[Inquiry] Re: Semiotics Of Misrepresentation -- Discussion
Jon Awbrey
jawbrey at att.net
Sun Apr 24 23:04:14 CDT 2005
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SOM. Discussion Note 3
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TG = Tom Gollier
TG: Actually, I'm not really interested in the can of "modern" or
the barrel of "formal" or in disentangling whatever worms and
monkeys might be intertwined within them. All I really need is
one of those worms or monkeys. That is, the "modern" logician who
would present a history of the practice of logic, even as briefly as
Peirce did in the "Fixation of Belief", by recounting the evolution
of the concept of "experience". Or, the "formal" logician in the
Russell-Frege tradition, as "transitory" as it may have been,
who would consider the phrase "practicing logic" to involve
experience as anything more than a trite illustration
now and then.
TG: I'd ask to leave Dewey out as he presents problems of
his own, but otherwise your choices are as wide open
as my generalizations have been sweeping.
Tom,
I went back to the beginning to read again was has transpired so far.
I think that a couple of issues from other discussions were colliding
in my mind: (1) the discussion of semiotic approaches to economic and
political issues, and (2) the way that all the referential opacities of
intentional contexts were arising again in relation to imputed intensions.
I think we agree that certain ways of reflecting on discourse are inadequate
therapies for many of the illusions that syntax is heir to. The question is
what is the root cause of these maladies? For my part, I trace most of them
back, not to the concern with form or syntax, indeed, reflecting on form and
syntax is a necessary part of the cure, but to the confounding of signs with
their objects, in particular, to an inclination to confuse the properties of
signs with the properties of their objects. That's as far I'm able to think
ahead for now.
But let me point to a couple of texts
that I've pointed to before, where all
of these same issues seem to collide:
POLA. Philosophy of Logical Atomism
00. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-August/thread.html#674
25. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-August/000750.html
26. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-August/000751.html
27. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-August/000752.html
RTOK. Russell's Theory Of Knowledge
00. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-August/thread.html#758
01. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-August/000758.html
02. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-August/000759.html
03. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-August/000760.html
Copied here:
POLA. Note 25
| 4.3. How shall we describe the logical form of a belief?
|
| I want to try to get an account of the way that a belief is made up.
| That is not an easy question at all. You cannot make what I should
| call a map-in-space of a belief. You can make a map of an atomic fact
| but not of a belief, for the simple reason that space-relations always
| are of the atomic sort or complications of the atomic sort. I will try
| to illustrate what I mean.
|
| The point is in connexion with there being two verbs in the judgment
| and with the fact that both verbs have got to occur as verbs, because
| if a thing is a verb it cannot occur otherwise than as a verb.
|
| Suppose I take "A believes that B loves C".
| "Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio".
| There you have a false belief. You have this odd
| state of affairs that the verb "loves" occurs in
| that proposition and seems to occur as relating
| Desdemona to Cassio whereas in fact it does not
| do so, but yet it does occur as a verb, it does
| occur in the sort of way that a verb should do.
|
| I mean that when A believes that B loves C, you have to have a verb
| in the place where "loves" occurs. You cannot put a substantive in
| its place. Therefore it is clear that the subordinate verb (i.e. the
| verb other than believing) is functioning as a verb, and seems to be
| relating two terms, but as a matter of fact does not when a judgment
| happens to be false. That is what constitutes the puzzle about the
| nature of belief.
|
| You will notice that whenever one gets to really close quarters
| with the theory of error one has the puzzle of how to deal with
| error without assuming the existence of the non-existent.
|
| I mean that every theory of error sooner or later wrecks itself by assuming
| the existence of the non-existent. As when I say "Desdemona loves Cassio",
| it seems as if you have a non-existent love between Desdemona and Cassio,
| but that is just as wrong as a non-existent unicorn. So you have to
| explain the whole theory of judgment in some other way.
|
| I come now to this question of a map. Suppose you try such a map as this:
|
| Othello
| |
| |
| believes
| |
| v
| Desdemona -----------> Cassio
| loves
|
| This question of making a map is not so strange as you might suppose
| because it is part of the whole theory of symbolism. It is important
| to realize where and how a symbolism of that sort would be wrong:
|
| Where and how it is wrong is that in the symbol you have this relationship
| relating these two things and in the fact it doesn't really relate them.
