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

[Eric Charles]

Glen, because I like control-loop metaphors for behavior, and think we are
very close on that issue, the more interesting question, to me, is:
"Why would we claim what Peirce claims in "What is Pragmatism?", that there
must be some things without a control loop at all?"

The answer is, I think, that is what science finds. What of phrenology, or
the attempt to measure ether winds, or bodily humours, or to determine the
make up of all the substances of the world out of the basic elements of
fire, earth, water, and air, or countless other aborted scientific
endeavors that serious people worked towards for decades? They found that
if you tried to cleave the world by those joints, and determine the
relations between the parts, you never got to a consensus about what the
heck was going on. The data didn't converge. New categories seemed more
promising, and the old categories were abandoned. Many of those new
categories were themselves abandoned after additional decades of work by
the community. Other new categories have been remarkably stable in their
ability to lead us to successful prediction and control. Those remarkably
successful categories might themselves be overturned one day - as we find
the limits of the success of their implications-in-practice. Even in many
of those cases where our knowledge seems most stable, it seems so largely
due to our having slowly limited the scope of the claims - X is true under
such and such conditions ( X and Y form compound X2Y3, when the PH of the
suspension is at least 7, the temperature above 87 degrees, the pressure
under 2 atmospheres, etc.). How many asserted "laws" of physics throughout
history are still believed to be true EVERYWHERE in the universe, and to
have been that way at ALL times? Even inside black holes, or in the first
moments after the big bang?

Or, to more directly answer your question: There are things we can conceive
of that do not, in fact, have a control loop at all, because our
conceptions are shitty. It may even be that very little we encounter and
think we have gotten a mental handle on has anything beyond local
stability. That includes both geographical and temporal locality, i.e.,
happenstance. That, at least, is what I think Peirce is asserting in that
context.


-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician
U.S. Marine Corps
<echarles at american.edu>
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