The Tetrast

Sad day for Peirce folks. News that Joseph Morton Ransdell, philosopher, Peirce scholar, originator and maintainer of Arisbe: The Peirce Gateway, moderator and manager of peirce-l, and former president of the Charles S. Peirce Society, passed away on December 27, 2010. The Tetrast (talk) 18:58, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Do you know about subpages?

Do you know about user subpages? For example, I copied the above to User:The Tetrast/1. WAS 4.250 07:41, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

I knew, sort of but, earlier, I had such trouble grasping the link methods, page creation, and the connection between them, that I did it once and then eventually deleted it. Thanks for creating one. I'll probably keep it and clear out the Talk page so that people will feel it's okay to actually talk there. The Tetrast 17:11, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Done! The Tetrast 17:12, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Glad to help. WAS 4.250 20:04, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce)

Hi! I was just reviewing Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce). It's very good work and you clearly have a lot of expertise on the subject. However, my concern is that some of the content may have been taken from another Wikipedia page or other material available on the web. What are the external sources of the article? Wikipedia articles are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License which means they may be copied, but must be attributed, meaning we might have to link back to the original article/its history, or do a history merge (by this point, that seems improbable). And copyrighted material on the web may not be used in most cases.

Cheers! — madman bum and angel 16:09, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I wrote or rewrote most of the "Classes of sign" section, some of it for "Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce)" and some of it originally for the main Charles Peirce article. In the main Charles Peirce article, it appeared under "Types of signs" which was a subsection of "Theory of signs, or semiotic," which is a subsection of "Dynamics of inquiry", and some of that was in rewriting things which others had already written. In the main Charles Peirce article, I also replaced the "Types of signs" subsubsection with a "Classes of signs" subsubsection, and I wrote it. (I changed the title because "Types of signs" was always a bad title, since the word "type" itself is a label Peirce used for a certain kind of sign, the "type" as in the type-token distinction). Meanwhile, in the "Clases of signs" section "Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce)" article, some phrases and a few sentences, I think, remain as written by others back in the main Charles Peirce article. For instance, the word "typology" was introduced by somebody besides me, and it proved a very useful word in discussing three of Peirce's most prominent typologies. (This in spite of "Types of signs" being a bad section title; if I had to use both or neither, I would get rid of "typology.")

The "Semiotic elements" section was originally the Peirce article in the section "Sign relations." I wrote a lot of it, including the bulleted definitions and the numbered definitions, but significant portions were written by others. And of course I've tweaked some of that stuff and others have tweaked some of my stuff.

The versions which I used as a basis for the "Semiotic elements and clases of signs (Peirce)" article had been reverted at the main Peirce article.

The main external sources were the Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms, and the definitions consist entirely in quotations from C.S. Peirce (b. 1839, d. 1914) himself. I did not copy whole unattributed sentences or paragraphs from Peirce, but some phrases such as "pure abstraction of a quality," yes. The main concern, then, will be with tracing the history back to the main Peirce article Charles_Peirce. I don't know anything about how to merge article histories. The Tetrast 17:43, 21 September 2007 (UTC) Revised The Tetrast 17:45, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Only administrators can perform history merges. I think the link to the original article should suffice for attribution, but I'll ask around. Thank you! — madman bum and angel 17:48, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

The main external sources were the Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms, and ITS definitions, I should say, consist entirely in quotations from C.S. Peirce (b. 1839, d. 1914) himself. My definitions are not copied and pasted from there. Also I did use a long quote from Peirce, near the beginning. I don't think that there should be a problem there, but I'll inquire and I should be able to say by tonight or tomorrow. The Tetrast 17:55, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Now that I think about it, some of my phraseology in the definitions of rheme, dicisign, argument, are so close to Peirce's, that I should footnote to the sources. I'll do that tonight (I'm at work right now) and review more generally. But it's still a matter of sentence clauses rather than longer passages. The Tetrast 18:14, 21 September 2007 (UTC) Revised The Tetrast 18:17, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

The long quote is indeed in the public domain -- it was originally published in the in the Monist in October 1906. Google Books has it available with no registration required and in OCR text-only form as well. I've expanded the sourcing after the passage: "(Peirce, The Collected Papers, vol. 4, p. 551; originally in "Prolegomena To an Apology For Pragmaticism," pp. 492-546, The Monist vol. VI, no. 4, Oct. 1906, see p. 523)"

As regards the phraseology in my definitions of rheme, dicisign, and argument, I find that it's not as close to Peirce's sentences as I thought, and some is drawn also from things which Peirce said in A Letter to Lady Welby published in Signs and Significs. I want to work some more on it, but I have to go to sleep for work tomorrow. I don't know what I was thinking when I suggested that I could get it all done tonight. The Tetrast 00:46, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

I notice that in "Classes of signs" I used the table of categories which I originally created in the main Charles Peirce article. I should just note that in the main article it's not in the "Theory of signs, or semiotic" section; instead it is in the "Theory of categories" section. So not everything coming from the main article came from the its "Theory of signs, or semiotic" section. Maybe I'm getting too detailed with this! Well, it's just a talk page. The Tetrast 01:33, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

If you copy something from one wikipedia page to another, you are supposed to say so in the edit summary; and if you forget then you are supposed to either say so in a subsequent edit summary or on the talk page. The idea is to fulfill the GFDL requirement for attribution in a reasonable way. Wikipedia is the largest and most significant GFDL copyrighted item in existence and since the issue has never been tested in court, it is expected that Wikipedia's customary practices will be influential if not defining in this regard. WAS 4.250 06:21, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Peirce

I have been meaning to thank you for your work on the Peirce article for some time. You are an asset to the project. Given your expertise, I was wondering if I could ask your advice: can you recommend eithe or both (1) readible and intellectually informative biographies of Pierce and also of Dewey (I do not know if you have read Monk's Biography of Wittgenstein but that represents my ideal for its lucid exposition of the theoretical and intellectual context, as well as the personal, and the clear but heavily contextualized exposition of LW's thought) and (2) very readible but serious accounts of pragmatism in its various forms (including pragmaticism)? I have read Menand's The Metaphysical Club and liked it very much but wonder whether there are not other equally well-written and engaging treatments that go into greater depth (but just as clearly - or moreso!) about the philosophical issues? thanks Slrubenstein | Talk 02:57, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Thank you very much! My expertise is a function of cumulative records, years of peirce-l, my handiness with search engines, my being energized about Peirce's classifications because of how I cross paths with him, and the handiness of online resources at Joe Ransdell's Arisbe and at Helsinki U's Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms, among other sites. Peirce ends up surprising everybody and I've won a few scholarly arguments with this or that professional because of it; everybody (certainly including me) takes his or her turns at being mistaken about Peirce, as far as I can tell. I haven't read any long biographical work on Peirce, and the only biography which I've seen praised without criticism regarding reliability was the fictional autobiography His Glassy Essence of Peirce written by Kenneth Ketner. So, second-handedly, I'd say that that is worth reading. (Even the Menand book came in for some serious criticism regarding its depiction of Peirce's views, at peirce-l.) The only full-scale conventional biography that I know of is the one by Joseph Brent. Ransdell thinks that Brent goes too far in calling Peirce things like "manic-depressive." Despite his differences with Brent, Joe (very Peirce-spirited) has two articles by Brent, "Pursuing Peirce" and "The Singular Experience of the Peirce Biographer" posted at Joe's Arisbe: The Peirce Gateway Website, go to http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/aboutcsp.htm and click on "Brent" in the left-side frame.

As for pragmatism generally, I'm not sure, I'm not familiar with James, Dewey, and the others. I'm a four-ist, I encountered Peirce who is a three-ist, and that's what I've been about for the past several years. As regards Peircean pragmatism (pragmaticism), I'm not sure that the definitive work has been written. There are at least four strands involved, the pragmaticism itself, the critical common-sensism, the Scholastic Realism (at first, about generals, then in later years, about modalities, e.g., possibility), and, of course, the trichotomism. The renowned Peirce scholar Thomas L. Short once mentioned to us at peirce-l the following works on Peirce's views of truth:

...Cheryl Misak's Truth and the End of Inquiry (Oxford 1991), Misak, ed., "Pragmatism" (1999 Supplementary Volume of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy), half the papers in which are about CSP's theory of truth, Christopher Hookway, "Truth, Reality, and Convergence" in Misak, ed., Cambridge Companion to Peirce (2004), Peter Skagestad, The Road of Inquiry (Columbia 1981), among many others.

