Clark, list,
You wrote,
>[CG] The line of thinking I was following was that generals, as
used by Peirce, simply has much narrower application possible than
universals like colors. It’s true that the universal yellow can be
instantiated by a limited number of objects but is treated as an
universal. However it seems like “some flowers are yellow” are
different from “some men wear hats.” The distinction I was getting
at, relative to Newton’s laws, was that distinction. The predicate
“is wearing a hat” simply seems a different sort of thing from “is
yellow.” Traditional universals within science accept the latter but
tend not to apply it to the former.
[End quote]
Peirce makes the distinction between mechanical qualities and qualities
of feeling, see CP 1.422-426, circa 1896. Particularly interesting is
that here he calls qualities generals - but qualities only as reflected
on. http://www.textlog.de/4282.html .
I'd think that laws of physics are more general than a sensible quality
like 'yellow', which is less widely applicable than the laws of physics
in our known physical universe, even if one does think that sensible
qualities are real.
Except when discussing 'universal' as understood in physics, it might be
better to stick to 'more general' and 'less general', rather than trying
for a distinction between 'universal' and 'general' that (A) merely
involves different degrees of generality and (B) gets tangled up in
terminological history. I've avoided (A) but tripped over (B). At one
time, I defined 'universal' and 'general' in the monadic case as
follows: given a term H true of something, H is _/universal/_ if there
is not also something of which H is false, otherwise H is _/special/_.
Given a term H true of something, H is _/general/_ if there is something
else of which H is true, otherwise H is _/singular/_. But that is more
in keeping with everyday English than with logical and philosophical
terminology, so if I need to discuss my notion of 'universal' you'll see
me using an invented word for it.
> [CG] [...] I think realism in physics is also partially about
that hope. I think when one is a realist about a particular claim
that one also has a hope that a particular entity is just such a
mind independent entity. So one can be a realist broadly about
something we don’t know (say whether there are fundamental
structures) but I take realism in practice to be claims about
particular entities.
> If one is a realist only about things one doesn’t know, then do
you think that makes one an instrumentalist about the other entities
if one views such entities as simplified models and not the ultimate
constituents?
[End quote]
Realism about particular laws etc. is just realism adjoined to the claim
to have found certain entities. 'Realism about GR' or 'Realism about
natural selection', etc. But philosophical realism is not the sum or
generality of such realisms. Instead _/realism about particular laws
etc./_ is the sum or generality of such realisms.
If one is a realist _/only/_ about things that one doesn't know, then
one implies that the real is not cognizable. I suppose that one could
say in a loose sense that one is partly an instrumentalist about
simplified models, but one may regard such models as still being close
to the truth, and thus as reflecting something nearly real, and in that
sense one is not an instrumentalist. In "On the Logic of Drawing
Ancient History from Documents", EP 2, somewhere in pages 107–9 Peirce
speaks of _/incomplexity/_, that of a hypothesis that seems too simple
but whose trial "may give a good 'leave,' as the billiard-players say",
and be instructive for the pursuit of various and conflicting hypotheses
that are less simple. One could loosely call that instrumentalism, but
to regard the incomplex hypothesis as offering some degree of promise of
leading to a true theory about something real, is not instrumentalism.
Regarding A-time and B-time, I thought that those were questions in
philosophy of physics, not in physics. Do you think that they have
something to do with the unification of space and time in the sense in
which that unification is understood in physics - such as to modify the
idea of the signal speed limit as a common yardstick of space and time?
Best, Ben
On 9/29/2014 2:36 PM, Clark Goble wrote:
On Sep 29, 2014, at 10:38 AM, Benjamin Udell wrote:
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.
Yes. Great point. I really should have clarified the issues of realism
in physics from more broad realism vs. idealism debates such as those
Dewey was involved in.
>> [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.
Hmm. That was really a bad way of expressing that on my part. I now
regret I wrote that. Clearly I’m wrong in what I wrote.
The line of thinking I was following was that generals, as used by
Peirce, simply has much narrower application possible than universals
like colors. It’s true that the universal yellow can be instantiated
by a limited number of objects but is treated as an universal. However
it seems like “some flowers are yellow” are different from “some men
wear hats.” The distinction I was getting at, relative to Newton’s
laws, was that distinction. The predicate “is wearing a hat” simply
seems a different sort of thing from “is yellow.” Traditional
universals within science accept the latter but tend not to apply it
to the former.
Probably what I should have written was more about what
universals/generals one was a realist about. Especially as it relates
to the reductionist issue.
