gmane.science.philosophy.peirce

RE: Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM

Eugene Halton — 2012-05-25T17:37:12

Gary Moore: I hope this phrase is a synonym for “language” because if it not language, how could it be “inferential” or “communicative”? But if it is language why did you not say “language”?

Gene Halton: In the Peircean perspective, language, if you mean by that linguistic language, is but a subspecies of the inferential and communicative process of semiosis, even within human communication. Two examples: “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture,” as Thelonius Monk once said to quiet a critic’s question. Or as the great modern dancer Isadore Duncan said, “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” Or consider felt, wordless empathic communication. Or this. Someone I know who studied with a Native American wise man told me that the man gathered all of his students, former and current, to spend a month with him for his last teaching. His last teaching he gave to them was his death, as it unfolded over that month.

            You quote Peirce stating, “There is no exception to the law that every thought-sign is translated or interpreted in a following one, unless all thought comes to an abrupt and final end in death.” But, noticing “unless,” Peirce did not think that “all thought comes to an abrupt and final end in death” as he made clear in his discussions of his philosophy of synechism:

            “Nor must any synechist say, 'I am altogether myself, and not at all you.'  If you embrace synechism, you must abjure this metaphysics of wickedness.  In the first place, your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in psychology, you would believe.  Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarist delusion of vanity.  In the second place, all men who resemble you and are in analogous circumstances are, in a measure, yourself, though not quite in the same way in which your neighbors are you…
      Synechism refuses to believe that when death comes, even the carnal consciousness ceases quickly. How it is to be, it is hard to say, in the all but entire lack of observational data. Here, as elsewhere, the synechistical oracle is enigmatic….But, further, synechism recognizes that the carnal consciousness is but a small part of the man. here is, in the second place, the social consciousness, by which a man’s spirit is embodied in others, and which continues to live and have its being very much longer than superficial observers think….Nor is this, by any means, all. A man is capable of a spiritual consciousness, which constitutes him as one of the eternal verities, which is embodied in the universe as a whole.” (‘Immortality in the Light of Synechism,’ EP 2:2-3, 1893)

            Consider the social consciousness Peirce describes as literally embodied here, electronically, in these words of our dialogue, minding in social dialogue. Or consider the man Peirce, dead almost one hundred years, yet continuing his being in social consciousness through the community of dialogue here. Signs live, and what makes one a human being involves signs that live in social relations that can continue when the carnal being decarnates. Pragmatic meaning involves conditional consequences. The pragmatic meaning of a person involves conditional consequences that have a being longer than the carnal life of that person.

            Ordinary discourse is fine for ordinary discourse. But there are also practices which require extraordinary discourse. The brain surgeon who says, “pass me that thingy over there, no, not that one, no, the one next to that with the scissory top,” would very soon be an expert in decarnation. That is why Peirce also advocated for a technical language for science.

            You asked where to find discussion of Peirce’s distinction of theory and practice. Vol. 2 of The Essential Peirce, Ch. 4, “The Conduct of Life,” goes directly to the issue. As the editors state there in the introduction: “…true scientific investigation must not be conducted with the question of utility in mind. The purpose of philosophy is not to win adherents and to improve their lives. Peirce makes a telling distinction between matters of vital importance and the selfless advancement of knowledge, and argues that, for the former, reason is a poor substitute for sentiment and instinct while, for the latter, reason is the key. The upshot is that belief has no place in science but is what must guide action in practical affairs” (p. 27).

            That idea of the selfless advancement of knowledge through scientific inquiry also gives a good example of what Peirce means in saying in the earlier quotation that “A man is capable of a spiritual consciousness,” by which he meant something very different from religious uses of “spiritual.” This is where Peirce, in my opinion, moves into new terrain, breaking with the modern era. Signs live, and we live through them, and we can potentially, synechistically, participate in the ongoing creation of the universe: “A man is capable of having assigned to him a role in the drama of creation…”

Gary Moore: All of your love will die with you except for sentimental little curios.

Gene Halton: You undervalue sentiment and overvalue words, in my opinion. And I don’t understand the quotations from Hamlet. But I would note that although Hamlet dies in every performance, Hamlet lives.

Cheers,
Gene


From: Gary Moore [mailto:gottlos752004< at >yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2012 2:53 PM
To: Eugene Halton
Cc: PEIRCE-L< at >iulist.iupui.edu
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM

Reply to: Eugene Halton <Eugene.W.Halton.2< at >nd.edu>
"PEIRCE-L< at >iulist.iupui.edu" <PEIRCE-L< at >iulist.iupui.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2012 10:34 AM
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM
[Unfortunately my first and now overdue letter to you disappeared in the mail, and this one is much, much worse if that is imaginable.]
Gary Moore: Only I can die my death, or have my cancer if that is better. Any information about death or cancer comes from comparison, analogy, likeness, but like my body is ontologically different from everyone else’s body so my death or my cancer is different from everyone else’s.
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Gene Halton: It seems to me that you are treating the inferential communicative process of semiosis as not inclusive of the process of one’s own death.
---------------------------
Gary Moore:  The way you phrase this is intriguing to me, though I do not know if I really get your meaning: “the inferential communicative process of semiosis as not inclusive of the process of one’s own death.” The first problem is, what is “one’s own death” that such a thing could be included in anything much less an “inferential communicative process”. I hope this phrase is a synonym for “language” because if it not language, how could it be “inferential” or “communicative”? But if it is language why did you not say “language”?  If “death” is a thing that can be talked about, that is, ‘this’ or ‘that’ thing we point to, it must be a living thing that no longer exhibits the characteristics of “life” as mobility”, “reaction”, reproduction”, etcetera. But if I can point to it, it is not ‘my’ death discounting the fact that I am writing this letter. ¶
Gary Moore: Peirce says in “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities”, The Essential Peirce, volume 1, page 38-9, “when we think, to what thought does that thought-sign which is ‘our self’ address itself?... It is always interpreted by a subsequent thought of our own... It follows the law of mental association where each former thought suggests something to the thought which follows it, i. e. is the sign of something to this latter... From our second principle, that there is no intuition or cognition not determined by previous cognitions, it follows that the striking in of a new experience is never an instantaneous affair, but is an event occupying time, and coming to pass in a continuous process...  Its prominence in consciousness [is] the consummation of a growing process... it freely follows its own law of association as long as it lasts, and in no moment is there a present thought to which no thought follows to interpret or repeat it. There is no exception to the law that every thought-sign is translated or interpreted in a following one, unless all thought comes to an abrupt and final end in death.” ¶
Gary Moore: Now, if Peirce’s thought process actually came “to an abrupt and final end in death” he would not know it because he would no longer have a knowing mind. If any thought of his, on his premises, came up short of a following thought, he would be dead. His thought, as he himself expresses it, is himself addressing himself. If he has a thought and there is no answer then, to us, Peirce is dead but he is not to himself at all. A sign of his death to us is that he stops talking to us. But what if he is lying, what if he is deceiving us with his symptom? How do we really know he is dead? That is why we embalm ‘dead’ people. Not really, but there are many circumstances where humans and animals alike fake their deaths, especially in war, so it is fairly common. The point is, it can be done, so therefore the death of another always has the ability of being pretence. You therefore do not know anther’s death except as mere ‘reasonable’ assumption because of the very nature of death. So therefore how can my death be an “inferential communicative process of semiosis” to you? And, if I am really dead, how can that death, my death, be an “inferential communicative process of semiosis” to “that thought-sign in which our self addresses itself?”¶
Gary Moore:  So death is the language of planning for one’s death, or of planning one’s death if they are different, but is not the ‘thing’, death itself, which we still have not pointed at or found. How is this death I plan, then, my own-most death? It is the nature of man to deservedly end in death. Only woman can be divine. It is so because I am that “character of simple location”, that is, the identity of me with myself as in a quarrel, as if A equals A as in Aristotle as ONLY true in the same time and the same place... all of which has already changed so that I can never be identical to myself at all just as Peirce said of the necessarily continuous chain of thought. In this way I can see my “nature as apprehended in my immediate experience... I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction I arrive at abstractions in which are located bits of matter...” (Gloucester: O, let me kiss that hand! Lear: Let me wipe it first, it smells of mortality.) It is true just as in Peirce’s deathless chain of thought -  “unless all thought comes to an abrupt and final end in death” and absolutely nothing “are all the minds included in the scientific scheme of things.” And, being really dead, of course, is “the real error of what is termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.” So obviously we can only know death while being alive just as the scholastics defined abstraction (ens rationis) as irrational and nothing, while the only rational thing is the thing itself, haecceitas, as ens reale because it impinges upon you, not you on it. ¶
Gary Moore: As Peirce said, in “The Doctrine of Chances”, The Essential Peirce, volume 1, page 148-9, “All human affairs rest upon probabilities, and the same thing is true everywhere. If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. In place of this we have death.¶ But what, without death, would happen to everyman, i. e. utter betrayal, with death must happen to some man. Death makes the number of our risks, of our inferences; it makes them finite, and so makes their mean result uncertain.” What I have planned in my absolute anticipation of death, death in its turn completely undermines and causes to betray me. I have a very limited number of possibilities which are absolutely nothing like yours, especially considering my unique perspective (A equals A only in the same time and the same place). ¶
---------------------------------------------
Gene Halton: “Ordinary reality,” the practical, is admittedly more concrete than theoretical philosophical discourse, as Peirce explicitly admits. ***[You have a far better knowledge of Peirce than I have – what specifically do you refer to and where can I find it?]
Gary Moore: Now, the “ordinary discourse” that I said always resolved philosophical activity to its detriment is not in the slightest “practical”. Philosophy determines what “practical” is to each person because every person is “always already” telling us things that imply their philosophy or they speak upon principle if they do not want to be bothered with queries. “A man is what he does” implies “practical” but is not in the slightest because Sartre does not value “practical.” Why not? You are going to die. All of your projects – for you – you know are going to come to nothing when you die even if your project is God. All the people that loved you come to nothing when you die. All of your love will die with you except for sentimental little curios. “Man is a futile passion.” That is why he has God as a project. ¶
Gary Moore: Man has God as a project because he desperately needs to find out if there is anything, anything at all, which is important, rather than nothing, nothing at all. But Peirce says everything betrays you whether we are all immortal (since everyone is alive, everyone has the same values which makes them either valueless ultimately, or, the same thing, monotonous -(they “betray” you) or whether we are mortal and separate in our values, our wishes, our perspectives – since we die by ourselves – and those things simply become trash (that is why God is proven to exist, that the universe might not be trash – ‘superfluous’, unnecessary). Peirce says, “Let the directors of an insurance company take the utmost pains to be independent of great conflagrations and pestilences, their actuaries can tell them that, according to the doctrine of chances, the time must come at last, when their loses will bring them to a stop. An actuary might be inclined to deny this (that is, ‘absolutely declining capital’, necessarily diminishing returns, ultimate entropy of the universe), because he knows that the expectation of his company is large, or perhaps (neglecting the interest upon money) is finite. But calculations of expectations leave out of account the circumstances now under consideration, which reverses the whole thing. However, I must not be understood as saying that insurance is on this account unsound, more than any other kinds of business (ibid.).”¶
-------------------------------
Gene Halton: That is why (“the practical is admittedly more concrete than thetheoretical”) it is inadequate for a philosophy of the long run, just as a theoretical philosophy of the long run is inadequate for living one’s life in a mortal limit, with all the passionate resources that go far deeper than language available. But death remains a biosemiotic and social process nonetheless . The concreteness of one’s death is not an isolate instance (in the business of undertakers and priests).
Gene Halton: Alfred North Whitehead: “...among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience (that is a very narrow ‘apprehension’), there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location (I am therefore not an ‘element’). ... [Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme (by whom?). Accordingly, the real error is an example of what I have termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.” (Bravo!)            Whitehead, Alfred North (compadre and complicitor to Bertrand Russell), (1925) [1919]. An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Gene Halton:  Or, perhaps more simply, as John Donne put it: from
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
*
MEDITATION XVII.
*
NUNC LENTO SONITU DICUNT, MORIERIS.
*
Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.
*
PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him.  And perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.  The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does, belongs to all.  When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingraffed into that body, whereof I am a member.  And when she buries a man, that action concerns me; all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another; as therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come; so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.

