Jeff D., Gary F., lists,
I seem to be recalling the neo-Scholastic de Wulf a lot lately, I don't
know why, I didn't read him that much. Anyway, at some point he wrote of
biology as "passing over" individual differences in order to understand
species and so on. And I thought, that's not it at all. In Chapter 2,
Paragraph 2 of the _The Origin of Species_ (I think I read up through
Chapter 3 many years ago), Darwin wrote "It should be remembered that
systematists are far from pleased at finding variability in important
characters, and that there are not many men who will laboriously examine
internal and important organs, and compare them in many specimens of the
same species."
http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/chapter-02.html
When Peirce said that his effort required the "utter abandonment of all
bias," he seems to have meant especially the possible bias that he might
have had as somebody deeply versed in logic and in Kant. In order to
avoid such bias, he tried to "to solve the puzzle in a direct
speculative, a physical, a historical, and a psychological manner". In
order to avoid bias by a particular one of those manners, he studied
them all. His conclusion in the 1860s was, to attack the problem of the
categories as Kant did, from the side of formal logic. I agree that this
implies that he believed that any of the other manners of _/solving/_
the problem, especially any taken singly, tends toward prejudicing one's
answer to the question. However this conclusion ought to be quite
separated from a conclusion, which I don't seem him drawing, that
_/looking into/_ direct speculations, physics, history, and psychology
in order to learn about categoriality involves an excessive risk of
prejudicing one's answer to the question. Indeed, Peirce never stops
looking for categorial patterns in many fields including the special
sciences. In later years, in one of the many passages that I failed to
make a note of, he says that the inductive corroboration of his
categorial views comes from continued fruitfulness of application in
many subject matters. Indeed, his early categorial explorations of those
fields may have helped him generalize back to logic, and later to
phaneroscopy. (He came to regard philosophy as consisting of "so-called"
logical analysis (intellectual autobiography, 1904, Ketner editor), and
to regarding such logical analysis as really being phaneroscopic
analysis (Peirce to James, 1909, CP 8.305); obviously by "logical
analysis" in that context Peirce did not mean the study of logic _/per
se/_.)
Best, Ben
On 9/15/2014 9:39 AM, Gary Fuhrman wrote:
Jeff D.,
Good question. I think that for the late Peirce, the key method for
avoiding bias and prejudice is phaneroscopy, because that is grounded
in observation of that which is most directly and immediately
observable, namely the phaneron. MS 337:4-5, 7, 1904: “The word
φανερόν is next to the simplest expression in Greek for manifest.…
There can be no question that φανερός means primarily _/brought to
light, open to public expression throughout/_.… I desire to have the
privilege of creating an English word, phaneron, to denote whatever is
throughout its entirety open to assured observation” (quoted by De
Tienne 1993, 280).
CP 1.286: “There is nothing quite so directly open to observation as
phanerons; and since I shall have no need of referring to any but
those which (or the like of which) are perfectly familiar to
everybody, every reader can control the accuracy of what I am going to
say about them. Indeed, he must actually repeat my observations and
experiments for himself, or else I shall more utterly fail to convey
my meaning than if I were to discourse of effects of chromatic
decoration to a man congenitally blind. What I term _/phaneroscopy/_
is that study which, supported by the direct observation of phanerons
and generalizing its observations, signalizes several very broad
classes of phanerons; describes the features of each; shows that
although they are so inextricably mixed together that no one can be
isolated, yet it is manifest that their characters are quite
disparate; then proves, beyond question, that a certain very short
list comprises all of these broadest categories of phanerons there
are; and finally proceeds to the laborious and difficult task of
enumerating the principal subdivisions of those categories.”
