Inquiry Into Inquiry

Re: Peirce List Discussion • JFS • JFS • JAS • GF • JAS • GF

I realize that iconolatry — just one of many forms of dyadic reductionism — runs too deep at present for most folks to appreciate this, but it happens to be one of the consequences of Triadic Relation Irreducibility (TRI) that symbols — signs that denote their objects solely by virtue of being interpreted to do so — are the genus of all signs, while icons and indices are species under that genus.  An icon is an icon only because interpreted as an icon, by dint of a property singled out from all possible properties shared with its object.

Thus symbols are the fons et origo of all other signs — they do not in the first instance grow from icons so much as icons crystallize from the primordial matrix of symbols.

Resources

• Semeiotic
• Sign Relation
• Semiotic Information

Re: Peirce List Discussion • CG • JA • CG • JA • CG • JA • CG

One of the points I’ve been trying to make all along is that a person doesn’t normally need to make a working assumption explicit when it’s understood by all practitioners in a given practical setting as being implicit in that practice.  It becomes necessary and pertinent to do so only when a working assumption stops working or when one needs to lay out the rationales of that practice to others who may not be familiar with it.

As long as Peirce was writing for readers with relevant backgrounds in the practice of math and science it wasn’t really necessary and would’ve even been considered impertinent for him to waste words on points that everyone in that audience would regard as routine.

Does that have any bearing on questions about the reality of generals?  It’s hard to say.  I guess it’s bound up with the reasons I think the only real realists I know and the only practicing pragmatists I know are all mathematicians, or at least scientists who use mathematics, for the moments they are immersed in doing so.

Referring again to the figure I drew for Peirce’s classification of sciences, many if not most of our theories on the mathematical side will have both individual terms and general terms, categorized not absolutely but in relation to each other in a given context.  So the distinction between individual and general does not align with the distinction between phenomena and theory.  The whole theory is judged (by us arbiters) according to how well it guides our transactions with the whole phenomenal domain in question.

We do not know whether anything like predicates and subjects, generals and particulars, waves and particles, or whatever, exists in the reality that generates the phenomenal world.  It is entirely conceivable that none of those terms will appear in the final account of things.  All we have to decide, as Gandalf says, is what to do with the time that is given to us.

Resources

• Pragmatic Theory Of Truth
• Correspondence Theory Of Truth

A paragraph from Kant and associated discussion I added to the Wikipedia article on the Correspondence Theory of Truth in June 2006 is useful at this point, and it serves to set up a corresponding statement from Peirce that we’ll take up in due course.  A version of this material survives on the InterSciWiki site:

Reference

• Kant, Immanuel (1800), Introduction to Logic.  Reprinted, Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (trans.), Dennis Sweet (intro.), Barnes and Noble, New York, NY, 2005.

Resources

• Pragmatic Theory Of Truth
  • InterSciWiki • OEIS Wiki
• Correspondence Theory Of Truth
  • InterSciWiki • OEIS Wiki

Re: Peirce List • Clark Goble • Jon Awbrey • Clark Goble • Jon Awbrey • Clark Goble

To put things more plainly, it’s a routine observation we have no need for moods and tenses in actually doing mathematics, that is, in developing the consequences of given axioms, constructing formal models, or applying models and theories to the applicable phenomena.  Theories of change, intention, and possibility can all be stated in present tense indicative mood.  Regarding change, intention, and possibilities as real or not is independent of the linguistic forms we happen to use in their description.

Audiences, interpreters, receivers are neither right nor wrong.  It simply happens that one audience may require us to articulate what goes without saying, what is taken for granted, “understood” in another context.  It may be useful exercise to unfold the implicatures and presuppositions taken for granted in a particular discourse situation, but giving a name to one’s habitual position is not the same thing as a change of address.

So, yes, I’d say Peirce is a realist about possibilities, and patterns of possibilities, from the start.  That much is simply implicit in his mathematical approach to logic, probability, and information.

