(Attempt at re-send)
Joe, list,
>[Joe] I was just now rereading your response to Charles, attending
particularly to your citation of Peirce's concern with verification, and I
really don't see in what you quote from him on this anything more than the claim
that it is the special concern for making sure that something that someone --
perhaps oneself -- has claimed to be a fact or has concluded to be so (which
could be a conviction more or less tentatively held) really is a fact by putting
the claim or acceptation of that conclusion to the test, in one way or another.
This verificational activity could involve many different sorts of procedures,
ranging from, say, reconsidering the premises supporting the claim as regards
their cogency relative to the conclusion drawn to actively experimenting or
observing further for the same purpose, including perhaps, as a rather special
case, the case where one actually attempts to replicate the procedure cited as
backing up the claim made. Scientific verification is really just a
sophistication about ways of checking up on something about which one has some
doubts, driven by an unusually strong concern for establishing something as
"definitively" as possible, which is of course nothing more than an ideal of
checking up on something so thoroughly that no real question about it will ever
be raised again. But it is no different in principle from what we do in ordinary
life when we try to "make sure" of something that we think might be so but about
which we are not certain enough to satisfy us.
The purpose (http://www.mail-archive.com/peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu/msg01288.html also
at http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/1344)
of my quoting Peirce on verification was to counter Charles' claim that
verification amounts to nothing more than one's acting as if a claim were true,
and Charles' making it sound like there's something superfluous about
verification, that it's somehow meaningless to think of really verifying or
disverifying a claimed rule like "where there's smoke, there's fire,"
meaningless insofar as it supposedly involves indulging in Cartesian doubt and
insofar one has already done whatever verification one can do, by acting as
if the claimed rule were true -- as if the way to understand verification were
to understand it as a piece of symbolism about a rule only hyperbolically
doubtable, understand verification as an act which stands as symbol (or, for
that matter, as index or whatever) to another mind, rather than as an
observing of sign as truly corresponding to object, and of interpretant as truly
corresponding to sign and object. Verification does not need to be actually
public and shared among very distinct minds, though it should be, at least in
principle, sharable, potentially public in those ways. (Of course, _scientific_
verification has higher standards than that.) I quoted Peirce on verification to
show that, in the Peircean view, the doubting of a claimed rule is not
automatically a universal, hyperbolic, Cartesian doubt of the kind which Peirce
rejects, especially rejects as a basis on which (a la Descartes) only
deductive reasoning will be allowed to build -- a Cartesian needle's eye of
doubt through which all philosophical ideas are mistakenly forced to pass or be
discarded. I was defending myself against Charles' claim that my view of
verification implied some systematic incorporation of Cartesian doubt into
research practices and against Charles' suggestion that therefore
maybe I was a nominalist.
>[Joe] My point is that it is surely obvious that we don't take steps to
verify something in ordinary life unless we have some special reason to do so,
and that any steps actually taken to verify anything are taken only if something
has come to our attention as requiring such action. Ordinarily, we just accept
what we unreflectively learn (come to believe or to think to be so) either in
the ordinary course of living and perceiving things or in the course of learning
about what other people think to be so, supposing we have a normal regard for
the competence of others as regards the sort of thing in question (which of
course varies a lot). Always, though, something of the nature of an acceptance
or claim to the effect that something is so is presupposed by the activity of
verifying it. It cannot be the case, then, that all of our understanding of
things includes verification as an essential part of it. In fact, it must be
only a very small percentage of the opinions, beliefs, etc., that we acquire in
the normal course of living involve verification in their acquisition. And this
makes it quite out of the question to suppose that verification especially and
essentially involves or includes something which is of a categorial nature which
is not already present in all cognition, which must surely include much that
involves no verification and is never considered to be in any need of it.
Evidently you still think that I'm talking only of conscious deliberate
verification involving the taking of physically active steps. That is not at all
the only kind of verification which I've been discussing.