| You cannot get in space any occurrence which is logically of the same
| form as belief.
|
| When I say "logically of the same form" I mean that one can be obtained
| from the other by replacing the constituents of the one by the new terms.
|
| If I say "Desdemona loves Cassio" that is of
| the same form as "A is to the right of B".
|
| Those are of the same form, and I say that nothing
| that occurs in space is of the same form as belief.
|
| I have got on here to a new sort of thing, a new beast for our
| zoo, not another member of our former species but a new species.
|
| The discovery of this fact is due to Mr. Wittgenstein.
|
| Russell, POLA, pp. 89-91.
|
| Bertrand Russell, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism", pp. 35-155
| in 'The Philosophy of Logical Atomism', edited with an introduction
| by David Pears, Open Court, La Salle, IL, 1985. First published 1918.
POLA. Note 26
| 4.3. How shall we describe the logical form of a belief? (cont.)
|
| There is a great deal that is odd about belief from a
| logical point of view. One of the things that are odd
| is that you can believe propositions of all sorts of forms.
| I can believe that "This is white" and "Two and two are four".
| They are quite different forms, yet one can believe both. The
| actual occurrence can hardly be of exactly the same logical form
| in those two cases because of the great difference in the forms
| of the propositions believed. Therefore it would seem that
| belief cannot strictly be logically one in all different
| cases but must be distinguished according to the nature
| of the proposition that you believe.
|
| If you have "I believe p" and I believe q" those two facts, if p and q are
| not of the same logical form, are not of the same logical form in the sense
| I was speaking of a moment ago, that is in the sense that from "I believe p"
| you can derive "I believe q" by replacing the constituents of one by the
| constituents of the other.
|
| That means that belief itself cannot be treated as being a proper sort of
| single term. Belief will really have to have different logical forms
| according to the nature of what is believed. So that the apparent
| sameness of believing in different cases is more or less illusory.
|
| Russell, POLA, p. 91.
|
| Bertrand Russell, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism", pp. 35-155
| in 'The Philosophy of Logical Atomism', edited with an introduction
| by David Pears, Open Court, La Salle, IL, 1985. First published 1918.
POLA. Note 27
| 4.3. How shall we describe the logical form of a belief? (concl.)
|
| There are really two main things that one wants to notice in this matter that
| I am treating of just now. The 'first' is the impossibility of treating the
| proposition believed as an independent entity, entering as a unit into the
| occurrence of the belief, and the 'other' is the impossibility of putting
| the subordinate verb on a level with its terms as an object term in the
| belief. That is a point in which I think that the theory of judgment
| which I set forth once in print some years ago was a little unduly
| simple, because I did then treat the object verb as if one could
| put it as just an object like the terms, as if one could put
| "loves" on a level with Desdemona and Cassio as a term for
| the relation "believe". That is why I have been laying
| such an emphasis on this lecture today on the fact
| that there are two verbs at least.
|
| I hope you will forgive the fact that so much of what I say today is tentative
| and consists of pointing out difficulties. The subject is not very easy and
| it has not been much dealt with or discussed. Practically nobody has until
| quite lately begun to consider the problem of the nature of belief with
| anything like a proper logical apparatus and therefore one has very
| little to help one in any discussion and so one has to be content
| on many points at present with pointing out difficulties rather
| than laying down quite clear solutions.
|
| Russell, POLA, pp. 91-92.
|
| Bertrand Russell, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism", pp. 35-155
| in 'The Philosophy of Logical Atomism', edited with an introduction
| by David Pears, Open Court, La Salle, IL, 1985. First published 1918.