The Tetrast 13:06, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the links. Fascinating! WAS 4.250 15:18, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Classifications

Thanks for getting back to me, I am not really up on Peirce or semiotics but my concern was that if someone arrived at this article otherwise than from Peirce himself, they would have little idea as to what it was all about (perhaps that's Derrida meant when he said...oh, never mind). Anyway, the introduction should be in its own section & set out the context of the article. Below that there shuld be the expansion. Hope that's not too meta for you. --Rodhullandemu (talk - contribs) 01:56, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

That's fine, I just tag new articles as I see them, I'm not a vicious ogre that goes around nit-picking. I'll leave it to you from now on. --Rodhullandemu (talk - contribs) 02:35, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you very much. The article is better for your involvement. The Tetrast 03:09, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Just had another look at this. Very impressive. --Rodhullandemu (talk - contribs) 21:27, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Thank you! I just keep plugging away as my spare time permits. The Tetrast 13:58, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

favor?

When you are of a mind, would you consider working on these two articles: Theory and Scientific method? My sense is that Pierrce has much to offer to our understaning of both but I think the people who most contributed to these articles were unaware of his implortance. You've done great work on the CSP article, but I hope you would bring you knowledge of Pierce to other, closely related topics. Night i suggest atarting with these two? Thanks,Slrubenstein | Talk 22:55, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

That would actually be a huge task for me, I don't know much about the history of 20th-Century philosophy of science; I know that Peirce exerted some influence pretty widely, and it seems to me that some have misunderstood him. I don't even know where I myself stand regarding a number of ideas in those articles. The Tetrast (talk) 16:27, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, maybe I could find something to say about Peirce's idea of a hypothetico-deductive-inductive method. The Tetrast (talk) 16:45, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

I leave it up to you. I know it could be a huge task - it all depends on how detailed you want to get. I just do not know who else is up to the task. Part of the issue is indeed 20th century philosophy and history of science and if you do not know that well, then you don't know that (e.g. Quine and Hempel - if you know anyone here who DOES know their work well, would you mind asking them to help out in this regard?) ... but even if Peirce lived a long time ago he is not just of interest to historians of philosophy, his account of scientific methods and the nature of scientific knowledge are still relevant and I believe influential and I am sure there is a place for an account of his views somewhere in these articles. Surely, his concept of abduction is very important and still relevant to the article on scientific method, no? Slrubenstein | Talk 20:15, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately I don't know anybody else who is active on Wikipedia. I've read Quine, but I can't even recall his talking about anything that sounded like scientific method to me. I don't think Peirce is only for the history books. I'll think about venturing some bits and pieces in those articles -- I have been usually incremental in my approach to the Peirce articles so far, though I've gotten stuck on his Scholastic Realism, where I don't have the Commens Dictionary's multitudes of relevant quotes from all sources to help point the way. Anyway, regarding scientific method, I'm not firm on Peirce's treatment of inference -- there were, in particular, two conceptions of the three modes which he developed. He preferred one of them but still wondered whether the other was right. It may be irrelevant to what's to be added to the Scientific Method article but I like to understand the ground that I tread, especially since, as far as I can tell, the general philosophical issue of inference remains hairy, especially in terminology. The Tetrast (talk) 21:00, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Fair enough. It is a shame Wikipedia does not have more editors who are knowledgable in these areas. Slrubenstein | Talk 22:30, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Sign relation

Jon Awbrey created a lot of wonderful articles in his field, then made the mistake of taking the acclaimed genius Charles Sanders Peirce's POV to articles like Truth where Peirce is just one POV among many. Jon got upset at not being able to portray that POV as "the Truth", and took his rage to WP:NOR where he self-destructed and we all agreed he had to be banned. He is now trying to disrupt Wikipedia. All the "war" you see is Awbrey puppets. Awbrey's wonderful articles on logic should be added to as you see fit. Please carry on. Thank you. WAS 4.250 (talk) 22:49, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

scientific method

I think what you wrote is terrific. I think others might benefit from "racionization" being explained. Also, some might appreciate knowing more about Pierce's backgrond as a practicing scientist and as a philosopher. Finally, it would be valuable to know the status of his understanding of the scientific method today. This may go beyond your expertise. My understanding is, philosphers in the US and UK take him very seriously even today. i have no idea about praqcticing scientists., or sociologists or historians of science, though. Slrubenstein | Talk 17:42, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. I should point out that what I did was edit and extend a briefer version of the section "Pragmatic model" that was already there. Scientific method#Pragmatic model (howsoever it stands now). Here's how it stood previously: http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Scientific_method&oldid=173793268#Pragmatic_model

After editing the Wiktionary definition of "ratiocination", I linked to it from the Scientific method article.

As regards Peirce's background, I feel unsure about saying it, it starts to sound like boasting for him. There is a link there to the main Peirce article, interested people will follow the link, I hope. The Tetrast (talk) 19:58, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Charles Peirce article

The subarticles have been deleted. Unfortunately, I think it's going to take Wikipedia several years to clean up all of the crap created by Jon Awbrey in his quest to make Charles Peirce the center of the universe. I rewrote the ampheck article yesterday, although I was tempted to just delete it. Could you take a look at some of these other articles and see if they look legitimately useful to Wikipedia:

1. Boolean domain
2. Boolean-valued function
3. Comprehension (logic)
4. Continuous predicate
5. Descriptive science
6. Hypostatic abstraction
7. Hypostatic object
8. Inverse relation
9. Logic of information
10. Logical graph
11. Logical matrix
12. Minimal negation operator
13. Multigrade operator
14. Normative science
15. Parametric operator
16. Pragmatic maxim
17. Prescisive abstraction
18. Relation composition
19. Relation construction
20. Relation reduction
21. Relative term
22. Semeiotic
23. Semiotic information theory
24. Sign relation
25. Sign relational complex
26. Sole sufficient operator
27. Tacit extension
28. Triadic relation
29. Zeroth order logic

I suspect some of these are anachronistic terms or neologisms that would be better suited as redirects or merged with larger articles. The tricky thing is that Jon created all of these articles and they all reinforce each other, so it's difficult to tell which ones are legitimate academic terms and which ones are simply pet terms used by Charles Peirce or Jon. I have no background in philosophy, so I was hoping you or someone with more knowledge could help sort through the mess. Kaldari (talk) 22:43, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Reply:

This will take a while. Right off the bat, I can say that the "Pragmatic Maxim" article is valuable. Right now it is pretty much the same as a post which Jon sent (maybe more than once) to the peirce-l forum, and which I think helped clarify for many people that the Pragmatic Maxim equates a concept's meaning not to its object's particular actual consequences but instead to the sum of the object's conceivable consequences. I may be able to add to the article in ways which further pre-empt confusions about the Pragmatic Maxim.

The article on the "continuous predicate" is about an idea which is at the juncture of various of Peirce's ideas -- on continuity, and on something which, in a later letter to Lady Welby, he called "the copulant" (a sign for a logical relation, neither denominative nor descriptive).

The more technical any given article of his is, the less I am qualified to judge of its worth, even in those cases where I understand it more or less (like the "Sign relation" article). I don't know whether there is a semiotic tradition within which what he does in that article is considered a fair (if simple) portrayal of sign relations. (Simple, i.e., one kind of thing for objects, another kind of thing for both signs and interpretants, no second set of quote marks for interpretants, etc.). No general reader will plow through those tables of symbols, though I could add tables using bits of ordinary language (and make the tables narrower while I'm at it). "Ennotation"? As defined therein, it seems an innocuous convenient term for a relationship that's "really there" in Peirce's ideas and is not "original research". But I don't have the background to say whether the article is valuable. My gut sense is that Jon makes Peircean sign relations "recognizable" by people who do databases or know their Boole.

Peirce has a vast swirl of specific ideas with their little curlicues for which at least some of those little articles come in handy.

In the case of an article like "Comprehension", where comprehension is defined as all of a sign's intensions together, it really would be useful to know which writers maintain that distinction beteen comprehension and intension, and a discussion of the term "connototation" there would be good too (apparently the original sense of "connotation" was rather closer to the current literary sense than to the sense currently encountered in discussions of logic). If Jon's definition is right and is the core definition among current logicians, then it's good to have at Wikipedia, since such a clear-cut definition of comprehension is hard to come by on the Internet.