The things which you describe are only part of that which I mean by
"verification," which I'm using as a forest term for the various trees. In
experience and life, the greater part of experience whereby the mind supports
and verifies (to whatever extent) is experience which the mind already has, and
the main active steps are usually at most a bit of digging through memory. The
whole "feeling" of experience, acquaintance, knowledge, recognition, etc., as
involving a _pastward_ orientation is no mere accident of linguistic history;
likewise the "feeling" of settlement, establishment, etc., as involving becoming
part of the past (not in the sense of the departed but instead in the sense of
that which has been, that which is the foundation on which we
stand). Oftenest, when a mind forms an interpretant supported by that
mind's experience, that's it right there -- recognition takes place at near
lightspeed -- "verification accomplished," as far as that mind is concerned, and
accomplished more or less fallibly as is often if not always also recognized by
the given mind. That is a big part of what I mean by "verification," and I hold
that it happens just as largely and minutely and consciously and unconsciously
at every semiosic stage and level, just as largely and minutely and consciously
and unconsciously as objectification, representation, and
interpretation happen.
Science is distinguished by (among other things) a very active attitude of
taking verificational steps in a context where an everyday mind
(and also a scientific mind busy with other things) is often content to
stand/sit/rest on the established. Science swims especially hard "upstream."
Science involves one's being very active in order to arrange to be "acted-on,"
determined, and supported, by truth. This interesting tension
between research activity and that at which it aims -- a basic kind of
passivity of/in subjection to truth -- is, I think most will agree, no mere
figment of conception, but instead a challenge which research confronts in its
practices every day. One keeps deciding and determining steps in order to _let
the truth decide_, ultimately also in order to see to it that the verificational
steps are also determined by truth rather than arbitrarily by truth's student,
and many are the de-legitimizing entanglements, the pitfalls and traps, and many
are the precautions taken against the student's (unwittingly or, unfortunately,
otherwise) stacking the deck, a stacking which can easily happen when,
after all, the student is being so _active_, mentally and/or physically. But the
kind of concentrated of example of verificational process which science is, is
not typical in every respect of verificational processes in everyday life, any
more than scientific representations, portrayals, indications, symbolizations,
etc., are typical in every respect of signs and representations in general and
in everyday life. As we remain well aware of science's prized unusually high
standards which make its representations "special cases" even as we look to
science for clarified examples of representation, so, likewise, we can
remain aware of the various respects in which scientific verification is
representative and unrepresentative of verification in its more common forms. In
particular, in everday life, one often prizes knowing about things. But a
scientist prizes and makes a discipline of knowing in or on what light or basis
one knows things -- a scientist prizes verification and makes a discipline of
it. Novelist Henry Green's occasional feat of making the reader "know"
something, somehow infer to it conclusively, without the reader's knowing how
s/he "knows" it, could work as a guilty pleasure, if not a source of discomfort,
to a scientist.
If, after all this, you wish that I would just use some other word than
"verification," I'm open to suggestions. I've also used "recognition" but the
problem with that word is that it also names a psychological act in some sense
that "interpretation" and "representation" do not, and there are other and
related problems with it as well. Though I didn't see it clearly from the start,
"recognition" in the sense in which I've used it really should not be _equated_
with "acknowledgement" any more than "representation" should be _equated_ with
"assertion." "Establishment" seems to come closest to the desired sense, but it
is also used in the sense of "founding" or "setting up" as in "establishing an
organization" etc., and even in the verificational sense it's kind of
strong in its "up-or-down" feeling; one is particularly unaccustomed to a phrase
like "degrees of establishment." Also it's hard to form a word like
"interpretant" or "recognizant" from "establish" -- going back to Latin, it
should be "stabilient" but that word does not evoke the word "establish." Maybe
I could go half-Spanish and coin "establecent." Or "establizant"? "Establicant"?
"Establishant"?
>[Joe] This is not to say that you are mistaken in stressing the
importance of verification as a philosophical topic. it is remarkable just how
little attention has been paid to it even by philosophers of science, where it
has usually been discussed only in the context of (1) the verificationist theory
of meaning and (2) the context of induction and the problem of establishing its
validity as a mode of inference. Those are not trivial contexts and what you are
saying may have considerable importance relative to those contexts of interest
and some others as well, perhaps. Thus I don't intend any discouragement or
disparagement of what you are concerned about as regards those contexts of
interest. But I think you may be inadvertently blunting the significance of what
you are driving at by relativizing it to the context of interest which concerns
the categorial conceptions, and, moreover, the attempt to make it relevant to
the problematics of the categories may actually be distorting your thinking in
some way. I think it may in fact be doing precisely that, and the reason for my
thinking so is that I keep finding myself unable to make what you are saying add
up to anything, regardless of how impressive it may seem prima facie.
