[Inquiry] Re: Logic Of The Sciences -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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LOTS.  Discussion Note 4

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AS = Arnold Shepperson
BM = Bernard Morand
JA = Jon Awbrey

Re: LOTS-DIS 3.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/002424.html
In: LOTS-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/thread.html#2416

JA:  One of the changes that has taken place in my views since we
     started these discussions has been more to revise my definitions of
     "early" and "late" in their application to Peirce's work than anything
     else.  I used to lump together everything up to 1870 as early Peirce,
     and everything afterwards as later Peirce, whereas now I am tending
     more and more to view the work up to 1865-1866 as the precocious
     Peirce and the work of 1870 as the "come of age" Peirce

AS:  Bravo, Jon.  This seems to sort of short-cut a lot of the
     misapprehension that Joe may have been trying to highlight
     in Tom Short's article.  Clearly, the New List of 1867 marks
     what one might classify as the transition from precocity to
     experience.  When you put it this way, I immediately saw that
     my appreciation of Peirce lies precisely in the extent to which
     his experience meliorated the precocity of his youth, leading to
     a form of late maturity in his writings (think of the the level of
     his reflections in "An Essay of Reasoning in Uberty and Security" in
     EP2) that remains consistent with the creativity of his early thought
     but embodies the essence of pragmaticism:  learning from experience.

BM: Yes, changing the pair early/late into precocious/experimented changes the 
    "connotation".  I don't see the meaning of shifting back from 1870 to 1865 
    proposed by Jon.  Is it the problem of sign / symbol ? (the symbol qua the 
    only kind of sign that logics would be concerned with?).  What I consider
    important with regards to the discussion with T. Short but with some other
    Peirce scholars as well, is that the conception of sign or representamen,
    while philosophically grounded in the New List, will remain the same until
    the end, even after it was passed under the control of the logic of relations.

BM: Representation is already defined in the NL as a triad S, O, I and such that I
    is in the same relation to O as S itself stands.  This makes the definition of
    the sign closed.  The condition I write after & was not added further in Peirce's
    life, it was already there in the New List as a logical requisite to be studied.
    The thesis of two Peirce, the one of the immediate object and interpretant and
    the other of the dynamical object, and two additional interpretants (for example)
    assumes most of the time, at least implicitly, that the requisite of sameness
    between S-O and I-O came later.  So, in the experienced man the precocious man
    was at work, I think.  This is tantamount to say that in the philosopher (young
    or old), the logician (young or old) was at work.  As regards to the New List
    I interpret this text as an agenda for future work, that is to say a large
    hypothesis (namely the prescission rules).  Time will render the hypothesis
    more and more plausible and this explain why the late CSP will consider this
    early work as his main contribution to philosophy.  But this is how I see
    myself the matter and I can be wrong.

Arnold, Bernard, List ...

It seems that a personal projection will be irresistable in this reconstruction --
I cannot help thinking of the time that I passed from being a "pure" or perhaps
"puritanical" mathematician to being more compelled/fascinated by applications,
and thus being drawn/forced to deal with the brute "impurities" of real data
and empirical fact.  It was not an easy adjustment, as I recall, even from
a hazy remoteness.  But one of the things that was key to making the link
between mathematical forms and empirical material was the association of
empirical extensions with theoretical intensions, and this meant being
able to contemplate fairly arbitrary sets of data, not just the kinds
that were received initially as a-priori familiar natural kinds.

The declared subject of the Harvard & Lowell lectures was the "Logic of Science",
and this requires a better appreciation of messy experience, where the kinds are
not so kind as we would like, that is, where the kinds that will seem natural to
us down the road, if we do indeed adapt, are not the same natural kinds to which
we have become accustomed through the long acquaintance of evolution and history.

To my way of seeing it, the New List is the culmination of a particular direction
of work -- even though it makes places for approximate reasoning and experimental
obduracy, it sums up those facets of our perverse reality that can be made pretty
and almost deceptively a-priori, and is therefore susceptible to misunderstanding
by those unacquainted with the underlying realities.

In this light, it is not really until the 1870 "Logic of Relatives"
that Peirce begins to solve, in an instrumentally effective way,
the problems that he set himself in trying to articulate the
Logic of Science.

Jon Awbrey

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