That's all for the time being. The Tetrast (talk) 03:09, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Note to whoever moves contributions from one article to another: The GFDL requires author attribution to be retained, and the customary way to do that at wikipedia is to add appropriate information into the edit summary and/or the talk page. In the case of articles like these that basically have one author, a statement like that indicating Jon Awbrey as the primary author of material in the article prior to (January 2007?) in both an edit summary (perhaps of a null edit?) and on the talk page would be appropriate. (Often I move content from one article to another and say in the edit summary "moved from name of article". That doesn't work if the article is then deleted. Why people don't just make the articles redirects instead of deletions makes no sense to me.) WAS 4.250 (talk) 18:09, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Philly meetup 6

I'm working on planning the sixth Philadelphia meetup, and I'm looking for ideas and votes about the place and location. Since you RSVP'd for the last one I thought you might like to weigh in. Thanks, and I hope to see you there! --TexasDex ★ 22:48, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Arthur Burks bibliography

This section has grown out of control--it is now half the article. The strictures of WP:NOT dictate that articles shouldn't be laden down with exhaustive bibliographies and other lists of references that are not directly related to the subject matter in the article--in this case, the biographical details of Arthur Burks. I tend to be inclusionist and look for ways to keep material wherever I can, but the existence of this section, particularly as long as it is, can't be justified by guidelines. Since you seem to have worked to build it, I think it's only fair to ask you to be the one to excise it. Robert K S (talk) 01:57, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Peirce's signs?

Hello - I'm trying to wikilink a quotation on the semiotics of theatre that uses Peirce's index, icon, symbol distinction. For the three referred to collectively, I'm linking to your Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce), but I wanted to link to more specific treatments of each individual term. So far, I've found iconicity and indexicality, but I can't seem to locate an article that treats symbol in Peirce's sense. Could you point me in the right direction? Many thanks, DionysosProteus (talk) 14:49, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

I can't find a wiki more specifically treating the symbol from Peirce's standpoint, and the Iconicity wiki doesn't reflect Peirce's particular perspective. For Peirce, icons included mathematical diagrams, and a mathematical diagram could be a formula, something as simple as "All A is B", an array of algebraic symbols, etc. In the "Semiotic elements..." wiki, I didn't even get into the division which Peirce made of icons into image / diagram / metaphor. (Well, technically the 'image' is a subclass of indexless icon but I wouldn't worry about it.) (Incidentally that wiki isn't entirely by me, it was adapted from material originally in the Charles Sanders Peirce wiki). If you're willing to use external links, best bets are Peirce's own definitions and characterizations gathered from acoss the years:

• The Commens Dictionary of Peirce's Terms.
  
  • Icon
    
    • Image
    • Diagram
    • Metaphor
  • Index
  • Symbol

The Tetrast (talk) 17:45, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

My edits of Categories (Aristotle)

I have tried to take a fresh look at The Categories. I see nothing in what Aristotle wrote to suggest that state refers to clothing, per se. (I think when I first saw that interpretation my immediate thought was like --- oh my goodness, you've got to be kidding!!)

Yet I see that it is the standard interpretation... I think that must be a later interpretation, probably coming from Latin translations. (I've only read Aristotle in English translations. So I can't claim to be an expert in such matters.) I do not believe it came from Porphyry, so I tend to blame Boethius. I am not enough of a historian to know for sure, however. I think it is the sort of thing that on the surface may be plausible enough --- so that no one ever asked if there was another interpretation for it. All I can tell from what Aristotle wrote is in two verb forms he gave as examples. That is all I have to go by.

Much the same is true of position. All I have to go by is two verb forms.

Once one comes to think of them in terms of verb forms, then the association is obvious --- the four categories: action, passion, state and position are really just different forms of one underlying category, divided by two bifurcations: active/passive and motion/rest. Combining active and motion yields action. Combining active and rest yields position. Combining passive and motion yields passion. Combining passsive and rest yields state.

Like you, I am fascinated by C. S. Peirce. Perhaps that is why I wanted to take a fresh look at Aristotle. I took a course from Bill Davis at Auburn University many, many years ago. What he said about Peirce remains with my even today.

There are, of course, difficulties in any interpretation. But I think I can work out a good many of them.

--Sophroniscus (talk) 20:01, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

---

I have realized that Aristotle mentioned position in his discussion of quality. "Rarity and density, roughness and smoothness, seem to be terms indicating quality: yet these, it would appear, really belong to a class different from that of quality. For it is rather a certain relative position of the parts composing the thing thus qualified which, it appears, is indicated by each of these terms. A thing is dense, owing to the fact that its parts are closely combined with one another; rare, because there are interstices between the parts; smooth, because its parts lie, so to speak, evenly; rough, because some parts project beyond others." I am not sure how to fit this in with the overall scheme of the categories.

--Sophroniscus (talk) 04:55, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

I dug up the Greek (as fixed up by scholars I don't know how) on page 27 of this djvu file http://meta.montclair.edu/ancient/greek/aristotle_greek/opera1/INDEX.djvu
Τὸ δὲ μανὸν καὶ τὸ πυκνὸν καὶ τὸ τραχὺ καὶ τὸ λεῖον δόξειε μέν ἂν ποιόν τι σημαίνειν, ἔοικε δὲ ἀλλότρια τὰ τοιαῦτα εἶναι τῆς περὶ τὸ ποιὸν διαιρέσεως θέσιν γὰρ μᾶλλόν τινα φαίνεται τῶν μορίων ἑκάτερον δηλοῦν. Πυκνὸν μὲν γὰρ τῷ τὰ μόρια σύνεγγυς εἶναι ἀλλήλοις, μανὸν δὲ τῷ διεστάναι ἀπ’ ἀλλήλων καὶ λεῖον μὲν τῷ ἐπ’ εὐθείας πως τὰ μόρια κε̑ῖσθαι, τραχὺ δὲ τῷ τὸ μὲν ὑπερέχειν τὸ δὲ ἐλλείπειν.

Here it is with fewer diacritical marks
Το δε μανον και το πυκνον και το τραχυ και το λειον δόξειε μέν αν ποιόν τι σημαίνειν, έοικε δε αλλότρια τα τοιαυτα ειναι της περι το ποιον διαιρέσεως θέσιν γαρ μαλλόν τινα φαίνεται των μορίων ‛εκάτερον δηλουν. Πυκνον μεν γαρ τω τα μόρια σύνεγγυς ειναι αλλήλοις, μανον δε τω διεστάναι απ’ αλλήλων και λειον μεν τω επ’ ευθείας πως τα μόρια κεισθαι, τραχυ δε τω το μεν ‛υπερέχειν το δε ελλείπειν.
The key word "keisthai" is used in the final sentence. I think that the key thing to remember here (as I've mentioned somewhere or other, noting that keisthai does indeed involve disposition of parts) is the importance in ancient Greek statues of the idea of due proportion, due rhythm, flow, in the disposition of parts. Consider also Plato on the role of rhythm in daily life and work, somewhere in the Laws I think, talking about the rocking of babies and so on. The category keisthai is that of the disposition of parts as expressive or reflective of a kind of flow or rhythm, of movement actual or potential, and this is not a Greek idiosyncrasy. The words "disposition" and "attitude" likewise mean a certain poisedness for action. "Attitude" comes from the same word as "aptitude," meaning an aptness to or for something. The ancient Greek word rhythmos comes from a word meaning "to flow" and, according to the poet Zukofsky, passed through stages of meaning "shape," "rhythm," and finally "style." The density or rarity of a kind of material is a quality of the material insofar as it is essential to that kind. But, if you had something which could switch from rarity to density just as something which changes its posture, then rarity and density would be positions or postures (keisthai) of that thing. Insofar as density or rarity can vary for the same thing such as H₂O as a result of what is done to the H₂O, the rarity and density are different states or conditions (echein). The Tetrast (talk) 17:18, 27 June 2009 (UTC).

To continue. I've mentioned the correlation with the four causes.

Efficient cause. Matter.

End. Form.

Now consider the four categories in question"

Action, Doing. Position, attitude.

Done-to, undergoing. State, condition.

When we consider a thing's action or doing, we consider what the thing does rather than what (i.e., the efficient cause) does or makes the thing. Likewise, in considering the keisthai (position, attitude) of a thing, there is to consider not what, qua other, "bears" the thing but rather the thing's bearing or carrying - carrying itself or bearing up under something, etc. Bearing, carriage, demeanor, are simply keisthai in motion. The Tetrast (talk) 17:42, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Still more:

Action, doing. Agent. Position, attitude, stance. Stander, endurer.

Done-to, undergoing. State, condition.