I agree that you seem not to have understood at least some of what I've
said, and, in the case of the conception of verification, you've taken me to be
discussing verification much more narrowly than I've been discussing it, and
so it's left you wondering why I see it as broad enough for general
relevance in a broad categorial context. It would leave me wondering too. So I'm
inclined to regard as arising from such misunderstandings your feeling that
something not yet articulable is big-time wrong with my ideas and your idea that
a categorial context is not right for this.
Lately I've noticed that people talk about "the categories" and seem to
mean the basic semiotic elements (object, sign, interpretant). When I see
"categories" or "categorial" I usually take it initially in the cenopythagorean
sense (quality, reaction, representation). Anyway, I'm unsure how you mean
"categorial" here, but it may ultimately make not that much difference. Anyway,
I'll respond to the rest of your post later.
Best regards,
>[Joe] It is my experience in doing philosophy over the years that one
frequently has to trust one's intuitive judgment or intuitive sense as regards
whether something being said really makes any sense. Sometimes one has to go
with something that seems clearly not to do so because, in spite of that, one
also has the feeling that it really does make good and important sense even
though one can't figure out what exactly that might be at the moment. And this
also holds for things that may seem to make sense, though one is not really sure
of that and one is suspicious of it as probably being senseless in spite of
seeming, on the face of it, to do so. In fact, on most topics of interest one's
hunches along these lines must be relied upon or else one will never get to
anything very interesting or worthwhile. And it is easy to be seriouisly
mistaken in both ways, which raises important questions about research
methodology in philosophy that are too often avoided.
>[Joe] But as regards the matter in question here, I can only say that I
have a strongly felt hunch that your argumentation is being distorted by the
misguided attempted to try to fit the problematics of verification into the
context of the problematics of category theory, where it simply doesn't fit. You
are mistaken in thinking that I am so totally persuaded that there is no fourth
category to be added to Peirce's three that I am simply prejudiced against what
you are saying for that reason. In fact, I am not persuaded of that at all and
would not be inclined to want to put the time in on trying to demonstrate it. I
just don't know of any reason that persuades me that there is such a thing. As
regards your work, It is just that when I read what you say on the topic I don't
really understand what you are saying most of the time, whereas I usually find
you very good at understanding and commenting upon what Peirce is saying, but I
do not find myself inclined to trust your judgment on this particular topic
because I find you saying so many things that seem to me to be off in some way,
even though I usually can't say exactly why. I can't simply refute your claim,
Ben, but I am suspicious enough of so much of what you are saying in that
connection that I am content with the hunch that you are mistaken, and I do
think that the reasons I have adduced in respect to the claim about verification
as being or essentially involving a fourth categorial factor are pretty good
ones for rejecting that particular claim of yours.
>[Joe] Well, maybe that really is the last word on that for me!
Best regards,
Joe
================================================
----- Original Message -----
(http://www.mail-archive.com/peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu/msg01288.html
also at http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/1344
)
From: Benjamin Udell
To: Peirce Discussion Forum
Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2006 2:46 PM
Subject: [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metaphor
Sorry, I forgot to compensate for an MS Outlook Express problem which
involves URLs not getting copied properly. Now taken care of.
Charles, list, Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com |
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" ... Joseph Ransdell
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metap... Charles F Rudder
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" ... Benjamin Udell
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" ... Gary Richmond
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metap... Charles F Rudder
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" ... Benjamin Udell
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph&qu... Joseph Ransdell
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograp... Benjamin Udell
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metap... Benjamin Udell
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metap... Benjamin Udell
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" ... Joseph Ransdell
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metap... Charles F Rudder
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" metap... Bernard Morand
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph" ... Jim Piat
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograph&qu... Bill Bailey
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograp... Bill Bailey
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograp... Benjamin Udell
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photo... Jim Piat
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photo... Bill Bailey
- [peirce-l] Re: The "composite photograp... Jim Piat