How Did It Come To This?

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

What brought us to this pass is the simple fact that too many people who take the most good from operating in a civilized, democratic, educated society have chosen not to pay for the goods they receive.

These people harbor the delusion that they created all those goods out of their own miraculous selves and thus bear no obligation to pay anything forward to the next harvest, much less toward the next generation.

The common wealth that makes their uncommon wealth possible — that is a concept beyond their grasp, and so they live like parasites, destroying the host that gives them a home.

These people abhor the idea of spending money on anything they can neither totally consume nor totally control.  And so the idea of paying taxes to support a civilized, democratic, educated society, with no more say than one equal vote in what the common good will be — that is utter anathema to self‑created deities such as these.

That is how it came to this.

The usual thing, worshiping false gods.

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The Unmet Challenge of Peirce’s Work

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

NB. I am posting these incipient thoughts as a promissory note, in hopes of nudging myself to develop the theme as time goes by.

The Unrealized Potential of Peirce’s Thought

One of my main philosophical and practical concerns for many years now has rested, in its restless way, with the potential contribution of Charles Sanders Peirce to our understanding of inquiry. If I were starting a new project today, instead of trying to dig my way out from under a mountain of unfinished business, it would get a title like “The Unmet Challenge of Peirce’s Work” or “The Unrealized Potential of Peirce’s Thought”. My feeling is that only a small fraction of Peirce’s potential contribution to our understanding has yet been realized and that something critical has been lost in the years since he lived. Consequently, my concern is less with the thinkers who came after him than with the clues their work provides to what was found and what was lost.

It has long been my experience that we cannot grasp the full import of Peirce’s work from the shadows that are cast on the analytic, atomistic, logistic, reductive, syntactic plane. I prefer looking at the work of the intervening years from Peirce’s conceptual perspective, instead of the other way around. I think that affords a much clearer view of things.

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C.S. Peirce • Of Triadic Being

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

Selection from C.S. Peirce, “Some Amazing Mazes, Fourth Curiosity” (c. 1909)

Of triadic Being the multitude of forms is so terrific that I have usually shrunk from the task of enumerating them; and for the present purpose such an enumeration would be worse than superfluous: it would be a great inconvenience. In another paper, I intend to give the formal definition of a sign, which I have worked out by arduous and long labour. I will omit the explanation of it here.

Suffice it to say that a sign endeavors to represent, in part at least, an Object, which is therefore in a sense the cause, or determinant, of the sign even if the sign represents its object falsely. But to say that it represents its Object implies that it affects a mind, and so affects it as, in some respect, to determine in that mind something that is mediately due to the Object. That determination of which the immediate cause, or determinant, is the Sign, and of which the mediate cause is the Object may be termed the Interpretant.

C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, CP 6.347

Peirce, C.S., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1–6, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds.), vols. 7–8, Arthur W. Burks (ed.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1931–1935, 1958. Volume 6 : Scientific Metaphysics, 1935.

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Definition and Determination • 8

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

Re: Peirce List • Jim Willgoose (1) (2)

The most general meaning of “formal” is “concerned with form”,
but the Latin “forma” can mean “beauty” in addition to “form”,
so perhaps a normative “goodness of form” enters at this root.

The Latin word “norma” literally means a “carpenter’s square”.
The Greek “gnomon” is a sundial pointer taking a similar form.
The most general meaning of “normative” is “having to do with
what a person ought to do”, but a pragmatic interpretation of
ethical imperatives tends to treat that as “having to do with
what a person ought to do in order to achieve a given object”,
so another formula might be “relating to the good that befits
a being of our kind, what must be done in order to bring that
good into being, and how to tell the signs that show the way”.

Defining logic as formal or normative semiotic differentiates
logic from other species of semiotic under the general theory
of signs, leaving a niche open for descriptive semiotic, just
to mention the obvious branch. This brings us to the question:

How does a concern with form, or goodness of form, along with
the question of what is required to achieve an object, modify
our perspective on sign relations in a way that duly marks it
as a logical point of view?

cc: Inquiry List • Peirce List (1) (2) (3)

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Definition and Determination • 7

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

Peirce clearly set great store by his 1902 definition of logic as formal semiotic, whose principles he proposed to deduce by evident and rigorous mathematical reasoning from his triadic relational definition of a sign.

    It is from this definition, together with a definition of “formal”, that I deduce mathematically the principles of logic.  (NEM 4, 21).
    It is from this definition that I deduce the principles of logic by mathematical reasoning, and by mathematical reasoning that, I aver, will support criticism of Weierstrassian severity, and that is perfectly evident.  (NEM 4, 54).

By “criticism of Weierstrassian severity”, Peirce refers to the reconstitution of mathematical analysis precipitated by Karl Weierstrass during the latter part of the 19th Century, replacing many intuitive but problematic concepts with exacting enough definitions to support the development of coherent and powerful theories.

That bit of history teaches an important lesson. Not every form of words that might be cast about an intuitive object or used to express an intuitive concept will exhibit the strength of a formal definition, one that supports mathematical reasoning from evident truths and allows the deduction of a coherent and comprehensive theory of its object domain, for example, in our present instance, “the principles of logic”.

The moral of the story so far is to recognize the qualifications of these “industrial strength” definitions, and to realize what it means for Peirce to be advertizing these very virtues for his 1902 brand of sign definition.

cc: Inquiry List • Peirce List (1) (2) (3)

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Definition and Determination • 6

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

Re: Peirce List • Gary Fuhrman (1) (2)

The following two passages may help to clarify Peirce’s admittedly peculiar usage of “formal” in this context.

