[Inquiry] Re: Logic 101

[Jon Awbrey]

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LOG.  Note 9

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| Lowell Lecture 9 (cont.)
|
| Thus both sensations and conceptions are hypothetic predicates.  They are,
| however, hypotheses of widely different kinds.  A sensation is a sort of
| mental name.  To assign a name to a thing is to make a hypothesis.  It is
| plainly a predicate which is not in the 'data'.  But it is given on account
| of a logical necessity;  namely the necessity of reducing the manifold of
| the predicates given to unity.  We give the name 'man' because it is needed
| to convey at once rationality, animality, being two-legged, being mortal, etc.
|
| To give a name is therefore to make a hypothesis.  Such a hypothesis,
| however, differs from what we usually comprehend under that term in
| a very important respect;  namely, that while the data require 'some'
| name they do not require any name in particular.  'Chou' is as good
| a word as 'cabbage' except for the sailor who thought the French
| inconsistent in using it.
|
| It is the same with a sensation;  if all that is painful to me had been
| pleasurable and 'vice versa', I should have derived as correct a knowledge
| of things from these sensations as I now do, because all the knowledge these
| sensations give us now is only that there is a difference between pleasurable
| and painful circumstances without telling us anything of the nature of the
| difference.
|
| It is the same with any other sensation.  The sensation of 'redness'
| corresponds only to a particular rate of vibration in the luminiferous
| ether, which the sensation itself tells us nothing of.  All that the
| sensation is good for therefore is to tell us that 'red' things are
| alike and differ from other things.  This sensation might have been
| of some other kind therefore without being any the less true.
|
| So that a sensation is like a name -- the data demand it
| but do not demand that it shall be of any particular sort
| so long as it is consistent.  In the next lecture we shall
| go a little deeper into the logical nature of sensations,
| but this is all we require for our present purpose.
|
| C.S. Peirce, 'Chronological Edition', CE 1, 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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