ONT Re: De In Esse Predication
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DEIP. Discussion Note 5
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GR = Gary Richmond
JA = Jon Awbrey
JA: Egged on a bit by Gary and John, I am only just starting to return to
the question of modality, as that was never so compelling to me in math,
where one gets by with a "necessary" and a "sufficient" that seem to rank
inane dismissal quotes in other people's ears, and so mood was never before
so compelling to me as the cousin/cozen issues of intentionality, but here
are some links to Peirce's derivation of information from logical grounds,
Peirce's 1865-1866 Lectures at Harvard and the Lowell Institute, where he
introduces his newfangled notion of "information" and the theory thereof:
GR: This is very good news indeed, jon.
GR: Of course, you've already expressed that third term
(beyond "necessary" and "sufficient"). And truly,
logical breadth x logical depth = information.
GR: But that's not the whole picture by half, right?
Therefore, modality has finally to be taken up
with all that trichotomic semiosis ought imply.
GR: Personally, I'm glad that John and I have been "nudges" here.
GR: I can hardly wait ...
Gary,
Be careful what you wait for ...
I had been putting off the gamma graphs until I was older.
I am older now. But I don't know if I am old enough yet.
Maybe when I'm aleph plus one ...
I hadn't really been thinking about this much as I gathered the data.
For my part, and I think for Peirce most of the time, 2-valued logic
of the good old-fashioned classical variety is good enough -- in the
beginning, and in the end, there are just two values of significance,
one begins with a distinction, one ends with a decision, and what it
means is that the question of uncertainty is always a meantime thing.
This is what I concluded long ago from my study of Peirce's essays
in 3-valued logics. The possibility of it all occurred to me when
I was first learning topology, and there you have a 3-valued logic
of {interior, boundary, exterior} rather than classing every point
as {in, out}, 2-tomously in relation to a set, no ifs ands or buts.
There was, and probably still is, a whole literature on "topo-logic",
just my pet name for it, that proceeds from basically this very same
intuition. The issue did not force itself on my attention again, so
far as I can recall at the moment, in this mood, until I was writing
my Theme One program, or one of its early precursors. There, in the
middle of a breadth-&-depth search function -- funny how those words
come up again -- what is frequently called a "beam search" algorithm,
I was led, wil-me, nil-me, to interject a "modal variable" of a type:
mode = (null, moot, firm). See here:
http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2003-March/000115.html
The use of the mode value dubbed "moot" is in the middle of a search,
to register the fact that the absence or presence of the thing being
sought is not yet decided, though in the end you know that it has to
fall out one way or the other, by the very definition of the case.
That's all I can remember at the moment ...
Jon Awbrey
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