[Inquiry] Re: Peirce's Logic Of Information -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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PLOI.  Discussion Note 4

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BCES = Bernard Scott

Re: PLOI-DIS 3.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-December/003293.html
In: PLOI-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-December/thread.html#3280

Bernard,

Comments interspersed below.

BCES: Not sorry at all.  Thank you indeed!

BCES: I note this in the extracts:

CSP: | we must look to the upshot of our concepts
     | in order rightly to apprehend them ...

BCES: Probably where I got the consequentialist turn,
      which I consider to be a very useful view to
      adopt re the 'meaning' of someone's beliefs.

Oh, there's no objection to the "turn" -- it's only when folks make
an "ism" out of it, in the sense of a reductive "nothing-but-ism",
that it tends to veer off radically from what Peirce had in mind.

BCES: Elsewhere:

CSP: | I did not, therefore, mean to say that acts, which are more
     | strictly singular than anything, could constitute the purport,
     | or adequate proper interpretation, of any symbol.  I compared
     | action to the finale of the symphony of thought, belief being
     | a demicadence. Nobody conceives that the few bars at the end
     | of a musical movement are the purpose of the movement.  They
     | may be called its upshot.

Yes, that was a late statement that was intended to correct some
of the "radical empiricist" excesses of William James and others.
The difference between them was that Peirce remained a believer
in rational concepts that go beyond the necessarily finite data
that we have in our experience at any given time, and so he has
no problem staying a scholastic realist about mathematical ideas,
or even a platonic realist about ideas of beauty, justice, truth,
and so on.

BCES: And putting the first extract in larger context:

CSP: | The doctrine appears to assume that the end of man is action --
     | a stoical axiom which, to the present writer at the age of
     | sixty, does not recommend itself so forcibly as it did at
     | thirty.  If it be admitted, on the contrary, that action
     | wants an end, and that that end must be something of a
     | general description, then the spirit of the maxim itself,
     | which is that we must look to the upshot of our concepts
     | in order rightly to apprehend them, would direct us towards
     | something different from practical facts, namely, to general
     | ideas, as the true interpreters of our thought.

BCES: I like that as an anticipation of the
      value of the general ideas we find in
      the conception of 'cybernetics'.

That's just how I see it, too.

Jon Awbrey

P.S.  Here's an interesting point of view on the life and times of Peirce:

Josiah Lee Auspitz, "The Wasp Leaves the Bottle:  Charles Sanders Peirce"
http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/auspitz/escape.htm

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