The Prime Movers of Disaster Capitalism

Posted on May 23, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

☠ Obscenely Rich Corporations (ORCs)
⇒ Corporate Owned Governments (COGs)
⇒ Mercantile Engineered Social Starvation (MESS)
⇒ Corporate Owned Biosphere Wasting Earth’s Bounty (COBWEB)

Posted in Democracy, Education, Governance, Open Access Research, The Big Picture | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Inquiry Live and Logic Live

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

Prompted by observations I made over a long period of time about the problems of fragmentation and increasing insularity in web communities and inspired in part by discussions I had with Michel Bauwens of the Peer2Peer (P2P) Foundation, I started a project a few years ago intended to explore architectural solutions to those problems while developing a body of useful content in the process.

As I reflected on the architecture demanded by the task, needed at least to make a good beginning at organizing the available resources, it took on the shape of an elliptical orbit, with the locus of topic nodes revolving around two ruling foci, called Inquiry and Logic, respectively.

Still exploring the possibilities for architecture and information in parallel, I created two focal wiki pages called Inquiry Live and Logic Live.

The Live bit indicated a couple of design goals I had in mind at the time — an emphasis on inter-activity and the use of animations to illustrate proofs in logical graphs.  I ramified the Logic focus by developing a syllabus of logical topics and then I mirrored and interlinked the whole structure across a number of wiki sites, regarded as peer installations.

Well, you know how it goes, I got pulled away by the exigencies of life and unfinished business in other areas, so it has been Spring of 2010 since I had much chance to work on things there.  To make a long story short, our recent animadversions on Boole, Frege, and Peirce did have the beneficial side-effect of leading me back to that niche of the web and upgrading the content, format, and links.  So be invited to take a gander if you’re into any of those things.

Posted in C.S. Peirce, Inquiry, Logic | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Modus Dolens

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

A yet innominate mode of inference has become so frequent in certain quarters that the time has come to fashion a suitable name for it. The scheme of thought in question goes a bit like this:

If A, then B.
Not B.
──────────────────
But A simply has to be ❢❢❢

I know some scholars will insist that it ought to be called “modus dolendo dolens” or something like that, but let’s not be pedantic.

Posted in Humor, Logic, Rhetoric | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

What Peirce Preserves

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

Re: Peirce List • On Peirce Preservation
Cf: Inquiry List • What Peirce Preserves

Looking back from this moment, I think I see things a little differently.  The critical question is whether our theoretical description of inquiry gives us a picture that is true to life, preserving the life of inquiry and serving to guide us on its way, or whether it “murders to dissect”, leaving us with nothing but a Humpty Dumpty hodge-podge of false idols and torn and twisted bits of maps that mislead the quest at every turn.

There is a natural semantics that informs mathematical inquiry.  It permeates the actual practice even of those who declare for some variety of nominal faith in their idle off‑hours.  Peirce is unique in his ability to articulate the full dimensionality of mathematical meaning but echoes of his soundings keep this core sense reverberating, however muted, throughout pragmatism.

If I sift the traditions of theoretical reflection on mathematics according to how well their theoretical images manage to preserve this natural stance on mathematical meaning, I would tend to sort Frege more in a class with Boole, De Morgan, Peirce, and Schröder, since I have the sense when I read them they are all talking like mathematicians, not like people who are alien to mathematics.

Posted in C.S. Peirce, Inquiry, Logic, Mathematics | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

❃ Blowin’ in the Wind ❃

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

❃ Blowin' in the Wind ❃

It was so windy today, 30 mph gusts at times, that I had to take a chair out on the deck and wait for moments when the tree held still for half a second.

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If the People are to Rule then the People must become Wise

Posted on April 14, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

Our Enlightenment Forerunners had the insight to see the critical flaw in all historical failures at democratic government, to wit, or not — If the People are to Rule then the People must become Wise.

