Ben: If I am understanding you correctly you are saying that all semeiosis is at least incipiently self-reflexive or self-reflective or in other words self-controlled AND that the adequate philosophical description of it will REQUIRE appeal to a fourth factor (which is somehow of the essence of verification) in addition to the appeal to the presence of a sign, of an object, and of an interpretant, allowing of course for the possibility of there being more than one of any or all of these, as is no doubt essential for anything of the nature of a process. The appeal to the additional kind of factor would presumably have to be an appeal to something of the nature of a quadratic relational character. To be sure, any given semeiosis might involve the fourth factor only in a triply degenerate form, just as the third factor might be degenerate in a double degree in some cases, which is to say that the fourth factor might go unnoticed in a single semeiosis, just as thirdness might go unnoticed in a single semeiosis.
That seems possible. Is that your view? I pose it in this abstract way to make sure we are talking about something on par with the sign, the object, and the interpretant. If so how do you know that semeiosis cannot be adequately described without recourse to that factor, i.e. cannot be described on the basis of an appeal to some complexity possible through recursion and referential reflexivity involving only three kinds of elements or factors -- as Peirce would have to claim? Joe Joseph Ransdell [EMAIL PROTECTED] . ----- Original Message ----- From: "Benjamin Udell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu> Sent: Sunday, August 13, 2006 2:40 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metaphor Jacob, Joe, Gary, Jim, list, >[Jacob] Theres been a lot of debate on this issue of verification, and it >almost sounds like patience is being tried. If I could just give my input >about one remark from the last posting; I hope it helps some. >[Jacob] Ben wrote: I dont know how Peirce and others have missed the >distinct and irreducible logical role of verification. I keep an eye open >regarding that question, thats about all. I dont have some hidden opinion >on the question. >[Jacob] Prof. Ransdall (or do you prefer Joe?) replied: I dont 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 >Peirces approach to logic as theory of inquiry doesnt mislead him into >thinking that one has to give a formal account of such a thing. >[Jacob] I want to agree with Joe; its hard for me to see Peirce overlooking >that bit, for several reasons. But the question of why verification isnt a >formal element in inquiry needs some unpacking. >[Jacob] The discussion sounds like everyones talking about isolated >instances. All the examples given to illustrate testing here are >particular, individual cases where one person observes something, draws a >conclusion, and checks to see if hes right. Thats not the only way to view >the development of thought. >[Jacob] Take Joes common-sense example: 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.) >[Jacob] I dont think anyone finds this sort of thing unusual; the >difficulty with this illustration is in *how* it bolsters the case Joe is >making. >[Jacob] It also seems to me theres some confusion about what were arguing >about. The role of verification in *inquiry* or *thought*? At the level of >individuals or in general? Let me try to illustrate what I mean. >[Jacob] When checking your work, you might discover that youd made an error >(often the case with me), or even that you initially had the right answer >but somehow messed up (not often the case with me). This occurs at the >individual level. But animals reason too, though they dont verify. And >thats telling. (This was Bens point when quoting Lewes on Aristotle: >science is science because of proof, testing, verification.) Animals don't deliberately verify. Even most human verification is not carried out with a specifically verificative purpose. To the extent that animals learn and are capable of unlearning, they do test, verify, disverify, etc. I throw a stick for a dog to fetch, we go through it a couple of times. Then I make the motion but don't release the stick. The dog runs, can't find the stick, walks half-way back, and I show the stick to the dog. Soon enough the dog realizes that just because I make that rapid throwing motion doesn't mean I throw the stick. The dog waits till it sees the stick flying through the air, at least until it thinks that I've stopped pretending about throwing the stick. >[Jacob] At the general level it doesnt seem to be the case. I cannot think >of any time in the history of physical sciences when the scientific >community at large said anything like, Copernicus goofed Ptolemy was right >after all! and *reverted* to the original way of doing things. It just >doesnt happen. When a development occurs in knowledge, its pretty much >forward-moving. The same goes for other fields of inquiry. Actually Copernicus brought about a reversion to the heliocentric view of Aristarchus, who arrived at it in apparently a reasonably scientific manner. (The view also appears in some of the ancient Vedas.) Yet there is a forward motion. A new theory is supposed to explain that which the old theory explained, and then some. The decrease of massive overturnings of previous scientific views pertains to research's becoming really good at verification, in those fields where research has done so. Freud held sway for quite a time, but many now say it's all junk; others say that his concepts of transference, denial, projection, etc., are solid additions to psychological theory, even if one rejects other aspects of his theory. Some theories in research have fared extremely well. But there is more to science than its solidest theories. There are weaker theories, there are hypotheses, there are older theories' attempted revisions, which undergo discorroboration, evidential weakening, disconfirmation, it happens all the time, and, without all those weaker theories, and hypotheses, etc., there wouldn't be science. Sometimes a major new thoery doesn't replace a major older theory unless the major older theory has come to look so bad that you wouldn't want to go back to it even if the new one were disproven. One reason that the solidest theories are so solid is that they don't just go on being accepted, instead they go on being tested, if the field is fecund and productive, and they go on standing up to the tests. It happens in that case more or less naturally, if the inquiry process is healthy. Attempts to build upon the theory, develop inquiry further, work as tests of that theory on which they are founded, though that is not their primary purpose. If houses built on a certain foundation keep crumbling, one starts to wonder about the soundness of the foundation; past a certain point, blaming the houses themselves, or making little adjustments of the foundation, etc., don't seem enough. Anyway, all of this pertains to the question of whether verification is important in research, and the quote from Peirce in a recent post of mine leaves, I think, no reasonable doubt that Peirce, for his part, thought that verification is quite important in research. The question at hand is, instead, the