There was a contention as far as a suit (in which, piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest.  If we understand aright the dignity of this bell, that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours, by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is.  The bell doth toll for him, that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute, that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God.  Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises?  But who takes off his eye from a comet, when that breaks out? who bends not his ear to any bell, which upon any occasion rings?  But who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors.  Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did; for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.  No man hath afflicion enough, that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction.  If a man carry treasure in bullion or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current moneys, his treasure will not defray him as he travels.  Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it.  Another may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell that tells me of his affliction, digs out, and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger, I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Donne, John. The Works of John Donne. vol III, Henry Alford, ed. London: John W. Parker, 1839. 574-5.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Gene Halton:  An excellent movie version of the play Wit, directed by Mike Nichols with Emma Thompson, shows the value of compassion, literally feeling with, in the experience of death and life. In the end, no matter how smart one is, compassion trumps wit.
----------------------------------------
Polonius: What do you read my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Polonius: I mean the matter that you read, my lord.
Hamlet: Slanders, sir. For the satiric rogue says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams – all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honestly to have it thus set down. For yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am – if like a crab you could go backward.
------
Regards,
Gary













From: Eugene Halton <Eugene.W.Halton.2< at >nd.edu>
To: "PEIRCE-L< at >iulist.iupui.edu" <PEIRCE-L< at >iulist.iupui.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2012 10:34 AM
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM

Gary Moore: Only I can die my death, or have my cancer if that is better. Any information about death or cancer comes from comparison, analogy, likeness, but like my body is ontologically different from everyone else’s body so my death or my cancer is different from everyone else’s.

Gene Halton: It seems to me that you are treating the inferential communicative process of semiosis as not inclusive of the process of one’s own death. “Ordinary reality,” the practical, is admittedly more concrete than theoretical philosophical discourse, as Peirce explicitly admits. That is why it is inadequate for a philosophy of the long run, just as a theoretical philosophy of the long run is inadequate for living one’s life in a mortal limit, with all the passionate resources that go far deeper than language available. But death remains a biosemiotic and social process nonetheless. The concreteness of one’s death is not an isolate instance.

Alfred North Whitehead: “...among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location. ... [Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, the real error is an example of what I have termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.”
            Whitehead, Alfred North, (1925) [1919]. An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press

Or, perhaps more simply, as John Donne put it:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

            An excellent movie version of the play Wit, directed by Mike Nichols with Emma Thompson, shows the value of compassion, literally feeling with, in the experience of death and life. In the end, no matter how smart one is, compassion trumps wit.

Gene Halton




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A DEFINITION OF SIGN

Gary Moore — 2012-05-25T07:30:50

"Signs for us are sensible objects because human knowledge as discursive originates from the senses. It can be said more generally that a sign is anything generally known in which something other than itself is presented, and this is the case with an intellectual concept in presenting the intelligibility of any object, or with a percept presenting the desirability or undesirability of any object."
 
John Deely, THE FOUR AGES OF UNDERSTANDING, PAGE 337
-----------------------------
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Re: Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM

Gary Moore — 2012-05-25T07:12:26

Dear Stephen C. Rose,
I am sorry they are so long, and yet I really do condence them because, as I see it, if you write as a philosopher writing about language's nature, the whole of language excluding nothing which is what you have to do because language is always, in many ways, larger than what you can write about it - and therefore never even begin to cover the 'whole' subject - I keep it as short as possible, much shorter even than Peirce did, though he always wanted, and needed, to write a book. And, now after my exchanges with Dr. Eugene Halton, I have found the use of literary irony on pages 38-9 and 148-9 in THE ESSENTIAL PEIRCE. Especially since literary trope like analogy  are as important, if not more important, than so-called 'straight'
logic, and far more necessary for general communication in the ontologically necessary (and 'infinite' since it has no boundaries of either logic or experience) "ordinary discourse" - within which "philosophical discourse" is a mere 'region' - is like how Bullinger (FIGURES OF SPEECH in the Bible) and the original translators of the King James vesion more closely followed the real Hebrew and Greek literary contexts, and which no other English version of the Bible, even with theological seriousness, even attempted to do what they thought was absolutely essential to such a translation. And I am not even a believer! 
 
So stephen, do what you think is necessary. 
 
Regards 
Gary 

From: Stephen C. Rose <steverose< at >gmail.com>
To: Gary Moore <gottlos752004< at >yahoo.com> 
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2012 3:02 PM
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM


I have in mind to offer to put these extensive posts onto pages that can be read at leisure - making them email seems to me to waste a lot of energy. At least when I read email I am usually in a hurry. I am merely confessing my inability to take everything in in this format. Best, S 
   

ShortFormContent at Blogger



On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Gary Moore <gottlos752004< at >yahoo.com> wrote:

Reply to: Eugene Halton <Eugene.W.Halton.2< at >nd.edu>
 is no exception to the law that every thought-sign is translated or interpreted in a following one, unless all thought comes to an abrupt and final end in death.” ¶
 assumption because of the very nature of death. So therefore how can my death be an “inferential communicative process of semiosis” to you? And, if I am really dead, how can that death, my death, be an “inferential communicative process of semiosis” to “that thought-sign in which our self addresses itself?”¶
 smells of mortality.) It is true just as in Peirce’s deathless chain of thought -  “unless all thought comes to an abrupt and final end in death” and absolutely nothing “are all the minds included in the scientific scheme of things.” And, being really dead, of course, is “the real error of what is termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.” So obviously we can only know death while being alive just as the scholastics defined abstraction (ens rationis) as irrational and nothing, while the only rational thing is the thing itself, haecceitas, as ens reale because it impinges upon you, not you on it. ¶
 inclined to deny this (that is, ‘absolutely declining capital’, necessarily diminishing returns, ultimate entropy of the universe), because he knows that the expectation of his company is large, or perhaps (neglecting the interest upon money) is finite. But calculations of expectations leave out of account the circumstances now under consideration, which reverses the whole thing. However, I must not be understood as saying that insurance is on this account unsound, more than any other kinds of business (ibid.).”¶
 scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another; as therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come; so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. 
 if by this consideration of another's danger, I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security. 
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Re: Soul Lips Ism

Gary Richmond — 2012-05-25T05:45:44

Dear Jon,
It would be helpful if you would contextualize such posts. 

Thanks.
Gary

Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
E202-O
718 482-5700

*** *** *** ***

http://theodoragoss.tumblr.com/post/23717015911/beauty-by-charles-baudelaire

Soul Lips Ism

Jon Awbrey — 2012-05-25T04:28:10

http://theodoragoss.tumblr.com/post/23717015911/beauty-by-charles-baudelaire

Re: Re: Help!

Benjamin Udell — 2012-05-24T20:41:53

Søren, Gary, list,

I've retrieved it and will send it to Søren.

Best, Ben

On 5/24/2012 4:31 PM, Gary Richmond wrote:



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Re: Help!

Gary Richmond — 2012-05-24T20:31:03

Søren,

Re: Andacht, Fernando. Iconicity Revisited: An Interview
with Joseph Ransdell. RSSI: Recherches
Semiotiques/RSSI: Semiotic Inquiry. 23.1 (2003):
221?240.

