Ben, Yes, please do post the paper. I don’t deal with the materialism-idealism issue in that paper. Just in things that aren’t directly Peirce related, though they do use some of his ideas.
I hadn’t thought of the legal issue, but Susan Haack is a legal philosopher first of all. I found her book in the law library here, which surprised me at first. Best, John From: Benjamin Udell [mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com] Sent: September 23, 2014 8:13 PM To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee; peirce-l@list.iupui.edu Subject: [biosemiotics:6969] Re: Natural Propositions, John, lists, I remember years ago here at peirce-l I did another one of those examples of what would happen in courtrooms (but I was a LOT wordier in those days) if some replacement of truth as a value were to prevail, Rorty's in that case, the value of democratic exchange of views. Rorty also didn't think that philosophers had anything to learn from science about inquiry and truth. Later a philosopher as I recall said at his blog that, in personal correspondence, Rorty said to him that the idea of truth remains rightly a value in places like courtrooms. Apparently it's only philosophy that's supposed to be subjected to this weird abnegation. Well, like you say, Rorty walked the walk, and walked (away). Among the reasons that Rorty quit philosophy was what he regarded as philosophers' always trying to achieve a 'god's eye' view. I don't know why it would be beyond philosophers to have the fallibilism of proper statisticians, it's among the main businesses of statisticians to try to infer to a 'god's eye' view of a totality. I noticed that you posted a paper "Signs without Minds" http://web.ncf.ca/collier/papers/Signs%20without%20minds.pdf so I hope you won't mind if I link to it at Arisbe. I haven't read it thoroughly but I noticed that it contained a quote that I'd been looking for, "if, for example, there be a certain fossil fish, certain observations upon which, made by a skilled paleontologist, and taken in connection with chemical analyses of the bones and of the rock in which they were embedded, will one day furnish that paleontologist with the keystone of an argumentative arch upon which he will securely erect a solid proof of a conclusion of great importance, then, in my view, in the true logical sense, that thought has already all the reality it ever will have, although as yet the quarries have not been opened that will enable human minds to perform that reasoning. [....]" EP 2:455. Does that paper relate to the materialism-idealism question in Peirce? I haven't followed that part of the recent discussion here at peirce-l. I've read Haack's "We Pragmatists," highly recommend it. Best, Ben On 9/23/2014 12:54 PM, John Collier wrote: Ben, Lists, Richard Rorty in his appeal to “ironicism” argues that it is best, if you are a postmodernist social constructivist, not to talk about truth at all. He considers it to be irrelevant. I would disagree with him, of course, but at least he puts the crux of the issue out front: truth has no role in his position. I have taught Rorty with Peirce along with a colleague who is a Rorty scholar. Her PhD thesis, which I examined, was a critique of Rorty’s liberalism, and was very good. I have tried to persuade her to publish it. I like to use Susan Haack’s conversation between Peirce and Rorty at the end of the course, when the students have a fairly good grasp of both. It is in Susan Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 31-47, the chapter “We Pragmatists” Peirce and Rorty in conversation. It takes actual quotes from the two and weaves them together into a dialogue. Very clever. Rorty comes off looking rather silly. I asked Susan about this, and she defended her production on the grounds that she used actual and typical quotes from the two. I think she is right, of course. On separate issue recently discussed, I agree that Peirce’s development is pretty much continuous, but I don’t think it is completely inevitable from the content of his early work. I think he gets caught in the materialism or idealism opposition, which I see as a mistake (as I have mentioned here more than once). I do use some of his later work first in my classes, and then go back to his earlier work. This seems to work fairly well, since it gives the students some idea of where this is all going, a map so to speak. John From: Benjamin Udell Sent: September 23, 2014 6:25 PM To: biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee<mailto:biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee>; peirce-l@list.iupui.edu<mailto:peirce-l@list.iupui.edu> Subject: [biosemiotics:6967] Re: Natural Propositions, Stan, lists, You prefer to use 'truth' in quotes and to call 'truth' any opinion that anybody calls a truth. You're saying that, as far as I can tell, that truth is culturally relative, period, end of story. That would imply that your cultural relativism is itself culturally relative and isn't finally true in any normal sense of the word. So why do you bother to make that or any assertion? Or, what looks like an assertion of truth from you is actually something else, like making a political move, or adjusting a windshield wiper, or scat singing. Yet camouflaged as discussion. For some reason you want both to throw a wrench into the language and to keep using the language, and the result is a surrealism of the text, though not a surrealism of its writer. As the sometimes surrealistically writing poet Jack Spicer said, "the surrealism of the poet could not write words." Best, Ben On 9/22/2014 