[Inquiry] Re: Doctrine Of Individuals -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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DOI.  Discussion Note 5

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CG = Clark Goble
JA = Jon Awbrey

Clark,

I meant to get back to some of the
passed-over issues, but it looks
like I left off about here:

Re: DOI-DIS 4.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-February/002343.html
In: DOI-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-February/thread.html#2343

CG, quoting JA:

JA: Not sure there's a question why.  The logical atom or
    absolutely individual term is just defined that way.

CG: Sorry, I should have been clearer.  Yes, when we are considering the logic.
    When we are talking about the application of the logic to "reality" then
    we can ask about the implications of this.  Leibniz and Peirce differ
    here in that Leibniz (and perhaps Russell following Leibniz) draw
    implications here.  Peirce sees it more as an ideal, as I
    understand it.

CG: I found a few relevant quotes in Peirce that may be helpful here.
    But it will have to wait until later tonight.

JA: Are there things in reality that would require
    an unlimited amount of information to specify?
    Probably -- but we don't really know for sure.
    At any rate, things keep being what they are.
    What we are pretty well acquainted with is
    a type of situation where things in reality
    exceed our capacity to specify exactly, but
    where we can acquire enough information to
    take some action, even if just to make an
    assertion, with respect to them.  One of
    the things that Peirce did was to give
    us suitable concepts for dealing with
    these sorts of middling situation,
    where we know more than nothing
    but less than everything, and
    so we need not spend all our
    time in futile quests for
    certainty about ultimate
    things, however much fun
    that may be in the odd
    hours of the day.

Let me just recitate the following statement of Peirce
about this middling state of knowledge, a problem that
he'd return to when he began to extend the existential
graphs to the level of the gamma graphs:

| The moment, then, that we pass from nothing and the vacuity of being
| to any content or sphere, we come at once to a composite content and
| sphere.  In fact, extension and comprehension -- like space and time --
| are quantities which are not composed of ultimate elements;  but
| every part however small is divisible.
|
| The consequence of this fact is that when we wish to enumerate the
| sphere of a term -- a process termed 'division' -- or when we wish
| to run over the content of a term -- a process called 'definition' --
| since we cannot take the elements of our enumeration singly but must
| take them in groups, there is danger that we shall take some element
| twice over, or that we shall omit some.  Hence the extension and
| comprehension which we know will be somewhat indeterminate.  But
| we must distinguish two kinds of these quantities.  If we were to
| subtilize we might make other distinctions but I shall be content
| with two.  They are the extension and comprehension relatively to
| our actual knowledge, and what these would be were our knowledge
| perfect.
|
| Logicians have hitherto left the doctrine of extension
| and comprehension in a very imperfect state owing to the
| blinding influence of a psychological treatment of the
| matter.  They have, therefore, not made this distinction
| and have reduced the comprehension of a term to what it
| would be if we had no knowledge of fact at all.  I mention
| this because if you should come across the matter I am now
| discussing in any book, you would find the matter left in
| quite a different state.
|
| C.S. Peirce, 'Chronological Edition', CE 1, 462.
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce,
|"The Logic of Science, or, Induction and Hypothesis",
| Lowell Institute Lectures of 1866, pages 357-504 in:
|
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce:  A Chronological Edition',
|'Volume 1, 1857-1866', Peirce Edition Project,
| Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.

Jon Awbrey

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