[peirce-l] Re: The roots of speech-act theory in the New List

[Benjamin Udell]

Jim,   >[Jim Willgoose] You say,    "The question is WHETHER the stove is black -- yes, no, novelly, probably, optimally, if & only if..., etc. What is required for assertion or proposition or judging or even conceiving the situation is that the mind can apprehend whether the stove is, isn't, may be, might be, is 57%-probably, is if-&-only-if-it's-Thursday, would feasibly be, would most simply be, is, oddly enough, etc., etc., etc., black. " (end)   >[Jim] I would say as I previously did that most of these can be handled by treating the subject as a proposition. Otherwise, you  predicate "possible blackness" of this stove rather  than the proposition "this stove is black." This might not be so bad if only identification didn't break down. "this stove" is definite but "this is a possible black thing" suffers.   I don't see what's wrong with it. In real life we do in fact talk about possibilities involving actual things. You can break it into two interlocked propositions if you wish, one affirming the actual existence of the stove and the other affirming a possibility about it. Just make sure that their subjects are somehow equated. And I don't see what's wrong with making the possibility sentence into a one-place predicate "Ex(x={this stove} & x[possibly(Ey y{y is black} & y=x)])" which can be rephrased to "This stove is possibly black." Of course, one is more likely to say something like, "This stove is possibly malfunctioning a bit."   "This stove is possibly black" and "this stove is possibly not-black" are not inconsistent in any logic whose treatment of the word "possibly" is within shouting distance of ordinary English usage. In fact their conjunction makes for at least one sense of the word "contingent," as in _it is a *contingent* question whether the stove is black or non-black._ Usually "possibly..." and "possibly not..." are taken in a sense parallel to that of "consistent" and "non-valid." Any truth-functional sentence is either (a) valid or (b) inconsistent or (c) both consistent and non-valid.   >[Jim] I might even go so far as to say that "this stove is possibly black" fails to assert anything and thus fails the test of cognition.    Tell that to the man who's just been told, in regard to his wife, "She is possibly pregnant," and, in regard to his finances, "You are possibly bankrupt," and so on -- all definitely existent things around which possibilities range.   >[Jim] It also runs up potentially against contradiction since "this" refers to a definite, individual object and the two propositions "this stove is possibly black" and "this stove is possibly not black" are inconsistent.   It potentially runs up against contradictions? I think you'll need to spell them out. They may be the fault of an inadequate logical formalism since obviously we deal with such things every day. And, again, "possibly black" and "possibly not black" are consistent, not inconsistent, unless one's formalism constrains one to signify something quite deviative from normal English usage of words like "possibly."   >[Jim] But 'It is possible that "this stove is black"' seems to work better. What is the deal about supposing the identity of the predicate and then assessing the modality of the proposition? Peirce gives the example of "it rains" in the gamma graphs. He doesn't consider possible rain but whether the proposition "it rains" is possibly true (false)   If your possibilitative propositions are incapable of transformation into one-or-more-place predicates, then they seem strangely limited. Anyway, I've gone on at some length about deductive formalisms, philosophical inquiry, and the difference between finding a convenient and smooth way to "encode" or represent something for a given general kind of guiding research interest, and a specifically philosophical exploration of the conceptions involved in those things represented. I certainly haven't exhausted the subject, but I leave it to you to respond by argument to the arguments which I've already started in http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/1377 (my second September 6, 2006 post to peirce-l).   Ben Udell http://tetrast.blogspot.com/ --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com