[Inquiry] Re: Futures Of Logical Graphs -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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FOLG.  Discussion Note 7

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JA = Jon Awbrey
JR = Joe Ransdell

Re: FOLG-DIS 2.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-October/003136.html
In: FOLG-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-October/thread.html#3135

JR: I agree that I did not express myself clearly enough in my
    recent post.  Perhaps I should begin again by making explicit
    something which you already understand intuitively, I am sure,
    which is that I cannot help but regard what you post from the
    standpoint of my position as list manager and it is from that
    perspective that I get disturbed at what you are doing.
    Let me try to explain why.

JR: From that point of view what is most noticeable about what you post is that
    you typically begin with a seeming concern for what is of philosophical and
    general interest, announce a goal of getting at something which will explicate
    this or that Peircean conception or theory, then begin laying out, day by day,
    both textual material and preliminary considerations in a great number of small
    "bite-sized" chunks that are supposed to eventuate in that explication, but which
    seem always to move from the philosophical to the mathematical and from what is of
    general interest to what is of interest to perhaps 2 or 3 other persons at best,
    who turn out not to have the time at their disposal to devote themselves to
    mastering the special understanding you require of those who would like to
    learn something from you, and whatever you are doing finally disappears
    from view altogether behind what has become an impenetrable barrier of
    pure formalism.

JR: Now, I do not want to function as a censor here as long as what is being
    posted can be construed as sincerely concerned with Peirce, regardless of
    how wrongheaded or misleading I may think it to be, and I have no doubt
    about your sincerity or your competence;  yet I cannot help but notice
    that the way you use the forum as a venue is one that seems to have a
    deadening effect on discussion here, which I would guess is due to the
    combination of what I described above taken together with the sheer
    quantity of individual messages you post day in and day out.  Again
    and again, PEIRCE-L drifts into being what is, in effect, AWBREY-L,
    regardless of what your intentions may actually be.  Your view seems
    to be "So what?", doubtless because you can say, quite rightly, that
    there is no necessity that your activity should have that effect since
    people can simply ignore you, if they wish, and talk about anything else
    they want to talk about. Also, I could myself contribute to the vitality
    of the forum as such by posting on other topics with the intention of
    stimulating discussion in that way, which is in fact what I have often
    done in the past.  But I have a life to live also, and am increasingly
    disinclined to put any more of my time in here for the purpose of
    compensating for what I perceive to be the deadening effect of
    your posting style and method.

JR: So this puts me into a quandary, since I do not want the forum to be perceived
    as involving any limitations on posting, provided it is construable as relevant,
    and whether wrong-headed or not, your concerns are surely relevant.  My message
    was thus motivated by this in part, and was an attempt to draw you back from
    your ascent into the sort of recondite formalism which is your natural milieu
    into recognizable philosophical engagement with Peirce's conceptions, so that
    something like a philosophical discussion might start up again here before
    you disappear once again behind the barbed-wire fa¨ade of your cactus logic.

Yes, there are certain difficulties in expositing what any aspect
or fraction of Peirce's work is all about, part of that being that
one has to introduce the generally educated reader of today not only
to what the trained mathematician of the 19th century would have been
trained to consider not worth mentioning in a technical paper, all the
while making that context seem seamless with what the prescient logician
would foresee about all the advances in logic that would-needs-be, if only
a few of them have-yet-been.  I'm doing the best that I can this time around,
and I can only excuse the slow pace of it by saying that I'm trying forestall
some of the misunderstandings that I've seen to arise the last few times around.

JR: Thus I noticed that the rationale behind what you are presently doing seems to
    have something to do with the earlier dispute about the iconicity involved in
    the functioning of symbols.  And what naturally occurred to me was that there
    is something decidedly puzzling about the fact that, in Peirce's view, the
    single most important thing about the logical notation he developed as
    "Existential Graphs" is that it is a symbolism which is as iconic of
    what it is designed to represent as possible, whereas you seem to be
    bent upon presenting an alternative notation exemplary of pure and
    non-iconic symbolism in its stead in the sense that it is in some
    sense more fundamental than his, which is supposedly just a special
    interpretation of it.  And my impression was that what you were
    saying was, in effect, that if we understand his semeiotic at its
    most profound level we will understand it as a "pure symbolism"
    free from any essential connection with iconism, though it can
    also be interpreted as iconicism or as indexical.

My earliest studies of Peirce, all too quickly approaching
their 40th birthday, were in great measure motivated by my
fascination with visual as distinguished from verbal modes
of doing logic, at a time when the straight-&-narrow tenon
of syntax was de rigueur mortise.  In short, I was icontry
before icontry was cool.  So I am naturally pleased to see
the iconic aspect of Peirce's logical graphs again receive
some popular press, just as I was in the late 60's when it
got a flurry of enthusiasm in Spencer Brown's revival tent,
and again in the mid 80's when John Sowa took notice of it.
But like any tide of fashion, the flow overreaches as much
as the ebb underwhelms.  With regard to Peirce's view, the
"single most important thing about the logical notation he
developed" can be nothing short of its adequacy to the res
of logic, and then the power that it brings to its purpose.
Iconic facility is frivolous if it doesn't facilitate that.

One of the critical needs at this point is to nuance our
comprehension of the varieties of iconic expression that
are actually available, instead of taking them whole hog,
that is to say, in a monolithic style.  But that demands
the laying down of a bit more groundwork than we have at
present before the issues can be discussed intelligently.
So I will continue to attend to that task in tandem with
replying to your remarks.

Jon Awbrey

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