[Inquiry] Re: Kaina Stoicheia -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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KS.  Discussion Note 8

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JA = Jon Awbrey
JP = Jim Piat

Re: KS-DIS 7.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-December/003300.html
In: KS-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-December/thread.html#3272

Jim, Peirce List,

JA: Partly I like these statements because they place the
    matter of defining "sign" within its due contexts of
    defining "formal" and defining "logic", which helps
    to "comprehend", in both senses of that term, some
    of the purposes and utilities of the definition.

JA: With respect to the question of contrast, Peirce in this instance
    explictly contrasts this definition with the most popular host of
    sufficient but not necessary descriptions, namely, those that use
    some of our common but typically unexamined introspections and/or
    intuitions about our own psychological processes in order to fill
    in a motley assortment of intuitive blind spots and logical holes
    in the description.  This affords a significant correction to the
    psychologically-biased descriptions, for instance, those deriving
    from the "New List" account.

JP: Ha!  Yes, I've always thought that the New List relied a bit on unexamined 
    psychological notions such as "attention" but then again I wonder if any 
    human endeavor (inquiry, defintion, thought or whatever) can completely 
    escape this sort of reliance.  Being a psychologist (whatever that is)
    this has never bothered me.  In fact it just now occurs to me that that
    for me is a good account of what I mean when I say I am a psychologist --
    that for me what is left undefined or the starting point if you will --
    is what in common parlance people mostly call psychological.

I have no brief against psychology -- it's a facscinating study, one of those
that I passed through several times in the "cycle of majors" that I had as an
undergrad and even spent a parallel life during the 80's taking a Master's in.
And I do not confound "psychological" or even "introspective" with "unexamind" --
it's merely that many of our most intuitive concepts remain as yet "primitive" --
in both the "logical undefind" and the "savage mind" senses of the word.  And
it's entirely appropriate to use the concepts that we have until we arrive at
clearer and distincter ideas, as the saying goes -- like you say, there is no
escaping that, not at the outset anyways.

JP: It's always struct me that Peirce's eschewing of psychologogism
    was no big deal -- mostly just a reaction to the excesses of the
    psychologizing in vogue at the time he was writing.  Something
    psychologists of the time eventually reacted against (to the
    point of excesses in the other direction) themselves.

"Struct" -- a sly alusion to Aristotle's 'pathemeta'
and the classical theory of being tutored by nature,
the mode of instruction via hard knocks impressions.
I like it, ergo, I think I'll steal it.

JA: But probably the most important feature of this definition is that
    it does not invoke too large a variety of undefined terms as a part
    of its try at definition, and the few significant terms that it does
    pass the buck to, like "correspondence" and "determination", are ones
    for which we find fairly fast definitions elsewhere in Peirce's works.

JA: The reason why these criteria are important is that they gives us what we need
    in order to carry out any measure of deductive or necessary reasoning on the
    basis of the definition alone -- the "standing on its own feet" character
    of a genuine definition.

JA: To be continued ...

JP: Looking forward to that!

WOWYWF, somebody may be keeping a list ...

Jon Awbrey

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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
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