Re: Peirce List • Jim Willgoose (1) (2)

We discussed that passage on Objective Logic a little while back, until we reached the customary fork of diverging interpretations.  The relation between classical logic and its supposed alternatives is a current interest of mine but I can see no alternative except to view it from the classical side.  This may be accountable to the way modalities, from impossible to possible and contingent to necessary, are viewed by the Platonic realist mathematician.  What is possible is real and thus realized in the requisite space of possibility.  So the possible may be surveyed, at any rate at the end of inquiry, in accord with the way its real extension rests arrayed under its comprehension.  Of course you see the catch — “at the end of inquiry” — and there the rub must be left to its itch, for now.

But I cited that passage this time around only for the sake of collating its introduction, “Logic, in the sense of Normative Semeotic”, with the words of Peirce’s definition, “Logic will here be defined as formal semiotic”, giving us reason to say Peirce equates formal with normative in this frame.

cc: Inquiry List • Peirce List (1) (2) (3)

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C.S. Peirce • Logic as Semiotic

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

Selection from C.S. Peirce, “Ground, Object, and Interpretant” (c. 1897)

Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe I have shown, only another name for semiotic (σημειωτική), 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.

C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, CP 2.227
From an unidentified fragment, c. 1897

Peirce, C.S., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1–6, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds.), vols. 7–8, Arthur W. Burks (ed.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1931–1935, 1958.  Volume 2 : Elements of Logic, 1932.

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Definition and Determination • 5

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

Walking the line between phenomenology and mathematics, let us cast our eyes on the prize of defining logic.  Peirce defines logic as formal semiotic — and that in turn calls for a definition of sign.

Here is a place where he defines logic and signs in one deft pass —

Peirce defines logic as formal semiotic.  We know semiotic is the doctrine or theory of signs, but the current passage leaves us with a promissory note on the meaning of formal.  Luckily, though, it is easy enough to find other places where he tells us that formal is pragmatically synonymous with normative, and that puts logic squarely within the normative sciences, as classical tradition always said it ought to be.

Peirce defines a sign in relational terms, as one role out of three, the other two roles being the role of its interpretant sign and the role of its object.  This is a very different matter from defining an essence, that is, an inalienable, inherent, intrinsic property of a “thing in itself”.

Peirce is emphatic about the independence of his joint definition from any reference to human cognition, just as normative sciences ought to be orthogonal to descriptive sciences, and yet he insists that his “non-psychological conception of logic” virtually inheres in the general idea of logic, however incognito it may abide there.

cc: Inquiry List • Peirce List (1) (2) (3)

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C.S. Peirce • On the Definition of Logic

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

Selections from C.S. Peirce, “Carnegie Application” (1902)

No. 12.  On the Definition of Logic

Logic will here be defined as formal semiotic.  A definition of a sign will be given which no more refers to human thought than does the definition of a line as the place which a particle occupies, part by part, during a lapse of time.  Namely, a sign is something, A, which brings something, B, its interpretant sign determined or created by it, into the same sort of correspondence with something, C, its object, as that in which itself stands to C.  It is from this definition, together with a definition of “formal”, that I deduce mathematically the principles of logic.  I also make a historical review of all the definitions and conceptions of logic, and show, not merely that my definition is no novelty, but that my non-psychological conception of logic has virtually been quite generally held, though not generally recognized.  (NEM 4, 20–21).

No. 12.  On the Definition of Logic [Earlier Draft]

Logic is formal semiotic.  A sign is something, A, which brings something, B, its interpretant sign, determined or created by it, into the same sort of correspondence (or a lower implied sort) with something, C, its object, as that in which itself stands to C.  This definition no more involves any reference to human thought than does the definition of a line as the place within which a particle lies during a lapse of time.  It is from this definition that I deduce the principles of logic by mathematical reasoning, and by mathematical reasoning that, I aver, will support criticism of Weierstrassian severity, and that is perfectly evident.  The word “formal” in the definition is also defined.  (NEM 4, 54).

Reference

  • Charles S. Peirce (1902), “Parts of Carnegie Application” (L 75), published in Carolyn Eisele (ed., 1976), The New Elements of Mathematics by Charles S. Peirce, vol. 4, 13–73.  Online.
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Definition and Determination • 4

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Jon Awbrey

If I hear what a couple of my interlocutors are saying, we need both a place to stand and direction of focus in order to tackle the massa confusa that rises up like a great cloud of unknowing every time we inquire into any topic of significance that is covered by Peirce’s writings.

I think I can see the wisdom in that …

For a place to stand, let’s adopt Peirce’s own two-footed and thrice-braced standing, a stance I like to picture in the following manner:

Peirce Syllabus

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)

Peirce’s formula says a large number of very important things about the relationship among logic (a normative science), mathematics, metaphysics, and phenomenology.  For one thing, he recognizes the classical distinction between descriptive sciences and normative sciences, which have independent objectives even when they survey the same domains of data.  For another, he allows for the collaborative or complementary duties of phenomenology, the observation of what appears in experience, and mathematics, the exploration of possible forms of existence.  In scientific types of inquiry, phenomenology and mathematics operate in tandem, the one supplying a stream of observational data and the other fitting its evolving stock of models and theories to the flux in hopes of finding or making one that makes partial sense of it all.

That will serve as a place and a stance to start.
Next to mark a few points of direction and focus.

cc: Inquiry List • Peirce List (1) (2) (3)

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