SUO: Themes Out Of Peirce
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Tom,
Just to put it as provocatively, or (thought-)provokingly, as possible,
I would say that the whole 20th century analytic tradition, along with
its neo-fragmatic sports, has so far failed to anticipate, very fully,
many of the most salient themes out of Peirce that are most critically
important for the understaning of how science, and signs, really work.
Pick a theme from Quine, say, that is relevant to making progress on
behalf of commensal ontologies, and we can begin work on it. I had
been meaning to move on to some of Quine's best late work, say,
'From Stimulus to Science', so maybe that would be a place to
look. But I see from scanning your questions below that you
may be taking some of what I say the wrong way. I have been
focusing on what I personally consider to be an advance in
Quine, and even in Russell, and saying that most of that
was already in Peirce. If I follow up a trajectory that
I consider to be retrograde, like 2-adic reductionism,
or its sprout, behaviorism, or nominalism, and so on,
my aim is purely diagnostic trouble-shooting, trying
to figure out where the initial insight went haywire.
Jon Awbrey
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Tom Johnston wrote:
>
> When I made reference to Quine's most important single publication, his
> article "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", John Sowa and Jon Awbrey both said that
> Peirce had anticipated Quine (in some strong sense, though I won't bother to
> go back and get direct quotes), on both his points. I don't know enough
> Peirce to challenge either of them. I have no doubt that anticipations of
> Quine's article are to be found in Peirce. My challenge, if I had the
> background to make it, would be "How strongly anticipated? In exactly
> what way?" For what Quine said in his article is not something isolated,
> separate from the rest of his life's work. The "Two Dogmas" theses are
> inextricably interwoven with his holism, his behaviorism, and his
> "naturalized epistemology", with dozens of articles of unchallenged
> importance, found in such collections as "From a Logical Point of View",
> "The Ways of Paradox" and "Ontological Relativity and Other Essays",
> as well as in "Word and Object". So in claiming that Peirce strongly
> anticipated "Two Dogmas", are Jon and John claiming that the entire
> corpus of Quine's work was strongly anticipated by Peirce?
>
> And what does "strongly anticipated" mean? That all of Quine's work is nothing more
> than a gloss on what Peirce had fully anticipated? That Quine (without the honesty
> to admit it?) was simply "Peirce's bulldog" (as T.H. Huxley was "Darwin's bulldog",
> and as C.J. Date has been "Codd's bulldog"?) If so, this is revisionist history
> with a vengeance I've seldom seen before. If not, a few comments on "strongly
> anticipated" would be helpful.
>
> In commenting on Richard Rorty, a few weeks ago, I issued a "caveat emptor",
> and said that my view of Rorty (as standing firmly on his own two feet, in
> little need of support from his student Robert Brandom) was probably not the
> standard view in analytic philosophy departments. Is there a caveat emptor
> to be issued here about Peirce, i.e. that we are dealing with strongly held
> personal opinions, albeit supported with numerous publications? Or are
> John and Jon passing on to us conventional wisdom on this issue from their
> academic disciplines? If the latter, could either of them suggest a few
> articles by recognized names in the analytic philosophy establishment --
> Putnam, Kripke, Davidson, Brandom, McDowell, Dennett, etc, etc. --
> which support their interpretation?
>
> What prompted all this is Jon's comment below, in which he claims that a
> fragment of Peirce's work "founded relational database theory". I've read
> and worked in the field of relational theory almost since its inception.
> In addition, I worked for Ted Codd, and although my conversations with him
> were limited, I'm pretty sure he never realized that Peirce's work "founded"
> relational theory. He, Ted Codd, founded it, and received the Turing award
> for doing so. Where, for example, did Peirce recognize and define Boyce-Codd
> normal form (whatever he called it) -- the "ultimate" normal form based on
> functional dependencies?
>
> What I'd like to offer here is a suggestion for a piece of authorical etiquette.
> Some of us are not as well-read as others. I consider myself part of the "some",
> not of the "others". In particular, I have learned a great deal these past couple
> of months reading Jon and John's contributions to this forum, and also some of their
> other published material. I've re-read 'Conceptual Structures' (parts of it, anyway)
> recently, and learned a lot more from it than I did when I read it a decade ago.
>
> My own favorite authors are Rorty and Quine. Rorty is my own candidate for #1 21st century
> philosopher. Who else can read Derrida and Searle, Davidson and Habermas, Putnam and Eco,
> and bridge the gap between continental and analytic philosophy by finding the common threads
> of epistemological and ontological concerns in all of them? Who else has spent a career
> making the hardcore arguments for a new and better interpretation of what "objective"
> means than the one that Plato gave us -- uncorrupted reports of what we saw when we
> turned around in the cave and gazed on the Really Real? Brandom has now written --
> at length! -- on Hegel, but Rorty was the one who interpreted Hegel as Kant
> historicized, bringing them both into this story of a millenia-long search
> for the meaning of objectivity and truth. Who else has also written
> extensively on social, ethical and legal issues, exchanging points
> of view with the best names in those fields, and relating these
> "soft" philosophical concerns back to the "hardcore" issues?
