Frederik, lists,
You wrote,
> [FS] You're right, it is rarely possible to define your way out
of any problem. I am not sure he thought signs and semiosis were
possible without living minds. The crux lies in "living minds like
yours and mine". P was anxious to distinguish between what must hold
for any possible mind and what holds for human minds in particular.
This was why he isloated the feature of connected signs of logic as
the general structure pertaining to any possible mind. The
"unpsychological" view of logic then claims this can be studied
without the particularities of human brains and minds (or any other
particular mind, for that matter).
[BU] I agree with that, and that it's the view that philosophical logic
should take.
>> [BU] Psychologists and other students of mind, behavior,
society in fact do study books as mental/social products,
processes, and as parts of larger mental/social processes, and
that goes to Peirce's point.
> [FS] But that is not the point of P's argument here. It is that
the structure of arguments characterizing the thought is in the book
rather than in the brain. Of course the book can be studied by
psychologists, just like it can be studied by physicists, chemists,
paper industrialists, book historians and much more. But Peirce's
claim is there is a property of the book which is not studied by any
of the above - the thoughts that it contains. So the book is not
merely a mental/social product. It is also an the structure of a
thought.
[BU] I agree partly. Both psychologist and logician can study the book,
but they study it in different regards. I don't think that only the
logician studies the thoughts in the book. They both can study the
thoughts in the book, but, as psychologist and logician, they study the
thoughts in different regards. They may need to be particularly careful
when studying a book on logic or a book on psychology. In studying the
idioscopic social aspects of mathematical or physical ideas as products,
a student of social studies needs to know enough of those subjects in
order to avoid getting into a _Social Text_ botch. A great deal of
mathematical work is based on mathematical considerations.
Mathematicians have plenty of _/mathematical reasons/_ for the character
of their work. The level of generality is much higher than that of
social studies. I agree with Peirce, more or less, but certainly enough
so for the present discussion. Mathematics is 'qualitatively', so to
speak, more general than the special sciences.
[CP 5.550, "Truth as Correspondence" From the "Basis of
Pragmaticism," 1906. Quote]
A _/mathematical form/_ of a state of things is such a
representation of that state of things as represents only the
samenesses and diversities involved in that state of things, without
definitely qualifying the subjects of the samenesses and
diversities. It represents not necessarily all of these; but if it
does represent all, it is the complete mathematical form. Every
mathematical form of a state of things is the complete mathematical
form of some state of things. [....]"
[End quote]
Decades ago I read some deconstructionists on literature who seemed to
think that literary artists never had any _/literary-artistic reasons/_
(just as mathematicians have mathematical reasons) for how they wrote. I
sensed a palpable dislike by those deconstructionists' part toward
literature and its writers. I thought, these deconstructionists are just
practicing and revving up for an assault on bigger academic game - the
sciences. I was out of the loop and the assault was already underway.
I've since met deconstructionists who really do like and love
literature, so I paint with a less broad brush now.
I also agree with Peirce that philosophy and philosophical logic are
'qualitatively' (my word again) more general than the special sciences.
I wouldn't put theoretical statistics in philosophy as Peirce seems to,
but I'd put them both in the same department, between math on one side
and special sciences on the other, in regard to generality. I'm saying
all these things in hope of showing that I'm not disagreeing with you as
much as you seem to think that I am.
>> [BU] I agree with that. [....] One might say that abductive
inference calls for instinct.
> [FS] I would say the opposite. Instinct has been selected for its
ability to perform abductive inference …
[BU] They seem not the opposite but the same to me. Peirce said it in "A
Neglected Argument" https://sites.google.com/site/cspmem/terms#simple :
[CSP. Quote]
[...] it is the simpler Hypothesis in the sense of the more facile
and natural, the one that instinct suggests, that must be preferred;
for the reason that unless man have a natural bent in accordance
with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.
[End quote]
[BU] To explain nature, to come up with a new idea to explain it,
requires inference, but that inference is neither (A) deduction to
elucidate what one already knows or assumes, nor (B) induction from part
to whole by a verisimilar 'generalization' of the character already
apparent in the sample data. We don't already have all the ideas that we
need. So the economy of research requires something of a guess or a leap
to a new or outside idea. This different kind of inference is called
abductive. And unless man have a natural bent, an instinct, in
accordance with nature's, said Peirce, he has no chance of understanding
nature at all. Inference to a hypothetical explanation calls for a
natural bent or instinct attuned to nature.
Best, Ben
On 9/9/2014 4:01 PM, Frederik Stjernfelt wrote:
Dear Ben, lists
[FS]> That is certainly correct - because he simply defined
quasi-minds as a logically interconnected series of signs - so
thoughts appearing apart from a mind is impossible by definition.
But mind is not psychologically defined, nor is only found in
connection to human brains - which form only one of the physical
systems supporting sign processing.
