[PEIRCE-L] RE: [biosemiotics:8377] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch. 10:
Lists, Peirce provides us with a definition of the distinction between what is a priori and what is a posteriori in the Century Dictionary. Here it is: from the former, from that which precedes; hence from antecedent to consequent, from condition to conditioned, or from cause to effect. Peirce took himself to be working from an account that traces its roots back to Albert of Saxony in the late Medieval period. He distinguishes between demonstratio a priori, which is reasoning from causes or first principles to effects, and demonstratio a posteriori, which is reasoning from effects to causes, which merely proves the fact without showing why it must be as it is. It is clear that this Latin terminology is being used to characterize an important Aristotelian division between two ways in which we might claim to know things. Peirce adds that, in the 18th century, demonstratio a priori was applied to reasoning from a given notion back to the conditions which such a notion involves. He goes on to distinguish between this modern use of the distinction and Kant's particular use of it--which is to employ it as an adjective in cases where there are disparate elements that are combined in cognition. So, in cases where our knowledge might be based, in part, on empirical evidence, there might also be a priori elements supplied by the power of the understanding that are necessary for the possibility of such experiential cognition. The forms of space and time, for example, are held to be a priori elements in our experiential cognition. As a person who was trained in an analytically oriented department, my early sense as a graduate student who was working on Kant was that a rather marked rupture occurred in the early 20th century as logical positivists and analytically minded philosophers started using the distinction in rather novel ways. The novelties they introduced only confused matters further when they tried to draw on these concepts in order to reconfigure the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. It would be good, I think, to be clear about where we are using 20th century versions of these terms to make our points and where we are trying to use the terms in the ways that Albert of Saxony, Leibniz, Kant, Hamilton--or Peirce--was using them. --Jeff Jeff Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy NAU (o) 523-8354 From: Frederik Stjernfelt [stj...@hum.ku.dk] Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2015 1:45 AM To: Cc: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu 1 Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8377] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch. 10: Dear Franklin, lists, You're probably right we'll have to agree in disagreeing. But my notion of the a priori has nothing to do with transcendentalism (see the refs. in my answer to Howard). And I would not say I am "professionally" committed to it, whatever that means. It is not in my university contract. Peirce vacillated as to the a priori. I know his 1878 rejection in "Fixation"; later in life, he described his own logic and semiotics as an a priori doctrine of signs. Your notion of empiricism as you define it, is obviously more sophisticated than the crude "sense data+logic" variant. I take note of you mentioning "conjunction and continuity" in experience - later you say these are the work of the mind. But indeed Peirce's claim would be that they are already present in reality and not merely the product of the mind. In your abduction-deduction-induction example, I do not think a priori and empirical stuff can be nicely separated. But all this comes down to us discussing two different notions of the a priori - you the Kantian one which you (rightly, I think) refuse, I the Husserlian one of objective dependence relations which we may only gradually come to know (hence fallibilism). Take biology. It is now accepted that life involves the interdependent notions of metabolism, replication, adaptation, evolution, etc. These are the ontological structures underpinning empirical biological research. Earlier ontological assumptions of "elan vital" and the like have been given up. So, the discussion will depend upon the interpretation of such basic concepts in the single sciences. Can there be given a convincing empiricist account of such concepts? I do not think a mentalist idea that such concepts are merely psychical constructions of the mind would work. Neither would Peirce, cf. his realism about universals. But such realism about universals, to me, is tantamount to apriorism in the sense mentioned. You're right, these mails grow long and we might get away from the discussion of ch. 10 of my book … Best F Den 21/04/2015 kl. 02.18 skrev Franklin Ransom mailto:pragmaticist.lo...@gmail.com>> : Frederik, lists, I'm not sure, but this appears in my email as a separate thread, having copied posts that
Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8377] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch. 10:
Frederik - would you compare your understanding of ' a priori' with Thirdness? That is, it IS an 'ontological structure underpinning biological systems'. And, it cannot be accessed directly by empirical contact. And, yes, with Peirce's focus on the realism of universals (and Thirdness is all about universals) - these are not reducible to products of the mind. This notion of 'a priori' has little to do with the same term used in the Fixation of Belief, which refers, I think, more to unexamined and even unconscious sociocultural beliefs. The 'a priori' in Fixation refers, I think, to the fact that these beliefs are not empirically directly accessible - that's the only correlation with the above notion of 'a priori' as objective dependence relations. Edwina - Original Message - From: Frederik Stjernfelt To: Cc: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu 1 Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2015 4:45 AM Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8377] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch. 10: Dear Franklin, lists, You're probably right we'll have to agree in disagreeing. But my notion of the a priori has nothing to do with transcendentalism (see the refs. in my answer to Howard). And I would not say I am "professionally" committed to it, whatever that means. It is not in my university contract. Peirce vacillated as to the a priori. I know his 1878 rejection in "Fixation"; later in life, he described his own logic and semiotics as an a priori doctrine of signs. Your notion of empiricism as you define it, is obviously more sophisticated than the crude "sense data+logic" variant. I take note of you mentioning "conjunction and continuity" in experience - later you say these are the work of the mind. But indeed Peirce's claim would be that they are already present in reality and not merely the product of the mind. In your abduction-deduction-induction example, I do not think a priori and empirical stuff can be nicely separated. But all this comes down to us discussing two different notions of the a priori - you the Kantian one which you (rightly, I think) refuse, I the Husserlian one of objective dependence relations which we may only gradually come to know (hence fallibilism). Take biology. It is now accepted that life involves the