[Arisbe] Re: Inquiry Into Information

Thu, 30 Aug 2001 21:06:02 -0400

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

JA, quoting CSP:

HP: Peirce's discussions and these principles
    have to do with relations among symbols
    and how the mind manipulates symbols.
    This is of interest to logicians, but
    until Peirce says more about how symbols
    come to refer to real objects, I can see
    why these principles are of little interest
    to the scientist.

JA, transposing HP into another key:

    | Einsteins' discussions and these principles
    | have to do with relations among pointer-readings
    | and how the experimenter manipulates pointer-readings.
    | This is of interest to instrument-makers-&-readers, but
    | until Einstein says more about how pointer-readings
    | come to refer to absolute space and time, I can see
    | why these principles are of little interest
    | to the scientist.

Strangely enough, I have actually read some old -- and some not so old --
commentaries on Einstein's "principles of relativity" that say just this.

I have already stated this many times before, but let me just try to emphasize again:
Peirce eventually settles on the word "sign" for the genus of what all he is talking
about here -- and I stick with his usage simply out of my instinctive abhorrence for
excessively long words -- but the genus of signs ranges through the full spectrum of
signals and significations, including all of the impressions of the sense organs and
all of the data of measurement, not just the usual suspects of conceptual, graphic,
and linguistic signs.  Symbols are just the species of signs that prevail in logic.

HP:  Earlier, Peirce defines logic:

CSP: | I define logic therefore as the science of the conditions 
     | which enable symbols in general to refer to objects.

HP: Well, even if I know "the conditions which enable symbols in general to refer to objects"
    I still need to know explicitly how a particular symbol refers to an object.  The greatest
    problems we have in our OCS discussion is over the meaning of words, that is, how we should
    determine what words like energy, entropy, information, formalism, etc. refer to in the real
    world, not just in our minds.  The issue also entails consensus and objectivity.

The last time I checked, things, forms, and symbols all reside in the real world.
The pragmatic theory of sign relations is all about the relations that signs have
to objects and to other signs.  So Peirce is always talking about the relations
of denotation or reference that signs have to their objects.  Moreover, he goes
to great lengths to point out that he is talking about more kinds of signs than
just the sorts of media in which the mind swims.  The only questions, then, are:
whether the statements that he makes about these relations are more or less true,
and whether the overall architecture of ideas that he outlines is useful in the
investigation of these relations.

HP: I often quote Hertz's test just because it is one good statement of how physicists work.
    It is a necessary but not sufficient test.  I have also read (many times) several of Peirce's
    pragmatic definitions of the meaning of concepts, but no matter how I read them, Peirce never
    gets beyond just thinking.  He "conceives effects" or "considers practical consequences" but
    he never suggests how he would actually test the consequents of his conceptions against the
    consequents of nature.  Without that test, there may be good logic, but there is no science.

As for Hertz's picture of a modeling relation,
I am still waiting for clarification of many
troubling questions that I asked about your
sketch of it.  At this time, I do not have
a clear enough characterization of what is
meant by the allegorical "consequent" in
either panel of Hertz's diptych even to
be able to guess if the picture is apt.

The pragmatic maxim directly implies a practical method of operational definition.
I do not know if Percy Bridgman picked this up directly from Peirce, but I do know
who put this idea into the air that he was breathing at turn of the century Harvard.

Jon Awbrey

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