Gary F,
I have a great deal of sympathy for your Turning Signs. And I believe that issues of normative science deserve a great deal of attention especially now. For any points that I may criticize or quibble, I emphasize that my comments are about details, rather than the main issues you discuss. For example, I learned a lot about formal logic from Rudolf Carnap. But I strongly reject his goal of purifying language by using formal logic to define all words in terms of observable features. Carnap's strongest condemnation of any subject was "That's poetry!" As a response to Carnap, I like your quotation from EP 2.193: CSP> I hear you say: 'All that is not fact; it is poetry.' Nonsense! Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for. One quibble I would make is about the word 'logic'. In the 19th century, logic for most people meant a course based on the Trivium. That is the way Peirce defined logic in CP 1.191: "Logic is the theory of selfcontrolled, or deliberate, thought; and as such, must appeal to ethics for its principles. It also depends upon phenomenology and upon mathematics. All thought being performed by means of signs, logic may be regarded as the science of the general laws of signs..." This definition is acceptable for readers who had studied 19th century textbooks. But in CP 1.185, Peirce wrote "Mathematics may be divided into a. the Mathematics of Logic; b. the Mathematics of Discrete Series; c. the Mathematics of Continua and Pseudocontinua." He also used the terms 'mathematical logic' (9 instances in CP) and 'formal logic' (191 instances) as synonyms for the mathematics of logic. See CP 1.29, where he mentions "mathematico-formal logic". Elsewhere, he drops the prefix 'mathematico-". Today, all our readers live in the 21st century. Mathematical or formal logic is the foundation for anything running on a digital computer. All courses about logic teach formal logic. Any discussions of the way people think use terms such as 'informal logic' or 'natural logic'. To avoid confusion for today's readers, it's important to put an adjective, such as 'normative', in front of the word 'logic'. It's not necessary to include the adjective at every occurrence, but it is importat to put it in front of the first occurrence in any context. On a related issue, the first six chapters of my 1984 book Conceptual Structures presented technical material about cognitive science and aritificial intelligence. But the final chapter 7 had the title "Limits of conceptualization". In it, I talked about the exaggerated claims for AI and the unsolved problems and open-ended questions that nobody knew how to address. Today, the earlier chapters would require a great deal of updating, but the questions in chapter 7 are as relevant as they ever were. See http://jfsowa.com/pubs/cs7.pdf . I believe that most of my chapter 7 is compatible with Turning Signs. But I also believe that it's important to distinguish several critcal terms: experience in the phaneron, mental imagery, percept, concept, icon, symbol, proposition, sentence, and word. When Peirce uses the word 'thought', it's not clear which of those words he means. For more examples about the sources of vagueness and mbiguities in language, see the first 20 slides for the talk "Natural logic": http://jfsowa.com/talks/natlog.pdf . In particular, note slide 18 about two professional lexicographers who admitted "I don't believe in word senses." Since Peirce was also a professional lexicographer who encountered the same issues, I believe that he would agree with them. Also note slide 17 about the word 'microsense', which was coined by the linguist Allen Cruse. He emphasized the tiny variations that occur in the meaning of a word even in different occurrences in the same document. For these reasons, there are serious issues about assuming that two occurrences of a word even in the same document have exactly the same "meaning". When they occur in different documents written in different years, discrepancies are even more likely. That's why careful attention to methodology is essential. The emphasis on methodology is one of Peirce's major concerns; note the 1024 instances of 'method' in CP (with various suffixes). John
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