Now, this gets a bit tricky. When we think of an agent's action as a doing, as distinguished from its action as a result, then we think of its doings as pushings and pullings, and so on, impartings of momenta or motions, as distinguished from the energetic work done which it necessarily involves and which we must also consider even as we distinguish it mentally. Now, though nowadays such things can be quantitatively distinguished (impulse, force, etc., versus work, power, etc., though this is not to say that impulse "causes" work), still we can't really qualitatively conceive of a doing in isolation from a thing done. In the same way, if we consider something bearing up, standing, enduring, we consider also, while distinguishing, a resultant stasis, an arrangement of parts, structure-like, state-like. But as long as we conceive of it through the standing, the lying, the gait, the demeanor, the rhythm (Aristotle didn't know it, but mass is a time quantity), etc., we are still conceiving of it through the bearer side of the bearer-borne distinction. Unfortunately this works better if one makes a distinction which Aristotle didn't make, between bearing (enduring, bearing up under) and undergoing (being driven by, yielding to). The Greek word paschô (whence "pathos") is unfriendly to this distinction, but the corresponding Latin word patior (whence not only "passion" but also "patience") is friendly to it. The kind of undergoing involved in being driven is a kind of impatience.
agent --- act
bearer -- borne
The bearer to some extent yields, undergoes (in the act, the work done) but also to some extent bears up and endures, and the borneness is that of the agency borne, endured, not entirely getting its way. A form or structure is the stable balancement and borneness of various agencies. If the matter is patiens qua supportans vel sustinens, the form is the supportatum or sustentum, the agentia supportata vel sustenta or their supportedness, borneness. (Analogously one dithers between regarding the act as the patient-as-driven or as the drivenness or as the thing wrought from the patient, etc.). So in defending the conceptions of keisthai and echein as stance and state respectively, I'm led away from the Aristotelian and Scholastic conception of form as act. Instead, form is the supportatum or supportatio. The Tetrast (talk) 17:05, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Also note: "We spoke, moreover, of the category of position when we were dealing with that of relation, and stated that such terms derived their names from those of the corresponding attitudes." and "It is to be noted that lying and standing and sitting are particular attitudes, but attitude is itself a relative term. To lie, to stand, to be seated, are not themselves attitudes, but take their name from the aforesaid attitudes."

--Sophroniscus (talk) 06:16, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Joe Ransdell

I had no idea my little article about Joe would grab your immediate attention. You must have spies watching me...

--Sophroniscus (talk) 22:31, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

I put your user page on my watch list when we were talking about Aristotle's categories. I've been on Wikipedia a lot lately, revising the CSP articles. The Tetrast (talk) 22:54, 24 November 2009 (UTC).

Credit for Charles Sanders Peirce article

Hi there. I didn't actually write that early version of the article; I simply imported it from Nupedia at that time. The actual author was Jaime Nubiola, who had submitted it to Nupedia. I don't know if Jaime was ever an active Wikipedian. -- Stephen Gilbert (talk) 20:28, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. Jaime Nubiola is a real Peirce scholar, director of the Peirce Studies Group at the University of Navarra in Spain. It feels good to know that I recognized good work without knowing that an established Peirce scholar wrote it. The Tetrast (talk) 20:41, 4 June 2009 (UTC). P.S. I knew that Nubiola had done some work appearing in the Peirce article somewhere along the way but I hadn't known it was or included the text in question. I also heard that Nubiola did something at the "Truth" page once. The Tetrast (talk) 20:44, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

American philosophy

First of all, thank you for your help with the pragmatism sections in this article. Recently, however, we've had something going on with the paragraph on Ayn Rand. Could you give us your perspective over at Talk:American philosophy? JEN9841 (talk) 04:05, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Benjamin Peirce's criterion

Hi Tetrast! I made a few updates, as noted on my talk page (responding to your earlier posting). I mention this for your convenience. Best regards, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 20:06, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

pp.

I'm the operator of FrescoBot. I included the exception in order to avoid the pp separation. However the half-linked pp is pretty strange... is it correct? -- Basilicofresco (msg) 20:26, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

I don't know whether it's correct. It was just a nicety, which helped make it a bit clearer that there was a link (especially to readers who have image-downloading turned off, as I sometimes do), especially when the linked page's number itself is a solitary little digit. Since periodic sweeps by bot users are to expected, I decided to put both "p"s outside the link - keep it simple not just for me but for one and all. And you've already gone ahead and incorporated an exception! Well, we're both accommodating. Best bet is that I'm the only person who would be so hair-splitting as to embed half a "pp." in a link, so I'd recommend dis-incorporating the exception. But thank you for the thoughtfulness of incorporating it.

Alternately, I could put "pp." entirely inside the link, but I found that unappealing from a logical standpoint, since it's a link to just one page. But maybe I could do it anyway when the page number is a single digit. Well, whatever. Meanwhile, I've already made the requisite alterations in the Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography article (which had a whole lot of such cases half-embedded "pp."s). I'll get to the other Peirce articles, where there may be cases here and there, but you don't need to wait for me if they're on your itinerary. Incidentally, thanks to your edits I found a link that was already broken, probably because of my own earlier bad editing. Not the first time that somebody's edits have helpfully revealed a pre-existent problem to me. The Tetrast (talk) 20:51, 27 February 2010 (UTC).

Thanks again

Thanks for your editing help and continued exemplary WP citizenship. Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 12:03, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

That's too kind of you. Anyway, keep firing them Melville's Jack Chase cannons, and call me in where you think I can help. The Tetrast (talk) 06:34, 28 March 2010 (UTC).

underscores

Tetrast, I replied on my talk page, but to save you time:

I use the secure.wikimedia.org server to work, and I noticed that when I select the links with spaces the secure server just seems to give up. But when I use the underscore the secure server seems to understand better. Of course, since the latest updates, the secure server seems to be broken anyway, so my changes are probably niceties, and hopefully redundant. --Ancheta Wis (talk) 12:50, 28 March 2010 (UTC)

Pragmaticism and instrumentalism

Comment on Talk:Pragmaticism#instrumentalism

Tkuvho had started a new section "instrumentalism" in Talk:Pragmaticism with the comment: Should this be compared with instrumentalism? Tkuvho (talk) 12:46, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Kiefer.Wolfowitz had responded:

This might be useful: Can you find a reliable source discussing the two ideas?

(IMHO/POV/OR(?): Instrumentalism seems to have been a degenerate version of pragmaticism, that was skeptical (or hostile) towards a central tenant of pragmaticism: the notion that the truth is "out there" and that it is essential to scientific progress to consider unobserved objects that cannot now be scientifically observed or tested, but that later scientists (or scientists of different species at different times and on different planets) could assess via experimentation.) Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 15:30, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

My response now:

Peirce thought that conceptions should be understood in terms of the conceivable practical consequences of their conceived objects, but it was only at a late stage that he stated firmly that this did not imply actualization of the consequences (even when only for later researchers a long, long time from now, very far away), and that a concept has practical-consequence meaning even if such consequences happened never to be actualized. Peirce's pragmaticism, in the strict sense, is about elucidation of conceptions into such meanings (it's about how to make our ideas clear - "making" them true or proven goes beyond that) and is not a whole method of science, but just a stage in that method, though it ramifies throughout the method and into Peirce's metaphysics as well. While Peirce would reject instrumentalism to the extent that it can be taken to abandon explanation and focus only on prediction, the capacity to predict was definitely for Peirce a gauge of scientific success - the success of explanations. And yet there's a kind of echo of instrumentalism. When Peirce talks about clarifying things by focusing on whether a given distinction makes a practical difference, he does not mean that a distinction that makes no practical difference is automatically worthless. An important test of whether an abstraction mirrors the concrete from which it abstracted is that it makes no practical difference (except to the practice of developing of conceptions, for instance in mathematics - it may make a lot of difference to that practice). In §7 of "s:A New List of Categories" Peirce discusses the sameness of black and embodying blackness, such that one of them would be superfluous but notes that the abstraction blackness is necessary in order for us to conceive of the respect in which two black things agree - to make that respect into the object of a conception. He later called it a hypostatic or subjectal abstraction. When such abstractions work indispensably, they are thereby shown to have a kind of validity or reality or objectivity. But how far would Peirce go? What about physical reasoning that (as seems to happen these days - but I'm no physicist) passes through scenarios that don't merely happen not to get actualized, but in fact never could be actualized? I can't see Peirce barring such reasoning, and to that extent pragmaticism seems to support a limited kind of instrumentalism - an instrumentalism that "knows its limits". The physical theory is not the same thing as a given useful but non-inevitable formalism which is employed for it and which culminates in the theoretical results whose match with observations is what matters. On the other hand, when a formalism or set of alternative formalisms is indispensable, and (aside from whether it paints an "impossible" picture with infinite energies and the like), one can't see what concrete reality they represent (except in their results), there maybe Peirce would have a problem; so I'm doubtful that he would have embraced the Copenhagen interpretation. The Tetrast (talk) 19:03, 18 April 2010 (UTC). Edited The Tetrast (talk) 19:20, 18 April 2010 (UTC). Edited again! The Tetrast (talk) 19:31, 18 April 2010 (UTC).

Kiefer.Wolfowitz, thank you for your remarks in your edit summary. I think that your question to Tkuvho, "Can you find a reliable source discussing the two ideas?" is the most practical remark so far. I wish I knew the answer to it. I'm kind of weak on comparison & contrast of Peirce with others (note how I hedged my remark about instrumentalism "to the extent that it can be taken to abandon explanation..."). The Tetrast (talk) 02:24, 19 April 2010 (UTC).