In saying this, I’m going somewhat beyond (or behind?) what Frederik
says about “direct access” in in NP (p. 14), where he argues that
according to a psychologistic view, “the meaning of a word in a
language may be taken to be the sum or average of the set of
individual mental representations of that word's meaning (something
similar goes for the acoustic or graphic image of the word which is
also identically repeatable or multiply realizable). An immediate
problem in such a conception is that an object to which we have fairly
direct access — word meaning as accessed by linguistics, dictionaries,
encyclopaedias, public definitions, introspection, action,
intersubjective agreement in everyday speech — is replaced by an
object to which we have no access (or very limited access), namely a
sum of different bundles of associations in the minds of a vast array
of individual persons.” Clearly we have even more direct access to the
phaneron, as Peirce defines it, than we do to dictionaries etc., all
of which (insofar as they are media) can be sources of bias.
One can of course argue that Peirce’s phaneroscopy itself (or his
phenomenology, as he called it from 1902 to 1904) was biased in its
quest for the “categories”, because Peirce had already by 1867 arrived
at a short list of categories by means of a logical analysis, and it
looks suspicious that he arrived at essentially the same list, decades
later, by phaneroscopic means. As I tried to show in my _Transactions_
paper, Peirce was well aware of this danger and took (by his account)
extreme measures to avoid it. But whether he succeeded or not, each
phaneroscopist has to do this for herself, i.e. do her own direct
observation and generalizing while setting aside (“bracketing” as
Husserl would say) any preconceived notions of categorial classes.
There is no abductive method of avoiding bias altogether, and that’s
why hypotheses have to be checked by the self-correcting methods of
inductive logic before we can claim truth for them. Whether those
methods are available to phaneroscopy itself is a difficult question,
I think, but I also think that phaneroscopy, due to our direct access
to the phaneron, was the essential key to Peirce’s efforts to avoid
bias in constructing his logic considered as semiotic.
gary f.
} For we are fed of its forest, clad in its wood, burqued by its bark
and our lecture is its leave. [Finnegans Wake 503] {
www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm }{ gnoxics
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeffrey Brian Downard
Sent: 14-Sep-14 5:36 PM
Jeff K., Frederik, Lists,
I agree with Peirce in thinking that the normative theory of logic
should serve as an important basis for our inquiries in metaphysics.
If we start with an account of the metaphysical categories and then
use it in setting up the logical theory, then we would be putting the
cart before the horse. Having said that, I do think that Peirce,
from early on, was drawing on a phenomenological and a logical
understanding of the categories in his inquiries in logic, and that
his reflections on these accounts of the categories guide many of his
inquiries concerning the nature of dicisigns.
I think it would be fair to say that Peirce is trying to develop a
logical theory that is free from the kinds of bias that would tend to
unduly skew the development of the theory. The sources of such bias
take a number of different forms. He characterizes them in the
following way in his later reflections on his youthful works:
"The first question, and it was a question of supreme importance
requiring not only utter abandonment of all bias, but also a most
cautious yet vigorously active research, was whether or not the
fundamental categories of thought really have that sort of dependence
upon formal logic. ... I will not trouble the reader with my answers
to these and similar questions. Suffice it to say that I seemed to
myself to be blindly groping among a deranged system of conceptions;
and after trying to solve the puzzle in a direct speculative, a
physical, a historical, and a psychological manner, I finally
concluded the only way was to attack it as Kant had done from the
side of formal logic." (CP 1.561-3)
We can see that he has actively tried other methods of
inquiry--including the method of philosophical speculation, a
physical method, a historical method and a psychological method--and
has found each of them wanting. He is not merely rejecting these
methods out of hand. Consequently, we could attach the following
labels to his approach in logic. It is un-speculative, un-physical,
un-historical, un-metaphysical and un-psychological in its methods.
There are three points that he is stressing in these passages as
objections to each of these other methods: first, they all bring
unwarranted biases and prejudices into the inquiry; second, they lead
us to blind groping and, third, the results of such methods are a
deranged system of conceptions.
Can we say more about his reasons for thinking that each of these
methods involves biases and prejudices--along with his reasons for
thinking that these biases and prejudices will tend to undermine the
process of formulating plausible hypotheses that will give rise to
systems of conceptions that will fit coherently with the phenomena
we're trying to explain? I'd like to see if we could tease this
points out a bit more if others are interested in the question.
--Jeff
-----------------------------
PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L
to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To
UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the
line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at
http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
