18 ideas
| 21489 | Super-ordinate disciplines give laws or principles; subordinate disciplines give concrete cases [Peirce, by Atkin] |
| Full Idea: In Peirce's system, a super-ordinate discipline provides general laws or principles for subordinate disciplines, which in turn provide concrete examples of those general laws. | |
| From: report of Charles Sanders Peirce (works [1892]) by Albert Atkin - Peirce 1 'System' | |
| A reaction: Does he really mean that subordinate disciplines have no principles or laws? That can't be right. |
| 19095 | Pragmatic 'truth' is a term to cover the many varied aims of enquiry [Peirce, by Misak] |
| Full Idea: In Peirce's naturalist view of truth, it is a catch-all for the particular local aims of enquiry - empirical adequacy, predictive power, coherence, simplicity, elegance, explanatory power, a reliable guide to action, fruitfulness, great understanding. | |
| From: report of Charles Sanders Peirce (works [1892]) by Cheryl Misak - Pragmatism and Deflationism 1 | |
| A reaction: The aims I cited in my thesis on explanation. One given, for me, is that truth is an ideal, which may or may not be attainable, to varying degrees. It is just what thinking aims at. I suspect, though, that these listed items have one thing in common. |
| 19097 | Peirce did not think a belief was true if it was useful [Peirce, by Misak] |
| Full Idea: Peirce was not in the slightest bit tempted by the thought that a belief is true if it is useful. | |
| From: report of Charles Sanders Peirce (works [1892]) by Cheryl Misak - Pragmatism and Deflationism 2 | |
| A reaction: All students of the pragmatic theory of truth should start with this idea, because it rejects the caricature view of pragmatic truth, a view which is easily rebutted. James seems to have been guilty of this sin. |
| 21494 | If truth is the end of enquiry, what if it never ends, or ends prematurely? [Atkin on Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Two related worries about Peirce's account of truth are (from Royce) what are we to make of truth if enquiry never reaches an end, and (from Russell) what are we to make of truth if enquiry ends prematurely? | |
| From: comment on Charles Sanders Peirce (works [1892]) by Albert Atkin - Peirce 3 'issues' | |
| A reaction: The defence of Peirce must be that the theory is not holistic - referring to the whole Truth about absolutely everything. The discovery of the periodic table seems to me to support Peirce. In many areas basic enquiry has reached an end. |
| 11211 | If a sound conclusion comes from two errors that cancel out, the path of the argument must matter [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: If a designated conclusion follows from the premisses, but the argument involves two howlers which cancel each other out, then the moral is that the path an argument takes from premisses to conclusion does matter to its logical evaluation. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], II) | |
| A reaction: The drift of this is that our view of logic should be a little closer to the reasoning of ordinary language, and we should rely a little less on purely formal accounts. |
| 21493 | Pure mathematics deals only with hypotheses, of which the reality does not matter [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: The pure mathematician deals exclusively with hypotheses. Whether or not there is any corresponding real thing, he does not care. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (works [1892], CP5.567), quoted by Albert Atkin - Peirce 3 'separation' | |
| A reaction: [Dated 1902] Maybe we should identify a huge branch of human learning as Hyptheticals. Professor of Hypotheticals at Cambridge University. The trouble is it would have to include computer games. So why does maths matter more than games? |
| 19102 | Bivalence is a regulative assumption of enquiry - not a law of logic [Peirce, by Misak] |
| Full Idea: Peirce takes bivalence not to be a law of logic, but a regulative assumption of enquiry. | |
| From: report of Charles Sanders Peirce (works [1892]) by Cheryl Misak - Pragmatism and Deflationism 2 n10 | |
| A reaction: I like this. For most enquiries it's either true or not true, it's either there or it's not there. When you aren't faced with these simple dichotomies (in history, or quantum mechanics) you can relax, and allow truth value gaps etc. |
| 11212 | The sense of a connective comes from primitively obvious rules of inference [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: A connective will possess the sense that it has by virtue of its competent users' finding certain rules of inference involving it to be primitively obvious. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], III) | |
| A reaction: Rumfitt cites Peacocke as endorsing this view, which characterises the logical connectives by their rules of usage rather than by their pure semantic value. |
