Jon A, Auke, List,
Peirce wrote about Paradaisaical logic in
connection with entitative graphs (1897). See the attached file
CP3_488.txt. The text is somewhat longer than the 1911 version (from
R669), but it is very similar.
In both texts, he is
making a claim that young children are in a state where they can't or
don't recognize negations. He also claims that nonhuman animals can't
learn to recognize negations.
AvB> But why couldn't
Peirce have written the passage, if he had witnessed [babies
crying]?
Babies very early and clearly show their
approval of some situations (by making pleasant cooing sounds) and strong
disapproval of others (by making unpleasant crying sounds). They do not
begin in some state of paradise where everything is positive.
Anybody who has a pet cat or dog also knows that they can
quickly learn to recognize a command such as "No!' And the animals
also learn that there are certain actions that are forbidden (at least
when somebody is watching).
JA> I generally take
these sorts of just-so stories with a grain of salt.
I
believe that the 1897 example and the 1911 example are cases where Peirce
violated his own principles. He wanted to make a point about negations.
To justify the point, he created an example that he had never actually
observed.
Such so-called evidence isn't worth a grain of
salt.
John
>From Monist 1897 on entitative graphs.
CP 3.488. The general method of graphical representation of
propositions has now been given in all its essential elements, except,
of course, that we have not, as yet, studied any truths concerning
special relatives; for to do so would seem, at first, to be
"extralogical." Logic in this stage of its development may be called
paradisaical logic, because it represents the state of Man's cognition
before the Fall. For although, with this apparatus, it is easy to write
propositions necessarily true, it is absolutely impossible to write any
which is necessarily false, or, in any way which that stage of logic
affords, to find out that anything is false. The mind has not as yet
eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Truth and Falsity.
Probably it will not be doubted that every child in its mental
development necessarily passes through a stage in which he has some
ideas, but yet has never recognised that an idea may be erroneous; and a
stage that every child necessarily passes through must have been
formerly passed through by the race in its adult development. It may be
doubted whether many of the lower animals have any clear and steady
conception of falsehood; for their instincts work so unerringly that
there is little to force it upon their attention. Yet plainly without a
knowledge of falsehood no development of discursive reason can take
place.
3.489. This paradisaical logic appears in the study of nonrelative
formal logic. But there no possible avenue appears by which the
knowledge of falsehood could be brought into this Garden of Eden except
by the arbitrary and inexplicable introduction of the Serpent in the
guise of a proposition necessarily false. The logic of relatives,
affords such an avenue, and that, the very avenue by which in actual
development, this stage of logic supervenes. It is the avenue of
experience and logical reflexion.
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