Re: SUO: "Abstract" and "dimensionality"
On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 01:44:50PM -0500, John F. Sowa wrote:
>
> Mike et al.,
>
> That article about abstract objects in the Stanford Encyclopedia is
> useful, but the author, like most 20th century analytic philosophers,
> is unfortunately ignorant of the history of his own subject. He cites
> Frege as the chief authority for the fundamental distinctions, even
> though Frege was almost as confused as his buddies.
>
> In the passage below, I have copied the excerpt from the Stanford
> Encyc. article that discusses Frege's contribution. I certainly agree
> that Frege was a very smart guy. But like most people who quote him,
> Frege was ignorant of the long history of logic, especially the major
> contributions by the medieval scholastics.
>
> Frege preached against "psychologism" in logic, but he constantly
> fell back into the old muddled ways of thought in his own terminology,
> with his repeated use of words like "Gedanke" (thought) and "Urteil"
> (judgment). Peirce used the scholastic term "propositio" (proposition),
> which is sufficiently neutral to serve as the "mind-independent"
> content without presupposing a necessary dependence on any kind of mind.
> Even though the scholastics were devoted Christians (and one of the
> chief authors, Peter of Spain, later became Pope John XXI), they were
> never so naive as to claim support from the "mind of God" in order to
> develop logic.
Apologies for running well into the off-topic nether regions -- please
stop here is not interested in historical asides.
It's no reflection on Peirce's ideas, but your terminological point seems
to me well wide of the mark w.r.t. Frege. Even conceding that the term
'thought' (Gedanke) might be confusing, Frege took pain to indicate that
it was not to be related to what is actually 'thought up' in a
psychological state or episode. As for the term 'judgments', Frege is
even more specific about it; besides, even in the Kantian tradition Frege
was familiar with, judgments are not inherently psychological.
OTOH, it's curious that you'd regard (contemporary) analytic philosophy
as being greatly indebted to Frege's parsing of these notions, since in
the view of many today Frege's views on these matters have been more
often than not grossly misunderstood, especially given the neo-empiricist
bent of much 20th century Anglo-Saxon philosophy (compared to Frege's
punctilious rejection of empiricism). There is ongoing and lively debate
among Frege interpreters.
> Most of the following quotation discusses ways out of Frege's muddle,
> which the medieval scholastics and, of course, Peirce avoided with
> their more sophisicated theories of semiotics.
I disagree. There is no Fregean muddle on this. As to whether medieval
scholastic is clearer on these issues than Frege's own work, anyone can
check for her/himself. A bit of Hegelian hindsight may be in order here:
No knock on Petrus Hispanus, but it's not by chance that logic blossomed
as a scientific discipline after 1879 instead of after 1079. This is not
to say that Peirce might have a more sophisticated general semiotics to
propose: however, the precise status of semiotics today seems to me quite
a bit more in question than that of logic.
> The author also mentions Bolzano and Brentano as having made claims
> that were "similar" to Frege's. That also distorts history, since both
> of them were very familiar with the scholastic writings, and unlike
> Frege, they did not succumb to the muddled terminology that they were
> arguing against.
Bolzano has very insightful things to say about the foundations of logic.
However, his contributions are hardly as systematic and as focussed as
Frege's. Understanding abstraction and the nature of 'concept' was
perhaps the single most important task Frege set for himself in the
Grundlagen. In fact, Frege thought that, as far as the reduction of
arithmetic to logic was concerned, the Begriffschrift had already done
everything that needed doing. He thought of the later work as a lengthy
and more accessible explanation of the conceptual foundations of the new
logic.
I don't know much about Husserl, and even less about Brentano. It seems
unquestionable that Husserl at least early on thought very hard about
precisely the same issues that were central to Frege's work. FWIW, I find
Husserl's work considerably less intelligible than Frege on the whole,
but I think Frege's criticism of it was unfair and unhelpful.
This said, I am certainly curious now about Peirce's ideas about
abstraction: can you please send a brief explanation, or perhaps give me
a few pointers?
Best,
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