I think that this is a really valuable point, Ben, and I think that an application of it bears very directly on discussions of psychologism and anti-psychologism in Peirce. Despite having opposed psychologism from the outset, Peirce was happy to pursue psychological solutions to some problems in logic. What's crucial here is to keep clear about the status of such solutions. When Peirce criticized his argument for the pragmatic maxim in 1877-78 for resting on a psychological principle, he was not, in my estimation, accusing his past self of psychologism. There are many reasons for this, starting with the fact that we'd have to come up with an explanation of how someone who railed against psychologism in the 1860's slipped into it in the 1870's. There are also clear anti-psychologistic claims in the stage-setting sections of "Fixation" and "How To" themselves. In the passage from the Minute Logic that Frederik quotes on p. 28 and in the later self-criticism I've already alluded to, it's pretty clear that by "psychological" treatments of logical matters, Peirce has in mind thinking about reasoning in terms of belief and action. There's nothing wrong about starting from claims about belief and action in order to establish certain logical norms, provided that one doesn't reduce the norms to that way of embodying reasoning. As you suggest below, Ben, it's a matter of a consilience of arguments. Peirce doesn't want his 1877-78 argument to be treated as the deepest or the only way of establishing such norms as the pragmatic maxim, but he's not accusing himself of circularity or relativism or the other vices of psychologism. If one doesn't attend carefully to the details of Peirce's self-assessments, he can seem inconsistent or confused about his position with respect to psychologism.
Best, Jeff ________________________________________ From: Benjamin Udell [bud...@nyc.rr.com] Sent: Monday, September 15, 2014 9:23 AM To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee; 'Peirce List' Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:6834] Re: Natural Propositions, Chapter 2 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<http://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
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