[peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metaphor

[Benjamin Udell]

Joe, Gary, Jim, list,   >[Joe] Ben Says:   >>[Ben] I don't know how Peirce and others have missed the distinct and irreducible logical role of verification. I keep an eye open regarding that question, that's about all. I don't have some hidden opinion on the question. Tom Short argued that there is a problem with answering how it is that semiosis learns to distinguish sense from nonsense, and Tom argued that Peirce saw this problem. I wasn't convinced that Peirce saw the problem, and I think that it's the verification problem; I can't help thinking that if Peirce had seen it, he would have addressed it more aggressively.   >[Joe] REPLY:   >[Joe] I don't think Peirce overlooked anything like that, Ben.  It is just that verification is not a distinctive formal element in inquiry in the way you think it is, and Peirce's approach to logic as theory of inquiry doesn't mislead him into thinking that one has to give a formal account of such a thing.  Oh, well, one can of course explain about how publication works, and how people are expected to respond to the making of research claims to do what one can describe as "verifying" them.  That would involve discussing such things as attempts to replicate experimental results, which can no doubt get complicated in detail owing to the fact that it would only rarely involve exact duplication of experimental procedures and observations of results, the far more usual case being the setting up of related but distinguishable lines of experimentation whose results would have rather obvious implications for the results claimed in the research report being verified or disverified, depending on how it turns out.  I don't think there would be anything very interesting in getting into that sort of detail, though.    One might make similar remarks on abductive inference, which is belief-laden and context-sensitive and would require getting into lots of details and variation case by case. Note that the kind of hypotheses which inferential statistics characteristically produces are "statistical hypotheses" rather than explanatory ones, and it is not as if statisticians never had an interest in the subject; a few years ago one statistician wrote here at peirce-l about being interested in general approaches to the production of the content of hypotheses which go beyond the usual statistical kind. Statistics deals with phenomena in general and, though often applied in idioscopy, is not itself about any special class of phenomena. Yet one does, in at least some philosophy, attempt and pursue general characterizations _of_ abductive inference and this is because abductive inference is a logical process of a general kind and is therefore part of philosophy's subject matter. Verification is also a logical process of a general kind. The question is, is it some kind of interpretation, representation, or objectification, or combination thereof? Or is it something else?   Now there are two more questions here: Did Peirce think that verification was important and determinational in inquiry? (Yes). Did Peirce think that verification is a distinctive formal element in semiosis? (No.) Your discussion of an emphasis on verification as reflecting a pathology of skepticism, a search for infallible truth, etc., goes too far in de-valorizing verification, certainly to the extent that you may be ascribing such a view to Peirce.   From the Collected Papers of C.S. Peirce Vol. I, I. General Historical Orientation, 1. Lessons from the History of Philosophy, Section 3. The Spirit of Scholasticism, Paragraph 34, http://www.textlog.de/4220.html  66~~~ 34. Mr. George Henry Lewes in his work on Aristotle(1) seems to me to have come pretty near to stating the true cause of the success of modern science when he has said that it was *_verification_*. I should express it in this way: modern students of science have been successful because they have spent their lives not in their libraries and museums but in their laboratories and in the field; and while in their laboratories and in the field they have been not gazing on nature with a vacant eye, that is, in passive perception unassisted by thought, but have been *_observing_* -- that is, perceiving by the aid of analysis -- and testing suggestions of theories. The cause of their success has been that the motive which has carried them to the laboratory and the field has been a craving to know how things really were, and an interest in finding out whether or not general propositions actually held good -- which has overbalanced all prejudice, all vanity, and all passion. Now it is plainly not an essential part of this method in general that the tests were made by the observation of natural objects. For the immense progress which modern mathematics has made is also to be explained by the same intense interest in testing general propositions by particular cases -- only the tests were applied by means of particular demonstrations. This is observation, still, for as the great mathematician Gauss has declared -- algebra is a science of the eye,(2) only it is observation of artificial objects and of a highly recondite character. Now this same unwearied interest in testing general propositions is what produced those long rows of folios of the schoolmen, and if the test which they employed is of only limited validity so that they could not unhampered go on indefinitely to further discoveries, yet the *_spirit_*, which is the most essential thing -- the motive, was nearly the same. And how different this spirit is from that of the major part, though not all, of modern philosophers -- even of those who have called themselves empirical, no man who is actuated by it can fail to perceive. ~~~99 [bold & italics at the Website]   There Peirce is talking about the difference which verification has made, and how a better kind and understanding and practice of verification has brought modern science to its success.  