[Arisbe] Re: Manifolds Of Sensuous Impressions (MOSI's)

[Jon Awbrey]

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Tom Holroyd wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 12 Mar 2001, Jon Awbrey wrote:
> 
> > Just by way of a hint, and I hope not too much of a heresy here,
> > I cannot take it as an automatic axiom that "logical entailment"
> > is really what fills the bill on the formal side of the diagram.
> 
> Can you elaborate?  (Oh wait, I _know_ you can elaborate :-)
> but maybe just say what you mean by this?

At this particular stage of the ever ungoing enantio-drama,
I probably should be reading more from the Rosen Cavaliers
and writing less out of the Awbrey Digs, but what the heck!
So let me just pose this as a query or a worry that I have,
one that has been bothering me sorely for quite a long bit.

In fact, I can still remember who started the fire.
It was in the book of none but Warren S. McCulloch,
and I can even recall the times, where I was, what
what I was doing, when I first I stared the puzzle
in the face.  Returning to the eldritch chorograph,
being stirred if not shaken by the gelid chills of
the corpus that so many of us have in common there,
I am struck by the fact that the entire complement
of its facets, the full complexion of its features,
the patent countenance of its mien, the whole host
of its outlooks, all of which I still spy upon the
surfaces of its canopic catafalque, lying in state,
so quiescently there upon the page, not to say how
I regard it as my holy book, or anything like that,
but it does bring up some personal anamnemesiseses,
anyway, I am struck not quite dumb enough, I guess,
by how strikingly apt it all seems for this moment,
and so I hope that you will indulge me if I expand
upon the topic with which we came through the door,
at least so far as to mind a bit of its embodiment.

Damn the toreutics!  Roll the clip!

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| Please remember that we are not now concerned with
| the physics and chemistry, the anatomy and physiology,
| of man.  They are my daily business.  They do not contribute
| to the logic of our problem.  Despite Ramon Lull's combinatorial
| analysis of logic and all of his followers, including Leibnitz with
| his universal characteristic and his persistent effort to build logical
| computing machines, from the death of William of Ockham logic decayed.
| There were, of course, teachers of logic.  The forms of the syllogism
| and the logic of classes were taught, and we shall use some of their
| devices, but there was a general recognition of their inadequacy to
| the problems in hand.  Russell says it was Jevons -- and Feibleman,
| that it was DeMorgan -- who said, "The logic of Aristotle is inadequate,
| for it does not show that if a horse is an animal then the head of the horse
| is the head of an animal."  To which Russell replies, "Fortunate Aristotle,
| for if a horse were a clam or a hydra it would not be so."  The difficulty
| is that they had no knowledge of the logic of relations, and almost none
| of the logic of propositions.  These logics really began in the latter
| part of the last century with Charles Peirce as their great pioneer.
| As with most pioneers, many of the trails he blazed were not followed
| for a score of years.  For example, he discovered the amphecks -- that
| is, "not both ... and ..." and "neither ... nor ...", which Sheffer
| rediscovered and are called by his name for them, "stroke functions".
| It was Peirce who broke the ice with his logic of relatives, from
| which springs the pitiful beginnings of our logic of relations of
| two and more than two arguments.  So completely had the traditional
| Aristotelian logic been lost that Peirce remarks that when he wrote
| the 'Century Dictionary' he was so confused concerning abduction, or
| apagoge, and induction that he wrote nonsense.  Thus Aristotelian logic,
| like the skeleton of Tom Paine, was lost to us from the world that it
| had engendered.  Peirce had to go back to Duns Scotus to start again
| the realistic logic of science.  Pragmatism took hold, despite its
| misinterpretation by William James.  The world was ripe for it.
| Frege, Peano, Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, followed by a
| host of lesser lights, but sparked by many a strange character
| like Schroeder, Sheffer, Gödel, and company, gave us a working
| logic of propositions.  By the time I had sunk my teeth into
| these questions, the Polish school was well on its way to glory.
| In 1923 I gave up the attempt to write a logic of transitive verbs
| and began to see what I could do with the logic of propositions.
| My object, as a psychologist, was to invent a kind of least psychic
| event, or "psychon", that would have the following properties:  First,
| it was to be so simple an event that it either happened or else it did
| not happen.  Second, it was to happen only if its bound cause had happened --
| shades of Duns Scotus! -- that is, it was to imply its temporal antecedent.
| Third, it was to propose this to subsequent psychons.  Fourth, these were
| to be compounded to produce the equivalents of more complicated propositions
| concerning their antecedents.  (McCulloch, WIANTAMMKIAAMTHMKAN?, EOM, pages 7-8).
|
| Warren S. McCulloch,
| "What Is a Number that a Man May Know It,
|  and a Man, that He May Know a Number",
| The Ninth Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture,
| 'General Semantics Bulletin', Numbers 26 & 27,
| Institute of General Semantics, Lakeville, CT, 1961.
| In 'Embodiments of Mind', MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1965.

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I think you see the problem ...

So let the strange sparks fly!

Jon Awbrey

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