[Inquiry] Re: Questions Involving Pure Symbols -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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QUIPS.  Discussion Note 45

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Re: QUIPS-DIS 40.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-May/002730.html
In: QUIPS-DIS.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-May/thread.html#2602

AB: You wrote:

JA: Well, it was partly tongue-in-cheek, so I wouldn't push it too far
    for fear of swallowing my tongue, but you seem to have made a leap
    from "exacting technical work" to "classification a priori" that I
    would not have had in mind when I said this.  It was precisely the
    balance and the back-and-forth interaction between pure intensions
    and raw extensions that made Peirce's technical work so productive.
    Now, some people get bent out of shape if I enumerate a collection
    of k-tuples as the extension of a relative concept, but it remains
    a plain fact that Peirce used these sorts of concrete exemplitudes
    to analyze such concepts in the most effective and exacting detail.
    Nor do I estimate nodding allusions to portraits and weather-vanes,
    which are after all but isolated examples of single signs that are
    torn from the context of their larger sign relations, as anywhere
    near comparable to the extensive samples of sign relations that
    are necessary to begin anything approaching a full analysis.

AB: As I remarked earlier it is often difficult
    to estimate the windings of your tongue from
    your writing. 

AB: I did not make the leap you suggest.
    You brought up the a priori.  I would
    not cast it in those terms myself.

AB: Although I agree that the weather vane and portrait examples
    are a little worn off, there is no need for disdain on this
    point.  That looks like a mathematician demanding from his
    novice pupil to start with differential calculus instead
    of those silly and well known additions and substractions.

AB: The main point of this remark seems to be to underscore
    your determination not to set one step out of logic.

Auke,

It is simply my personal sense about this type of work
that the generation of theoretical niches is outracing
the evolution of viable enough species to inhabit them.
One or two examples in each niche, and those of a very
sparse and tenuous sort, not even fully fleshed out as
extensive sign relations, is not enough to support the
theoretical superstructure that is being built on them.

Part of the reason that I feel this way is that I've seen
the parts of Peirce's work where he kept a better balance
between the abstractions and the concretions, and the end
product was all the more fitting and sturdy in proportion.

It is as if people were trying to construct a periodic table
at a period in time when they knew but a handful of elements.
I think it is rather that this line of work is all too often
trying to do calculus before it has learned its times tables.

I do not disdain the appetizers, but if they serve their function then
my desire to get on to the ampler course is simply piqued all the more.

Jon Awbrey

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