Can there be any serious doubt that Peirce did indeed think that verification has a determinational role in inquiry, that it settles questions in ways the support the further advance of inquiry?  Furthermore, general things can be said and understood, and fruitfully practiced regarding verification, as shown by the fact, pointed out by Peirce, that the modern students of science have understood the need to get into lab and field.  Evidently there is something general to be said about verification even if, as in the case of abductive inference, general treatment beyond various points lead to diminishing returns (for the generalist purpose) and to the development of "field guides" about the process as practiced in various fields of inquiry and areas of intelligent life.  A process which is both important and theory-unfriendly becomes more difficult to understand in a general way, not less important to understand in a general way.  Mathematics is full of insoluble general problems; mathematicians then pay attention also to patterns of insoluble general problems and the reasons for them. There's still plenty to be understood in such cases.  Through the gap where truth was supposed to be, one may yet discern truth.   Peirce held that verification was important and inquiry-determinational.  Yet, and yet, Peirce did not think that verification has a distinctive formal role in semiosis & inquiry, at least such a role as to seat it alongside object, sign, and interpretant.  Gary asked me how Peirce and his interpreters could have missed such a thing, and my response has been that I don't know.  I point out that verification involves, and is a kind of, experience/observation of a thing, and that sign and interpretant convey information but not experience of the thing, so a verification is not a sign or interpretant in those relations in which it is a verification.  My verification may be for another person merely a sign. Scientists have reportedly verified that, on the large scale, space is Euclidean.  I accept that they've verified it under their standards, standards which I acknowledge in a general way to be sound, I acknowledge that the verification was not a fiat, etc., but, to me it's a only a sign that space on a sufficiently large scale is Euclidean and I still wonder whether there is a slight curvature insufficient for detection within the current limits of observation.  I do think that verification is defeasible.  But my verification is not, for me, merely a sign, but instead an experience, conveyable across memory and time, and, as experience, supporting further signs and interpretants, experience conveyed into the ongoing semiosis and helping determine it.  It itself has been determined logically by object, sign, and interpretant, and determines semiosis going forward. In a commind uniting various people's minds, experience, in an indirect way, is also communicated, as when I take my friend's representation that there is a boat on the water as _acquaintaince_ with the _fact_, at least, that there is a boat on the water, even if I cannot observe the boat myself directly.  As I've said in the past, there is a certain amount of slack and experimentability with the distinction between that which one recognizes as mere interpretation & construal and that which one recognizes as establishment.  The ways in which one "makes" or learns through practice about the distinction are themselves subject to verification which, as verification, embodies, preferably but not necessarily in tame form, existential consequences.  Here the Peircean usually says or thinks, "but that's mere secondness."  But I stand by the tetradicity of reference by such an experience, have offered many an argument for it, and ask anybody to refute those arguments directly.  As to secondness I point out that there is a big difference between an external force imposed on a system, and a stable balance of a system's own internal forces.  This is a big difference as it parallels and is tied to the difference between a system's linear energy and a system's rest energy (which is proportional to the system's rest mass, its quantity of matter, in such a way that it can be considered an equivalent way of expressing the quantity of matter).  That stable balance is manifested as a structure, and is a far cry from the brute clash of the outside; it is that which suffers and stands up to the clash, it is that which is borne out, it is the supportedeness, and, in people, a stable rational balance is manifested as experience, the kind of experience and verification which brings inquiry to a reasonable rest, basis, foundation, upon which inquiry can soundly build.   