[Arisbe] To the Kiddies

[t.gollier at att.net]

Jon,

    I had to smile at the controversy you're managing to generate with
your "Truth Theory" entry for Wikipedia. It seems you must be sprucing up
the "Peirce" entry as well judging from some recent remarks on Peirce-L.
	   
    But as much as I enjoy the resistance you provoke, I have to admit I'm
a bit resistant — like I was with your use of acronyms long ago — to put
forth the effort myself to grasp what you're getting at. For one thing, it
has got to do with a characteristic Bosanquet attributed to logic, and all
philosophical sciences:

    "The teacher of philosophy, from Socrates downwards, has talked about
    common things, things already familiar to his hearers. And although he
    calls upon them to think of these things in a peculiar way, and from
    an unaccustomed point of view, yet it is likely to be felt that he is
    demanding a new effort, without supplying a new interest. …"

and he goes on to nail, I think, the attitude of your antagonists at
Wikipedia toward your efforts.

    "… And it is a common experience, that after a time the mind rebels
    against this artificial attitude, which fatigues without instructing,
    if we have accustomed ourselves to understand by instruction the
    accumulation of new sense-perceptions and the extension of historical
    or scientific vision over a wider superficial area." [Bosanquet,
    'The Essentials of Logic']

    Still, that doesn't explain my own reluctance, as I've put up with the
"boredom" of philosophy and logic for some time. In my own case I think
it's more a distaste for any theory of truth, the conviction that any
attempt to provide a theory or criterion of truth is inherently circular,
that before something can be true because it corresponds, coheres, or
whatever, it must be true that it does correspond, cohere, or whatever.
Truth is one of those "pure concepts" that can be predicated of other
things but of which nothing can be (non-circularly) predicated, and while
it has been the pretension of philosophy to predicate things of these
concepts anyway, I don't think it has really been successful. Personally,
I think "truth" can still be defined — as "true is true" — so as to
produce conjunction, negation, and a truth-functional logic; but if that's
not going to fly, or that's not enough to account for logical thought,
Peirce's option displacing it to an indefinite future — where it can still
function but where we are not able nor do we need to say anything further
about it — is the next best thing. I would want to argue that Peirce was
dispensing with such theories of truth himself — that it's more James'
notion of truth the goes under the rubric of "pragmatic" with such
theorizing — but I always have problems with what I would want Peirce to
say and what he actually said.

    At any rate, it's good to see you're still kicking.

Tom

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey at att.net>
> o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
> 
> that reminds me, i probably ought to post the last
> by way of exegizing the ad-verse.  check out the
> article on "truth theory", while it lasts, as
> it's the one i created from all the stuff
> that the others were deleting from "truth",
> but now the new one has been blacklisted
> for deletion.  we'll see how it goes.
> 
> jon
>