Thanks again for your kind words. It's always a pleasure to work with you on improving articles. I wrote the following on the other page:

However, Peirce criticized the instrumentalism of Ernest Mach (for being back-ward looking in summarizing previous ideas rather than in helping to find new laws): See pages 506-507 in

• Stewart, W. Christopher (1991). "Social and Economic Aspects of Peirce's Conception of Science". Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. Vol. 27, no. 4. Indiana Univerity Press. pp. 501–526. JSTOR 40320349. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |chapterNoShow= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |season= ignored (|date= suggested) (help)

However, Peirce applauded Mach's economic analysis of theories (information-compression).

Here, I'll add that I neglected to check the primary sources, to make sure that Peirce is accurately represented by Stewart, but the article seems to be rather good scholarship. Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 22:54, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

I don't have access to JSTOR articles, but here's Peirce in the CP:
Peirce on Mach:
CP 1.122 in The Economy of Research (c. 1896). "Dr. Ernst Mach, who has one of the best faults a philosopher can have, that of riding his horse to death, does just this with his principle of Economy in science."
CP 2.86, from "Minute Logic" 1902, passing mention of Mach's guesses about rectilinear motion as a counterexample to how physicists proceed.
CP 4.1, from the 2nd 1898 lecture, discussing nominalism versus realism, with Mach as nominalistic and Hegeler as realistic: "It is as pressing today as ever it was, Ernst Mach, for example, holding that generality is a mere device for economising labor while Hegeler, though he extols Mach to the skies, thinks he has said that man is immortal when he has only said that his influence survives him."
CP 5.601 (from the 8th Lowell Lecture of 1903): "It is Prof. Ernst Mach who has done the most to show the importance in logic of the consideration of Economy although I had written a paper on the subject as early as 1878. But Mach goes altogether too far. For he allows thought no other value than that of economizing experiences. This cannot for an instant be admitted. Sensation, to my thinking, has no value whatever except as a vehicle of thought."
CP 7.220 footnote, c. 1901: "The whole service of logic to science, whatever the nature of its services to individuals may be, is of the nature of an economy. So much truth, -- and more than this, -- I concede to the doctrine of Ernst Mach, although I cannot approve of the extreme length to which he carries the theory of economy. . . ."
CP 7.484 and following, "Relative and Absolute Motion," criticizing Mach on motion.
The Tetrast (talk) 16:50, 13 June 2010 (UTC).

Peirce on continuum

Thanks for updating the Peirce bibliography. More references should be added, in addition to the Moore volume (which has not even come out yet!). Incidentally, there is a suitable page already continuum (theory) where a section on philosophy could be added. Tkuvho (talk) 13:25, 6 May 2010 (UTC) P.S. I just noticed that you had already added Havenel and Dauben in an earlier edit, thanks! Dauben has a paper from the 70s that's of interest as well. Tkuvho (talk) 13:28, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Supply some references, I'll add them. As for expanding the Continuum theory wiki, like I've said, I feel underqualified to supply the main basis for a philosophical discussion of the continuum. I could tweak the results as regards Peirce, help with footnotes etc. The Tetrast (talk) 14:30, 6 May 2010 (UTC).

Hmm... I feel the same way about it. Is there another editor who could be interested in starting a section at continuum (theory)? John Lane's piece at the Stanford encyclopedia is a good starting point. Tkuvho (talk) 08:11, 7 May 2010 (UTC) Incidentally, Continuum theory is not the right page as it redirects to continuum (topology), which is unrelated. Tkuvho (talk) 08:14, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

I don't know of another editor for the job. The Tetrast (talk) 00:56, 9 May 2010 (UTC).

What about posting a more or less detailed request at the philosophy project page? Tkuvho (talk) 12:34, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

I don't know anything about the folks there. It couldn't hurt, though. Go ahead and try it. The Tetrast (talk) 00:52, 10 May 2010 (UTC).

OK, well, we have a bit of a start of a discussion there, but not too many participants so far. Would you care to contribute a comment there? Perhaps it may generate greater interest. Tkuvho (talk) 08:21, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Why don't you just tell them what you want? You want there to be an article covering philosophy about infinity & the continuum, but you don't feel qualified to write it and the guy who edits the main Peirce article doesn't feel qualified to write it, and you're hoping that they know somebody who would write it. Tell them about the upcoming books which would help make such an article timely, just ahead of the curve - one book a selection of Peirce's works on infinity & the continuum, and the other an anthology about Peirce's views of infinity & the continuum. Provide the books' names, editors, planned publication dates, etc., and links to the publisher pages where they can view the table of contents if that's provided (I think that it is in the case of selection of Peirce's continuum works). The Tetrast (talk) 21:26, 14 May 2010 (UTC).

I added some comments at continuum (theory), please feel free to elaborate. Tkuvho (talk) 15:47, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Good work, again, you two! Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 21:22, 25 May 2010 (UTC) (A fan from Sweden)

As editor Tkuvho is aware, I added some Peircian references to the talk page of the article on infinitesimals. Best regards, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 16:44, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

pointcruft

At least I hope you agree "examplefarm" doesn't apply either. Knodeltheory (talk) 20:53, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

I can see why you removed it; it strikes you as misleading. I don't know the intent of the person who originally inserted it, but there was some discussion among editors about "what's too trivial" and unfortunately I can't remember which numbers' talk pages it was on; some of it was on the Numbers project talk page. It's Saturday night so — tomorrow I'll track it all down and provide links. A majority in that discussion had agreed that the number pages are basically collections of interesting items (even the mathematical information is sort of "fun facts" about a given number, math doesn't really study individual numbers, there's no "monology", "duology", etc.), and that nevertheless "something should be done" for the number pages, so that they include text about how items shouldn't be too trivial or unnoteworthy; a couple of editors discussed formulating a standard. Then the discussion simply died out and later the "examplefarm" template got inserted.
I should note that when I said "discuss mass deletions on talk page," I meant the article's talk page, not my talk page though it's perfectly okay with me to discuss it here if that's your preference. Anyway, give me till tomorrow to come back to this and retrace the discussion. If you prefer to move this to an article talk page, go ahead and copy this discussion here so far to Talk:4 (number), or just let me know and I'll do it.The Tetrast (talk) 00:27, 6 June 2010 (UTC).
I'm thinking that maybe we should revisit that earlier discussion and get the ball rolling on it. The Tetrast (talk) 00:34, 6 June 2010 (UTC).

I reverted about a dozen of his removals, and pointed him to a new discussion section at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Numbers#WP:POINTCRUFT edit summaries. Perhaps that would be appropriate. (I still don't know where WP:POINTCRUFT may have been pointed to; it now points to the same place as WP:POINT.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 08:03, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Quite by coincidence, I was at Bible study yesterday when another one of the students brought up something about the number 3 in the old Jewish theological tradition and how it has been re-interpreted by Christianity. I was pretty sure the Wikipedia article had that very bit of information, so I looked it up, and I couldn't find it. I didn't pursue the matter further at the time because we had gotten on enough of a tangent as it was.

Later that night, I saw in the history that a good 14 kilobytes were restored to the article. Guess what? It still doesn't have the bit of information I was looking for! Or maybe it does have it, but it's buried in such a muddled mess that it's beyond my ability to find it. Or maybe that bit of information is in a very, very old version of the article. Or maybe my memory is playing tricks on me and that bit of information has never been in Wikipedia.

Whatever the truth of that may be, it's pretty clear that in the tug of war between focusing these articles exclusively on mathematics and filling them with any and every thing that has anything to do with a particular number, these articles have become pretty useless to anyone who just wants to find some particular bit of information. James470 (talk) 21:15, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

There isn't a muddled mess, instead there have been extensive deletions. (To view an article's edit history, go to that article, then click on the "View History" tab near the top.) I looked through the edit history and used the year & month fields to jump back to a June 2009 version. There are many items there about religious threes, including threes from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Most of those items have been deleted since then, I don't clearly remember why, somebody was eager to cut the article's size and for my part I settled for saving some things, not all. Some of the Ancient Greek/Roman mythological threes look questionable to me but quite a few look noteworthy. I didn't find anything about a Christian reinterpretation of a Jewish three but maybe you recognized it where it wasn't made explicit?
I agree it would be nice if the wiki were a little more stable. It should be possible for people to look over these things for patterns, developments, reinterpretations, or hints thereof. I occasionally wonder about cultural patterns across threes myself though I've gotten the sense that such a pattern is more the exception than the rule (likewise with fours). But let people judge for themselves. There have been some patterns here and there, I think. The Tetrast (talk) 22:48, 6 June 2010 (UTC).

