Clark, Jon A.S., and Claudio, I'm trying to relate Peirce's logic, mathematics, semiotic, theory of truth, and logic of pragmatism to his insights into perception, cognition, and purposeful action.
CSP's essential insights: triadic semiotic; icons as the starting point; symbols growing from icons; laws for relating and defining anything; diagrams as lawful constructions from icons; logic of pragmatism for constructing, refining, and testing diagrams; phaneroscopy for examining imagery from any source, external (all sensory modalities) or internal (mental models or a kind of virtual reality); and language for social interaction and collaboration on all of the above. Clark
There’s a bit to unpack there - most particularly who the “we” is... the ideal community of inquirers rather than any particular person... while the universe is knowable and therefore imaginable it doesn’t follow that it is imaginable for any finite group of people.
Re 'we': I meant anybody and everybody, individually or in any kind of collaboration. The human methods of perception, cognition, and action as individuals are the basis for communication and collaboration with any groups of individuals in any place or time. Re imaginable: All perception and imagination is by individuals. But by collaboration, we can share our imaginations, build on them, refine them, correct them. Clark
As you note this is also separate from the nominalist debate since a nominalist can agree with this.
Yes. As Peirce himself said, he began as a nominalist, but his continued studies and analyses led him to a kind of extreme realism. I prefer CSP's later interpretations. Claudio
Do you mean the LAWS OF NATURE, or just what we think that laws of nature are?
Either or both. Our methods of reasoning are independent of the nominalist-realist debate. But the methods of making predictions and testing them can give us some confidence than we are at least approximating them -- at least for those areas we have tested. Claudio
everybody has to check twice... before 'believing'...
Yes. When we communicate and collaborate with others, we need to recognize that they are just as fallible as we are. Even worse, they may have confused, misguided, or hostile motives. Claudio
I would NEVER say that truth is irrelevant!!!
I wasn't accusing you. But there are people who use terms like 'post truth' or 'alternate facts'. They even claim "Whatever you repeat often enough becomes the truth." That way of thinking and talking is extremely dangerous. Jon
Peirce carefully distinguished between images and diagrams as two different types of icons (or "hypoicons"). "Those which partake of simple qualities, or First Firstnesses, are images; those which represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams" (CP 2.277; c. 1902).
That's exactly what I intended. Thanks for digging up the quotation. Jon
did Peirce himself ever affirm that every sign begins with an "external" image, and that every sign constructed from other signs is an "internal" diagram?
I don't think that he used the term 'internal' and 'external'. But I wanted to relate what Peirce said to the modern work in neuroscience. Note the following point by Antonio Damasio:
The distinctive feature of brains such as the one we own is their uncanny ability to create maps... But when brains make maps, they are also creating images, the main currency of our minds. Ultimately consciousness allows us to experience maps as images, to manipulate those images, and to apply reasoning to them.
I quoted that passage in slide 56 of http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/ppe.pdf In those slides, I was trying to relate and extend Peirce's version of existential graphs to a more general kind of diagrammatic reasoning. In slide 55, I quoted the psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird who claimed that Peirce's EGs "anticipate the theory of mental models in many respects, including their iconic and symbolic components, their eschewal of variables, and their fundamental operations of insertion and deletion." JFS
Therefore, the knowable universe is limited to everything we can imagine, and mathematics can analyze anything we can imagine.
Jon
Does it help to amend the initial statement to form a subjunctive conditional? "Therefore, the knowable universe is limited to everything we would be able to imagine, if the right conditions were to occur." If so, is this formulation still unobjectionable to a nominalist?
Carnap introduced possible worlds to support modal logic. He might accept the term 'knowable'. But Quine objected to the term 'possible world'. I suspect that he would also object to the term 'knowable universe'. John
----------------------------- 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 .
