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

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Heh, that's completely inverted.  You're claiming that fewer interactions between the individual and its environment imply a tighter coupling between them.  I'm claiming that more interactions between them imply a tighter coupling.

Maybe think about it this way.  Imagine 2 androids (no "beliefs", just behaviors) lying on tables in a lab.  Android A reaches down with an arm to touch the ground, then moves its legs and gets off the table. We can count 2 (coarse) interactions with the ground: touching it, then standing on it.  Android B just gets off the table without touching it first.  We count 1 (coarse) interaction.  You claim Android B is more tightly coupled with the ground than Android A.  I claim Android A is more tightly coupled with the ground than Android B.

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On 03/28/2018 07:23 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
> Glen... I quite confused as to what you mean by tight and loose control...
> 
> Let us take the case of belief in a tight relationship between my height off the ground and my likelihood of being injured in a jump. If I firmly believe that, then whether or not I jump is tightly coupled with the height. If I doubt such a relationship exists, then the height I find myself at will be only loosely coupled with my likelihood of jumping... right? Is that not the type of thing you are referring to with "tight" and "loose" control?
> 
> Either way, Peirce is more interested in the higher-order question of what leads beliefs to be stable. There are many answers to that question (see his "Fixation of Belief"), though the interesting answer, the one he tries to elaborate for the rest of his life, is fixation via the scientific process, in which beliefs stabilize (control behavior more tightly) as their implications attain in practice, and destabilize (control behavior more loosely) as their implications fail to attain in practice. In that context, the scientific context, "Truth" or "Real" are odd terms we use to refer to those things for which all implications will attain in the very, very long run.
>  
> (... which might, in the very, very long run, turn out to be almost nothing...)
> 
> So, there is, on the one hand, something to be said about the "control" that is the belief itself, and something else to be said about the "control" that is the sociological stability of the belief and the basis of that stability.
> 
> In your case of the "dead horse" of putting feet on the floor, the "tight coupling" is what happens when one acts their entire daily life without once checking the belief. Doubt makes one put ones feet down tentatively, makes one walk with caution. The relation of the person to the floor gets looser as doubt increases... doesn't it? The person who firmly believes the floor is there acts towards it unhesitatingly the whole day, thousands of times; his behavior is tightly coupled to a floor being present... as becomes obvious in a dramatic fall if it isn't.

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