[BU] I don't think that you mean that he simply defined his way out
of the problem. Anyway, I think he was trying for a nontrivial
solution, how to conceive of signs and semiosis without living minds
like yours and mine. It does not follow, however, that he would
define mind logically such that, idioscopically regarded, it would
not be studiable from a psychological standpoint. In Peirce's broad
sense, psychology or psychognosy simply _/is/_ idioscopic study of
mind and mind-related phenomena, final causation, etc.; in other
words, psychognosy not only includes all individual psychology and
social studies, but also would not even be confined to the study of
brainy or nervous organisms or organisms at all.
You're right, it is rarely possible to define your way out of any
problem. I am not sure he thought signs and semiosis were possible
without living minds. The crux lies in "living minds like yours and
mine". P was anxious to distinguish between what must hold for any
possible mind and what holds for human minds in particular. This was
why he isloated the feature of connected signs of logic as the general
structure pertaining to any possible mind. The "unpsychological" view
of logic then claims this can be studied without the particularities
of human brains and minds (or any other particular mind, for that
matter).
[BU]> Now, in studies of special classes of positive phenomena, all
mental thought, if not all quasi-mental thought, would be regarded
as subject matter of psychological study, so John has a point - all
actual thought, the thoughts that we do think, are psychological,
in some sense of that word.
[FS]> This is a concise presentation of a possible view which has
the merit of being widespread. There is, however, a large number of
claims in Peirce going against such a view.
[BU] I used 'psychological' in sense that I didn't clarify was not
the conventional narrow sense. I've thought about Peirce's
classifications maybe a little too much. Anyway, I was thinking in
the broader sense of 'psychognosy' that I've now discussed above.
[FS]> I quote a series of them in my ch. 2. This is a further quote
(from ch. 7 discussing P as an important forerunner of the Extended
Mind hypothesis):
> "Again, the psychologists undertake to locate various mental
powers in the brain; and above all consider it as quite certain that
the faculty of language resides in a certain lobe; but I believe it
comes decidedly nearer the truth (though not really true) that
language resides in the tongue. In my opinion it is much more true
that the thoughts of a living writer are in any printed copy of his
book than that they are in his brain." (Minute Logic, 1902, 7.364)
[BU] Psychologists and other students of mind, behavior, society in
fact do study books as mental/social products, processes, and as
parts of larger mental/social processes, and that goes to Peirce's point.
But that is not the point of P's argument here. It is that the
structure of arguments characterizing the thought is in the book
rather than in the brain. Of course the book can be studied by
psychologists, just like it can be studied by physicists, chemists,
paper industrialists, book historians and much more. But Peirce's
claim is there is a property of the book which is not studied by any
of the above - the thoughts that it contains. So the book is not
merely a mental/social product. It is also an the structure of a thought.
[BU]>> All actual thinking by minds will be limited by the actual
powers of the homo sapiens or whatever it is that is thinking, and
implementation will matter a great deal, as Stan said.
Implementation will certainly matter in AI.
[FS]> Implementation indeed matters a lot - not all implementations
may perform the same amount of reasoning, at the same speed, with
the same degree of attention, etc. All these are aspects of the
psychology of thinking which P holds must be kept distinct from the
structure of thought and rationality itself.
[BU] Yes.
[BU]>> Peirce's anti-psychologism isn't the idea that we don't
depend on often unconscious cerebral processes that we don't
understand in order to reason. For example, he regards abductive
inference as guided by instinct, and regards the plausibility or
natural simplicity desirable in a hypothetical explanation as
something's seeming simple and natural in terms of one's evolved
instinctual attunement to nature, as opposed to logical simplicity,
which he regards as
badlysecondary.https://sites.google.com/site/cspmem/terms#simple.
Yet even here he includes a normative "ought", saying "By
plausibility, I mean the degree to which a theory ought to
recommend itself to our belief independently of any kind of
evidence other than our instinct urging us to regard it favorably."
(A Letter to Paul Carus 1910, Collected Papers v. 8, see paragraph
223.) Philosophical logic, in Peirce's view, then will be concerned
with instinct's role in abductive inference, but not with the
specific evolutionary history and kind of instinct possessed by
homo sapiens.
[FS]> Peirce in general had a rather high confidence in instinct -
he thought that evolution had forced organisms to implement many
aspects of simple logic. But again, this is not a psychologistic
idea. Quite on the contrary: It is not instinct that defines
abduction - it is instinct that has approached abduction during
evolution.
[BU] I agree with that. I discussed abduction and natural
plausibility a few times recently on peirce-l but you weren't
receiving peirce-l posts at that time. One might say that abductive
inference calls for instinct.
I would say the opposite. Instinct has been selected for its ability
to perform abductive inference …
Best
F
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