| 11210 | Standardly 'and' and 'but' are held to have the same sense by having the same truth table [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: If 'and' and 'but' really are alike in sense, in what might that likeness consist? Some philosophers of classical logic will reply that they share a sense by virtue of sharing a truth table. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000]) | |
| A reaction: This is the standard view which Rumfitt sets out to challenge. |
| 10352 | The real is the idea in which the community ultimately settles down [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: The real is the idea in which the community ultimately settles down. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (works [1892]), quoted by Martin Kusch - Knowledge by Agreement Ch.16 | |
| A reaction: If this is anti-realism, then I don't like it. If it is realist, then it is probably a bit on the optimistic side (if you think about cultures that are into witchcraft and voodoo). |
| 13498 | Peirce and others began the mapping out of relations [Peirce, by Hart,WD] |
| Full Idea: It was Peirce and Schröder in the nineteenth century who began a systematic taxonomy of relations. | |
| From: report of Charles Sanders Peirce (works [1892], 4) by William D. Hart - The Evolution of Logic 4 |
| 8508 | A 'trope' is an abstract particular, the occurrence of an essence [Williams,DC] |
| Full Idea: I shall divert the word 'trope' to stand for the abstract particular which is, so to speak, the occurrence of an essence. | |
| From: Donald C. Williams (On the Elements of Being: I [1953], p.115) | |
| A reaction: Thus tropes entered philosophical discussion. Presumably the precedent for an 'abstract particular' would be a particular occurrence of the number 7. |
| 8509 | A world is completely constituted by its tropes and their connections [Williams,DC] |
| Full Idea: Any possible world, and hence, of course, this one, is completely constituted by its tropes and connections of location and similarity. | |
| From: Donald C. Williams (On the Elements of Being: I [1953], p.116) | |
| A reaction: Note that Williams regularly referred to possible worlds in 1953. This is a full-blooded trope theory, which asserts that objects are bundles of tropes, so that both particulars and universals are ontologically taken care of. |
| 8510 | 'Socrates is wise' means a concurrence sum contains a member of a similarity set [Williams,DC] |
| Full Idea: 'Socrates is wise' means that the concurrence sum (Socrates) includes a trope which is a member of the similarity set (Wisdom). | |
| From: Donald C. Williams (On the Elements of Being: I [1953], p.119) | |
| A reaction: Resemblance has to be taken as a basic (and presumably unanalysable) concept, which invites Russell's objection (Idea 4441). |
| 21491 | Peirce's later realism about possibilities and generalities went beyond logical positivism [Peirce, by Atkin] |
| Full Idea: The realism about possibilities, generalities, tendencies and habits that we find in Peirce's later maxim is something that the logical positivists would have been uncomfortable with. | |
| From: report of Charles Sanders Peirce (works [1892]) by Albert Atkin - Peirce 2 'Concl' | |
| A reaction: Atkin examines the various later statements of the earlier maxim, given here in Idea 21490. Ryle and Quine express the empiricist and logical positivist approach to dispositions. |
| 16376 | The possible can only be general, and the force of actuality is needed to produce a particular [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: The possible is necessarily general ..It is only actuality, the force of existence, which bursts the fluidity of the general and produces a discrete unit. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (works [1892]), quoted by François Recanati - Mental Files 13.1 | |
| A reaction: [Papers 4 1967:147] This was quoted by Prior, and is often cited. Recanati is interested in the notion of a singular thought being tied to actuality, by generating a mental file. |
| 19107 | Inquiry is not standing on bedrock facts, but standing in hope on a shifting bog [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Inquiry is not standing upon a bedrock of fact. It is walking up a bog, and can only say, this ground seems to hold for the present. Here I will stay until it begins to give way. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (works [1892], CP 5.589), quoted by Gottfried Leibniz - Letter to Newton 4 | |
| A reaction: [I don't know which article this lovely quote comes from] |
| 11214 | We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: The standard view is that affirming not-A is more complex than affirming the atomic sentence A itself, with the latter determining its sense. But we could learn 'not' directly, by learning at once how to either affirm A or reject A. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], IV) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This seems fairly anti-Fregean in spirit, because it looks at the psychology of how we learn 'not' as a way of clarifying what we mean by it, rather than just looking at its logical behaviour (and thus giving it a secondary role). |