[Inquiry] Logic Of The Sciences -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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LOTS.  Discussion Note 1

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BB = Bill Bailey

Re: LOTS 2.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/002414.html
In: LOTS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/thread.html#2413

Bill Bailey wrote:

BB: Jon, or list:  Would you elaborate on these statements from the citation?
    Are these literal statements for Peirce?  They sound as if he has things
    in the saddle with man.  Surely he's not equating human sensory responses
    to a mirror reflection.

BB, citing JA, quoting CSP:

CSP: | Man has sensation or receptivity, but so has has a looking-glass.
     | Man has the power of testing the truth of representations by comparison;
     | but so has a syllogism on paper.  Man elaborates knowledge by abstraction;
     | but so does a proposition.

Bill,

I use vertical bars like "|" in the left margin to mark verbatim quotations.

I will wade in later with my own remarks, but I'd like to make sure
that I've got enough context first -- my first couple of guesses
about how much context it will take are usually always wrong.

Yes, I think that these are variations on the "man as sign",
and "French interpreter" arguments, in this case taking the
word "subject" as a transition to the interpretant concept.

Peirce elsewhere refers to these as "metaphorical arguments",
so I believe that we have to take them as stepping stones to
something that is better understood in its own right, namely,
a formal equivalence for converting between two corresponding
abstractions, namely, the hypostatic abstraction that we call
the interpreter and the prescissive abstraction that we call
the interpretant.

I would not say that Peirce is "equating" human sensation with a looking glass,
merely that they have a property in common that allows us to substitute either
"person" or "mirror" in the frame "___ has sensation or receptivity" and still
make sense, and similarly with the other contextual frames.

Jon Awbrey

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