interdependent notions of metabolism, replication, adaptation, evolution, etc. These are the ontological structures underpinning empirical biological research. Earlier ontological assumptions of "elan vital" and the like have been given up. So, the discussion will depend upon the interpretation of such basic concepts in the single sciences. Can there be given a convincing empiricist account of such concepts? I do not think a mentalist idea that such concepts are merely psychical constructions of the mind would work. Neither would Peirce, cf. his realism about universals. But such realism about universals, to me, is tantamount to apriorism in the sense mentioned. You're right, these mails grow long and we might get away from the discussion of ch. 10 of my book … Best F Den 21/04/2015 kl. 02.18 skrev Franklin Ransom : Frederik, lists, I'm not sure, but this appears in my email as a separate thread, having copied posts that I sent to the other thread. Since Frederik replied to my posts on this one, I suppose I'll reply here for now. If this doesn't appear as a new thread to anyone else, then please ignore my comment. Just to be clear, I think that this will definitely be a case of "we will just have to agree to disagree". Frederik, you are clearly professionally committed to the a priori; I am constitutionally committed to radical empiricism. Now that you are forewarned about that, I'll say a couple of things about my point of view. I'm not so sure that empiricists like myself have an "a priori fear of the a priori". When I look at the philosophy of transcendentalism and its results, the fear strikes me as quite experience-based. One can also think about Peirce's remarks in "The Fixation of Belief" about the method of the a priori. I'm not, as an empiricist, particularly impressed with logical positivism as a form of empiricism. I believe it a commonplace in classical pragmatism that the theory of experience at play in pragmatism is not the atomistic approach of the British empiricists or their inheritors in logical positivism/empiricism. My understanding is that whether we are talking about Peirce, James, or Dewey, experience is not conceived on the model of a series of distinct, discrete sense impressions or sense-data. Instead, experience is much more complex, in which conjunction and continuity are just as much found in the experience as are disjunction and discreteness--we do
[PEIRCE-L] Re: [biosemiotics:8377] Re: Natural Propositions, Ch. 10:
Dear Franklin, lists, You're probably right we'll have to agree in disagreeing. But my notion of the a priori has nothing to do with transcendentalism (see the refs. in my answer to Howard). And I would not say I am "professionally" committed to it, whatever that means. It is not in my university contract. Peirce vacillated as to the a priori. I know his 1878 rejection in "Fixation"; later in life, he described his own logic and semiotics as an a priori doctrine of signs. Your notion of empiricism as you define it, is obviously more sophisticated than the crude "sense data+logic" variant. I take note of you mentioning "conjunction and continuity" in experience - later you say these are the work of the mind. But indeed Peirce's claim would be that they are already present in reality and not merely the product of the mind. In your abduction-deduction-induction example, I do not think a priori and empirical stuff can be nicely separated. But all this comes down to us discussing two different notions of the a priori - you the Kantian one which you (rightly, I think) refuse, I the Husserlian one of objective dependence relations which we may only gradually come to know (hence fallibilism). Take biology. It is now accepted that life involves the interdependent notions of metabolism, replication, adaptation, evolution, etc. These are the ontological structures underpinning empirical biological research. Earlier ontological assumptions of "elan vital" and the like have been given up. So, the discussion will depend upon the interpretation of such basic concepts in the single sciences. Can there be given a convincing empiricist account of such concepts? I do not think a mentalist idea that such concepts are merely psychical constructions of the mind would work. Neither would Peirce, cf. his realism about universals. But such realism about universals, to me, is tantamount to apriorism in the sense mentioned. You're right, these mails grow long and we might get away from the discussion of ch. 10 of my book … Best F Den 21/04/2015 kl. 02.18 skrev Franklin Ransom mailto:pragmaticist.lo...@gmail.com>> : Frederik, lists, I'm not sure, but this appears in my email as a separate thread, having copied posts that I sent to the other thread. Since Frederik replied to my posts on this one, I suppose I'll reply here for now. If this doesn't appear as a new thread to anyone else, then please ignore my comment. Just to be clear, I think that this will definitely be a case of "we will just have to agree to disagree". Frederik, you are clearly professionally committed to the a priori; I am constitutionally committed to radical empiricism. Now that you are forewarned about that, I'll say a couple of things about my point of view. I'm not so sure that empiricists like myself have an "a priori fear of the a priori". When I look at the philosophy of transcendentalism and its results, the fear strikes me as quite experience-based. One can also think about Peirce's remarks in "The Fixation of Belief" about the method of the a priori. I'm not, as an empiricist, particularly impressed with logical positivism as a form of empiricism. I believe it a commonplace in classical pragmatism that the theory of experience at play in pragmatism is not the atomistic approach of the British empiricists or their inheritors in logical positivism/empiricism. My understanding is that whether we are talking about Peirce, James, or Dewey, experience is not conceived on the model of a series of distinct, discrete sense impressions or sense-data. Instead, experience is much more complex, in which conjunction and continuity are just as much found in the experience as are disjunction and discreteness--we do not require some outside source to make our experiences appear connected for us in the first place. Certainly the mind works to bring connection and continuity to its experiences. But it does not do this ex nihilo; such connections and continuities work to extend in novel ways connections and continuities already experienced--the mind generalizes what it has been given to work with. So far as I see it, this is the empiricism that classical pragmatism is based upon, and is part of what my take on empiricism amounts to. I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "dependence structures of objectivity". I also find your ascription of fallibilism to a priori knowledge as bizarre. Rather than discuss what you have had to say further (this post would become inordinately long), I think it would be best to simplify the matter. Suppose I have a surprising experience, and then develop a hypothesis to explain that experience. Once I have the idea in hand from the hypothesis, I deduce consequences from this hypothesis to the point that I now know how to put the hypothesis to inductive experimentation. Now, at this point, I have not yet conducted any inductions. Is this process, from the gaining of a hypothesi
