On 3/10/2017 8:57 AM, Jon Alan Schmidt wrote:
By contrast, Peirce's realism recognizes that "correspondence, coherence, consensus, and instrumental reliability are all essential and constitutive elements of truth--none is any more fundamental than the others. Moreover, each of these elements of truth is a necessary condition for realizing the others. Each one--properly understood and fully explicated in accordance with the pragmatic maxim--implies the others" (Paul Forster, p. 175).
Excellent point. And by the way, Forster's book is good for what it does, but he always compares Peirce to his predecessors or contemporaries. In order to understand the implications of CSP's work, it's essential to test his ideas with the future -- both successes and failures. Peirce always insisted that the meaning of Thirdness is in the future. For example, note that Rudolf Carnap, a good logician whose mind was warped by Frege and Mach (hence logical positivism), refused to admit Truth in his system. But he finally admitted truth values, when Tarski showed him the model-theoretic criterion. But to the end of his life, Carnap repeated Mach's claim that the laws of physics were nothing but summaries of observations. Historical studies are important, and Peirce studied the past more than most of his contemporaries. But it's important to confirm his ideas by looking at successful applications -- *and* at major failures caused by ignoring him. The most spectacular failures were behaviorism and logical positivism, which dominated a major part of the 20th century. Quine didn't call himself a logical positivist, but he had nothing better to offer. Hao Wang, who earned a PhD with Quine, called Q's philosophy "logical negativism". Among their failures is the total absence of normative science and value judgments. They have nothing to say about the claims "Greed is good" or "I'm OK. Pull up the gangplank." John
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