Peircers,
Let me pick it up here:
SN: The main idea or "real issue" that JR seeks to present via Kleinman's
paper is brought out in paragraph 3: "whether scientific inquiry is to
continue to be recognized institutionally as a discovery process, guided
ideally by the norms implicit in such ideas as that of truth, knowledge,
reality, objectivity, and so forth, or is to be controlled instead by
the principles of persuasion and accommodation that are used in
negotiational and political activity" (emphasis in JR's text). JR wants
to argue in the rest of the paper that scientific inquiry should be
guided by said norms. The either/or construction of JR's sentence seems
worth pondering, as is the emphatic formatting of the term,
"discovery." Two questions come to mind in this regard:
1) Why does JR put stress on this concept of "discovery"? What is the
implicit contrast to it (discovery/found vs inventive/made)? Is this a
reference to some idea of Peirce here?
2) Perhaps more important: Are the two different ways that JR identifies
of governing such discovery processes really, fundamentally, discrete
alternatives? are they as completely separable and interchangeable as JR
seems to think they are? In sum, is this really a "Plan A or Plan B"
situation? I'm skeptical about it being accurate to think of discovery
processes as guided either (and simply) by "norms" on the one hand, or
by "principles" of the kind JR identifies on the other? I'm surprised
to see JR even use the term "principle" in relation to the strategies
and tactics of political activity he references (I'm not sure what JR
has in mind by "negotiational" activity). It sounds as though JR's
view of political life is very negative, lacking in norms implicit in
its own ideas of truth, knowledge, reality, not to mention honor.
Perhaps JR is simply saying that science ought to be governed by ideals
that rise above the historical contingencies within which any given
practice must be situated, ideals that relate to subject matter that is
itself relatively enduring, general, and transcendent. Any thoughts
about how to sort out this passage?
For (1), I don't think we find the usual suspect dualism between discovery and
invention
in Peirce's account of the inquiry process. Haack made a recent attempt to
characterize
the pragmatic synthesis as "foundherentism", but I think it's better to realize
from the
outset that working in sign-relational framework means never having to murder
to dissect,
that the object-referent aspect and the sign-processing aspect are mere
projections from
the whole sign relation in which we are participating at any given moment.
For (2), I think this spectrum of difference reflects the classical distinction
between
logic (reasoning that proceeds independently of the peculiar conditions of
interpreters)
and rhetoric (reasoning that is tailored to the peculiar conditions of its
interpreter).
Jon
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