[Arisbe] Re: Logic As Semiotic

[Jon Awbrey]

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Howard Pattee wrote (HP):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):

JA, quoting CSP:

    | Logic is an analysis of forms not a study of the mind.
    | It tells 'why' an inference follows not 'how' it arises
    | in the mind.  It is the business therefore of the logician
    | to break up complicated inferences from numerous premisses
    | into the simplest possible parts and not to leave them
    | as they are.
    |
    | CSP, CE 1, page 217.
    |
    | Charles Sanders Peirce, "Harvard Lectures 'On the Logic of Science'", (1865),
    |'Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 1, 1857-1866',
    | Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.

HP, quoting Poincare:

    | Mr Russell will tell me no doubt that it is not a question of psychology,
    | but of logic and epistemology;  and I shall be led to answer that there is
    | no logic and epistemology independent of psychology;  and this profession
    | of faith will probably close the discussion because it will make evident
    | an irremediable divergence of view.
    |
    | Poincare's arguments with Bertrand Russell
    | over the foundations of logic and mathematics.
    | From "The Logic of Infinity", 'Last Essays',
    | Dover, NY, 1963, p. 64.

HP: It is the business of the cognitive scientist to discover how brains
    make those special distinctions and classifications on which all logic
    must operate.  It is not only my faith but experience with understanding
    physics that leads me to conclude that there are no safe a priori logical
    principles that necessarily tell us "why" or "how" about anything.

JA, transcribing HP:

    | It is the business of the materials scientist to discover how atoms
    | make those spectral tinctures and crassifications on which all design
    | must operate.  It is not only my faith but experience with understanding
    | physics that leads me to conclude that there are no safe a priori design
    | principles that necessarily tell us "why" or "how" about anything.

Well, I could have told you that without the physics.
I am a Material thinker, a Natural thinker -- all is
embodied in Matter and evolves in accord with Nature.
If you call this way of thinking a question of faith
or simple matter of economic convenience, it demands
nothing like an exorbitant ontological commitment on
my part since I never said that I had much of a clue
what that Matter was or what the laws of Nature were.
And yet I observe no trace of materialism in the way
that I see the world's panorama, not in the sense of
any abberrant condition of perspectival antismantism
to pit one eye, one mote, one spect, against another.
I do not know where people get this stuff about Form
versus Matter -- you never saw Aristotle even trying
to get away with peddling that -- and it just sounds
like a versus that's bound to be losing battle to me.
And where do you get this bit about "a priori"?  Are
you still buying that stuff from those guys who said
it was "just understood", that it was implied by the
Form in which you took those Beads?  Not my business.
So about all that's left to try and clear up is this
matter of what exactly might be meant by that little
word "independent", anyway.  Well, maybe another day.

Jon Awbrey

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