[FRIAM] Dope Slap Thread

Fri Jan 20 18:28:37 EST 2023

Nick wrote: (emphasis mine)

*"Even though I might have to admit that the truth will never be found, *I still find that the truth is an aspiration that I cannot live without.* So I think that probably the underlying in Peirce as I see him is that human experience is the result of cognition, both at the individual and the group level, and that cognition (habit formation, etc.) is ultimately a truth seeking mechanism which operates statistically, looking for human-relevant regularities in the stream of experience. *So while I might have to agree that we will never know when we have arrived at the truth of any .matter  and that therefore, we will always have to deal with different versions of what that truth is, etc., You are comfortable with that state of affairs, while I am not.*  I need to think we are working together toward something that can be won for us both and then bullt upon by us both.... and everybody else."*

Reading your paragraph engendered a sense of guilt vis-a-vis my often vocal (especially at St. John's) antipathy to truth. Almost as if I was challenging Nick and not just Nick's ideas. That emotionalism aside, your statement engendered these reactions:

1) truth is an aspiration ... Is there a truth continuum; from something like "the butler did it with a knife in the library" to "F=MA" to "God Lives"? And, if so, how far along that continuum does your aspiration take you?

2) different versions of what truth is and relativism ... is there no mechanism for reconciliation? Might it be the case that two conflicting truths are but 'local minima' that our 'hill climbing algorithm' will ultimately bypass?
    2A) you and I are fans of etymology as a vehicle for finding the "truth' of meaning for a word. Is it possible to devise an analogous method/technique for finding the meaning of a "truth?" This question arose recently when I was trying to discover why Catholics , currently, hold the truth, 'life begins at conception' when both Aristotle and, more importantly, Aquinas argued that a person did not exist until a soul inhabited a fetus, something that occurred five months after conception for boys and eight months for girls. My reading of Pierce hints at such a method, but that is probably a misconception.

3) human-relevant regularities in the stream of experience ... can any truth be found if the stream of experience is constrained to one watershed? This is my old argument about the impossibility of finding truth unless your stream of experience includes psychedelics and other non-objective/physicalist experiences.

4) premature truth ... not from something you wrote, but a personal reaction. When I am at my most immodest, I fancy myself to be a haeresiarch—an arch-heretic vis-a-vis any and every orthodoxy. I have probably misread, egregiously, Pierce, but I find his program leading less to truth than to orthodoxy. This despite his insistence that all truth is subject to revision. I am far more skeptical than Pierce when it comes to the possibility of overcoming the inertia of "established" truth.

5) Cognition ... a topic for another time and place, except to note that my best working hypothesis with regard cognition is grounded in panpsychism.

Thank you for your post, I found it quite provocative. 

