Clark, list,
By the way, I think that we should remind or inform readers that many
physicists, when they speak of 'realism', mean ideas such as that a
particle has an objective, determinate state, even when unmeasured.
Peirce's realism does not imply that, so far as I can see, and his
realism about absolute chance doesn't clash with the denial of of such
unmeasured objective determinate states either.
More responses interleaved.
On 9/28/2014 11:57 PM, Clark Goble wrote:
On Sep 27, 2014, at 8:11 PM, Benjamin Udell wrote:
>> [BU] A realist can and often enough ought to be skeptical about
particular models and diagrams as representative of reality. A
realist believes not that all generals are real but instead that some
generals are real and some generals are figmentitious.
>[CG] Yes, I think this is key. I think Peirceans have more tools at
our disposal because generals are broader than mere universals.
(Broader in the sense of encompassing more structures)
[BU] I didn't know that Peirce or Peirceans made such a distinction. Do
you remember where you've found that? One finds Aristotle translated as
using the noun 'universal' to mean a character that belongs, or at least
could belong, to more than one thing, and even recent philosophers (E.J.
Lowe, for example) call 'universals and particulars' the things that
Peirce called 'generals and singulars'. (The ambiguity of 'particular'
as referring the indefinite _/something/_ and the determinate
_/Socrates/_ is another issue.) Peirce's usage is more congenial to
everyday English, wherein the noun 'universal' instead parallels the
adjective, and, unqualified, evokes unlimited generality, and the word
'general', unqualified, evokes a generality that is not necessarily
universal and uninterrupted. In logic, examples of universal
propositions are 'all G is H' and 'all is H'. That's where I've noticed
Peirce speaking of the universal, while a general term is, roughly
speaking, a non-singular term (leave plurals and polyads out of it for
the moment), and thus correlates to the Aristotelian idea of a
universal. Anyway, given the way that English works, I'd advise against
a terminology in which the general is said to be broader than the
universal. Or maybe that was a typo and you meant to say that the
universal is broader than the general. I think so, given I what I
re-read now in your remarks below.
>>> [CG] If that’s true, even if a realist /appears/ to be appealing
to Aristotle’s four causes in practice what they /really/ think is
going on is probably something different. That is on a practical
basis for most physical theories even realists behave as an
instrumentalist. If true, then in what way can Aristotle’s
categories really be seen ontologically?
>>> So it’s really a subtle point about realism, foundational
ontology and Aristotle I'm making.
>> [BU] I'm not sure that I get you. Skepticism toward particular
models, the desire that they 'do the job' (i.e., stand up to
evidence) doesn't by itself seem to amount to choosing
instrumentalism over realism.
> [CG] I’ll give it an other shot. It’s a subtle point, and one that
perhaps isn’t a problem to Peirceans due to our distinctions between
generals and universals.
> Skepticism towards model’s reality is a problem simply because most
physicists are reducitonist but also don’t think they know what a
final theory is like. That means any model has to be reduced to
foundational laws/objects to discern what things really are. However
since we don’t know what to reduce them to, we’re left not knowing how
to conceive of the physics we know in terms of what they actually are.
> Now Peirce has a solution to this with generals. So we could say
that Newton’s Laws are true generals but are not universals. They have
a limited area of application. But within that application they are
true. Now we can quibble about how we’re dealing with errors due to
the difference between the general and what a more general law, like
general relativity might give. There are obviously some complexities
there we can debate. But fundamentally how Peirce approaches common
sense as phenomena heavily tested in a limited area is how we approach
physics.
> But note that this isn’t really how realists among physicists
conceive of it. When they talk about realism they aren’t merely
talking about structures that are mind independent but also the
grounds of those structures. And those grounds just aren’t known
> (Clearly a realist will accept that Newton’s laws describe mind
independent structures for most phenomena though, even if they don’t
quite put it into the form of generals the way Peirce might)
> Hope that helps. The issue is really that realism within a
reductionist system is what is fundamentally real. So it’s not that
the realists are the same as the instrumentalists. Simply that because
they don’t know the assumed foundational laws in certain practical
ways they act like an instrumentalist.
[BU] You seem to be suggesting that to say that there are real,
mind-independent laws, generals, etc., relating things, is to say also
that one knows just what the laws, generals, etc., are. But Peirce's
realism says that there are real, mind-independent laws, generals, etc.,
relating things, about which one can learn and some of which easily may
yet remain unknown or incompletely known to the given inquirer or group
of inquirers. At any rate, the inquirer _/hopes/_ to find such laws etc.
and the inquiry logically presupposes that they're there to be found
somehow.
>>> [CG] The closest I could find was the more typical (even today)
physicts view that we haven’t a clue what energy is beyond it’s
place in an equation.
>>> We should hardly find today a man of Kirchhoff’s rank in science
saying that we know exactly what energy does but what energy is we
do not know in the least. For the answer would be that energy being
a term in a dynamical equation, if we know how to apply that
equation, we thereby know what energy is, although we may suspect
that there is some more fundamental law underlying the laws of
motion. (EP 2:239)
>>> Peirce here was using energy and its meaning as an analogy for
relations.
>> [BU] I like to think that Peirce would think that the equations
tell us a little more now. Energy, in nearly the sense that he
understood it, is a time-minus-proper-time quantity in the sense that
momentum is a distance (or displacement) quantity. Energy,
momementum, mass, can all be expressed in the same units, in a sense
they're the same thing in terms of different reference-frame
structures. I should add at some point that Peirce didn't think that
energy was an cenoscopically philosophical subject, since the
conservation of energy requires special experiments to establish.
> [CG] I won’t even try to guess what Peirce would think. I don’t feel
I know his thought enough for that. I suspect you’re right in regards
to energy being cenoscopic or idioscopic. It seems an experimental
reduction rather something worked out philosophically. Whether they
are the same thing or not seems a bit trickier. I know that’s one
popular interpretation. I’m not sure that being able to transform
things entails they are the same thing though. That’s a tricky
conversation though. It might be they are all manifestations of
something more fundamental though.
[BU] That seems almost to say that maybe space and time aren't really
unified, when I thought that that was an even surer thing than the
equivalence of mechanical inertia and gravitational mass. Well, I've
heard that there are perspectives in which spacetime is emergent, so I
guess I don't know.
Best, Ben
-----------------------------
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 .
