[Arisbe] Re: Fuzziness, Generality, Vagueness

[Jon Awbrey]

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Stan Salthe wrote (SS):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):

SS: The triadic formulation could be used with less specified or more specified objects,
    I agree.  It is general enough for that.  The interpretants generated by the system
    of interpretance could get increasingly more specified as they lead from one to the
    next as the system constructs its view of the object.

JA: Maybe that is one way to go about it, but the way that I am thinking about at present
    is to make the interpretant the arbiter of the moment's classifications and decisions.
    When it comes to attributing vagueness to the actual world, I think that is likely to be
    a mistaken way to go about it, no matter what version of fuzzy, persian, topos theory one
    finds to be useful or not in the end.  A similar diversion arises in the so-called theory
    of "partial objects", where most folks I know that have gone down that road come back
    saying that they wish they had realized at the beginning that it's not the object,
    the "Ding An Sich" (DAS), that is partial, but only our human knowledge of it.

SS: Well, the latter is certainly true, BUT I have found it useful in constructing
    development theory to take the view that all systems begin relatively more vague
    and become more definite as they develop.  This IS the ground of development theory.
    You may say that that is just an example of "our human knowledge" -- fine with me.
    I do not know on what grounds anyone could assert instead that natural objects
    are fully present in the actual world.  I think it unlikely, because in that
    case they could not change.

Again, if I am being careful then I would probably say that the
fuzziness, generality, vagueness, or whatever is in the relations
among objects and signs and ideas, and not exactly attributable or
precisively partitionable to any one of these parties to the fray.
The argument that you give in favor of your a-tri-bution is novel,
though, it's the one that Heraclitus eternally poses to Parmenides.

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| Actors, taught not to let any embarrassment show
| on their faces, put on a mask.  I will do the same.
| So far, I have been a spectator in this theatre which
| is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage,
| and I come forward masked.
|
| René Descartes, 'Praeambula'

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Robert Meersman wrote (RM):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):

JA: Well, I survived my endodontological (root-canal) procedure this morning
    and so I am feeling emboldened enough to tackle this ontological abcess --
    or is that just the novocaine talking?

RM: No Jon, you're making a lot of sense all of a sudden  :-)

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Thanks, Robert, with that kind & early review
I will consider myself encouraged to continue.

This is a story about logic and time, and so I could, as I have in the past,
take it all the way back to the days of a philosophical divergence between
Parmenides and Heraclitus over the "nature of things", whether the cosmos
be one, eternal, and immutable or else it be many, secular, and transient.
But I have long since had a vision that the One and the Other now concur
in some Platonic Heaven, where their discourse now goes a bit like this:

| Parmenides:  But you and I were always eternally of one mind.
| 
| Heraclitus:  And you are constantly changing yours into mine.

So let us leave these Antic Attics to their hard-won peace of mind,
and fast forward to modern times, were the scene is more thrilling!

I take the stage of our current problematic to be set
by the work of Descartes and Kant.  More specifically,
I have in mind the following two loci:

1.  The place in the 'Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii',
    or the 'Rules for the Direction of the Mind',
    by René Descartes, where he says:

    | But if we are to select those dimensions
    | which will be of the greatest assistance
    | to our imagination, we should never attend
    | to more than one or two of them as depicted
    | in our imagination, even though we are well
    | aware that there is an indefinite number
    | involved in the problem at issue.  It is
    | part of the method to distinguish as many
    | dimensions as possible, so that, while
    | attending to as few as possible at the
    | same time, we nevertheless proceed to
    | take in all of them one by one.
    | (CSM, 63).

2.  The early tractate of Kant that is known in English as
   'On the False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures',
    where he supposedly shows that all of our inferences
    reduce to syllogisms in the First Figure, which is
    tantamount to saying that all of our reasoning is
    deductive in character.  My memory is a little bit
    hazy here as to whether this is how Kant intended
    it to be taken, but I believe that this was what
    most people took the thrust of his tract to be.

Gotta Break For Now,

Jon Awbrey

http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2001-February/000242.html

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Anyway, about all I can say is that I have been down this road before --
oh yes, me too! -- and I shall not pass that way again, well, y'know,
so far as my "limited sight distance" view of things lets me know.
The parting of the ways among Descartes, Kant, and Peirce was
set in concrete some time ago, and that has made all the
triference to me.

JA: All of these issues are related, of course, to standard themes
    in pragmatic philosophy, the upshot of which induces me to
    prefer the following way of transforming your tenet:

JA: | From:
    |
    | | BUT, the big philosophical problem of the mismatch between the
    | | vague actual world and the crispness of our maps still remains.
    |
    | To:
    |
    | | The mismatch between the real world,
    | | which is more than the actual world,
    | | and the maps of our poetic conceits
    | | 'is' the fuzziness of that relation.

SS:  I could live with that, but, as I just said, not work with it.
     One reason I prefer my view is that our logics do tend toward crispness.
     That is, our (Western) texts and machines (excepting Peirce, of course! --
     perhaps to his credit) valorize clarity and definite purposes.  So, if there
     is a mismach, then it must be because the world itself is not clear, despite
     all our attempts to construct is as such.

But Peirce was a classical logician, through'n'through,
valued clarity, definity, and purpose, and I'm sure he
would've fathomed that Nature is clear, except for the
fuzzy stuff in and between our ears that keeps us from
being able to hear what she is saying to us.  My guess.

But I begin to suspect, and here I blames myself that did not follow
my usual practice of checking this out "up front", as they say, that
we are not using the word "fuzzy" in the same sense.  So maybe I had
better back up and inquire about that.  What's "fuzzy" mean to you?

Jon Awbrey

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