This was offered as the first of last year's *Slow Reads* of some of
Joe's papers. It is available in the list archives; or, perhaps, you can
contact Fernando directly as he is a list member. I'm pressed for time
since I'm preparing for travel over the next few days or I'd hunt it up
for you myself. I'm sure you'll find it easily.

Best, 

Gary Richmond

Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
E202-O
718 482-5700

*** *** *** ***
Is there anybody that can help me with an electronic file of Ransdell,
Joseph (2003): Iconicity revisited. Recherches
Sémiotiques/Semiotic.Inquiry,  vol. 23 No. 1-2-3, 2003.p. 221-240.? I
seem to have lost mine and need it urgently!

Venlig hilsen/best wishes

Søren Brier

Professor of semiotics of Information, Cognition and Communication, at
Department of Business Communication, CBS. Homepage: 
uk.cbs.dk/staff/soeren_brier. Address:
Dalgas Have 15, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark. Room DH2Ø042. Tel. (+
45) 38153132
Ed. Cybernetics & Human Knowing http://www.imprint.co.uk/C&HK/ ,
Subscription $ 104

Book: Cybersemiotics: Why Information Is Not Enough, Toronto University
Press, 2008, sec. ed. 2010. Google book.

PhD-course on Cybersemiotics:
http://www.cbs.dk/en/Research/PhD-Programmes/All-PhD-Courses/PhD-courses-at-Copenhagen-Business-School/PhD-Courses-2012-Fall/Cybersemiotics-and-Transdisciplinarity-Applications-in-linguistics-communication-semiotics-and-art-technology-analysis-20-24-August-2012
________________________________________
From: peirce-l-request< at >iulist.iupui.edu
[peirce-l-request< at >iulist.iupui.edu] On Behalf Of Gary Richmond
[richmondga< at >lagcc.cuny.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2012 6:08 PM
To: PEIRCE-L< at >iulist.iupui.edu
Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Fwd: Peirce Society Facebook Group

Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
E202-O
718 482-5700

*** *** *** ***



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Re: Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM

Gary Moore — 2012-05-24T18:53:16

Reply to: Eugene Halton <Eugene.W.Halton.2< at >nd.edu>
 "PEIRCE-L< at >iulist.iupui.edu" <PEIRCE-L< at >iulist.iupui.edu> 
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2012 10:34 AM
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM
[Unfortunately my first and now overdue letter to you disappeared in the mail, and this one is much, much worse if that is imaginable.]
Gary Moore: Only I can die my death, or have my cancer if that is better. Any information about death or cancer comes from comparison, analogy, likeness, but like my body is ontologically different from everyone else’s body so my death or my cancer is different from everyone else’s. 
-------------------------
Gene Halton: It seems to me that you are treating the inferential communicative process of semiosis as not inclusive of the process of one’s own death. 
---------------------------
Gary Moore:  The way you phrase this is intriguing to me, though I do not know if I really get your meaning: “the inferential communicative process of semiosis as not inclusive of the process of one’s own death.” The first problem is, what is “one’s own death” that such a thing could be included in anything much less an “inferential communicative process”. I hope this phrase is a synonym for “language” because if it not language, how could it be “inferential” or “communicative”? But if it is language why did you not say “language”?  If “death” is a thing that can be talked about, that is, ‘this’ or ‘that’ thing we point to, it must be a living thing that no longer exhibits the characteristics of “life” as mobility”, “reaction”, reproduction”, etcetera. But if I can point to it, it is not ‘my’ death discounting the fact that I am writing this letter. ¶
Gary Moore: Peirce says in “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities”, The Essential Peirce, volume 1, page 38-9, “when we think, to what thought does that thought-sign which is ‘our self’ address itself?... It is always interpreted by a subsequent thought of our own... It follows the law of mental association where each former thought suggests something to the thought which follows it, i. e. is the sign of something to this latter... From our second principle, that there is no intuition or cognition not determined by previous cognitions, it follows that the striking in of a new experience is never an instantaneous affair, but is an event occupying time, and coming to pass in a continuous process...  Its prominence in consciousness [is] the consummation of a growing process... it freely follows its own law of association as long as it lasts, and in no moment is there a present thought to which no thought follows to interpret or repeat it. There
 is no exception to the law that every thought-sign is translated or interpreted in a following one, unless all thought comes to an abrupt and final end in death.” ¶
Gary Moore: Now, if Peirce’s thought process actually came “to an abrupt and final end in death” he would not know it because he would no longer have a knowing mind. If any thought of his, on his premises, came up short of a following thought, he would be dead. His thought, as he himself expresses it, is himself addressing himself. If he has a thought and there is no answer then, to us, Peirce is dead but he is not to himself at all. A sign of his death to us is that he stops talking to us. But what if he is lying, what if he is deceiving us with his symptom? How do we really know he is dead? That is why we embalm ‘dead’ people. Not really, but there are many circumstances where humans and animals alike fake their deaths, especially in war, so it is fairly common. The point is, it can be done, so therefore the death of another always has the ability of being pretence. You therefore do not know anther’s death except as mere ‘reasonable’
 assumption because of the very nature of death. So therefore how can my death be an “inferential communicative process of semiosis” to you? And, if I am really dead, how can that death, my death, be an “inferential communicative process of semiosis” to “that thought-sign in which our self addresses itself?”¶
Gary Moore:  So death is the language of planning for one’s death, or of planning one’s death if they are different, but is not the ‘thing’, death itself, which we still have not pointed at or found. How is this death I plan, then, my own-most death? It is the nature of man to deservedly end in death. Only woman can be divine. It is so because I am that “character of simple location”, that is, the identity of me with myself as in a quarrel, as if A equals A as in Aristotle as ONLY true in the same time and the same place... all of which has already changed so that I can never be identical to myself at all just as Peirce said of the necessarily continuous chain of thought. In this way I can see my “nature as apprehended in my immediate experience... I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction I arrive at abstractions in which are located bits of matter...” (Gloucester: O, let me kiss that hand! Lear: Let me wipe it first, it
 smells of mortality.) It is true just as in Peirce’s deathless chain of thought -  “unless all thought comes to an abrupt and final end in death” and absolutely nothing “are all the minds included in the scientific scheme of things.” And, being really dead, of course, is “the real error of what is termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.” So obviously we can only know death while being alive just as the scholastics defined abstraction (ens rationis) as irrational and nothing, while the only rational thing is the thing itself, haecceitas, as ens reale because it impinges upon you, not you on it. ¶
Gary Moore: As Peirce said, in “The Doctrine of Chances”, The Essential Peirce, volume 1, page 148-9, “All human affairs rest upon probabilities, and the same thing is true everywhere. If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. In place of this we have death.¶ But what, without death, would happen to everyman, i. e. utter betrayal, with death must happen to some man. Death makes the number of our risks, of our inferences; it makes them finite, and so makes their mean result uncertain.” What I have planned in my absolute anticipation of death, death in its turn completely undermines and causes to betray me. I have a very limited number of possibilities which are absolutely nothing like yours, especially considering my unique perspective (A equals A only in the same time and the same place). ¶
---------------------------------------------
Gene Halton: “Ordinary reality,” the practical, is admittedly more concrete than theoretical philosophical discourse, as Peirce explicitly admits. ***[You have a far better knowledge of Peirce than I have – what specifically do you refer to and where can I find it?] 
Gary Moore: Now, the “ordinary discourse” that I said always resolved philosophical activity to its detriment is not in the slightest “practical”. Philosophy determines what “practical” is to each person because every person is “always already” telling us things that imply their philosophy or they speak upon principle if they do not want to be bothered with queries. “A man is what he does” implies “practical” but is not in the slightest because Sartre does not value “practical.” Why not? You are going to die. All of your projects – for you – you know are going to come to nothing when you die even if your project is God. All the people that loved you come to nothing when you die. All of your love will die with you except for sentimental little curios. “Man is a futile passion.” That is why he has God as a project. ¶
Gary Moore: Man has God as a project because he desperately needs to find out if there is anything, anything at all, which is important, rather than nothing, nothing at all. But Peirce says everything betrays you whether we are all immortal (since everyone is alive, everyone has the same values which makes them either valueless ultimately, or, the same thing, monotonous -(they “betray” you) or whether we are mortal and separate in our values, our wishes, our perspectives – since we die by ourselves – and those things simply become trash (that is why God is proven to exist, that the universe might not be trash – ‘superfluous’, unnecessary). Peirce says, “Let the directors of an insurance company take the utmost pains to be independent of great conflagrations and pestilences, their actuaries can tell them that, according to the doctrine of chances, the time must come at last, when their loses will bring them to a stop. An actuary might be
 inclined to deny this (that is, ‘absolutely declining capital’, necessarily diminishing returns, ultimate entropy of the universe), because he knows that the expectation of his company is large, or perhaps (neglecting the interest upon money) is finite. But calculations of expectations leave out of account the circumstances now under consideration, which reverses the whole thing. However, I must not be understood as saying that insurance is on this account unsound, more than any other kinds of business (ibid.).”¶
-------------------------------                                                                                                   
Gene Halton: That is why (“the practical is admittedly more concrete than thetheoretical”) it is inadequate for a philosophy of the long run, just as a theoretical philosophy of the long run is inadequate for living one’s life in a mortal limit, with all the passionate resources that go far deeper than language available. But death remains a biosemiotic and social process nonetheless . The concreteness of one’s death is not an isolate instance (in the business of undertakers and priests). 
Gene Halton: Alfred North Whitehead: “...among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience (that is a very narrow ‘apprehension’), there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location (I am therefore not an ‘element’). ... [Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme (by whom?). Accordingly, the real error is an example of what I have termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.” (Bravo!)            Whitehead, Alfred North (compadre and complicitor to Bertrand Russell), (1925) [1919]. An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Gene Halton:  Or, perhaps more simply, as John Donne put it: from 
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
*
MEDITATION XVII. 
*
NUNC LENTO SONITU DICUNT, MORIERIS.
*
Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.
*
PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him.  And perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.  The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does, belongs to all.  When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingraffed into that body, whereof I am a member.  And when she buries a man, that action concerns me; all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our
 scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another; as therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come; so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. 
 