As you note Peirce typically uses general as non-singular. The reason
I had said it was broader was more about Peirce allowing realism
towards many generals that a physicist wouldn’t. So many people are
open to mathematical entities being universals for instance. (Think
Quine for example) However they tend not to be a realist towards
statements like “is wearing a hat.” That’s fundamentally an emergent
phenomena and wrapped up with individual minds, the way most
nominalists think of it.
But I might just simply be wrong in all this. I think I was thinking
in terms of passages like the following:
A particular proposition asserts the existence of something of a
given description. A universal proposition merely asserts the
non-existence of anything of a given description.
Had I, therefore, asserted that a perceptual judgment could be a
universal proposition I should have fallen into rank absurdity.
For reaction is existence and the perceptual judgment is the
cognitive product of a reaction.
But as from the particular proposition that “There is some woman
whom any Catholic you can find will adore,” we can with certainty
infer the universal proposition that “Any Catholic you can find
will adore some woman or other,” so if a perceptual judgment
involves any general elements, as it certainly does, the
presumption is that a universal proposition can be necessarily
deduced from it. (EP 2:210)
Now this is getting at vagueness vs. generals. And now that I try and
rethink through my reasoning, I suspect that it is this vagueness vs.
generalness issue that’s at play.
Peirce I should note makes the point you do explicitly which makes
this a more embarrassing error on my part.
it may be pointed out that the “Quantity” of propositions in
logic, that is, the distribution of the first subject, † is either
singular (that is, determinate, which renders it substantially
negligible in formal logic), or *universal (that is, general)*, or
particular (as the medieval logicians say, that is, vague or
indefinite). It is a curious fact that in the logic of relations
it is the first and last quantifiers of a proposition that are of
chief importance. To affirm of anything that it is a horse is to
yield to it every essential character of a horse: to deny of
anything that it is a horse is vaguely to refuse to it some one or
more of those essential characters of the horse. (EP 2:352)
Aristotle’s definition of universal predication, which is usually
designated (like a papal bull or writ of court, from its opening
words) as the Dictum de omni, may be translated as follows: “We
call a predication (be it affirmative or negative ) universal,
when, and only when, there is nothing among the existent
individuals to which the subject affirmatively belongs, but to
which the predicate will not likewise be referred (affirmatively
or negatively, according as the universal predication is
affirmative or negative).” […] The proper mate of this sort to the
Dictum de omni is the following definition of affirmative
predication: We call a predication affirmative (be it universal or
particular) when, and only when, there is nothing among the
sensational effects that belong universally to the predicate which
will not be (universally or particularly, according as the
affirmative predication is universal or particular) said to belong
to the subject. Now, this is substantially the essential
proposition of pragmaticism. Of course, its parallelism to the
Dictum de omni will only be admitted by a person who admits the
truth of pragmaticism.
(EP 2:344)
The question then becomes how this applies to Newtons laws. While I
think I made an error, I think I’m headed towards a correct
distinction. I just need to think through it more. I think the point I
was at is that in physics universals apply to everything. Generals
need not apply to all subjects.
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.
Yes, and I think realism in physics is also partially about that hope.
I think when one is a realist about a particular claim that one also
has a hope that a particular entity is just such a mind independent
entity. So one can be a realist broadly about something we don’t know
(say whether there are fundamental structures) but I take realism in
practice to be claims about particular entities.
If one is a realist only about things one doesn’t know, then do you
think that makes one an instrumentalist about the other entities if
one views such entities as simplified models and not the ultimate
constituents?
I think the ultimately problem is that most physicists (like most
scientists) are nominalists and thus to make a realist claim requires
knowing what the singulars are. Yet most physicists don’t think they
know the singulars. This leads to problems for a nominalist that a
scholastic realist like Peirce doesn’t face.
Now I think physicists would do well to jettison nominalism. But I’m
realistic that few are open to scholastic realism.
> [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.
Well exactly what we mean by space and time being unified isn’t clear.
There are still plenty of papers arguing via a careful consideration
of the physics for either A-time or B-time which entails quite
different conceptions of the “unification.” I tend to favor an
ontology that privileges General Relative and a substantial
space/time. But that’s hardly the only view.
Spacetime as emergence is actually a fairly common view. One could
well argue that in certain ways it was Einstein’s in that he was
really trying to do a Leibnizean monadology where space/time emerges.
See for example the SEP on the hole argument.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-holearg
Einstein’s view is a little different than the classic Leibnizean
relativism sought after by figures like Mach. That’s because warped
spacetime appears to be as much a part of an object as are its volume
and mass. That is you don’t have windowless monads where all events of
the object through time are contained within it.
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