davew

On Fri, Jan 20, 2023, at 2:54 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> Eric, 
> I keep being torn between "honoring" your post by responding to it promptly and "honoring" it by not responding prematurely.  You rightly focus on the "underlying", concerning which I am going append a paragraph from R. J. Bernstein's **Beyond Objectivism and Relativism:** which is cited in his **The Pragmatic Turn with** which I am happily engaged at the moment.   I am sorry that the passage is in a photograph;  I just didn't have heart to key it in with my very arthritic fingers. 
> 
> I think it is becoming clearer that I have a hankering that you do not share and that I see that hankering expressed in Peirce, but expressed in a kind of minimalist way that I find very satisfying.  Even though I might have to admit that the truth will never be found, I still find that the truth is an aspiration that I cannot live without. So I think that probably the underlying in Peirce as I see him is that human experience is the result of cognition, both at the individual and the group level, and that cognition (habit formation, etc.) is ultimately a truth **seeking **mechanism which operates statistically, looking for human-relevant regularities in the stream of experience. So while I might have to agree that we will never know when we have arrived at the truth of any .matter  and that therefore, we will always have to deal with different versions of what that truth is, etc., You are comfortable with that state of affairs, while I am not.  I need to think we are working together toward something that can be won for us both and then bullt upon by us both.... and everybody else.  Peirce is quite haughty about cultural critiques because their goal is self-expressive rather than convergent.  
> 
> I did my best to attach the Bernstein file.  If it isnt there then ping me and I will find a way to get it to you.
> fi
>   
> 
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 1:54 PM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:
>> Thanks Nick,
>> 
>> I need to affirm and thank Glen for the other post, which does indeed attach to just what I was requesting.  But I won’t be able to get to that today.
>> 
>> I wanted to reply to this one yesterday, and will hope the idea hasn’t faded enough to miss what seemed to me an interesting direction your response below can go.
>> 
>> A denial of status for “the underlying” seems, to me, to be the evil cult that Neo-PoMo is selling.  Back to that in a second, but as that thought comes up, I recall Glen’s arguments over the hears that post-modernism wasn’t born evil; its later generations of carriers turned it into that.
>> 
>> But from this thread, I have a new articulation of what the non-evil early post-modernism might have been, or might have become.  One might say that, had post-modernism gone in its best direction, it would have been the project of showing how difficult and subtle a true pragmatism is, when one realizes that everything is “up for grabs”, to settle into a shorthand I used in the first post for the various unpackings I wrote later to mean the same thing.
>> 
>> It would absolutely not have been a denial of any status for “the underlying”, bur rather a call to understand what is the nature of the status of “the underlying” in relation to our activity, which can include both “within our activity” and “as context for our activity”.  
>> 
>> I don’t think one escapes it, and I think your statement below affirms how much you haven’t let it go, because you can’t.
>> 
>> You say “statistics is all we got”.  If you think “you[‘ve] got” statistics, then you have just committed to "a belief” (not a great word, but let me not digress to look for a better one) in an underlying that, in fact, you don’t have, or so I claim.  The categories, the activities of observing and casting-in-language that attach quantities to them, a language and logic of quantities, bring into existence quantity-concepts, accepted tracks of argument to manipulate them.  Without all that machinery, you don’t “have” any “statistics” to “do”.  In thinking “you[‘ve] got” it, you have just made the essential commitment to “an underlying” that creates a starting point from which the rest of your thought and discourse can even emanate.  To understand how and why you have done that, and probably why you have had to do that, is the exercise of figuring out what the status of “the underlying” is.  I think the correct point of view is that all that framework “statistics” that you act toward _as if_ “you[‘ve] got”, is structurally just another fluctuating pattern, analogous in its status to the sample-estimator values assigned to particular quantities that get used when you apply statistical conventions to some particular collection of experiences. 
>> 
>> Remember that I wrote, originally and then again in the second post, that the language of “sample estimators in relation to the underlying” was meant as an analogy — within a frame taken as the context to express it — for the much more interesting problem of arriving at faithful renderings.  _Within_ the illustration used to express the analogy, “the underlying” certainly exists, in the sense that it has as well-defined roles in the structure of the process as the states of knowledge which are values for the sample estimators.  I did _not_ say, and precisely did not _mean_ that the concreteness that “the underlying” has in the illustration of doing a statistical inference problem — more precisely, the peer status of the underlying and the sample-estimator values, which are precisely _as concrete_ as each other, however concrete that is, within that frame — then transports through to a comparably concrete “underlying” in pragmatism in the sense of truth-notions.  The intended service of the analogy is that it allows us to see both sample estimators and their “underlying” concretely, and thereby to recognize the differentness of their places in our own thought organization and use.  It is that thought organization and use that (as I am proposing it) maps through the analogy from the illustrative cartoon of a statistical inference application, to the general case of “coming to terms” with “the world".  But precisely because the frame that makes “the underlying” given, in the illustrating cartoon, does _not_ map through the analogy, we have a new project of understanding the nature of “the underlying” in the truth-notion problem.  
>> 
>> In my little self-invented world of uninformed story-telling, where that was what could be seen in early post-modernism, one can see how through whatever combination of error or malevolence, later generations (the Neo-PoMoists) would have heard (probably, by disposition, _chosen_ to hear) the original postmodern call to figure out the nature of the status of the underlying as a denial that there is any such status, reducing all of life to brute competitions for power, to which they then dedicated themselves, because that’s the kind of people they are.  But that life is same-old same-old.  For postmodernism to have become the next stage in a serious project of pragmatism would, to me, have been very interesting.
>> 
>> Many thanks, 
>> 
>> Eric
>> 
>> 
>>> On Jan 18, 2023, at 5:41 AM, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I am finding what Mail.google <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fMail.google&c=E,1,oTroWtMEEiR-NXSvzbvTXwTxraw30bZ5Vqe84jNaHS8eF5vahfunyIUjdzzI5_lCc4LtthbLJffakVXWMRmc3tC6LE7d3ypXuyZH1u5TSA1KiQ,,&typo=1&ancr_add=1> does to messages so confusing that I am gong to try to simplify here. 
>>> 
>>> EricS writes
>>> 
>>> 
>>> **My liking of the analogy of sample estimators and underlying  values **Ii.e.values on which the estimations converge--NST**] ****is that, if one felt that were a valid analogy to a specific aspects of Peirce’s truth-relative-to-states-of-knowledge concept, it would completely clear the fog of philosophical profundity from Peirce, and say that this idea, for a modern quantitative reader, is an everyday commonplace, and one that we can easily examine at all levels from our habits to our formalism, and study the structure of in cognition.**
>>> 
>>> To which I can only respond:
>>> 
>>> **Y E S !!!!**
>>> I did feel obligated to reframe the word "underlying" because it adds back a bit of the mystery that I am so glad to see expunged.  Another way for thinking about Peirce is to say that  cognition is a statistical project and statistics is all we got.  Peirce is trying as hard as possible NOT to be profound. 
>>> Nick
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> *Attachments:*
>  * Bernstein jpeg.jpg
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