Below, you point out that there is no act of verification which makes, upon completion, an actual universal illuminant penetration through to all minds.  And you point out that a supposedly verified claim can be disverified.  I agree.  But as I point out above, we learn more about verification, standards of verification, etc., as we go along.   I'd say that you are the one who is giving in to a skepticism but are calling it fallibilism.  Obviously I don't think that the triad is worth one's investing oneself in such a skepticism.  I'm fallibilistic about verification, but I don't think that it's merely interpretation.   First of all, the mind can recognize something as an interpretant and recognize it as not being a verification and as not being verified. Second of all, an interpretation narrows down from the universe represented by the sign, but various singular (dis-)verifications are possible and necessary regarding the interpretant.  There is a singularness about experience, associated with the existential consequentialness of putting an interpretant to the test whether for deliberate verificative purpose or otherise.  The idioscopic study of experience as a class of phenomena -- the human & social studies -- deals with a lot of idiosyncrasies and singularness -- while the study of motion and forces, all that 'brute secondness,' is physics, which is idioscopy's most mathematical, general, and law-formulable area, studying objects which we suppose to be most basic in the order of (concrete) being (as opposed to the order of knowledge, etc.). As for the question of the importance of verification, and why philosophers would or should care about it, which you further deal with below, I think that I and, better, Peirce, have dealt with it above.  Likewise with the question of whether there's much of a general character to be said about verification.  People don't just become satisfied with a lot of construal, a lot of interpretation.  They don't, at least when they're intelligent, do vague unaccountable "somethings" which satisfy them, for reasons that no philosopher could care about.  I don't know why you would paint such a picture.  If that's how some portion of academics are behaving with regard to verification, your statement is a big indictment, but I wouldn't call it a picture of a scientific intelligence, or even of a common intelligence.  To the contrary, people have and sometimes seek experiences which bear upon the truth or falsity of the interpretant sign, and this is important in inquiry and semiosis.  They even seek to check the interpretant, the sign which it interprets, etc., the whole thing -- seeking, even if proven right, to know whether they were right for the right reasons.  Lots of general things can be said about verification and about the relationship of experience to semiosis.   Now, it is quite natural to suppose that, having an interpretant but insufficient experience of a thing, one would resort to experience collateral to the interpretant in order to confirm the interpretant.  Some peirce-listers supposed so before I started to make such a big deal about collateral experience (though what brought me to focus on the subject was not that, but instead your later sending out all those collateral experience quotes to peirce-l a few years ago; and still it took a while).  And I think I've shown many times that such is a good description of what people actually do -- resort to experience collateral to the interpretant in order to confirm or corroborate the interpretant (or disconfirm, etc.).   >[Joe] I forgot to say something about the supposed problem of distinguishing sense from nonsense.  That's what the pragmatic maxim is all about, isn't it?  Tom' Short's take on this has to do with Peirce's supposed failure to realize that his view of infinite interpretability entailed an infinite deferral of sense being given to the initially senseless symbol.  In my view Tom doesn't understand what Peirce's view in the work of the late 1860's actually is.  I think I can establish pretty persuasively that Peirce was, to put it mildly, a bit more sophisticated than Tom credits him with being.  It is really just a matter of understanding what he meant by an "imputed quality" in defining the symbol in the New List, which Tom finds too distastefully Lockean to be taken seriously; but it has to be laid out and tediously tracked through text after text in order to put an end to the sort of misreading of Peirce that Tom gives, which is what I am currently completing.  I don't see that it has anything to do with verification, though.  It is just a question of what his theory of meaning is.   As to what Tom Short was thinking and why he was thinking it, I can't say whether it had more to do with an overdisinvestment in Lockean ideas or with something else.  I'm (unfortunately) just going by my memory that, having read his article and all his posts (from which admit that I'm unprepared to quote), I thought that he was indeed getting at a problem of semiosis's not having a "move" for getting back into experience, and that he saw Peirce's conception of the Ultimate Logical Interpretant, which Peirce said is "not a sign," as a way of providing semiosis with such a "move."  