reviewed, and
as revised over an interval of many years, then they can be taken to illustrate
the diverse kinds of changes that occur in the formulation, the development,
and the clarification of a continuing POV.
Jon Awbrey
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