There was a contention as far as a suit (in which, piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest.  If we understand aright the dignity of this bell, that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours, by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is.  The bell doth toll for him, that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute, that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God.  Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises?  But who takes off his eye from a comet, when that breaks out? who bends not his ear to any bell, which upon any occasion rings?  But who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? 
 
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. 
 
Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors.  Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did; for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.  No man hath afflicion enough, that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction.  If a man carry treasure in bullion or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current moneys, his treasure will not defray him as he travels.  Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it.  Another may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell that tells me of his affliction, digs out, and applies that gold to me:
 if by this consideration of another's danger, I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security. 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Donne, John. The Works of John Donne. vol III, Henry Alford, ed. London: John W. Parker, 1839. 574-5.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Gene Halton:  An excellent movie version of the play Wit, directed by Mike Nichols with Emma Thompson, shows the value of compassion, literally feeling with, in the experience of death and life. In the end, no matter how smart one is, compassion trumps wit.
----------------------------------------
Polonius: What do you read my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Polonius: I mean the matter that you read, my lord.
Hamlet: Slanders, sir. For the satiric rogue says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams – all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honestly to have it thus set down. For yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am – if like a crab you could go backward.
------
Regards,
Gary
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


From: Eugene Halton <Eugene.W.Halton.2< at >nd.edu>
To: "PEIRCE-L< at >iulist.iupui.edu" <PEIRCE-L< at >iulist.iupui.edu> 
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2012 10:34 AM
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM


Gary Moore: Only I can die my death, or have my cancer if that is better. Any information about death or cancer comes from comparison, analogy, likeness, but like my body is ontologically different from everyone else’s body so my death or my cancer is different from everyone else’s. 
 
Gene Halton: It seems to me that you are treating the inferential communicative process of semiosis as not inclusive of the process of one’s own death. “Ordinary reality,” the practical, is admittedly more concrete than theoretical philosophical discourse, as Peirce explicitly admits. That is why it is inadequate for a philosophy of the long run, just as a theoretical philosophy of the long run is inadequate for living one’s life in a mortal limit, with all the passionate resources that go far deeper than language available. But death remains a biosemiotic and social process nonetheless. The concreteness of one’s death is not an isolate instance. 
 
Alfred North Whitehead: “...among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location. ... [Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, the real error is an example of what I have termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.”
            Whitehead, Alfred North, (1925) [1919]. An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press
 
Or, perhaps more simply, as John Donne put it: 
 
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
 
            An excellent movie version of the play Wit, directed by Mike Nichols with Emma Thompson, shows the value of compassion, literally feeling with, in the experience of death and life. In the end, no matter how smart one is, compassion trumps wit.
 
Gene Halton
 
 
 

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Re: Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM

Gary Moore — 2012-05-24T10:13:16

From: Eugene Halton <Eugene.W.Halton.2< at >nd.edu>
To: "PEIRCE-L< at >iulist.iupui.edu" <PEIRCE-L< at >iulist.iupui.edu> 
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2012 10:34 AM
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM

Gary Moore: Only I can die my death, or have my cancer if that is better. Any information about death or cancer comes from comparison, analogy, likeness, but like my body is ontologically different from everyone else’s body so my death or my cancer is different from everyone else’s. 

Gene Halton: It seems to me that you are treating the inferential communicative process of semiosis as not inclusive of the process of one’s own death. “Ordinary reality,” the practical, is admittedly more concrete than theoretical philosophical discourse, as Peirce explicitly admits. That is why it is inadequate for a philosophy of the long run, just as a theoretical philosophy of the long run is inadequate for living one’s life in a mortal limit, with all the passionate resources that go far deeper than language available. But death remains a biosemiotic and social process nonetheless. The concreteness of one’s death is not an isolate instance. 

Alfred North Whitehead: “...among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location. ... [Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, the real error is an example of what I have termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.”
            Whitehead, Alfred North, (1925) [1919]. An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press

Or, perhaps more simply, as John Donne put it: 

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

            An excellent movie version of the play Wit, directed by Mike Nichols with Emma Thompson, shows the value of compassion, literally feeling with, in the experience of death and life. In the end, no matter how smart one is, compassion trumps wit.

Gene Halton

-----------------------------
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to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-l< at >iulist.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to peirce-l but to iulist< at >iulist.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe peirce-l" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
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Fwd: Peirce Society Facebook Group

Gary Richmond — 2012-05-23T16:08:09

Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
E202-O
718 482-5700

*** *** *** ***
-----------------------------
PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" 
to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-l< at >iulist.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to peirce-l but to iulist< at >iulist.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe peirce-l" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .

RE: Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM

Eugene Halton — 2012-05-23T15:34:14

Gary Moore: Only I can die my death, or have my cancer if that is better. Any information about death or cancer comes from comparison, analogy, likeness, but like my body is ontologically different from everyone else’s body so my death or my cancer is different from everyone else’s.

Gene Halton: It seems to me that you are treating the inferential communicative process of semiosis as not inclusive of the process of one’s own death. “Ordinary reality,” the practical, is admittedly more concrete than theoretical philosophical discourse, as Peirce explicitly admits. That is why it is inadequate for a philosophy of the long run, just as a theoretical philosophy of the long run is inadequate for living one’s life in a mortal limit, with all the passionate resources that go far deeper than language available. But death remains a biosemiotic and social process nonetheless. The concreteness of one’s death is not an isolate instance.

Alfred North Whitehead: “...among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location. ... [Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, the real error is an example of what I have termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.”
Whitehead, Alfred North, (1925) [1919]. An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press

Or, perhaps more simply, as John Donne put it:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

An excellent movie version of the play Wit, directed by Mike Nichols with Emma Thompson, shows the value of compassion, literally feeling with, in the experience of death and life. In the end, no matter how smart one is, compassion trumps wit.

Gene Halton

-----------------------------
PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All"
to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-l< at >iulist.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to peirce-l but to iulist< at >iulist.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe peirce-l" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .

Conference: The American Style in Philosophy

Khadimir — 2012-05-23T15:12:22

The American Style in Philosophy

*Two Day International Conference*
*June 11th-12th, 2012*
*University College Dublin*

Supported by:
The IRCHSS (“New Ideas” Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences)
UCD School of Philosophy
UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies
International Journal of Philosophical Studies
http://www.american-voice.org/Conference Outline

In comparing the styles of American and French philosophical writing, James
Conant has noted the characteristic “diffidence” of writers like Thoreau
when compared to the characteristic “brilliance” of intellectuals like
Derrida. Conant provocatively suggests that this Parisian brilliance most
typically registers “what is now taken as the sound of philosophy”. “The
sound of much of the language in Thoreau’s *Walden*”, he writes, “is apt to
strike a reader – at least on a first encounter – as not particularly
philosophical at all, as not even trying to sound like philosophy”.
(Conant, J., “Cavell and the Concept of America” in Russell Goodman
(ed.), *Contending
with Stanley Cavell* (Oxford University Press, 2005, 60). In comparing the
sound of Emerson, James and Wallace Stevens with that of Nietzsche,
Foucault and Derrida, Richard Poirier makes a similar point: “it should be
apparent by now”, he writes, “that in presenting their case, the Americans
simply sound different. They sound altogether less rhetorically embattled,
less culturally ambitious, than do any of these European cousins.”
(Poirier, J., *Poetry and Pragmatism* (Boston: Harvard University Press,
1992), p. 155).

Taking such soundings of American philosophy as points of departure and
provocation, this two-day international conference moves from Emerson,
James and Santayana, via Quine and Sellars, to the contemporary writings of
Rorty, Putnam, Cavell and Nussbaum. It finds in the diversity of these
American voices a surprising unity of philosophical aspiration, where
writing style is considered not incidental but central to philosophical
achievement. Of course, no stylistic choice can be presumed as impartial,
not even the choice to write with supposed transparency. What distinguishes
this particular cluster of figures is the inseparability of style from
content in the very processes and development of their thought. There is a
resulting inclination, as in poetic analysis, to direct quotation in
discussion of their work. We propose these figures as supreme stylists of
the American tradition who contest the traditionally marginal status of
philosophical style in procedures both literary (Emerson and Nussbaum,
Santayana and Cavell) and non-literary (Quine and Putnam). That such easy
distinctions stand to be re-complicated is evidenced in the writings of
James as well as Rorty.