I'm sure Jim knows how to look through the history. But when you have hundreds of revisions to go through, and not a clue as to the motives of the various editors, it becomes an exercise in futility to find the information that you remember a Wikipedia article had at one point. In the course of my ill-explained deletions I found that someone had deleted the mathematical properties off 81 (number); I had to look back several revisions to find it and restore it. Isn't that the part ALMOST EVERYONE AGREES NUMBER ARTICLES OUGHT TO HAVE? Knodeltheory (talk) 19:07, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Why are you shouting at me? I never deleted mathematical info from any number article or any other article, and have restored vandalized math info numerous times. I even added some though I didn't write it very well (I've just now rewritten it). This is not about math deletors vs. culture deletors, or something like that. The Tetrast (talk) 20:34, 7 June 2010 (UTC).

As you already know, there are advantages to real-time wiki editing. But with these number articles, I feel like we're only getting the disadvantages. The subject matter has hardly changed in the past decade, yet there is such a flurry of changes to the articles that it takes extremely careful examination to determine what is of value, what is not, and what is simply redundant. (The heavy preference for bulleted lists doesn't help, as it seems to encourage people to add stuff at the end of the list without checking whether or not the item is already somewhere in the middle.

The other Bible student said he'll bring the book he read that stuff in to the next class; he thinks Wikipedia cited that book at some point but doesn't anymore. If you care to know what happens with that, just let me know and I'll tell you next week. James470 (talk) 02:23, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I definitely want to know, thank you for the offer. I've restored most (but not all) of the 3 (number) religion & myth material from its deletive edit in September 2009, and eliminated most of the redundancies. The Tetrast (talk) 02:40, 8 June 2010 (UTC).

Alright, I'll let you know next Sunday or Monday. James470 (talk) 22:55, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

The guy forgot to bring the book. James470 (talk) 02:18, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Can you get the names of the book and author? Then I can do some searching through old versions of the article. The Tetrast (talk) 02:47, 15 June 2010 (UTC).

You are now a Reviewer

Hello. Your account has been granted the "reviewer" userright, allowing you to review other users' edits on certain flagged pages. Pending changes, also known as flagged protection, is currently undergoing a two-month trial scheduled to end 15 August 2010.

Reviewers can review edits made by users who are not autoconfirmed to articles placed under pending changes. Pending changes is applied to only a small number of articles, similarly to how semi-protection is applied but in a more controlled way for the trial. The list of articles with pending changes awaiting review is located at Special:OldReviewedPages.

When reviewing, edits should be accepted if they are not obvious vandalism or BLP violations, and not clearly problematic in light of the reason given for protection (see Wikipedia:Reviewing process). More detailed documentation and guidelines can be found here.

If you do not want this userright, you may ask any administrator to remove it for you at any time. Courcelles (talk) 18:02, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Fixation of belief and Peirce user-box

It seems that the end of one of the two Wikisources on "Fixation of Belief" is corrupted, since the "worthy knight" finale is missing.

You (and your readers) might find this amusing! (Comments are welcome! Cheers, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 17:26, 4 July 2010 (UTC) )

This user "strives to be the worthy knight and champion of" Charles Sanders Peirce.

Nice template! I checked via the link and I found the "worthy knight" finale there.
I wish that they hadn't given the articles such long URLs. I want to embed the URLs in the list of important articles in the main Peirce wiki. The Tetrast (talk) 18:01, 4 July 2010 (UTC).

Oh, the other link! Thanks, Kiefer, I've repaired it now, with a nod to you in the edit line. That version was missing the final paragraph - the version at Peirce.org likewise! Wikisource's "newer" Popular Science version was missing an em dash. Looks like the punctuation will need to be checked on all the recently imported Popular Science texts. Yikes. The Tetrast (talk) 18:53, 4 July 2010 (UTC).

~

Thanks for the repair work (and the generous nod!)! Cheers, Kiefer.Wolfowitz (talk) 18:57, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

I alerted the proprietor of Peirce.org, and the missing paragraph has since been added there, too. The Tetrast (talk) 23:46, 5 July 2010 (UTC).

Talkback

Hey just letting you know I want to discuss the definition of abduction on the talkpage of that article, mainly with you (I'm actually here to discuss, not just argue, so don't worry), but on that talkpage so other users can find it. Happy editing.--Heyitspeter (talk) 09:48, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Definition of abduction (cont'd)

Continued from Talk:Abductive reasoning#Definition_of_abduction

WMdeMuynck, that's a thought, for my part I'll have to think about it, but the thing is, if we decide that abduction depends in some essential way on circumstantial evidence, then that's our "original research" - we can't just put it into the wiki.
Heyitspeter, the situation isn't as bad as you think. It's the same in deduction. We can note that B implies C without proceeding to deduce C from B. We don't deduce everything that we see that we could deduce, and this is clear when it matters what we deduce, for example in deducing predictions from a hypothesis. Many deducible propositions would fail to place the premisses in an aspect either new or nontrivial - but usually we won't define deduction by novelty or nontriviality - those characteristics instead contribute to making a deduction not valid or sound, but valuable (in usual situations, not logical-axiom selection situations - "A is A" is a truism till somebody might deny it, then it is a capital-T Truth; well, objective truth properties don't behave like that, but you know what I mean). At this point, I rambled on and it becomes inappropriate for this talk page. So I'm copying the above and moving the rest to my talk page, if anybody is interested. (If we get back to stuff that'll affect how the wiki is edited, that should, I think, still be on the Abductive inference talk page.)

Now, to deduce C from B is not merely to determine that B implies C, though to deduce C from B does involve determining that B implies C. Implication is not inference (much less proof, which depends on inferential soundness), any more than correlation is actual connection or causation.

And one could look at it technically. A statement in the form "If all A is B and all B is C, then all A is C" is truth-functional and true. The corresponding argument in the form "All A is B, all B is C, ergo all A is C" is not truth-functional or true or false; it is valid (well, the schema is valid, as Quine would prefer to say). If its premisses are true, then the valid deduction is sound ("p & not p, ergo q" is valid but cannot be sound - I think there should be a term for that - "formally unsound" might suffice in a pinch). Anyway, in that sense implication and inference are not the same thing.

From a practical viewpoint, with an inference one is moving from premisses to conclusion and "setting oneself up," so to speak, on the conclusion as on a new base; whereas a conditional proposition ("if p then q" as logically equivalent to "not both p and not q") is simply a compound proposition, not a 'movement' (though Peirce often treated it that way, not indefensibly at all, but still technically inference expresses the movement, while formal and material implications do not). One becomes concerned not only with implication relations or even only with implications and valid arguments, but furthermore with building a structure of knowledge through sound arguments to sound conclusions as bases supporting further such arguments and conclusions.

(Let me note that I realized (by remembering a more general problem) that another problem with defining abduction of A from B as determining that A is unnecessary but sufficient for B, is that it also would make it harder to distinguish abduction from induction; also I've wondered whether something like that is involved in why Peirce spoke of "a matter of course" rather than "a matter of necessity". One can avoid the problem by avoiding that particular formulation, but more generally it bothers me that the inference modes are distinguished from each other in varyingly simple/complicated ways by their respective implication relations - IMHO that manner of distinguishing the modes should instead be simple and straightforward across all the modes, so I'm not satisfied with any of the usual or traditional definitions of abduction - my POV.)

Peirce said some more things about what makes abduction work, but I don't know that subsequent researchers have gone along with all of them; and a statistician who edits Wikipedia told me that Peirce's earlier view of abduction as induction of characteristics was the influential one in statistics because it's the one in some works that Peirce wrote in 1878 ("Illustrations of the Logic of Science") and 1883 ("A Theory of Probable Inference") that were quite influential in the late 19th Century. Peirce got them confused partly because his earlier form for abduction really does seem to cover induction of characteristics as well ("All this bag's beans are white; these beans are white; ergo (hypothetically) these beans are from this bag"). He decided to worry less both about the syllogistic forms and about comprehension and extension (the attribution of characters to objects).

