[FRIAM] Abduction

[Nick Thompson]

Glen, 

I thought the Century-Link outage was going to rescue me from my present quandary, which is that I am still working on your email from three days ago, while now you heap on more, each more interesting and pertinent than the one before.  

So to THIS one I say only that to a Peircean, all relations are SIGN relations and all sign relations have there "arguments", or "operators" or "values" or whatever you smart people call it.  Every relation is seen from a point of view.   But that does not amount to solipsism because I can adopt your point of view and see what you see.  Only if there is NO point of view from which an onion is in layers does your point hold in Peirce-land.  Says I.  I should remind you, and everybody else, that my Peirce mentor, Mike Bybee, who has taught me everything I know about Peirce, routinely rejects every assertion I ever make about Peirce, even when I try, docilely to repeat whatever he has just said.  Peirce experts are a hard lot.  

I reserve the right to deny everything I have written here when, in five year's time, I finally get done with answering your message of three days ago. 

Nick 



Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of ? u???
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2018 12:59 PM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abduction


First, by saying you and Eric(C) *attribute* so-and-so to Peirce, I'm not suggesting you're wrong.  I'm expressing my ignorance.  But I don't want to (falsely) accuse Peirce of anything, since he's not here to defend himself.  So, I can only respond to what you say about what he said.  I'm very grateful for your attempts to suss it all out and serve it on a platter for people like me.

Second, in that same vane (Ha!), I haven't put in the effort to grok your "Natural Designs".  So, when I'm wrong, feel free to simply call me ignorant and move on.  I'm cool with that.

But on to the meat: When you say 

On 12/26/18 10:22 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> But we have to be careful not to mix up levels when we talk.  In any particular conversation, we must not equivocate about levels, confuse things within us, with things 'of' us"

I believe you're (implicitly) committing an error.  I've failed to call it out before.  You're asserting that the hierarchy is *strict*, which MAY be wrong.  As Eric(S)'s post reflects (I think), higher order comprehensions (in the sense of "set comprehension" or quantifications like ∃ and ∀) are context-dependent and *may* even be dynamic.  That was my point about the inadequacy of "levels" (where N is stable but N+1 is unstable).  This is why "layer" is a better concept, because it's *softer*, weaker.

If you imagine an onion, some of the layers are like levels, thick and impenetrable.  And some of them (in some regions on the surface) are thin and mixed with the layers just inside or just outside.  The layers are heterarchical, not hierarchical.  If you really must use "level", we can say that some things in the level N comprehension are also contained in the level N+1 comprehension ... perhaps it helps to think of multiplying a scalar against a matrix, where the scalar is multiplied by each element of the matrix.  The scalar is of level 1, but the matrix is of level N+1 and it still makes sense to combine the two into something like a level 0.5 (or 1.5 ... or whatever) ... a fractional leveling.

Eric(S)'s discussion of equivalence, as dynamically regenerable coarse comprehensions of finer grained elements allows for this, whereas I'm not sure your "convergence to the real" does.

But my layer prejudice criticism of both your and Eric(S)'s conceptions applies, I think, because it's direction-independent.  While Eric(S) seems prejudiced to the fine-grain (inferred from his idea that the coarse equivalences should be robust to refinement), yours seems prejudiced to the coarse-grain (inferred from your "convergence to the real", and bolstered by your statement below about Natural Designs).  Which direction one is biased toward is less relevant to me than the assumption of a strict hierarchy.

And particular responses below:

On 12/26/18 10:22 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> On 12/25/18 7:02 AM, ∄ uǝʃƃ wrote:
>>  Why can't both the fine and coarse things have the same ontological status?  The example of the unicorn is unfortunate, I think, because the properties of unicorns are essentially stable.
> 
> */[NST==>Well, that’s sort of why I bring it up.  I think it’s 
> possible that inquiry might converge on what a unicorn IS without 
> there ever having been a unicorn.  Obviously, a unicorn is a white 
> horse with a luxurious mane and tail and a narwhale horn in the middle 
> of its nose and on its back a damsel with long flowing golden locks, a 
> garland crown, and a white gown.  Obviously.  We all agree on THAT, 
> don’t we?  <==nst] /*

You forgot the sparkles and the rainbows!

> [...]

>> And if we admit to a multi-level hierarchy, perhaps level N is unstable, level N+1 is stable, and level N+2 is (again) unstable?  Why not?
> 
> */[NST==>Oh wow I agree with all of THAT.  But I don’t think Peirce, 
> or Eric (Charles), or I are level-chauvinists in the way you need us 
> to be.  I think Peirce thought it was signs all the way down, i.e., he 
> would be as happy talking about sign relations in the retina as in a 
> supermarket window.  See my Nesting and Chaining 
> <http://www.behavior.org/resources/146.pdf> paper, if you can stand 
> it.  <==nst] /*

But both your treatment of 1) statements about unicorns and 2) convergence to the real *seem* to imply that this isn't true, that you *are* layer prejudiced in the way I infer you are.  With (1) why would comprehensions be more or less real/true than their components? Are matrices more or less real than scalars?  Why wouldn't we eventually settle out that unicorns are just as real as statements about unicorns?  With (2) why can't temporary things be just as real as permanent things ... or perhaps more accurately, why can't intermediate states (stepping stones) be just as primary as the limit points they approach?  Considering a furniture maker, is the chair any more real than the hammer?  What if, after the chair is finished, on a lark, she nails the hammer she used to make the chair, to the back of that chair?  The time-ignorant compositional circularity should be obvious, here.

--
∄ uǝʃƃ

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