What, if anything, is to be gained by juxtaposing Quine’s striking
naturalism with Santayana’s quiet composure? How do Cavell’s romantic
procedures attune if at all with those of Emerson? How does Putnam’s work
fit within the Pragmatist tradition? And most importantly, is there a
characteristically American* philosophical style*? The conference attempts
to find answers to these questions.
Organisers

The confernce has been conceived and organised by:
Dr Áine Kelly, IRCHSS Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Philosophy, University
College Dublin
Dr Sarin Marchetti, Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Philosophy,
University College Dublin
Fergal McHugh, IRCHSS Doctoral Fellow, School of Philosophy, University
College Dublin

Fw: Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM

Gary Moore — 2012-05-23T06:56:20



----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Gary Moore <gottlos752004< at >yahoo.com>
To: Catherine Legg <clegg< at >waikato.ac.nz> 
Cc: "PEIRCE-L< at >iulist.iupui.edu" <PEIRCE-L< at >iulist.iupui.edu> 
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2012 2:22 AM
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM


 
 
From:Catherine Legg <clegg< at >waikato.ac.nz>
To: peirce-l< at >iulist.iupui.edu 
Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2012 10:48 PM
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM
 
Catherine Legg: Hello list! Here we are at IU - thank you to all those who put work into moving us over. 
It seems the instigators of this thread have tired of it but I’m just catching up. 
----------------------------------------------
Gary Moore: I have not. It seems the main problem is “ordinary reality” which all human beings must overridingly deal with above and beyond mere philosophical discourse. Probably I did not make this perfectly clear to begin with. I thought my, Gary Moore, or your, Catherine Legg or Benjamin Udell, dying or having incurable cancer would have been the pure province of an “ordinary discourse”, one that everyone must give way to, must acknowledge as having an importance that trivializes “philosophical discourse” in the face of one’s own death that is the only ‘thing’ that is overridingly “most one’s own”. There are a number of logical problems with this statement (Jacques Derrida has acutely pointed out that one can experience death only ‘second hand’ in comparing one’s own existential condition to the deaths of ‘others’ which is appearance only to myself since I only know myself as alive no matter what condition I am in),
 but solipsism as an existential fact – as opposed to being merely a philosophical concept in the discussion of philosophical insiders – is that which exposes the reality of being ontologically, absolutely alone. Only I can die my death, or have my cancer if that is better. Any information about death or cancer comes from comparison, analogy, likeness, but like my body is ontologically different from everyone else’s body so my death or my cancer is different from everyone else’s. 
------------------------
Gary Moore: Now this is phenomenology (but Peirce definitely had his own phenomenology) and comes from Heidegger (but Heidegger is an explicit and acknowledged influence on John Deely one of the most major Peirceans) and it has a number of logical aporias (Derrida has pointed out one). But this phenomenology in a way reflects theology in that it totally revolves around one unique subject. And, as in Aquinas, in this methodology the central core of the problem cannot even be named legitimately or defined precisely because 1] it is absolutely unique, and 2] as such, beyond all predicates. There is nothing I can write that presents my uniqueness (which is nothing at all special but is merely a term in “ordinary discourse”) or defines my unique perspective.
------------------------------------------
Catherine Legg: I’ve been thinking in particular about the issue of solipsism. I remember looking at this issue in detail when studying Wittgenstein as an undergraduate. At that time I thought, what could be more recondite or pointless a philosophical question than whether you are the only actually existing person in the Universe? No matter how difficult it might be as an intellectual exercise to counter-prove clever arguments for the view. 
--------------------------------------
Catherine Legg: However now looking at the issue through a more pragmatist lens it strikes me as one of the most urgent that human beings face in lived experience. 
------------------------------------
Gary Moore: Glory hallelujah! You got the point! Praise the lord god almighty!
------------------------------------
Catherine Legg: I mean the issue of whether one’s relationship with other human personalities is *real* and, in fact, if it is (real), what would that mean exactly. It seems increasingly common these days to comment on narcissism as a phenomenon of contemporary personality, arguably spread about the place by social media which allow everyone the pleasures and pitfalls of behaving in a way previously reserved for a few ‘celebrities’. Isn’t this solipsism by another name? What it actually looks like if it is lived.
--------------------------------
Gary Moore: The ‘solipsism’ as psychological fact is a  “narcissism” almost everyone runs away from in terror. It is the “narcissism” of Dostoyevsky, next in line in 1849 to be executed, who decides “Why not believe in God no matter how absurd the concept is? After all, that is a decision that only applies to me who in a few seconds will die!” How much more factual can you get? Well, actually, much much more, because historically ‘Dostoyevsky’ can be a myth. You were not there to see it happen. All history could be a fake and a lie. But when your back is put to the pole, your hands tied behind you, and a hood put over your head, then it is you.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Catherine Legg: So if the issue of solipsism is viewed in those terms, how do we “argue against it”? Or what otherwise do we do about it - if anything? It seems to me that one could try to answer the question “Am I a solipsist?” ‘from the inside’, as it were. 
-------------------------------------
Gary Moore: You are separated from society. Ethics is created by society for its own sake. You are separated from ethics. If you argue ‘for’ ethics’ it has to be on a basis that has nothing to do with entities, things, like good or evil. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground.
-------------------------------------------
Catherine Legg: This would involve examining one’s inner world, trying to detect the presence of ‘others’ in there, or sincere desires in there to understand and further the interests of persons not oneself. 
-----------------------------------------
Gary Moore: That is one of the aporias of so-called ‘solipsism. The ‘others’ within you are very real because your only method of understanding and expression is language and, guess what, someone else taught you language which is formed entirely to the purpose of ‘others’, not you. So whenever you speak, you speak the thoughts and purposes of others. This is a part of what Heidegger meant by mit-sein, being with. All of language is being-with others. It is not a problem of being alone in so-called solipsism but exactly the opposite, of finding yourself unidentified in a crowd of strangers and being unable to know who you are. That is why Heidegger brought in death as that which is most ‘mine’ (or yours) even though, logically, death is only a rumor you will never find the truth about.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Catherine Legg: I see some of those kinds of activities alluded to below. I guess this would be a phenomenological project. 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Moore: In the words of my generation, “Right on! Hell no we won’t go! Ho ho Ho Chi-Minh!”
-------------------------------------------
Catherine Legg: It strikes me though that this might be still too Cartesian an approach to the problem. 
--------------------------------
Gary Moore: Now you blaspheme! If there is no “ego”, there is no “Cogito cogito sum”! We have just established that an “ego” is the last thing you find if you find it at all! It is just an abstraction which Kant, though he was a Cartesian of sorts, saw through in transcendental apperception as the mere “X” that poses as the subject of what is purportedly ‘my’ sentence. We are all poseurs staging ourselves in a play, performing as actors who are, phenomenologically, just actors through and through. That is, as real things, we are absolutely nothing.
-------------------------------------------
Catherine Legg: Perhaps a more Peircean view on the matter would concede that one really cannot know ‘from the inside’ whether one is being a solipsist or not, with any given person(s), at any given time. 
---------------------------------
Gary Moore: You are wonderful! You answer the question before I can barely get it out!
--------------------------------------------
Catherine Legg: What determines it is whether over time, oneself and the other person(s) actually serve one another – look out for one another’s best interests and spend time in shared practical projects the final upshot of which might not even be known for some time. “By their fruits ye shall know them”, etc. 
One could think of many examples here. However, consider a divorced father. 
----------------------------------------
Gary Moore: Yes! ‘Real’ life! 
---------------------------------------------------
Catherine Legg: He has just moved out of the family home and is very angry about the damage to his relationship to his kids. He no longer has exclusive access to them and feels very intensely what a close relationship he has to these young people, how correspondingly unfair is what has been done to him, and he goes to court to fight for whatever access he can have. Some years later he meets and marries a new partner. Whilst trying to be nice, the new wife experiences these frequent access visits as something of an intrusion on the new life she’s excited to be building with her new husband, and the new family she’s planning with him. Fights inevitably erupt, which the father doesn’t enjoy. He tells the kids they need to be better behaved. Eventually they don’t come round so much and the father is relieved. 
I suppose the moral I’m trying to draw with this story is very obvious. 
Cheers all, Cathy
------------------------
Gary Moore: It is obvious in the sense that the loss and pain is as real as one can get without being that person. Would that pain itself not be incommunicable? But it is a logical loci, that is, the words surround an invisible point that is ‘someone’. It raises fundamental questions of ethics, that is, If doing ‘good’ only gets you more pain, why do good? That is why people desperately seek external motivation and justification for doing good, because doing ‘good’ absolutely on one’s own is a miserable experience. And we are back to Dostoyevsky: Raskolnikov in Siberia with Sonia who keeps the other prisoners from beating him up all the time because he is such an arrogant self-centered ass-hole.
----------------------------
Cheers  all, nobody in particular
 
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


From: Catherine Legg <clegg< at >waikato.ac.nz>
To: peirce-l< at >iulist.iupui.edu 
Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2012 10:48 PM
Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM


Hello list! Here we are at IU - thank you to all those who put work into moving us over. 
 
It seems the instigators of this thread have tired of it but I’m just catching up. I’ve been thinking in particular about the issue of solipsism. I remember looking at this issue in detail when studying Wittgenstein as an undergraduate. At that time I thought, what could be more recondite or pointless a philosophical question than whether you are the only actually existing person in the Universe? No matter how difficult it might be as an intellectual exercise to counter-prove clever arguments for the view. 
 
However now looking at the issue through a more pragmatist lens it strikes me as one of the most urgent that human beings face in lived experience. I mean the issue of whether one’s relationship with other human personalities is *real* and, in fact, if it is (real), what would that mean exactly. It seems increasingly common these days to comment on narcissism as a phenomenon of contemporary personality, arguably spread about the place by social media which allow everyone the pleasures and pitfalls of behaving in a way previously reserved for a few ‘celebrities’. Isn’t this solipsism by another name? What it actually looks like if it is lived.
 
So if the issue of solipsism is viewed in those terms, how do we “argue against it”? Or what otherwise do we do about it - if anything?  It seems to me that one could try to answer the question “Am I a solipsist?” ‘from the inside’, as it were. This would involve examining one’s inner world, trying to detect the presence of ‘others’ in there, or sincere desires in there to understand and further the interests of persons not oneself. I see some of those kinds of activities alluded to below. I guess this would be a phenomenological project. 
 