10:44 AM, Stanley N Salthe wrote: Replying to Ben ad Frederick Replying to Ben: B: You're simply not distinguishing between truth and opinion. If two traditions arrive at contrary conclusions about the same kind of phenomenon, the normal logical conclusion about the contrarity is that at most one of the conclusions is true and true for sound reasons, at most one is the result of sufficient investigation even though both traditions claim sufficiency. Peirce's semiotics is logic studied in terms of signs. You don't distinguish between sufficiency and claims of sufficiency, truth and claims of truth, and reality and claims of reality. Both traditions' conclusions might be false, results of insufficient investigation. They might both be mixes of truth and falsehood, various inaccuracies, and so on. S: I do not believe in an external non-mediated TRUTH as such. I think different traditions might reach different concepts of truth, and, indeed, more importantly, some might not construct an idea of truth at all. As I see it, you are simply defending the European conceptual tradition that has now become global. It was globalized because of its usefulness (sufficiency), and because no objection was permitted B: Simply accepting contrary conclusions as reflecting two "realities" because two traditions arrived at them is a defeatist method of inquiry, a form of 'insuccessibilism'. Imagine the swelling mischief if courts treated widely discrepant testimony from various witnesses as reflecting different "realities" rather than different perspectives or mistaken or differently limited observations or memories, or lack of honesty or candor, and so on. Imagine being an accused defendant in such a court, with one's money, career, freedom, life, hanging in the balance. S: The ‘truth’s here are those imposed within one culture/society, where internal conformity is requisite (as we can see today, when it is collapsing in many places. I do not support rebelling against a hegemonic system just because there could be other systems.). B: Waiting for the conflicting traditions to resolve their conflicts and hoping that their resultant conclusion will be the truth, is a method of inquiry of last resort, that to which a pure spectator is confined. S: Our culture did not ‘wait’ to supplant all the others (that counted). B; To go further and _define _ truth as the conclusion of any actual tradition or actual dialogue among actual traditions, underlies the method of authority, a form of infallibilism. If two traditions don't resolve their argument and if you for your part have no way to investigate the question itself and arrive at a conclusion about the subject of their argument, then your normal logical conclusion would be that you won't know the answer to the question, not that there are conflicting true answers to the question. S: I do not define (philosophical) truth at all. B: I disbelieve that you ever did physics in either way. I don't see why you'd want to impose such weak methods on philosophy, or have a semiotics in which contrary signs about the same object merely reflect different "realities"; S: To me, relativism is the only way to proceed once we understand the Umwelt concept. As I work within our culture I accept its norms and procedures, but I do not need to accept the concept of absolute philosophical truth in order to do so. B: such would turn logic and semiotics into mush. Peirce's theory of inquiry, which seems to reflect the attitude of scientific research, does not boil down to 'poll the experts' S: Actually, in science (and likely elsewhere) it DOES often boil down to just this. B: or 'poll the traditions', instead it boils down to 'do the science,' by a method actively motivated and shaped by the idea of putting into practice the fallibilist recognition that inquiry can go wrong (because the real is independent of actual opinion) and the 'successibilist' recognition that inquiry can go right (because the real is the cognizable). To argue about this, as you do, is to presuppose that there is a truth about this very matter under discussion, a truth that can be found and can be missed. S: The ‘truth’ here is only that there is no unmediated absolute truth. then Replying to Frederick: F: I agree Stan's interpretation of fallibilism here is far too colored by radical constructivism. S: Yes. I admit it. F: Fallibilism is not equal to scepticism or constructivism at all, nor does it imply that all "knowledge" will change completely over time. S: Within a culture it very likely will NOT. F: Science is growing by the day, we achieve more and more insight in a large number of fields of reality, including those of history, sociology, arts, political science etc. Fallibilism is the realization that even if most of that knowledge is in all probability true, we have 1) no absolute assurance that is the case which is why 2) any single item of that knowledge may be subject to some degree of revision over time. Cf. Peirce's sane refusal of absolute, Carteseian doubt: we should only doubt any single result when we have some reason or other to actually do so (inconsistencies, missing data, new information, gut feeling or any other reason). But we should not doubt established knowledge tout court without any reason ... S: The reason is implied in the Umwelt concept, as well as in the common sense idea that culture can evolve. STAN On Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 12:28 PM, Benjamin Udell <bud...@nyc.rr.com<mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com> > wrote:
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