[FRIAM] Peirce's "What Pragmatism is."

[Nick Thompson]

A last thought.  [it’s hard not to have last thoughts when one is packing.]

 

When we speak of the truth, we speak not of something that is but that is beyond our reach, but of a hankering.  With respect to any matter, we hanker for that conception that will forever still the voices of dissent, the babbling and the squabbling.   Truth is the intention of inquiry.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Sunday, March 25, 2018 9:11 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Cc: Mike Bybee <mikebybee at earthlink.net>; marthafranks <marthafranks at earthlink.net>; Stephen Van Luchene <srvl48 at gmail.com>; Grant Franks2 <grantfranks at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Peirce's "What Pragmatism is."

 

I'm not going to try to lard the post-modernism discussion, but want to reply in general: 

In Peirce's cosmology, it is quite possible that there is very little that stays stable in the very long run. Maybe even nothing!  And yet, it is exactly those stabilities that the scientist is searching for, and it is exactly long-term convergence of the evidence that they are trying to get at with words like "true" and "real". What happens when decades of investigation don't find stable relations between categories of things? We change the categories being used and try again. What is an element? There were many things that people thought were "elements" but which were later determined to be "composites" of  several "elements." 

We know "iron ore" is many things, but what about "hematite"? Is hematite one thing, or many things? And we know "iron ore" is composed of many things, one of which is "iron", but is iron one thing or many things? The "truth" of any attempted answer to those questions is a matter of whether, in the long run, actions based on those beliefs stay stable. That "iron" is "an element" is nothing other than a claim regarding what would or would not be found in the very, very long run of scientific investigation, and the vast majority of such claims will be wrong, because they are carving out swaths of the world in which the claimed stability simply does not exist. 

If there is one glaring bit of faith in Peirce's philosophy, it is belief that, in the long run, the honest investigators will win out. He believes that reality impinges upon belief, and that, in the long run, the temptation of fixating belief in response to authority, pure stubbornness, or other methods will ultimately give way, and people will come back to seeking out what is true. 

 

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