It strikes me though that this might be still too Cartesian an approach to the problem. Perhaps a more Peircean view on the matter would concede that one really cannot know ‘from the inside’ whether one is being a solipsist or not, with any given person(s), at any given time. What determines it is whether over time, oneself and the other person(s) actually serve one another – look out for one another’s best interests and spend time in shared practical projects the final upshot of which might not even be known for some time. “By their fruits ye shall know them”, etc. 
 
One could think of many examples here. However, consider a divorced father. He has just moved out of the family home and is very angry about the damage to his relationship to his kids. He no longer has exclusive access to them and feels very intensely what a close relationship he has to these young people, how correspondingly unfair is what has been done to him, and he goes to court to fight for whatever access he can have. Some years later he meets and marries a new partner. Whilst trying to be nice, the new wife experiences these frequent access visits as something of an intrusion on the new life she’s excited to be building with her new husband, and the new family she’s planning with him. Fights inevitably erupt, which the father doesn’t enjoy. He tells the kids they need to be better behaved. Eventually they don’t come round so much and the father is relieved. 
 
I suppose the moral I’m trying to draw with this story is very obvious.  
 
Cheers all, Cathy
 
 
From:peirce-l-request< at >iulist.iupui.edu [mailto:peirce-l-request< at >iulist.iupui.edu] On Behalf Of Benjamin Udell
Sent: Friday, 18 May 2012 8:40 a.m.
To: peirce-l< at >iulist.iupui.edu
Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS OR SKEPTICISM

Gary, list,

I think we've reached some impasses here. 

You assert solipsism, but you deny "self." Yet solipsism just means the belief that there is only oneself and no other. 

Solipsism by the same stroke means the belief that the world is just oneself without any other. Yet you deny "world," "totality," and so on because there is always new information or whatever; evidently you believe that one cannot refer (for example by words like "world" and "totality") to future or possible information. Yet your assertion of solipsism means that you believe that all new information will still conform to there being only yourself and no other.  This implies that you believe that one can refer to future or possible information; but that's just what's done by terms like "world" and "totality." That's also what's done by the idea of a rule projectable beyond any definite set of enumerated instances.

You seem to think that one must need to be able list the members of a totality in order for it to make sense. However if one needed to do that, then in the same spirit one should need to list the instances of law in order for the law to make sense. But the whole point of a law or a generality (in such form as "All G is H") is its projectability beyond any particular, definite set of enumerated instances a, b, c....  

You say that human purpose cannot be the final cause because God is the final cause (as if there could not be both shorter-term and longer-term final causes), but that does not cohere with having ordinary discourse as the final cause of anything. You also seem to think it's impossible to have two things such that each serves the other's ends. 

When I spoke of the idea of changing the past, I pretty obviously meant changing the past itself, like through a time machine, and not changing one's views of the past. I can't see any good reason for your having taken it in the sense of revisionism.

While the idea of rules as projectable may be subject to serious argument, I think that most of my points above indicate that we've reached the point where this this thread has lost its point.