question of whether Peirce should have conceived of verification as having a formally distinct role in semiosis, such as to seat verification alongside object, sign, and interpretant. >[Jacob] One major reason verification didnt seem to figure in Peirces >3-headed view, then, turns on his conception of thought, even of logic. At >times he speaks of it in the particular sense of someone at the desk >thinking away, but other times he speaks of thought in a more general >sense. Its this sense that was more interesting to him. >[Jacob] Among other things Peirce studied was the history of the logic of >science science understood in both the particular sense and the general >sense of knowledge as such. The general sense was more important; Peirce >regarded individuals (including himself) as tiny parts of the continuum of >thought, cells in a body, atomic particles even. And like physics, things >behave a little bit differently at the microscopic level than at the >macroscopic. Verification is part of the microscopic realm, an individual >affair: at the macroscopic level, knowledge simply evolves. If that's the reason that Peirce discounted a distinct logical role for verification, then I disagree with him. I think that that makes the wrong kind of division between logic and facts. I don't think that there's some kind of semiosis which is beyond testing. If a semiotic system's design is not tested by the semiotic process itself, then it's not semiosis. That is to say, if it's incapable of learning from experience, then it's not semiosis. To the extent that biological evolution is a kind of rudimentary trial-&-error learning, or let's say, a "quasi-learning by trial and error," to that extent biological evolution is a quasi-semiosis. > When I say that verification is not a formal element of *thought* (rather > than inquiry), I mean the development of thought *as a whole* does not do > the verifying. Thats what individual scientists do, and their work has > effects on the whole. So verification has its place inquiry, but it isnt a > formal component of thought simply because its not itself a general > operation; it is to thought as the electrons spin is to a balls > ballistics. It's not as electron spin is to a ball's ballistics. The development of thought as a whole is addressed to experiences which test it, apart from whether the thought's purpose is specifically scientific, verificative, etc. The artist's thought developed as picture, music, words, etc., is addressed the possibility of its being enjoyed and appreciated and of some conceivable audience's becoming attached to it. _Will this stroke work? Does this chord work here? Why does this sentence have such a excited sound when I place it after that paragraph?_, etc. Now, if Peirce thought that there's some level of semiosis which can carry on happily without verification, if he thought that thought or semiosis as a whole is not precisely that which is tested in its very design, and which is, from learnings from such tests, redesigned, through the process of itself, then it's odd that he himself doesn't evidence awareness of a tension beteen that view and his view that a better understanding and practice of verification has brought modern science to its success. Still, maybe such indeed is what he thought. Anyway, the outcomes of the earlier science were the outcomes of an unplanned test of such science itself as a process. Unplanned, but still learned-from just as if they had been planned. Some things are simply theory-unfriendly. The conception of energy, for instance, is considered a something of a nuisance in relativity, especially general relativity, because it's not Lorenz-covariant. Total energy (as I understand) is Lorenz-covariant, but not linear energy. There are even "worse" quantities. And, in mathematics, as I said, there are plenty of insoluble general problems, many of which are not unimportant. All semiosis calls for tests, but semiosis, at least usually, doesn't spell the tests out in singular particulars of the test itself in the interpretant, even though it does determine them quite enough to make big differences. Then again, a sign doesn't spell out its interpretant if there really is more information made explicit in the interpretant than in the sign. The sign determines the interpretant enough to make a big difference, but my interpretant, your interpretant, some Alpha Centaurian's interpretant, of the same sign may be quite different, reflectively of differences in our _standards of value and interest_. The sign represents a universe some of whose ramifications the interpretant picks out, selects, a narrowing-down from the universe, a narrowing-down which doesn't go all the way to singularization. The difficulty of generalization about verification is a technical problem for philosophy, philosophy itself being general; it is not a disqualification of verification's roles in thought as a whole. If one accepted such a disqualification, one could also disqualify the interpretant because, though it doesn't singularize (in the sense which I've been discussing), it does narrow down from a universe. Fields which take universes or totalities as their starting point, such as deductive mathematical theories of logic, information, probability, and optimization, in fact tend to be regarded by the Peircean as "dyadic." They are not concerned in a thematic way with these "standards of value and interest," like those of a biological species or a kind of research, guiding inference. Such interpretation seems general but not universal -- general-_cum_-special, sort of like ampliative induction, just as verification seems singularistic and idioscyncratic, sort of like abductive inference. But what those folks do is not really *thought*? Tell that to them, but their response might sound a lot like yours; they're the ones doing some of the "science which you can do even if you wake up tomorrow and the universe is gone." Cenoscopy does depend on something more than mathematics does. It studies positive phenomena in general. It does not draw deductive conclusions. It is not too much to say that, if space and time were very different, if the fundamental quantities were not merely different in size but different in their relational structure -- I mean if there were a flatly different system of physical laws -- then positive phenomena in general would have a different cast for intelligent beings in such a world. So, is what philosophers, as cenoscopists, do, is that really *thought*? (Of course it is; but I think that verification is semiotic, too. And remember that Peirce understood math itself as involving verification through observation -- of diagrams. He thought it important to understand that math does verification in this way). >[Jacob] I hope Im not just rehashing whats been said before; this >discussion goes way back before I joined (a week or so ago). Just trying to >help clarify the problem. If you're guilty of any re-hashing, then I'm quadruply guilty, for sure! Best, Ben http://tetrast.blogspot.com/ --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.10.9/417 - Release Date: 8/11/2006 -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.10.9/417 - Release Date: 8/11/2006 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