RTOK. Note 2
| We come now to the last problem which has to be treated
| in this chapter, namely: What is the logical structure of
| the fact which consists in a given subject understanding a
| given proposition? The structure of an understanding varies
| according to the proposition understood. At present, we are
| only concerned with the understanding of atomic propositions;
| the understanding of molecular propositions will be dealt with
| in Part 3.
|
| Let us again take the proposition "A and B are similar".
|
| It is plain, to begin with, that the 'complex'
| "A and B being similar", even if it exists,
| does not enter in, for if it did, we could
| not understand false propositions, because
| in their case there is no such complex.
|
| It is plain, also, from what has been said, that we cannot understand
| the proposition unless we are acquainted with A and B and similarity
| and the form "something and something have some relation". Apart
| from these four objects, there does not appear, so far as we can
| see, to be any object with which we need be acquainted in order
| to understand the proposition.
|
| It seems to follow that these four objects, and these only, must be
| united with the subject in one complex when the subject understands
| the proposition. It cannot be any complex composed of them that
| enters in, since they need not form any complex, and if they do,
| we need not be acquainted with it. But they themselves must
| all enter in, since if they did not, it would be at least
| theoretically possible to understand the proposition
| without being acquainted with them.
|
| In this argument, I appeal to the principle that,
| when we understand, those objects with which we
| must be acquainted when we understand, and those
| only, are object-constituents (i.e. constituents
| other than understanding itself and the subject)
| of the understanding-complex.
|
| Russell, TOK, pp. 116-117.
|
| Bertrand Russell, 'Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript',
| edited by Elizabeth Ramsden Eames in collaboration with Kenneth Blackwell,
| Routledge, London, UK, 1992. First published, George Allen & Unwin, 1984.
RTOK. Note 3
| It follows that, when a subject S understands "A and B are similar",
| "understanding" is the relating relation, and the terms are S and
| A and B and similarity and R(x, y), where R(x, y) stands for the
| form "something and something have some relation". Thus a first
| symbol for the complex will be:
|
| U{S, A, B, similarity, R(x, y)}.
|
| This symbol, however, by no means exhausts the analysis of
| the form of the understanding-complex. There are many kinds
| of five-term complexes, and we have to decide what the kind is.
|
| It is obvious, in the first place, that S is related to the
| four other terms in a way different from that in which any
| of the four other terms are related to each other.
|
| (It is to be observed that we can derive from our five-term complex a complex
| having any smaller number of terms by replacing any one or more of the terms
| by "something". If S is replaced by "something", the resulting complex is
| of a different form from that which results from replacing any other term
| by "something". This explains what is meant by saying that S enters in
| a different way from the other constituents.)
|
| It is obvious, in the second place, that R(x, y) enters in a different
| way from the other three objects, and that "similarity" has a different
| relation to R(x, y) from that which A and B have, while A and B have the
| same relation to R(x, y). Also, because we are dealing with a proposition
| asserting a symmetrical relation between A and B, A and B have each the same
| relation to "similarity", whereas, if we had been dealing with an asymmetrical
| relation, they would have had different relations to it. Thus we are led to the
| following map of our five-term complex:
|
| A o
| \ <
| ^\ *
| \ *
| % \ *
| \ *
| % \ R(x, y) *
| o------o------> o---------<---------o Similarity
| % / ^ * ^
| / | * /
| /% | * /
| / |* /
| / % * | /
| / < | /
| B o % | /
| ^ | /
| \ % | /
| \ | /
| \ % | /
| \ | /
| \ % | /
| \ | /
| \ % | /
| \ | /
| \ % | /
| \ | /
| \%| /
| \| /
| o
| S
|
| In this figure, one relation goes from S to the four objects;
| one relation goes from R(x, y) to similarity, and another to
| A and B, while one relation goes from similarity to A and B.
|
| This figure, I hope, will help to make clearer the map of
| our five-term complex. But to explain in detail the exact
| abstract meaning of the various items in the figure would
| demand a lengthy formal logical discussion. Meanwhile the
| above attempt must suffice, for the present, as an analysis
| of what is meant by "understanding a proposition".
|
| Russell, TOK, pp. 117-118.
|
| Bertrand Russell, 'Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript',
| edited by Elizabeth Ramsden Eames in collaboration with Kenneth Blackwell,
| Routledge, London, UK, 1992. First published, George Allen & Unwin, 1984.
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