As to how we select hypotheses, in everyday life often a person settles untentatively on a guess as true without even intending to test it, when the guess is not only of a simple explanation but also has no competitors - one can't think of any other explanation. In deliberate rational inquiry, as Peirce noted, one goes not just for that which seems the best, simplest explanation but for the explanation which is testable (in the mind or physically, whatever) and indeed best worth trying - so even if the hypothesis seems unlikely (though still simplifying and plausible), one prefers to test it at or near the start if it's cheap to test for falsity while if it stands up to testing then the seemingly unlikely hypothesis could be especially significant (but if the hypothesis seems even more surprising than the phenomenon that it's supposed to explain, then probably one won't try it in the first place; but such surprisingness is at least difficult to quantify objectively). The testability of an abductive conclusion (a hypothesis) is an important constraint, and Peirce came to regard all three modes of inference as making incomplete sense separately from each other. Instead he came to see all three as clarified by their cooperative roles in inquiry. Abduction proposes a hypothesis from which deduction can deduce predictive conclusions such that induction can test them and evaluate the hypothesis. So the abduction's aim at simplicity and naturalness is a kind of proximate aim; abduction has longer aim to provide new ideas for deduction and induction and thereby move inquiry forward; Peirce held that all explanatory content and new ideas in a theory come ultimately from abduction.

Now, Peirce focused on this idea of the plausible, simple, natural explanation, distinguishing such simplicity from any idea of probability, likeliness, whatever. It's not that the truth is always and unfailingly simple and natural to us; instead it's that looking for simple and natural explanations is the only way to truth when new ideas are needed in order to grasp a truth, and that's part of Peirce's inductive general rationale for abduction. Peirce also thought that we are attuned sufficiently by instinct to nature that what seems natural to us sometimes really is so, and that our guesses are bad less often than guesses by pure luck would be; this seems not a purely philosophical question, but some sort of question also for a special science of homo sapiens or of intelligent life more generally; and Peirce furthermore said in 1902 that the art of abductive inference is governed by the economics of research, which as a science is a special science, a part of economics. This partial movement of abduction as a topic from philosophy into special sciences is something that Peirceans seem not to emphasize (and Peirce said in 1903 the question of philosophical pragmatism is the question of abduction), but I'm not familiar enough with the secondary literature to say for sure (there's a lot of it). In my view philosophy can have plenty to say about abduction but the nitty-gritty of the study of abduction will be in the special sciences (just as the nitty-gritty of the study of induction has its proper locus in fields like philosophy (first of all, and ideally if not actually) and statistics, which I count as a "general field" like philosophy).

Anyway, again the way I look at it is, that what makes a given inference a legitimate or valid instance of its kind, is not the same thing as what makes that given inference valuable. An abductive conclusion should bring simplicity/naturalness to the abductive inference in the sense in which a deductive conclusion should place the premisses in a new aspect; the deductive conclusion brings novelty (a kind of surprisingness) or nontriviality (the nontrivial as the not simple and not obvious and instead at least bit complex). For very good reasons, we don't define deduction as inference both necessary and nontrivial (such would exclude obvious tautologies and anyway non-obviousness and nontriviality are hard to define, not to mention quantify), so I'd say that, analogously, we shouldn't define abduction by simplicity and naturalness; but one could say that those inference modes aim usually at those characteristics. The valid categorical syllogisms (Barbara and the rest) are all set up to have conclusions that are not completely trivial or lacking in a new aspect (that newness or novelty is also hard to define or quantify; technically the deductive conclusion never adds information to that which is already in the premisses). And that interest in the new or nontrivial aspect is at least part of why we don't deduce all that we can from some given premisses - we can note that some propositions are deducible, deductively implied, by the premisses but we skip them because they're pointless, unless we're actually looking for obvious tautologies (in order, say, to select some as logical postulates or axioms).

So we have these ironic "aspects" that inferences shoot for. Deduction that proceeds through equivalences should be nontrivial despite equivalence of information. Deduction which removes information should present a novel aspect via the conclusion, despite diminishment of information. Induction, though it actually adds information (and thus decreases security), should present a likely and reasonable aspect via its conclusion (that likeliness seems to be what Bayesians seek to quantify). Abduction, despite its complexity (in my view, it's the inference that adds some info and removes some other info - but that's not a Peircean or other standard definition, so now instead I call it "surmise"), should present a simple and natural aspect via its conclusion. People agree that those aspects are there, though they're hard (and persistently controversial) to define or quantify (likewise difficult to define or quantify is the inquiry-triggering surprisingness or complication of an observed phenomenon), and those aspects, though subjective in a sense, decisively affect all actual inquiry in its course. The ideas of validity, legitimacy, etc., do not address all important questions about inference. In the combined universal absence of those aspects of nontriviality, novelty, likeliness, and simplicity/naturalness, no inference would be worth making, no matter its technical validity or legitimacy as an inference. The Tetrast (talk) 16:54, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

entelechy

Hi! Did you get a chance to consider my proposal to merge entelechy in to the new version of potentiality and actuality? I believe that the new version covers all the material from entelechy without creating any new problems? If anything, by having the full sequence of related subjects in one article it maybe even makes more sense? (As mentioned to User:LoveMonkey if potentiality and actuality one day becomes too big, of course I have nothing against splitting at that point but potentiality and actuality is currently not a long article by any normal standard.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:37, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of C. S. Peirce categorial table

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A tag has been placed on C. S. Peirce categorial table requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a very short article providing little or no context to the reader. Please see Wikipedia:Stub for our minimum information standards for short articles. Also please note that articles must be on notable subjects and should provide references to reliable sources that verify their content.

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• A) You could have moved it yourself into the Template: namespace or B) you could have put a {{db-user}} tag on it. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 16:01, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

I'd have gladly done so, but I just couldn't move fast enough. I was looking up how to do such thing in Help. The Tetrast (talk) 16:03, 15 November 2010 (UTC).

Peirce on Dedekind

I noticed your recent comment about Peirce's criticism of Dedekind's "logicism". Where can one find out more about it? Tkuvho (talk) 21:06, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

The passage that I originally had in mind was in Peirce's application to the Carnegie Institution on linked page. But when I decided to add a footnote about it, I went and looked, and found that he notes Dedekind's view without getting into it. A quick search turned up no mention of Dedekind in Peirce (1898), "The Logic of Mathematics in Relation to Education" in Educational Review v. 15, pp. 209–16, Internet Archive Eprint, where Peirce talks about math helping logic. I don't recall Peirce using words like "logicist" or "logicism", so it'd take some searching through his mentions of Dedekind in CP & W in order to find out more. The Tetrast (talk) 21:14, 17 November 2010 (UTC).

Peirce mentions Dedekind's view in CP 4.249 CP 4.239, and proceeds to criticize the idea but not in the form of an argument with Dedekind. So much for CP, Dedekind, and logic as before or after math. The Tetrast (talk) 21:28, 17 November 2010 (UTC). Corrected. The Tetrast (talk) 21:30, 17 November 2010 (UTC).

I've checked the Writings and the reviews in The Nation and find nothing more by Peirce on Dedekind in connection with logic before/after math. The Tetrast (talk) 21:34, 17 November 2010 (UTC).

Is "CP 4.239" available online or perhaps you could copy whatever Peirce says about Dedekind? Logicism at the time would have been Frege's doing--or who does Peirce have in mind here? Tkuvho (talk) 07:48, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

It's in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce v. 4, paragraph 239. It is from the "Minute Logic" manuscripts and is dated by the editors as January-February, 1902. It's also been reprinted at least once, on p. 141 in "The Nature of Mathematics" in Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Peirce wrote, "The philosophical mathematician, Dr. Richard Dedekind, holds mathematics to be a branch of logic. This would not result from my father's definition, which runs, not that mathematics is the science of drawing necessary conclusions — which would be deductive logic — but that it is the science which draws necessary conclusions." He goes on to discuss this but doesn't mention Dedekind again. Maybe I shouldn't have used the word "logicism", maybe that's my retrospective exaggeration. Here's a search that should find the passage so that you can read it in Google preview http://www.google.com/search?q=Dedekind-holds-mathematics-to%2Bbe-a-branch. The Tetrast (talk) 17:37, 18 November 2010 (UTC).

Thanks very much, that's terrific. I am looking forward to seeing what Peirce has to say. I must admit from what you reproduce above I have no idea what is going on. what's the difference between "of drawing conclusions" and "that draws conclusions"? Is there some kind of a disquotational statement here? Puzzledly yours, Tkuvho (talk) 18:01, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

It's the difference between a science which draws necessary conclusions and a science ABOUT drawing necessary conclusions. Like the difference between a science which rides a bicycle and a science about riding a bicycle. The Tetrast (talk) 18:07, 18 November 2010 (UTC).

Maybe this summary will help. In Peirce's view:

• Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions.
• Logic itself is part of philosophy and is the science about drawing conclusions necessary and otherwise.
• Mathematics studies purely hypothetical objects.
• Philosophy studies positive phenomena in general (not special classes as physics, psychology, etc. do). Logic is philosophy that studies how positive phenomena in general represent and imply. Philosophy, including logic, does not resolve its questions through special experiences or special experiments; it does not rest on principles drawn from special sciences (e.g., physics, psychology, etc.).
• Mathematics is the most basic. It aids philosophy and logic, not vice versa. Mathematics and philosophy (including logic) aid the special sciences (physics, psychology, etc.)
• There is also mathematics of logic, and that is the most basic part of mathematics. Like the rest of mathematics, it draws necessary conclusions about purely hypothetical objects and is not about drawing conclusions necessary or otherwise.

