On Feb 3, 2019, at 3:55 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> My argument is deductively valid, so in order to disagree with its > conclusion, one must also disagree with at least one of its premises. With > which of those premises do you specifically disagree, and why? > Jon, here's my 2 cents. I don't think your inclusion of "every" in your major premise, "every Sign is determined by an Object other than itself," can possibly have a shred of inductive support. That is, I think your major premise is a mere hypothesis. I wonder if your major premise is analogous to this: "Every point making a black dot is black." Here I'm referring to a black area on an otherwise white plane. According to bivalent logic it is either true or false that a given point making up the black dot is black—and we'd have to say "true." But, Peirce discovered tri-valent logic by wondering about the color of the outer borderline of the dot separating the black dot from the white surroundings, and determined that, since no point in the line can be half black and half white, and since you can't butt two points up together (one point in the white line surrounding the dot and the other point at the outer black line of the dot abutting the white line) with no room in between, the borderline's color must be indeterminate. So, the logic by which everyone thought the major premise, "every point making a black dot is black", was secure, was in fact not applicable to that outer edge, and therefore the inclusion of "every" is specious. I think that it may be, by analogy, that the logic by which you think the major premise, "every Sign is determined by an Object other than itself", is secure, is likewise not applicable to your task. I can accept this revision: "every Sign save the universe-as-a-whole is determined by an Object other than itself," but that's not useful for your task. The mere possibility that your major premise, "Every Sign is determined by an Object other than itself", is analogous to this major premise, "Every point making a black dot is black", means that your major premise is a mere hypothesis. It's not inductively supported because you can't possibly assign a probability to the status of the analogy, for example, "the probably that the analogy holds is 25%." It would be like determining the color content of beans in a bag after randomly sampling a percentage of beans from all but the bottom layer of the bag. The probability that you assign to your induction doesn't apply to the contents of the whole bag but only to the area from which you were capable of sampling. If you pulled all white beans, the statement, "all the beans in the bag are white", must still be treated as a hypothesis. (I'm not considering that you have a clue as to how the beans got into the bag, as that would be useful information; all that you could include in your induction about how the universe got here are further hypotheses.) A valid syllogism that has a hypothetical major premise has a hypothetical conclusion. So your deduction begs the question: Can the reality of God be logically supported? Matt
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