Resources

• Pragmatic Theory Of Truth
• Correspondence Theory Of Truth

Re: Peirce List • Clark Goble • Jon Awbrey • Clark Goble • Jon Awbrey

With respect to the issues surrounding “modal realism” — what stance Peirce took and when he took it — let me refer to a figure I constantly have in mind, one I drew to map the first few principalities in Peirce’s classification of sciences.

Normative science rests largely on phenomenology and on mathematics;
metaphysics on phenomenology and on normative science.

❧ Charles Sanders Peirce • Collected Papers, CP 1.186 (1903)
Syllabus • Classification of Sciences (CP 1.180–202, G-1903-2b)

There is more discussion of the figure and its legend here.

The picture reminds us of both the analogy and the disparity between phenomenology and mathematics, between our observation of actual appearances in phenomenology and our observation of possible existence in mathematics, with “possible” in this case meaning no more than not inconsistent.  The disparity is something we come to know as the fallibility, partiality, or subjectivity of all our models, representations, and theories of reality.

The most astute physicists appreciate the significance of this disparity or gap, and there is a famous quip by Einstein that testifies to it, but more often than not they tend to get by like the rest of us, with a variety of naive realism.

In contrast, doing mathematics requires a more constant awareness of the distance between the two footings, the terra firma of actuality and Plato’s heaven of possibilities.  This means that the standpoint known as “modal realism” is really the modus operandi or standard operating philosophy within the realm of mathematics, so taken for granted that its marching orders need no banners or fanfare in the ordinary course of work.

Being one who sees more continuity of development than radical reconstruction in Peirce’s thought over his lifetime, what I do see changing through the years is the greater diversity of his audiences as the river of his work flows from its constant sources to the alluvial delta he left later generations to sift.  The greatest share of emphatic variance in what he writes is explained more by variations in whom he addresses than what he is trying to communicate.

Drawing the conclusion for the present case, my initial guess would be that any apparent conversion to modal realism is more likely explained by an increasing need to underscore attitudes of mind that are simply tacit in the scientific application of formal logic, mathematics, probability, and statistics.

Resources

• Pragmatic Theory Of Truth
• Correspondence Theory Of Truth

Re: Peirce List Discussion • Val Daniel

Viewing the normative science of logic and its object, truth, in the medium of a triadic sign relation, the first cut among notions of truth divides those that take the object domain into account in a fundamental way from those that regard truth as a predicate of signs alone.

At first sight, then, it appears we can usefully contrast the pragmatic and correspondence conceptions of truth from the motley crew of intuitions about truth based on coherence, consensus, and truth by logical consistency alone.

That is the perspective Susan Awbrey and I adopted in our work on “Universities as Learning Organizations” and “Conceptual Barriers to Creating Integrated Universities”, where we applied a sign-relational framework to the problem of integrating knowledge across the walls of intellectual silos that have come to shape the disciplinary architectures of our modern universities.

References

• Awbrey, S.M., and Awbrey, J.L. (2001), “Conceptual Barriers to Creating Integrative Universities”, Organization : The Interdisciplinary Journal of Organization, Theory, and Society 8(2), Sage Publications, London, UK, pp. 269–284.  Abstract.
• Awbrey, S.M., and Awbrey, J.L. (1999), “Organizations of Learning or Learning Organizations : The Challenge of Creating Integrative Universities for the Next Century”, Second International Conference of the Journal ‘Organization’, Re-Organizing Knowledge, Trans-Forming Institutions : Knowing, Knowledge, and the University in the 21st Century, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.  Online.
• Haack, Susan (1993), Evidence and Inquiry : Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK.
• Misak, Cheryl J. (1991), Truth and the End of Inquiry : A Peircean Account of Truth, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Resources

• Pragmatic Theory Of Truth
• Correspondence Theory Of Truth

Re: Peirce List Discussion • CG • JA • JA • JA • JAS • JA • CG • JA • JBD • JA

Working on what is worth saving in old Wikipedia articles requires me to rummage through their edit histories, which raises a host of annoying ghosts from bygone days.  In this review I’d like to avoid rehashing old skirmishes and use what I’ve learned in the mean time to give a better account of pragmatic truth.

Resources

• Pragmatic Theory Of Truth
• Correspondence Theory Of Truth