At 14:48:09 -0500, 31 Jan 2015, Gary Fuhrman wrote:
Evidently you, like John, move mainly in
professional circles where the normal use of
determine implies determinism. But if you
want to understand what Peirce is saying or any
writer who was extremely scupulous in his use of
words and a leading expert on their usage by
others then you cant rule out a usage which
differs from the one that happens to suit your
habits. Especially when your accustomed usage
would not make sense in the contexts where Peirce
used the term such as his definitions of sign.
HP: You are missing my point. I am not ruling out
usages or suiting my habits. I am distinguishing
essential and different usages. My point does not
depend on how Peirce or Oxford defines
determinism. I am making a necessary epistemic
distinction between two types of determinism: (1)
models of determinism (as in Newton's Laws) and
(2) the determinism of models as in creative abduction.
Here is what I said: "I think John is correct. I
can say that according to the (symbolically
expressed) law of gravity this law predicts that
a rock is determined to fall. I cannot correctly
say that the above expression of the law of
gravity is determined. Like all creative models
it was discovered using abduction."
To elaborate, as a realist physicist (e.g.,
Einstein) I may believe that Nature has strictly
deterministic laws, or as a quantum physicist
(e.g., Born) I may believe that Nature determines
only probabilistic laws. Unfortunately, we only
have symbolic models approximating Natures's
laws; but in both cases we have faith that
Nature's type of determinism, whatever it is,
exists independent of our models.
My point is that we cannot equate the determinism
of Nature with the conceptual determinism of how
the symbolic laws come about. That would be
confusing the map from the territory. As many
physicists have pointed out, without respecting
this epistemic cut, none of our models would make sense.
Howard
-----------------------------
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 .