The consequence is that equally distributed education and information are not just commodities you buy so you and yours can get ahead of them and theirs — they are essential to the intelligent functioning of government and the public interest.

That is why we are supposed to have universal free public education.  That is why we are meant to have a government operated postal service to enable the free‑flow of information at a nominal fee, not whatever price the market will bear.

Posted in Democracy, Education, Governance, Information | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Paradisaical Logic and the After Math

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

Re: Peter Cameron • Cultures, Tribes, or Just an Illusion?
Re: Peirce List • (1) (2) (3) (4)

Not too coincidentally with the mention of Peirce’s existential graphs, a tangent of discussion elsewhere brought to mind an old favorite passage from Peirce, where he is using his entitative graphs to expound the logic of relatives.  Here is the observation I was led to make.

Paradisaical Logic

Negative operations (NOs), if not more important than positive operations (POs), are at least more powerful or generative, because the right NOs can generate all POs, but the reverse is not so.

Which brings us to Peirce’s amphecks, NAND and NNOR, either of which is a sole sufficient operator for all boolean operations.

In one of his developments of a graphical syntax for logic, that described in passing an application of the Neither-Nor operator, Peirce referred to the stage of reasoning before the encounter with falsehood as “paradisaical logic, because it represents the state of Man’s cognition before the Fall.”

Here’s a bit of what he wrote there —

Resources

cc: Peirce List

Posted in Amphecks, C.S. Peirce, Critical Thinking, Inquiry, Logic, Logic of Relatives, Logical Graphs, Logical Reflexion, Mathematics, Peirce, Relation Theory, Second Intentions, Semiotics, Sign Relations, Truth Theory, Visualization | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

C.S. Peirce • Relatives of Second Intention

Posted on April 7, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

Selections from C.S. Peirce, “The Logic of Relatives”, CP 3.456–552

488.   The general method of graphical representation of propositions has now been given in all its essential elements, except, of course, that we have not, as yet, studied any truths concerning special relatives;  for to do so would seem, at first, to be “extralogical”.

Logic in this stage of its development may be called paradisaical logic, because it represents the state of Man’s cognition before the Fall.  For although, with this apparatus, it is easy to write propositions necessarily true, it is absolutely impossible to write any which is necessarily false, or, in any way which that stage of logic affords, to find out that anything is false.  The mind has not as yet eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Truth and Falsity.

Probably it will not be doubted that every child in its mental development necessarily passes through a stage in which he has some ideas, but yet has never recognised that an idea may be erroneous;  and a stage that every child necessarily passes through must have been formerly passed through by the race in its adult development.  It may be doubted whether many of the lower animals have any clear and steady conception of falsehood;  for their instincts work so unerringly that there is little to force it upon their attention.  Yet plainly without a knowledge of falsehood no development of discursive reason can take place.

489.   This paradisaical logic appears in the study of non‑relative formal logic.  But there no possible avenue appears by which the knowledge of falsehood could be brought into this Garden of Eden except by the arbitrary and inexplicable introduction of the Serpent in the guise of a proposition necessarily false.  The logic of relatives affords such an avenue, and that, the very avenue by which in actual development, this stage of logic supervenes.  It is the avenue of experience and logical reflexion.

490.   By logical reflexion, I mean the observation of thoughts in their expressions.  Aquinas remarked that this sort of reflexion is requisite to furnish us with those ideas which, from lack of contrast, ordinary external experience fails to bring into prominence.  He called such ideas second intentions.  Is is by means of relatives of second intention that the general method of logical representation is to find completion.

