[Inquiry] Re: Logic 101

[Jon Awbrey]

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LOG.  Note 8

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Cf: LOG.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-April/thread.html#2570

We have just completed an initial scan of Peirce's "Logic Chapter 1"
(MS 115, Winter-Spring 1866) that forms one of the precursors of the
1867 "New List of Categories", and I would now like to look over the
whole text of Lowell Lecture 9 (MS 130, November 1866) that in large
part parallels and elaborates on the material of MS 115.  As usual,
for ease of study, I have broken the longer paragraphs into parts.

| Ladies and gentlemen: --
|
| At the last lecture, we made some reflections upon the proper mode of
| conceiving the progress of truth from the outward things to the full
| understanding.  We found that the first impressions upon our senses
| are not representations of certain unknown things in themselves
| but are themselves those very unknown things in themselves.
|
| Our first impressions are entirely unknown in themselves and the matter of
| cognition is the matter of fact and what is not a question of a possible
| experience is not a question of fact.  These impressions are grasped
| into the unity which the mind requires, the unity of the 'I think' --
| the unity of consistency, by conceptions and sensations.  These are
| nothing else than predicates which the mind affixes by virtue of a
| hypothetical inference in order to understand the data presented
| to it.
|
| A hypothetical predicate is one which is affixed to a thing which
| has not been experienced as possessing it in order to bring the
| manifold in the experienced thing to unity.  Now this is just
| the character of a conception or sensation.
|
| Take the sense of beauty as an example;  when we hear a sonata
| of Beethoven's the predicate of beautiful is affixed to it as a
| single representation of the complicated phenomena presented to
| the ear.  The beauty does not belong to each note or chord but
| to the whole.  We have not therefore 'heard' the beauty for we
| have heard only the single chords successively.  What we have
| heard is therefore only the 'occasion' of the feeling that it
| is beautiful, only the data to reduce which to unity the sense
| of beauty serves.  'Beautiful' is therefore a hypothetically
| adjoined predicate.  This illustrates how the logical function
| of 'sensations' is that of a hypothetical predicate.
|
| The same thing is still more obvious in the case of a conception.
| I make five dots on the board [.::].  Now, a person in a drowsy
| state might see those dots and not reflect that they were 'five'.
| The conception of 'five' is, therefore, not in the eye, is not
| seen, since that drowsy person would see all that we do, but
| is introduced by the mind in order to comprehend (or reduce
| to a consistent whole) what is seen.
|
| C.S. Peirce, 'Chronological Edition', CE 1, 471-472
|
|"The Logic of Science, or, Induction and Hypothesis",
| Lowell Institute Lectures (1866), pp. 357-504 in:
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce:  A Chronological Edition',
|'Volume 1, 1857-1866', Peirce Edition Project,
| Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.

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