[FRIAM] where are the "patriot hackers"?

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Hi,Glen, 

No, I think you've straw-manned it.  EricS assumes only that, ==> IFF <== if there are any stable rules of experience, that scientific practice are those that will get you to them.  Not to hang this on EricS, but in my rendering of the idea, it is a tautology.  Scientific practices are just those that bring us to the most stable formulations of experience.  Peirce is quite content fundamentally with the notion that all experience is random.  However, from his perspective, it seems not always to be the case, and those cases, he thinks, should be a great interest to organisms trying  to make their way in the flow of experience.  Like you and me, for instance.  Note that in my formulation above, if drug use, or meditation, or standing in large crowds cheering for Trump, can result in conceptualizations that endure and hold their shape despite the heavy grinding of scientific practice, then, I have to admit conceptualizations so derived to the company of scientific conceptualizations.  

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2020 12:18 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] where are the "patriot hackers"?

That seems a bit strange. EricS seems to *assume* there is a truth (consistent network of things that hang together) to be converged upon. But I thought Peirce was not metaphysically committed to the idea that a final opinion was inevitably possible, only that *if* it's there, it can be converged upon.

And given Peirce's work in alternative logics, it seems completely reasonable that he would allow for different types of consistency and, perhaps even, multiple sets of different networks, each of which may be self-consistent, but perhaps not connected to other networks. And if *that's* right, then there could be >2 final opinions converged upon by >2 collections of seekers, yet who disagree about what is real/true.

And even further, because the real and the extant might be somewhat decoupled, the >2 truths might be able to interact (exist) without requiring them to merge into 1 truth.

So it seems odd that you'd say EricS' description is Peircian. Maybe it's only part of it (weaker)? Maybe it's stronger? But is it really the same?

Thanks in advance for any corrections.


On 12/30/20 8:53 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> What you wrote here is one of the most succinct, persuasive, and all around nifty explications of Peircean Pragmati[ci]sm I have ever read.  Complete with the ricochet  shot to the heart of  Rorty.  Thanks.

> On 12/30/20 3:12 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>> All points here good to know, Stephen, and many premises I agree with.
>> 
>> It seems to me that, if this conversation is ever to do more than have people talk past each other, all discussants need to find it valuable to use restricted scopes for words, to remain within each other’s scopes along the track of a discussion to figure out what premises are common and what follows from them, and to operate on however many tracks in parallel are needed to include the things people want to talk about.  
>> 
>> Here is a concrete example.  In the Rights of Nature article, I find:
>> 
>> “Christianity and science, the legitimising powers of the western society, have been in agreement on this fundamental tenet."
>> 
>> Well, that’s one thing the word “science” can stand for in a conversation: one of the two legitimizing powers of ’the western society’, together with Christianity (what lovely bedfellows).  
>> 
>> 
>> When Nick uses the word science in the sense his original objection, I am willing to recast it in my language as a label for what many of us believe is a new domain of linguistic, behavioral, and social cognitive practice distinguished by the following premises (or tenets):
>> 
>> — there is some truth-notion characterized above and before all else 
>> by internal consistency, allowing it to be converged toward by a 
>> suitable body of practice which we aspire to build.  One could even 
>> say that this premise of a stable truth-notion is put forth as the 
>> replacement for Descartes’s Cogito, as a starting point on which to 
>> build commitments, even if all subsequent steps are fluid and subject 
>> to update and overhaul
>> 
>> — the state of knowledge (so, recipes, propositions, lexicons, etc.) 
>> is something like a very elaborate sample estimator for the values 
>> that make up “what is true”.  It’s very fluid, if every instance of 
>> the adoption of a term, the commitment to rules of language or logic, 
>> interpretations of experiments, and every other habit is considered 
>> potentially in error and subject to overhaul; so it is essential to 
>> what one means here by “science” that this premise of a stable 
>> truth-notion is its starting tenet
>> 
>> — all the methods traditionally invoked as constituting “scientific 
>> method” could be seen as some first finite components in an 
>> open-ended toolbox for trying to recursively find and identify errors 
>> by classes of family resemblances they have, in the expectation that 
>> correcting the error makes the state of knowledge a better reflection 
>> of whatever is true.  So, intersubjectivity or rigorous rules of 
>> argument to overcome sample omissions, observation bias, deluded 
>> thinking, etc.; empiricism as a corrective to delusions that can 
>> persist in group levels of any size, etc.  But unlike the 
>> Encyclopedists, the body of method for error discovery is just as 
>> open-ended as the state of knowledge it has produced at any given 
>> time.  Since errors tend to propagate recursively, we probably have 
>> to assume that the tools to detect them can be expended indefinitely, 
>> else the premise that one can converge on true assertions would be 
>> implausible
>> 
>> (Apologies that these first three reiterate something I wrote here a 
>> couple of months ago.  I don’t like repeating oneself either.)
>> 
>> — that the above criteria separate out some propositions at any given 
>> time from everything we might be capable of thinking or feeling at that time, making it not all equivalent.  Thus the unhappiness of Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each according to its own fashion, is not really a pattern for what a “true assertion” looks like.  Or more neurologically, synaesthesics may see the letters of the alphabet in colors.  However, each synaesthesic may see a each of the letters in a different color than the other synaesthesics do.  Do I deny that they experience the letters with colors?  No, of course I don’t.  However, do I expect science to arrive at a conclusion that it is in the nature of a printed letter to _have_ a particular color, or to have any color at all?  Also No.  And so on.  If no state of belief a person can sincerely hold can ever be batshit crazy, then there can’t be category distinctions, and the true assertions don’t actually exist in the sense the scientific tenet supposes.
>> 
>> 
>> I would argue that any good-faith person has to recognize that these two operationalizations of the word “science” simply are not referring to the same thing.  Having recognized it, what can one then do?
>> 
>> 1. You can argue, like Richard Rorty, that it is the nature of people that they cannot possess the truth-version of “science” without having it coopted into the “legitimizing power” version, and therefore we should try to exterminate the truth-version in a kind of totalitarianistic PC, William James’s pragmatism-as-social-utilitarianism taken to its limit, which is the annihilation of Peirce’s pragmatism.  To me this is only a stone’s throw from the Unabomber argument.  One can make and then debate the quality of such arguments.  They can be insightful about how the various aspects that are simultaneously present in human life and thought affect each other, and thus can contribute to solving problems and righting wrongs even if one doesn’t think the original arguments hang together as wholes.
>> 
>> 2. One could, instead (also like Rorty), insist on changing the subject, but not acknowledge that that is what is being done.  Whenever a discussant tries argues for keeping the truth-version, one can act as if the legitimizing-power version was intended, and then give the counterargument for dismantling the latter.  That could be done, I guess, innocently, or obstinately, or maliciously.  But it doesn’t seem like it resolves to anything.
>> 
>> Anyway,
>> 
>> Eric




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