> Who single-handedly brought respectibility back to American
> Pragmatism (the pragmatism of James and Dewey)?
>
> And so, when I read other authors, I frequently find myself saying
> "That's just a paraphrase of what Rorty said in (fill in the blank).
> I haven't just read all of Rorty. I've learned to think Rortyean.
> Jon and John, I suggest, haven't just read all of Peirce. They've
> learned to think Peircean. So Jon, John, I and all of us should
> certainly try to convey to others how clear and clean and beautiful
> the world looks when seem from our respective perspectives (8)>.
> But I think that each of us has an obligation to avoid misleading
> those who might be impressed by our arguments. And that obligation
> is to make it clear when we are expressing strongly held beliefs,
> and when we are expressing widely-held conventional wisdom.
>
> Perhaps Jon and John feel that it "goes without saying" that they are
> expressing strongly held opinions which are not conventional wisdom.
> But I don't read widely enough to know that. That's why I asked for
> other references. In the meantime, I'll continue to work through
> the material I find on John's website, and the quotations from and
> commentary on Peirce that Jon provides. The gestalt shift into
> Peircean hasn't happened yet (and I think the strangeness of
> the vocabulary -- no fault of Peirce's, of course -- is part
> of the reason why). But I'll keep trying.
>
> So:
>
> 1. Jon, in what way did Peirce "found" relational theory?
> Can you find anyof the relational normal forms in
> Peirce's writings?
>
> 2. John and Jon, are Quine's holism, behaviorism, nominalism, adversion
> to quantified modal logic, and naturalized epistemology all fully
> anticipated in Peirce? And who else is providing material for
> this revisionist view of Quine?
>
> 3. And everyone should watch out when I talk about Rorty. I do think that
> conventional wisdom is that he is now a "grand old man", a little past it,
> someone who left a legacy of writings which the Pittsburg school (Brandom
> and McDowell) are now busy cleaning up and placing on firmer foundations.
>
> Tom
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org
> [mailto:owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org]On Behalf Of
> Richard Cooper
> Sent: Monday, August 25, 2003 5:53 PM
> To: Jon Awbrey
> Cc: SUO
> Subject: SUO: RE: article on the pitfalls of metadata
>
> > Rich,
> >
> > I have an old bibliography, current to about 1992,
> > that I will dig out later.
>
> Thanks, I would especially appreciate URLs to tutorials
> about his work, if there are any.
>
> > If you read Peirce's early work (1865-1870), you can see that
> > he began by trying to figure out how science works, more broadly,
> > to understand the logic of any method that deserves to be called
> > scientific, in whatever field that it might be applied. It was
> > in order to do this that he was forced to develop the theory
> > of signs, or "semiotics", and the logic of relative terms,
> > a fragment of which was a major source of predicate calculus
> > and founded relational database theory.
>
> I see. I've been hearing about Peirce on this list for quite
> some time, but he always sounded more like a philosopher than
> a student of discovery processes.
>
> > In critiquing the Cartesian and Kantian models of science,
> > Peirce revived some old ideas of Aristotle that identified
> > three basic types of reasoning, that have come to be called
> > abductive, deductive, and inductive.
>
> > Abductive reasoning is
> > the form of reasoning that generates hypotheses, and thus it
> > is critical to the whole process of discovery and invention
> > in science. The nature of hypothesis formation, which is
> > also akin to diagnostic reasoning, is a thing that needs
> > to be better understood, but most people eventually come
> > to the conclusion that it is the most difficult kind of
> > reasoning to formalize, much less automate. About the
> > best you can do is clarify the conditions under which
> > it is apt to succeed, like restricting hypotheses to
> > consequential and falsifiable statements, that are
> > subject to deductive follow-up and inductive test.
>
> This sort of hypothesis formation is what many current
> discovery systems are using. It would be nice to read
> a formalization of it.
>
> > Jon Awbrey
>
> Thanks for your comments.
>
> Rich
>
> > o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
> >
> > Richard Cooper wrote:
> > >
> > > Jon:
> > > > Having swum a sufficient number of cycles in the eternally recurring
> > > > literature on "discovery", or whatever it's being called this month,
> > > > I have learned a criterion for recognizing the contributaries who
> > > > are least likely to repeat the same old set of trials and errors
> > > > eternally, and that is whether they have done their homework.
> > > > Doing your homework means reading something beyond the 5-year
> > > > window on the literature that is de rigueur mortis in some
> > > > fields I know, that keeps them eternally rediscovering
> > > > what they eternally discredited just 5.5 years ago.
> > > > A good rule of thumb, as I know you know, is to
> > > > look in their bib or index and see if you find
> > > > the name of Peirce figuring there. Filtering
> > > > on that admittedly fallible feature leaves
> > > > me with still more than I can mine my way
> > > > through in this brief life, and so I will
> > > > focus mostly on that radioactive residue.
> > > >
> > > > Jon Awbrey
> > >
> > > How is Peirce's work related to discovery?
> > >
> > > Rich
> >
> > o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
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