Maybe a look at Classification of the sciences (Peirce) will help. FWIW, in my view, philosophy is about positive phenomena in general in the same sense that statistics is about positive phenomena in general. There's evidence that Peirce considered probability theory and statistical methods as applications of mathematics in philosophy and logic. The Tetrast (talk) 20:49, 18 November 2010 (UTC).

RE review

Already posted this on another editors page, this is not primary source but a commentary on a prmary source, if you have the time or when you have the time and you have the patience to pass the soapboxing in the article and look at the graph provided, would be interested in your opinions, it appears they have they may have fudge the results. [deleted pdf URL]

I am aware it is not suitable content for wiki, if it is a bother I respect that. no urgency here, you may find some of the commentaries amusing.

Jayseer (talk) 23:38, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

I deleted the pdf URL because when I tried to open it, I got an odd message from Adobe, then the browser tab froze, and I had to terminate the Adobe process. I don't know why that pdf was linked here, and why there's an invitation to read it without specification of what it's about. At this point I don't care and I will not read it in a pdf or allow the pdf to be linked here. The Tetrast (talk) 00:41, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

My aplogies, it was a statiscal analysis of an AA survey, the findings looked suspect. No problem I am close to a unversity, I will suss it out there. sorry about PDf was unaware of problems could occur.

regarding linking pdf files to the wiki, is it a violation of wiki policy to do so? You seemed very clear. Jayseer (talk) 01:42, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

No it's not a violation of general wiki policy and I've linked to pdfs too, but one is allowed to exert more control one's own user pages, as I do with a pdf that causes a problem with my computer. Regarding statistics and AA, I know little about statistics although maybe you thought that I know about statistics because I edited the Statistics wiki a few times recently - I did it because sometimes experts miss the forest for the trees and omit to say basic stuff helpful to the general reader. My text got moved but is still in the wiki so I guess it wasn't too amateurish. The Tetrast (talk) 02:40, 6 December 2010 (UTC).

Thanks

Thanks for the Scientific Method talk and the introduction to Charles Sanders Peirce. Zulu Papa 5 * (talk) 19:47, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

You're welcome. The Tetrast (talk) 22:43, 3 January 2011 (UTC).

Volume 4A: Combinatorial Algorithms of Donald Knuth's Art of Computer Programming

Hi Tetrast! Knuth has a lot on Pierce, half the time noting his priority on the Sheffer stroke! Cheers,  Kiefer.Wolfowitz  (Discussion) 21:29, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, Kiefer. I looked up Knuth Peirce and found Knuth talking about (drum roll) the Shaeffer stroke! (though not under that name). I didn't know that Knuth was so into Peirce. (I also didn't know how important Knuth is.)

I knew of Knuth only for his tetration arrow notation. I'm still stumped by this (misconceived?) puzzle:

pure math	idea from applied yet nontrivial math	quantification of said idea
extremum	optimum	a 'location', a distance (difference with direction)
measure	probability	ratio
(differentiation? function? something to do with groups)	information	logarithm
(ordering?)	logical complexus or datum	base (root)? hyperlog (associated with tetration)?

So I was looking at tetration but I lack the background for pursuing this puzzle.

Google lets me look at hardly anything but snippets of Knuth on Peirce. I've gotten busy lately - not as busy as you or others whom I know, but (whiny voice) I'm not uuused to it! Seriously, can you summarize Knuth's overall view of Peirce? The Tetrast (talk) 22:01, 1 March 2011 (UTC).

I cannot summarize AoCP4A, since it just arrived yesterday. He makes no effort to understand Peirce or explicate him. Knuth is trying to present the best understanding of the mathematics of computer programming, with careful attribution of priority (but not an attempt to provide a history). The index (p. 867) lists pages 48, 50, 53, 418, and 542 for Peirce; The real star is Peirce's triangle, on pages 418, 434-436, 438, 769, 771, and 779.

Knuth posted draft versions of sections as PDF files, which could be available (as pirated versions? or legal drafts?) somewhere:

Correction: Page 50 notes Peirce's "Peirce arrow" (found decades before the Sheffer stroke). Peirce is ignored when the Sheffer stroke appears on page 89, which also states a result of Schröder (Peirce??? again????).

Thanks! A historian of logic who's into Peirce told me that Peirce may not have originated the Peirce arrow symbol itself - it may have been Quine (the "Quine dagger" as it's also called). I remember once working with a problem which amounted to partitions (which I didn't know about), and hitting upon what I later learned were called the "Bell numbers" (it wasn't till rather later that I learned that Peirce found them). My way of calculating the numbers was hopelessly laborious and the series seemed recalcitrant and splendiferous. I kicked myself when I read of the easy way (Bell/Peirce triangle)! The Tetrast (talk) 22:56, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I should add here, don't let yourself get bogged down in the puzzle if it doesn't remind you of something right away. Anyway it's 4-chotomical, not trichotomical. The Tetrast (talk) 23:48, 1 March 2011 (UTC).

reason, intellect, intelligence

Hi! Wondering if you would look at this.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:11, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

proposal to delete the article Minimal negation operator

Hi Tetrast, I left a note on the CSP page. I trust that all is well with you! Best regards,  Kiefer.Wolfowitz  (Discussion) 20:56, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Working hypothesis

I was wondering if your could weigh in on the working hypothesis page. I have been having some trouble maintaining legitimate scholarly source material and accurate describing of the concept, specifically in the first sentence of the opening paragraph. Check out the discussion there to see further illustration of the problem. Thanks T.Whetsell (talk) 03:36, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Recognition

	'Worthy knight and champion' of Charles Sanders Peirce
	"The new Wikipedia material on Peirce is more reliable than usual", observed Professor John Collier of Auckland University, commending Wikipedia to the students of "Peirce and Rorty".  Kiefer.Wolfowitz 22:27, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that's a gratifying remark. Thanks for posting it to my user talk page, Kiefer. John is a long-time member of peirce-l though he hasn't been active there during the past year or two. He's extremely intelligent (and writes very clear posts). He has background in both science and philosophy and is into evolution and biosemiotics, among other things. The Tetrast (talk) 04:07, 21 September 2011 (UTC).

The principles of mathematics

Hi, Would you care to move some of the material on Peirce you added here to the main body of the article from the footnote? There seems to be agreement to that effect on the talk page. Tkuvho (talk) 16:37, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

The community of inquiry

I was wondering if you would weigh in at "the community of inquiry" article. As you probably know, this term is credited to Peirce. It's not a very good article, i've been trying to correct that.T.Whetsell (talk) 00:58, 5 June 2012 (UTC).

I've taken a quick look at the article. I can already see need for a few changes but I want to proceed carefully because I know little of Dewey and I don't have the Lipman reference on Peirce.
  Regarding the lead paragraph, and the idea the community of inquiry as somehow opposed to that of objective reality - that's not Peirce's view. Peirce wrote much oftener of "the real" than of "reality," but he held truth to be immutable and the real to be independent of actual opinion and destined to discovery by any who push investigation far enough - i.e., the real as objective, though he reserved the word "objective" for another sense. Peirce thought that he was at odds with the other pragmatists on truth's immutability, but he didn't single Dewey out in the discussion in "A Neglected Argument" (this stuff is in the Pragmaticism article). I don't know what Dewey thought about truth's immutability. I've heard that, in later years, Dewey moved closer to some of Peirce's positions. All of this makes it hard for me to think of specific revisions to the lead paragraph; but as it stands as a whole it does not reflect a view shared by Peirce and Dewey. Anyway, for Peirce, the social character of inquiry and the independence-and-discoverability (i.e., 'objectivity') of the real go hand in hand. "The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge." (from "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities".) Without definite limits: and therefore potentially capable of correcting errors as far as needed. Well, heck, all this stuff is too much for the lead paragraph and it doesn't even cover Dewey as far as I know.
  In the "Education" section: I don't know what Lipman originally said, but my understanding is that Peirce's interest in the community of inquiry was generally in the scientific kind, particularly that of scientists, but he didn't so restrict it by definition. (Note: for Peirce, a "scientific intelligence" is one capable of learning from experience.) By Peirce's definition of inquiry (in s:The Fixation of Belief), a community of inquiry could be unscientific (not to mention anti-scientific) - fashion-governed or authoritarian or even in thrall to initial opinions. The Tetrast (talk) 05:58, 5 June 2012 (UTC)

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