My view (expressed at the time) was that I wasn't sure that Peirce really saw the problem which Tom was discussing, but that the problem was real, was really the problem of verification even if Tom didn't quite see it that way, and that the Ultimate Logical Interpretant was the barest crack in the door in the triadic "dome" (as I pictured it) which seals semiotic growth off from experience and thereby leaves semiosis only ways to "develop" but not ways to learn and evolve.  Inquirers don't wait for semiosis to evolve, bye and bye, into an interpretant which is no longer a sign of its object, evolve into a generalized disposition, etc.; instead they foreshorten the process, maintain the object reference, and test the interpretant against the reality whereof the interpretant is a mere construal.  I don't see how one can have a theory of meaning (anything like human or intelligent meaning) without a theory of experience and verification. Questions of truth, soundness, validity, etc., add a good deal, pleasant & unpleasant, to questions of value and meaning, as Hamlet learned, not only suffering from uncertainties, but also from carrying out his commitment to act decisively in logical consequence of the truth's establishment, the establishment which he had committingly valued so highly.  Poisonous lying representations and interpretants poured into ears brought people to grief; so did verifications; art and inquiry won't necessarily save people.  If we treat questions of verification as tiresome little technical ones, they'll come back to bite us big-time, and they may do so even when we take them as seriously as we can, though at least the odds thereof are reduced.   Best, Ben http://tetrast.blogspot.com/   >[Joe] Take a common sense case of that.  You tell me that you observed something on the way over to my house to see me, e.g. a large fire at a certain location, and I think you must have made a mistake since the edifice in question is reputed to be fire-proof.   So I mosey over there myself to check it out and, sure enough, the fire is still going on at the place you said.  Claim verified.  Of course, some third person hearing about this might think we are both mistaken or in collusion to lie about it, and having some financial interest in the matter, might not count my report as a verification of your claim.  So he or she might mosey over and find that we were both confused about the location and there was no fire at the place claimed.  Claim disverified.  But then some fourth person . . .    Well, you get the idea.   So what is the big deal about verification?  (This is pretty much what Jim Piat was saying, too, perhaps.)     >[Joe] The question is, why have philosophers of science so often gotten all agitated about the problem of verification as if something really important hinged on giving an exact account of what does or ought to count as such?    >[Joe] You tell me, but my guess is that it is just the age old and seemingly insatiable but really just misguided quest for absolute and authoritative certainty.  Why this shows up in the form of a major philosophical industry devoted to the production of theories of verification is another matter, and I suppose that must be explained in terms of some natural confusion of thought like those which make it seem so implausible at first that we can get better control over our car when it goes into a skid if we turn the car in the direction of the skid instead of by responding in the instinctively reasonable way of trying to turn it in opposition to going in that unwanted direction.   Okay, not a very good example, but you know what I mean:  something can seem at first completely obvious in its reasonableness that is actually quite unreasonable when all relevant considerations are taken duly into account. some of which are simply too subtle to be detected as relevant at first.  Thus people argue interminably over no real problem.  It happens a lot, I should think.     >[Joe] In any case, a will-of-the-wisp is all that there is in the supposed need for some general theory of verification.  There is none to be given nor is there any need for one.  People make claims.  Other people doubt them or accept them but want to be sure and so they do something that satisfies them, and others, noting this, are satisfied that the matter is settled and they just move on. Of maybe nobody is ever satisfied.  That's life.   Of course it can turn out at times that it is not easy to get the sort of satisfacion that counts for us as what we call a verification because it settles the matter in one way, or a dissatisfaction because it settles it in a contrary way.  But that is all there is to it.  Maybe there are fields or types of problems or issues in which the course of experience of inquiry about them has resulted in the development and elaboration of procedures that are regarded as having verification or disverification as their normal result, but that will surely just be because that particular sort of problem or subjectmatter happens to require analysis of a certain rather complex kind involving a lot of detailed procedure.  I don't know what can lie at the end of it all, though, other than the fact, if it is a fact, that people have finally had enough of it to not feel any need to do anything further.  That culminating de facto acceptance is of course always capable of being mistaken.  Such is the view of the fallibilist who is not a pathological sceptic.   Joe Ransdell --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com