Jeff that was an exceedingly rich message and it has taken me some time to work my way through it. The past I am most interested in is at the end. See below:
-----Original Message----- From: Jeffrey Brian Downard [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, 24 August 2014 1:26 p.m. To: Peirce List Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Phaneroscopy, iconoscopy, and trichotomic category theory One of the points Peirce is making at this point in subsection 4 is that the comparison of the intensity of two experiences of the quality of blue is something that is "measured chiefly by aftereffects." (EP, 320) He is laboring over this point, I believe, because he is keenly interested in set of related issues. Consider, for instance, the following questions: 1) What is the standard that we can use when comparing the feeling that an argument is a good inference to the feeling that an argument is an invalid inference? Isn't this similar in some respects to comparing the intensity of a one experience of a feeling of blue to another feeling of blue? Isn't it different in other respects? 2) Once we have formed a class of sample arguments that we take to be good and a class that we take to be bad, what kind of measurements can be made when comparing these classes? At the very least, we can apply a nominal scale in saying that they are labeled as different classes. For the sake of the logical theory, however, we need a stronger standard of measurement, don't we? 3) What is the standard for making the comparison of the goodness or badness of an argument? Should we take it to be a prototypical argument that appears to be beyond criticism? Perhaps we should take an argument, such as a cogito argument, or an ontological argument for God's reality, or an argument for the indubitability of the axioms of logic as a prototype, and then place one or another of these arguments in a glass case in Westminster. I suspect that this would fail to serve the purpose we have in removing possible errors from our measurements of the goodness or badness of any given argument. How can the examples of measuring silk against a yardstick, comparing biological specimens to a "type-specimen", and comparing the weight of carbon and gold to hydrogen help us think more clearly about the grounds we having for comparing arguments and saying that one class contains a sample of good inferences and that another class contains a sample of bad inferences. In making such comparisons, we need something more than just a nominal assignment of the term 'good' to one class and 'bad' to another. Having said that, don't we need more than an ordinal scale that enables us to make relative comparisons of goodness and badness? How might we arrive in our theory of logic at a standard of measuring the validity of inferences that is richer than a nominal or ordinal scale? After all, we are relying on our standards for comparing arguments for the sake of arriving at conclusions about what, really, is true and false. These are the kinds of questions that I'm particularly interested in trying to answer. My hunch is that, rabbit hole or not, Peirce is pointing us to the resources needed to answer these kinds of questions. [...] >> These are great questions. I think the Existential Graphs hold the key to answering them. It is not so much a matter of finding perfect argument-prototypes and exhibiting them so people can copy them. It is more a matter of building a SYSTEM within which constructing an invalid argument is literally impossible, where you can play with the system and learn to feel the impossibility of the invalid constructions there. Note that this system consists of more than the marks on the sheet of assertion but also the RULES for manipulating them. This systemic character respects the much greater complexity that there is in logic, compared to length measurement. Cheers, Cathy
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