[Inquiry] Grounds And Respects -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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GAR.  Discussion Note 1

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JP = Jim Piat

Re: GAR 4.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/002444.html
In: GAR.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/thread.html#2441

JP: Might as well kill the whole day.  Mine -- not yours.

JP: I want to comment here because it relates to an earlier
    discussion I had with Gary Richmond in which I tried
    to make the case that qualities were as actual as
    were resistances or seconds.  I suggested then
    that qualities were the result of the form or
    organization that matter (which gives rise
    to inertia, resistance of secondness)
    takes in in space.  I would add now
    that form is distinct from scale or
    magnitude  (whereas secondness is 
    inextricably tied to magnitude).

Jim,

Enough about basketball ...

Conventional wisdom, according to some conventions, at any rate,
says not to mix logic and psychology, or metaphysics and physics,
and I wish that I could say that I've never had occasion to sin
on those scores, but there is one sort of circumstance in which
I am forced to say 'mea culpa' -- excuse my Latin -- because I
happen to subscribe to the "Physical Sign System Thesis" (PSST),
and so I have to wonder about the dynamic-sytematic incarnations
of all brands of representations of whatever system is in view,
even the one that is responsible for the representation itself.

Unfortunately, for the sake of your question, I have barely
gotten so far as considering very abstract and impoverished
systems of the sort that might be both dynamic and symbolic,
certainly nothing so solid as to be capable of supporting a
significant concept of energy, inertia, matter, or momentum,
no more than a few sparse hints of how things like entropy,
information, uncertainty, and so on, might come into play.

So I guess my point is that I consider things like inertia and matter
to be rather late arrivals on the dynamic scene, logically speaking,
having to be defined or derived in terms of more primitive dynamical
properties.  I do not know if intellectual history actually traced
this path -- maybe in a sleepwalking mode at best -- but the way
that it's usually done these days is to develop all this stuff
out of a subject that's called the "calculus of variations".

JP: So, to relate this notion to those mentioned by Peirce below  I would also say
    that resemblance or likeness is not mere versimilitude but actual identity of
    form.  I would reserve versimiltude for approximate resemblance of form.

Another question we have to ask in a context-relative way
is whether Peirce is using -- or whether we want to use --
the word "form" in a Platonic, Aristotelian, or more
thoroughly modern physical way.  Hard to decide.

JP: So, in my view a representation can agree with its object in both
    form (scale and organization) and magnitude of secondness.  Complete
    agreement in both form and secondness would constitute identity.  But
    if signs were identical to their objects they would provide no advantage
    as means of thought or communication.  The advantage of thinking in signs
    or symbols is precisely that they are not identical to their objects in
    secondness.  Otherwise it would be as impractical to think with them
    as actually manuevering the objects themselves.  The disadvantage
    of thinking in signs or symbols is that lacking identity with
    their objects they can sometimes lead us to false conclusions
    that are in fact not identical with what we would obtain if
    we manipulated the actual objects.

The thing about representations is that they are represented to be such.
This is an interpretive factor that does not reduce to anything less,
and is not covered by any representation-independent explanation.

Jon Awbrey

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