[FRIAM] A longer response to Dave's question

Thu Feb 20 12:01:03 EST 2020

Geez, Dave, 

There's an awful lot here.  Do you mean to take the hardest case?  A person?
And particularly a person who has been so much in all our faces that it's
hard for most of us to think of him rationally, if at all?  

Let's take a simpler example.  An example that Peirce takes is
transubstantiation, the idea that in ritual of the mass the communion wine
becomes the blood of Christ.  Once consecrated, is the communion "beverage"
wine or blood?  Let's say we disagree on that point.  We both see that it's
a red liquid in a chalice, on which basis we jump to different conclusions.
>From the properties or redness and liquidness that the substance in the
chalice shares with both blood and wine, you abduce that it is wine, I
abduce that it is blood.  So far, we stand equal. But now the chalice is
brought to our lips.  For me, (forgive me, Catholics, for I know not what I
say) I feel momentarily cleansed of my sins, uplifted.  Since part of my
conception of Christ's blood is that if I drank some of it I would feel
cleansed and uplifted, I conclude that it is indeed, Christs' blood.  You,
on the other hand, experience the flat, sour taste of inexpensive wine, feel
no uplift whatsoever, and conclude that the chalice contains wine.  We are
still on equal footing. 

But now the science begins.  We whisk away the stuff in the chalice to the
laboratory.  As a preliminary, each of us is asked to list in their entirety
all the effects of our conception.  We are being asked to deduce from the
categories to which we have abduced, the consequences of our abductions
They are numerous, but to simply the discussion, lets say each of us lists
five.  I say, if it is Christ's blood, then I should feel transformed when
drinking it, and then I pause.  The scientists also pause, pencils in hand,
and I have to go on.  Well, in addition to its red-liquidity,  I say, it
should be slightly salty-sweet to taste, be thick on the tongue, curdle when
heated, sustain life of somebody in need of a transfusion, etc.  So we do
the tests, and the  results are yes, no, no, no, no.  The scientists now
turn to you and you say, it should, as well as red and liquid, be sour, thin
on the tongue, intoxicating in large amounts, produce a dark residue when
heated, etc..  So, the tests come out yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. 

So, is it really blood or really wine?  Well, that of course depends on
one's priorities.  If the sole criterion for a red fluid being Christ's
blood is that it produces in one person, Nick Thompson, a sense of
cleansing, then the fact that it doesn't pass any of the other tests for
blood will make no difference.  I can assert that that Christ's blood is a
very special sort of blood that cleanses the spirit of Nick Thompson, but
does none of the other things that blood does.  Indeed, I might assert that
anything the priest handed me in the chalice, once duly consecrated, would
be Christ's blood.   The idea that it "works for me" makes it "Christ's
blood for me and that's all that matters.  And if I could bring a regiment
of Spanish soldiers with spears to friam, and have them insist that you
drink from the chalice and feel cleansed, many of you might begin to agree
with me.  

This is the view of pragmatism that James has been accused of, but it is
definitely NOT the view that Peirce held.  If the position is, "whatever the
officiant says is christs blood is christ's blood by definition", then,
Piece would say the position is either 

Meaningless or false.  It might be meaningless, because there is no possible
world in which it could be false.  Or it might be false, because our best
guess as scientists is  that in the very long run, in the asymptote of
scientific inquiry, our best scientific guess is that the contents of the
chalice will be agreed upon to be wine. 

Again, let me apologize for my ignorant rendition of Catholic ritual.  It IS
the example that Peirce takes, but I now see that that is probably a poor
excuse.  Peirce was, after all, a protestant, and one with many prejudices,
so it would not surprise me if he was anti-catholic and himself chose the
example in a mean-spirited way.  So, be a little careful in how you respond.

Is Trump a proto-dictator?  What are the consequences in experience of
believing that he is?  What does that belief cause us to expect in him.  Tim
Snyder, in his little book ON TYRANNY, does a very good job of laying out
the parallels between what is going on in our politics right now and what
goes on in the early stages of the establishment o a dictatorship.  Trump is
fulfilling many of Snyder's expectations.  Whether Trump succeeds in
establishing a dictatorship or not, I think the long run of history will
conclude that he is making a stab at it.  

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 Prof David West
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2020 8:48 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] question for pragmatists and Piercians among us

Politically charged question to follow. Unlike my usual wont, I am not
trying to be provocative. I pick a difficult example for my question in the
hope that it will generate enough heat to produce light with the hope that
the light will illuminate clarity.

Pierce said:

"Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we
conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these
effects is the whole of our conception of the object."

The Donald is our object.

1- Can we enumerate the "effects with conceivably practical bearings" we
expect our object to have?

2- Must the enumeration include both "positive" and "negative" effects?

  2a- does the answer to #2 depend on the definition of "our?" If 'our' is
defined inclusively the answer to #2 would seem to be yes, but if 'our' is
exclusive or restricted to only those with pro or anti
perspectives/convictions, maybe not.

3- Must the effects we conceive have some threshold measure of a quality we
might call 'truthiness', 'likelihood', 'believe-ability', reality'? [T
becoming a dictator is a conceivable effect, but, I for one, see no
possibility of that effectuating.]

4- If we had a "consensus" enumeration of plausible effects does our
"conception of the object" have any relation to the ontology of the object?

5- If we have myriad enumerations does that mean "we" cannot possess a
conception of the object, merely multiple conceptions of caricatures of the
object?

I'm working on a paper with an epistemological focus and that brought me to
Pierce and prompted the above questions.

Another question for the evolutionists who are also pragmatists: why
pragmatism over "naturalized epistemology?"

davew

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