Best, Ben 

On 5/17/2012 6:28 AM, Gary Moore wrote: 
From:Benjamin Udell <budell< at >nyc.rr.com>
To: owner-peirce-l< at >listserv.iupui.edu 
Cc: PEIRCE-L< at >LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU 
Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2012 7:12 PM
Subject: Re: [peirce-l] Title Corrected: ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE TO ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS
-----------------------------
Gary M., list,
Benjamin Udell: On solipsism: If you find an "other," unexpected and uncontrolled by you, even in your internal world, then that seems even more reason for rejecting solipsism, whereas it seems to lead you to solipsism as a psychological truth. 
-------------------------------
Gary Moore: Yes, just as a psychological truth – but a most fundamental one.
---------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: Yet to find this interior other is to find that there isn't even a part of the appearance-world that is securely 'self' rather than 'other', so how much less likely is it that the whole appearing world is really oneself only, solipse, without other?
-------------------------
Gary Moore: Yes, exactly: none! Language is your ‘external’ self yet at the same time it is everybody elses’ also. There is dialogue, but the rules of rhetoric and literature always apply as another level of communication alongside logic and grammar. You are in a situation of “appearance of appearance” as the early Nietzsche would say [I refer to the early Nietzsche because then he is much more technically explicit ABOUT the behavior of language. Then at the time of writing Also Spoke Zarathustra he writes assuming implicitly his own philosophical rules of self-about-self-writing-to-others who have to catch up to him, and which makes him sound like loose literary stylization when that is not at all the case. Only in my old age have I started ‘catching up’ with Neitzsche by colliding with James I Porter ---->
http://sites.google.com/site/jamesivanporter/
http://sites.google.com/site/jamesivanporter/books2
http://sites.google.com/site/jamesivanporter/articles
Untimely Meditations: Nietzsche’s Zeitatomistik in Context (Journal of Nietzsche Studies 20 (2000) 58-81)
The article about almost sounds like Peirce and is ‘metaphysically’ detailed and logical about time, as being more important than space, is the physicist’s primary concern as being more objective and more unmanipulatable intellectually than space, is and is the ground for space. It was a complete surprise to me.
-----------------
Benjamin Udell: Likewise, if the world is so vaguely and insecurely defined, lacking clear unity and bounds, how could there be a "world-self" that would be oneself? 
----------------------------------------
Gary Moore: Exactly! That is one of the reasons I want to drop “world” as a legitimate logical and philosophical term. However, then one must think about all its synonyms and cognates: If you take away “world”, where, then, is any “totality”?
------------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: Anyway, I was talking about one's totality of personal experience, which involves a brute element opposed to one (and that, says Peirce, is what makes it experience ). 
------------------------------------
Gary Moore: When you say “opposed to one” you are admitting that a fundamental part of ‘your’ experience belongs to something or someone ‘other’, or might be said to come from a vague ‘elsewhere’ out of one’s control. 
-------------------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: Or maybe one should speak of what Peirce called the phaneron, the totality of appearances in any way present to the mind (such appearances are the subject of Peirce's phenomenology). 
-----------
Gary Moore: I have trouble with the words “total” and “totality”. How is it “total” if in fact there is always a surplus of new information and experience intruding into awareness through sensation and language?
-----------------
Benjamin Udell: That world, already there, precedes the distinction into self and other.
-------------------------------------------
Gary Moore: I think what I have said so far leads to a real conflict in “the distinction between self and other”. I have never seen, heard, or logically identified any real object as “self”, and, if it is not an object, how can it be distinguished? The “self” is just a myth or mere abstraction as Kant says. One can find better words to express ites function which is entirely emotional. // 
“That world” I question for the above reasons. But, yes, there is something preceding your ‘self’ [context per se] that one always discovers as ‘always already’ present, and, yes, it raises the distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’. However, it is never clear and distinct because that is a linguistic distinction, something Kant covered very well in the Critique of Pure Reason using “I” as equivalent to “X” and in turn making the “I” equivalent to the subject of a sentence, the object of which is something ‘other’, the object of intention. 
-------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: Anyway I wasn't speaking of the world in any physical or metaphysical cosmological sense. 
-----------------------
Gary Moore: It does seem inescapable does it not? I mean I can ‘sort of’ point to it. But then someone hears me and says “You are pointing towards a chair – are you saying ‘world’ is a chair?” And I say, “No, no, I mean the whole that the chair is within.” And they reply, “So you mean the room the chair is in?” and so forth ad infinitum. The literalness is irritating, but ‘they’ are referring to distinct things where ‘I’ refer to nothing distinct at all in any way, no sharp boundaries. 
--------------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: As regards the problem of whether Peirce thought solipsism to be solved by basic phenomenology, or by semiotic ideas of representation, the problem is my ignorance, I just don't know. 
_______________
Gary Moore: I am in the same position. But if the ‘self’ is destroyed, then is not the importance of “solipsism”?
--------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: I doubt that he would demote it to psychology (if that's what you meant by a "mere description of experience").
-----------------------------------
Gary Moore: No, there is NO demotion as experience and a psychological grounding fact. The Phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger use “world” extensively, but as an aspect only of what one loosely calls the whole of experience, the identity of ‘self’ and ‘world’ as grammatically divisible  in language but in pure experience indivisible. How could you see if ‘self’ is really divided from ‘world’? One important distinction – that just hit me but comes from them – is the difference between considering the “whole of experience” as “there” - a technical term to them, or at least Heidegger, since the “whole” of everything is just “there”, presented before you, whereas “here”, the ‘self’ meant not as representation but something to point at is wholly impossible. However I put it, the ‘self’ is just an “appearance of appearance. My “I” can never be pointed to [indiced?]. The difference is between
 “that thing there as a whole of experience” as if seen now in this instant - VERSUS “world” as temporally always in the process of gathering everything together. There is always a process of gathering together to make identities, das Ding, in Heidegger. Does anyone know if Peirce says anything like this? It seems to be a conclusion he would naturally come to in his thinking as simply understanding more and more through time.
----------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: There are, though, psychological problems that arise when one makes the wrong kinds of distinction between self and other, and at least a tendency toward solipsism-in-practice, treating all and sundry as if they were merely oneself, with no ends of their own, would be a psychological dysfunction against which I suppose we have some degree of natural and cultural guards.
_____________-
Gary Moore: I agree. A great deal of the dysfunction comes from the psychology of fanaticism, or ‘ethics’, we are all inescapably raised in as knowing absolutely that “right” is the opposite from wrong despite everyday experience, yet as disinterested philosophers must reject. That is, “I know the truth and I am right and all those who disagree with me are wrong.” This may either be implicit or explicit in teaching morality, but is always considered necessary to establishing firm boundaries that must not be crossed. This is perfectly obvious in the ethical field, but actually reflects the psychological fact of solipse or phaneronas you wrote above as in “Only I can see what I see.” This is absolute, the psychological fact of solipsism in perception or “in practice” as you said. But this creates a God-like view of things that combines with childhood training, that is, a child is taught to know as absolute the difference between right
 and wrong. This is intended as a legitimate process of habituation simply for teaching morality but how can it not ‘rub off’ epistemologically? And then confusion abounds if we say killing is wrong but we support soldiers who do so by law, that murder is wrong but we lawfully execute murderers. Maybe this artificial habituation of morality is set against the epistemological uncertainty that “Only I can see what I see”, the eye-witness account of myself, especially when a significant other says, “No, you are wrong. You did not see that.” This happens if there is only one right way.¶
------------------------
Gary Moore: As a thought experiment, I state literally language is God [initially because of its overwhelming objective power over our minds], and THEN work out language as a living thing all its own. This does seem to be, to a certain degree, the facts of the matter. But only people make demands of you, one might say, and never language as such. This makes the person demanding identical with God. And this goes with another thought experiment, “If God does not exist then the universe must be trash.” Jean-Paul Sartre would have been comfortable with that: “Man is a futile passion” and “Man’s project is God”. This also attacks the whole conception and meaning of “importance” – what and where it is and how it is recognized – and that, again, what morality is all about whereas Sartre replied the interviewer’s  question shortly before he died, What is the most important thing you have accomplished in life? And Sartre replied, “Not
 much” and started hysterically laughing. What a wonderful way to go out of the world! Vastly disturbing to me, this seems to be what Aquinas is saying according to John Deely and the whole import of semiotics: If EVERYTHING is a sign . . . And how can you possibly write or say anything opposed to that without using signs? How can you indicate anything at all without using signs? Peirce is in accord, to my understanding, because he strives to make knowledge habitual just like Aristotle and Aquinas. You learn it, you work with it, and you make it habitual in order to build other knowledge upon it. Both Aristotle and Aquinas seem to have a situational ethics, that is, an ethics that must take account of all context and all circumstances before judgment, and rests on a clear and rational definition of what man is. 
-------------------------------------------
Benjamin Udell: On ordinary discourse as the final cause of or to all intellectual endeavors: As to final cause, I did mean the Aristotelian telos, anything from natural terminus of a process, to human purpose. I just can't think of any reason to see ordinary discourse as the final cause of/to all intellectual endeavors and not just as well vice versa, and not just as well see both as having further final causes later in time. Moreover, there are many intellectual endeavors for which ordinary discourse would need to be revolutionized in order to be able to accommodate them. Such intellectual endeavors include any theory seriously dependent on mathematics, for example and, more generally, any intellectual endeavor that requires active experimentation and practice, mental or otherwise, in order to understand it. I also wonder how many important visual 'aids' in chemistry, biology, etc., could be efficiently translated into ordinary discourse.
----------------------------------------
Gary Moore: Final cause cannot be a human purpose. Yes, this is what has been commonly taught, but I do not even think Aquinas believed that. God is the final cause because everything ends up with God, not because of choice but because of the way things are. You can change some things in morals if you have a good teacher who habituates you to the truth of things, but there is no such thing as free willy-nilly ‘choosing’. But even then you had the teacher and the mugger sticking his knife into your ribs did not. Certainly the mind of the mugger is not wondrously illuminated by any clarity of ethics, and if even he really doesnot understand what he is doing, then how ‘much’ can he be blamed by what rational standard?¶
Gary Moore: I originally placed “ordinary discourse” in the same category in Aristotle’s thinking as death, that is, something temporally and factually we must naturally come to. “What is the final cause of your life?” “To die.” “You mean the meaning of your life is simply to die?” “In a materialistic, real, logical manner, the answer is yes. Desire has absolutely nothing to do with “Final Cause”. Now, what you propose is correct in its context. But the context of the classroom ceases to exist at the ring of the bell and you load everything up and go to your car to drive to the grocery store. You completely drop at the end of every work day scientific and philosophical discourse upon going “public”, into society generally or specifically going home to family. These are contexts within which science and philosophy are subordinated even if you bring them up. And like death, as Jacques Derrida made very clear to me, you cannot
 experience your own death – that is a logical deduction made from other things and events. The same happens with ‘ordinary discourse’ because the final end of language always ends in an overall ‘ordinary’ social purpose. ¶
Gary Moore: But suppose you say that Socrates died discoursing on philosophy mixed in with some mathematics. And yet the reason why he dies at all is that the law decided he introduced “new gods” into society disturbing the absolute norms of right and wrong. We see discoursing on philosophy as normal, maybe even trivial and harmless, but Socrates’ society saw it as a gross and direct attack on the Athenian polity. Socrates may be discoursing on philosophy as he drinks the hemlock, but he drinks the hemlock because of the final cause of ordinary discourse that determined that he is a criminal. ¶
Gary Moore: You do not talk philosophy or mathematics to the cop writing out a traffic ticket. Not only does he take precedence in and through the order of “ordinary discourse” but everything on the street on the way home takes precedence over philosophy. Only if you go before a judge does the discourse become strict, and that is the discourse of law used in adversarial conflict where the conflicting parties present their best not to establish truth but to win the conflict. And the situation of law arose from a conflict in ordinary discourse whether understood correctly or not. Even Plato’s dialogues indicate that Socrates’ prosecutor’s motivations had nothing to do with what was true or false but only with revenge for the embarrassment they thought Socrates had inflicted on him even though, yes, Socrates was trying to teach them the difference between truth and falsehood or even good and evil. But truth does not trump public embarrassment and
 philosophical discourse in its final results never trumps ordinary discourse.
-------------------------------------------------------- 
Benjamin Udell: Peirce adopted the common distinction between theorems and corollaries (corollaries follow more or less obviously from their premisses), and developed ideas about theorematic and corollarial reasoning. Here he calls "schemata" that which elsewhere he usually calls "diagrams."
[....] Theorematic reasoning invariably depends upon experimentation with individual schemata. We shall find that, in the last analysis, the same thing is true of the corollarial reasoning, too; even the Aristotelian "demonstration why." Only in this case, the very words serve as schemata. Accordingly, we may say that corollarial, or "philosophical" reasoning is reasoning with words; while theorematic, or mathematical reasoning proper, is reasoning with specially constructed schemata." (' Minute Logic', CP 4.233, c. 1902) 
--------------
Gary Moore: Excellent! The grammar of language actually enforces a logic that we must live by. It can be formally logical even if filled with absurdities. “All men are turtles.” “Socrates is a man.” “Therefore Socrates is a turtle.” The amazing fact is so few conflicts of meaning arise to awareness in daily conversation. It obviously cannot be because of correct or incorrect judgment. Then on what does this general social lacunae survive? For instance, what is money? Everyone says it is important, everyone constantly uses it, and no one just throws it away. Yet the only rational definition of money I know of, since the real objective market value of gold and silver was taken away, is that “Money is what the law says it is.” Obviously we do live in something of a dream world.
---------------------------
Benjamin Udell: A longueur [a dull and tedious passage]on volition regarding the past: the rest of my post. This thread already seems chock full of longueurs, so why not? Readers are forewarned! 
Regarding volition, I was alluding to the scholastic view that there is no volition of the past, since obviously one cannot change the past. ¶
-----------------
Gary Moore: In reality, everyone changes the past all the time. Almost no recounting to the past is ever measurable against an objective standard. The only ‘real’ objective standard there can be is time-travel and the direct comparison of evidence. And that has even much greater logical problems. So no account of the past is ever anything more than a deliberately constructed viewpoint. Every historian is a complete liar. The judgment of being a good or bad historian is the consistency and evidential justification of his conclusions. In effect, a good historian proves Socrates is a turtle every time because, just like signs which they are, “evidence” is what you say it is. The historian defines the context as the theatre where the judgment of truth will occur. He brings up, that is, deliberately selects the evidence “So and so wrote... which is confirmed by what Who and who wrote... and the present day proof of this is that object that stands
 there.” But all this evidence is, first, determined what is selected for view; second, the truthfulness of the selected reporter and the reporter that confirms that report, and, thirdly, whether the actual history [more reporting] of the objective object is actually relevant. The ‘past’ as the past’ is simply how you tell it. And everyone, in one way or another, tells the past in the way they want it to be. In a court of law evidence is produced. First, most legal prosecutions proceed on amounting evidence until the perp confesses. However, if he does not confess, if he holds out till the jury returns, his simple silence can put a significant question against the mountain of evidence against him. And how is the verdict determined? It is determined by the feelings of the jury. So everyone changes the past.
 
