On 10/22/2016 3:44 PM, Edwina Taborsky wrote:
both explanations are based on belief; I really don't think either is open to empirical evidence.
Peirce encouraged reasoning by hypothesis (abduction), but he insisted that the implications of those hypotheses be evaluated by testing (purposive action) and observation (perception). He was highly skeptical about philosophers who proposed hypotheses that could not be related, directly or indirectly, to perception and action. In an earlier note, I cited the recent lecture by Susan Haack: http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl/Haack16.pdf In slide 6, she included a photo of Peirce and wrote "Peirce urged that philosophy be undertaken in the same spirit as the best work of the sciences, and that it should rely on experience as well as reason." In slide 7, she quoted two phrases by Peirce: "sham reasoning" by theologians and "lawless rovers on the sea of literature." At the end (slide 84), she included a photo of Bertrand Russell sitting in an armchair and wrote "the idea that philosophy can be conducted purely a priori is an illusion ... but a seductive one." I'm sure that Peirce would have been happy to know that people were still reading, analyzing, and debating his writings a century later. But I doubt that he would approve of "lawless rovers" on the sea of what he wrote. Instead, he would want his readers to continue the work he could no longer do: evaluate his hypotheses against their own experience (by phaneroscopy) and by empirical evidence gathered and published by others. The debate in this thread is useful. Speculation about what he meant should be tested against the many versions of his writings, but they should also be compared to the theories and empirical evidence of the past century. I believe that Peirce's writings improve on many of his successors. His writings about indexicals (based on his long analysis of language) are a great improvement on the armchair philosophers: e.g., Russell's hypothesis about definite descriptions, Perry's essential indexical, and most of the speculation about proper names in possible worlds. John
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