[FRIAM] Dope slaps, anyone? Text displaying correctly?

David Eric Smith desmith at santafe.edu
Sat Jan 7 18:20:44 EST 2023


Nick, the text renders.

You use words in ways that I cannot parse.  Some of them seem very poetic, suggesting that your intended meaning is different in its whole cast from one I could try for.

FWIW: as I have heard these discussions over the years, to the extent that there is a productive analogy, I would say (unapologetically using my words, and not trying to quote his) that Peirce’s claimed relation between states of knowledge and truth (meaning, some fully-faithful representation of “what is the case”) is analogous to the relation of sample estimators in statistics to the quantity they are constructed to estimate.  

We don’t have any ontological problems understanding sample estimators and the quantities estimated, as both have status in the ordinary world of empirical things.  In our ontology, they are peers in some sense, but they clearly play different roles and stand for different concepts.

When we come, however, to “states of knowledge” and “truth” as “what will bear out in the long run”, in addition to the fact that we must study the roles of these tokens in our thought and discourse, if we want to get at the concepts expressive of their nature, we also have a hideously more complicated structure to categorize, than mere sample estimators and the corresponding “actual” values they are constructed to estimate.  For sample estimation, in some sense, we know that the representation for the estimator and the estimated is the same, and that they are both numbers in some number system.  If we wish to discuss states of knowledge and truth, everything is up for grabs: every convention for a word’s denotation and all the rules for its use in a language that confer parts of its meaning.  All the conventions for procedures of observation and guided experience.  All the formal or informal modes of discourse in which we organize our intersubjective experience pools and build something from them.  All of that is allowed to “fluctuate”, as we would say in statistics of sample estimators.  The representation scheme itself, and our capacities to perceive through it, are all things we seek to bring into some convergence toward a “faithful representation” of “what is the case”.

Speaking or thinking in an orderly way about that seems to have many technical as well as modal aspects.

Best, 

Eric


> On Jan 7, 2023, at 5:05 PM, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The relation between the believed in and the True is the relation between a limited function and its limit. {a vector, and the thing toward which the vector points?]   Ultimately  the observations that the function models determine the limit, but the limit is not determined by any particular  observation or group of observations.  Peirce believes that The World -- if, in fact, it makes any sense to speak of a World independent of the human experience -- is essentially random and, therefore,  that contingencies among experiences that lead to valid expectations are rare.  The apparition of order that we experience is due to the fact that such predictive contingencies--rare as they may be-- are extraordinarily useful to organisms and so organisms are conditioned to attend  to them.  Random events are beyond experience.  Order is what can be experienced.     
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