Benjamin Udell: I was pointing out that we have pastward-oriented volition - e.g., adherence and (volitional) habit - just as we have pastward-oriented cognition - memory, recognition - and pastward-oriented affectivity - e.g., the feeling of attachment. 
The idea of volition as a power like cognition or affectivity goes back a long way. Aquinas said that, as judgment is related to reasoning , so, in the same manner, choice is related to deliberation . Tetens apparently it was who introduced the idea of the three-way division of the psyche's powers into feeling (including pleasure and pain), understanding, and will. Kant more or less went along with that (but took desire as a sort of will). Peirce made a three-way division into (1st) feeling, (2nd) will, and (3rd) general conception. I'm unsure how Peirce would place or distribute affectivity in that division (Peirce spoke of feelings in terms of qualities such as redness).
Pastward-oriented volition no more implies pastward time travel of effects than pastward-oriented cognition implies retrieving or receiving data from the past by some sort of time machine. There isn't cognition OF the past in that sense any more than there is volition OF the past. Memory is not simply cognition of the past, as if one could simply use personal memory to investigate, for example, the solar system's origin; instead it is one's cognition of something _as_ having been previously cognized by one. In parallel to that, one's (volitional) habit and adherence are one's willing of something _as_ having been previously willed by one (also, one may break with the past). What I was getting at with the comparison of pushing against the ground was this: If one wants to think of volition as to the past as volition OF the past and as an effort to transmit effects onto the past, one might think of it in this somewhat metaphorical way: The would-be effect
 of volition as to the past simply instead "rebounds," as it were, onto the one doing the willing, likewise as pushing on the ground is one's way of pushing oneself along or away from the ground. Only more so, since a person's pushing the Earth moves the Earth by some vanishingly small amount, whereas one's "pushing" on the past presumably affects the past not at all.¶
-----------------
Gary Moore: Excellent! 
------------------------------ 
Benjamin Udell: As to spontaneity, constraint, etc., I didn't happen to be discussing those questions about the will. Of course we can and do question, test for limits, etc., as to the freedom and power of the will, just as we do in regard to the unadulteratedness and aptness of competence, the unmanipulatedness and goodness of affectivity, and the unfooledness and truth of cognition. People can at least sometimes be forced, corrupted, manipulated, or deluded, so, are those what really happen ALL the time to everybody? Is it simply what nature or reality does to us? Socrates would complain that such radical skepticism, taken seriously, makes the thinker lazy, excusing and promoting uninquisitiveness. Logically, such radical skepticism can't survive its own causticity, and anyway few if any behave as though they believed in it. But skeptical puzzles along such lines, especially as regards cognition and knowledge, are quite an industry in philosophy.
 Whatever the uses of Cartesian doubt and its less totalistic but still radical progeny, I agree with Peirce that it's not the most fruitful thing in philosophy. 
------------------------
Gary Moore: In the history of philosophy Socrates’ and Plato’s school, the Academy, became also known as the Skeptical philosophers. And as such they mainly survive in Classical literature in just fragments until Sextus Empiricus who was totally forgotten until his manuscripts were rediscovered in the Renaissance wherein for a while he was a best seller. The main reason for this, I think, is that a skeptic did not propose contradictions of substance to the Catholic Church but just questioned the truth value of any propositions without stating opposing propositions substantially contradicting them. Obviously Socrates did not like “uninquisitiveness” but ultimately all his arguments came down to setting up context [which can be personal history] for a comparison. Tom is taller than Jerrod, and Cassius is taller than Jerrod but shorter than Tom. “Taller” and “shorter” are the logic and judgment, but without the context they are meaningless.
 And my Tom, Jerrod, and Cassius you know nothing about. It is exactly the same form as the syllogism “All men are turtles”. The form of logic can be correctly preserved although filled with absurdities. Setting up a context of evidence depends on putting signs to non-verbal sensation. The process of defining a specific sensation as a sign renders it as no longer a sensation except in so far as a connection in my memory [that lies] with the unidentified sensation. So in the end the skeptic always wins. He is just not useful. But to be useful you have to know what is important for certain.
 
Best, Gary Moore


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peirce-l archives currently available

Benjamin Udell — 2012-05-22T04:50:14

Jon, list,

The I.U. archives not public. I think that this is a worthwhile issue. 
The I.U. peirce-l archive is the official record for peirce-l since some 
time in July 2011. However, there is also the gmane archive which has 
current posts. Here's the WHOLE story on currently available peirce-l 
archives:

*The Indiana University peirce-l archive. *
Early July 2011 - present.
To be able to modify subscription settings online and view archives, go 
to https://iulist.iupui.edu

 1. Click on the "First login?" link in the upper left-hand corner.
 2. Enter your email address and click the "Request first password" button.
 3. Go to your emails and open the message from the I.U. List Service
    and click on the link for choosing your password.
 4. Enter your new password (twice) and then click the "Submit" button.
    The password must be at least 8 characters long and contain at least
    one number and at least one letter. (Note to I.U. Network password
    holders: Do NOT use your I.U. Network password.)
 5. Once you've set your password, click on the "Home" tab to access the
    other features of the I.U. List Service.

  * *I.U. Sympa Home:* https://iulist.iupui.edu/sympa/home
  * *I.U. Sympa Help pages:* https://iulist.iupui.edu/sympa/help
  * *What is I.U. List, and how do I use it?:*
    http://kb.iu.edu/data/bbto.html
  * *On I.U. List, what commands are available via email?:*
    http://kb.iu.edu/data/bbvs.html By sending these commands via email,
    you can subscribe, unsubscribe, adjust settings, etc. Note that the
    "REView" command, which gives a list of list subscribers, is
    available only to list owners in the case of peirce-l.

Once you are logged in, you can access peirce-l, its I.U. archives, and 
the settings of your peirce-l subscription, at 
https://iulist.iupui.edu/sympa/info/peirce-l.

*The Texas Tech Lyris peirce-l archive, which still exists (and which I 
hope will exist in perpetuity)*.
http://lyris.ttu.ed/read/?forum=peirce-l
*February 2000 - early July 2011.* (Unfortunately some from 2002 are 
missing.) Its content has not yet been copied to the I.U. peirce-l 
archive - it's a technical challenge.

*The peirce-l archive at gmane*.
http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce
*January 9, 2006 - present.* Sometimes it omits a post, usually when the 
post's filesize exceeds some sort of limit.

*The peirce-l archive at osdir*.
http://osdir.com/ml/science.philosophy.peirce/
*January 9, 2006 - May 11, 2008.* If I recall correctly, this archive 
also is missing a few posts.

*The arisbe list at stderr*
http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/
In *February-July 2005*, Joe Ransdell was using it for a peirce-l 
discussion of a critique of Tom Short on Peirce. Many of the posts in 
that discussion are on both the arisbe list and peirce-l.

Best, Ben

On 5/22/2012 12:38 AM, Jon Awbrey wrote:

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Re: Testing Archive Links To See If They Are Public

Jon Awbrey — 2012-05-22T04:44:19

Nope, you have to be registered and logged in to access archive links.

Jon

Testing Archive Links To See If They Are Public

Jon Awbrey — 2012-05-22T04:38:58

https://iulist.iupui.edu/sympa/arc/peirce-l/2012-05/msg00065.html

Re: A Petition to Require Free Access over the Internet to Scientific Journal Articles Arising from Taxpayer-Funded Research

Benjamin Udell — 2012-05-22T04:12:01

Also the research data sets and, where technically feasible, specialized 
programs/code used to process the data. - Best, Ben

On 5/22/2012 12:04 AM, Jon Awbrey wrote:



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A Petition to Require Free Access over the Internet to Scientific Journal Articles Arising from Taxpayer-Funded Research

Jon Awbrey — 2012-05-22T04:04:32

A Petition to Require Free Access over the Internet to Scientific Journal Articles Arising from Taxpayer-Funded Research

❝We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results 
of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to 
patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the 
research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific 
research.

❝The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without 
disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all 
federal agencies that fund scientific research.❞

Register (if not already) and sign on this page:

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/require-free-access-over-internet-scientific-journal-articles-arising-taxpayer-funded-research/wDX82FLQ

Regards,

Jon

test 2 ignore/delete

Gary Richmond — 2012-05-21T22:18:10

test 2 ignore/delete
 
 
Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
 
718 482-5700
```````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
IF POSSIBLE PLEASE CC messages to: gary.richmond< at >gmail.com

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test: ignore/delete

Gary Richmond — 2012-05-21T22:09:06

test: ignore/delete

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Re: Knowledge Workers of the World, Unite❢

Jon Awbrey — 2012-05-21T16:34:25

Re: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2012/02/02/knowledge-workers-of-the-world-unite%E2%9D%A2/

Latest comments —

Comments on Peter Cameron's Blog

Post 6. Open Access Publishing

• http://cameroncounts.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/open-access-publishing-2/

Comment 6.1

By nature and training a whole systems thinker, I tend to view the architecture of commerce, the architecture of 
government, and the architecture of inquiry as participants in a larger system.

When it comes to the desiderata of inquiry, I find myself constantly returning to the guidance of Charles S. Peirce, so 
elegantly maximized in the following words:

“Do not block the way of inquiry.”
• http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-January/001027.html

My last best expression of how I saw the problem of sustaining the soul of inquiry within the body of the post*modern 
millennial university is contained in the following paper:

Conceptual Barriers to Creating Integrative Universities
• http://org.sagepub.com/content/8/2/269.abstract

Comment 6.2

As far as the interaction between the dynamics of commerce and the dynamics of inquiry goes, there may always be a 
tension between the two value systems, the one that is coming to value short-term monetary profit above all else, and 
the one that orients itself toward sustainable truth over the long haul.

But I think we are passing a critical point, where the party of gold is now insisting on a right to control the whole, 
or else crush the party of green out of existence.

Back when this discussion starting hitting the air webs, I collected a few of my impressions on this blog page:

Knowledge Workers of the World, Unite❢
• http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2012/02/02/knowledge-workers-of-the-world-unite%E2%9D%A2/

Comment 6.3

Peer review as measure of quality can be replaced — and in these times there is no austerity of forces pushing to 
replace it with something far worse.  Wherever you find a measure of quality that is too one-dimensional and 
simple-minded to be true, you will find that someone is getting filthy rich selling the custodians of quality a 
clockwork broom.

Jon Awbrey wrote:
 >
 > Peircers,
 >
 > It's beginning to look like adding new remarks to old blog posts is not
 > the way to go over the long haul -- I am still  more used to wikiworking
 > than bloglogging -- but while I figure out a better way to organize things
 > the discussion of Open Access Research (OAR?) continues on the web, so here
 > is an old post with a few new comments and reflections toward the end of it:
 >
 > http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2012/02/02/knowledge-workers-of-the-world-unite%E2%9D%A2/