Reference

  • Charles S. Peirce, “The Logic of Relatives”, The Monist, vol. 7, 161–217, (1897).  Reprinted, CP 3.456–552.
Posted in Abstraction, Amphecks, C.S. Peirce, Cognition, Experience, Inquiry, Logic, Logic of Relatives, Logical Graphs, Logical Reflexion, Mathematics, Peirce, Relation Theory, Second Intentions, Semiotics, Sign Relations, Truth Theory | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

C.S. Peirce • A Guess at the Riddle

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

Selections from C.S. Peirce, “A Guess at the Riddle”, CP 1.354–416

359.   First and Second, Agent and Patient, Yes and No, are categories which enable us roughly to describe the facts of experience, and they satisfy the mind for a very long time.  But at last they are found inadequate, and the Third is the conception which is then called for.  The Third is that which bridges over the chasm between the absolute first and last, and brings them into relationship.

We are told that every science has its Qualitative and its Quantitative stage;  now its qualitative stage is when dual distinctions,—whether a given subject has a given predicate or not,—suffice;  the quantitative stage comes when, no longer content with such rough distinctions, we require to insert a possible half-way between every two possible conditions of the subject in regard to its possession of the quality indicated by the predicate.

Ancient mechanics recognized forces as causes which produced motions as their immediate effects, looking no further than the essentially dual relation of cause and effect.  That is why it could make no progress with dynamics.  The work of Galileo and his successors lay in showing that forces are accelerations by which a state of velocity is gradually brought about.  The words cause and effect still linger, but the old conceptions have been dropped from mechanical philosophy;  for the fact now known is that in certain relative positions bodies undergo certain accelerations.

Now an acceleration, instead of being like a velocity a relation between two successive positions, is a relation between three;  so that the new doctrine has consisted in the suitable introduction of the conception of Threeness.  On this idea, the whole of modern physics is built.

The superiority of modern geometry, too, has certainly been due to nothing so much as to the bridging over of the innumerable distinct cases with which the ancient science was encumbered;  and we may go so far as to say that all the great steps in the method of science in every department have consisted in bringing into relation cases previously discrete.

  • Charles S. Peirce, “A Guess at the Riddle”, MS 909 (1887–88).
    First published in CP 1.354–416.  Reprinted in EP1, 245–279.
Posted in C.S. Peirce, Dynamics, Geometry, Inquiry, Peirce, Physics, Triadic Relations, Triadicity | Tagged , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

C.S. Peirce • The Reality of Thirdness

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

Selections from C.S. Peirce, “Lowell Lectures of 1903”, CP 1.343–349

343.   We may say that the bulk of what is actually done consists of Secondness — or better, Secondness is the predominant character of what has been done.  The immediate present, could we seize it, would have no character but its Firstness.  Not that I mean to say that immediate consciousness (a pure fiction, by the way), would be Firstness, but that the quality of what we are immediately conscious of, which is no fiction, is Firstness.

But we constantly predict what is to be.  Now what is to be, according to our conception of it, can never become wholly past.  In general, we may say that meanings are inexhaustible.  We are too apt to think that what one means to do and the meaning of a word are quite unrelated meanings of the word “meaning”, or that they are only connected by both referring to some actual operation of the mind.  Professor Royce especially in his great work The World and the Individual has done much to break up this mistake.

In truth the only difference is that when a person means to do anything he is in some state in consequence of which the brute reactions between things will be moulded to conformity to the form to which the man’s mind is itself moulded, while the meaning of a word really lies in the way in which it might, in a proper position in a proposition believed, tend to mould the conduct of a person into conformity to that to which it is itself moulded.

Not only will meaning always, more or less, in the long run, mould reactions to itself, but it is only in doing so that its own being consists.  For this reason I call this element of the phenomenon or object of thought the element of Thirdness.  It is that which is what it is by virtue of imparting a quality to reactions in the future.

Reference

  • Charles S. Peirce, “Lowell Lectures of 1903”, III, vol. 1, 3rd Draught.  (CP 1.343)
Posted in C.S. Peirce, Comprehension, Inquiry, Intension, Intention, Intentionality, Logic, Meaning, Peirce, Peirce's Categories, Pragmatic Cosmos, Purpose, Reality, References, Semiotics, Sign Relations, Sources, Thirdness, Triadic Relations | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment