Pynchon & Politics( Lacey essay)

[alice wellintown]

We are speaking of Peirce and Pragmatism.
from Wiki,

Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere
verbal or hyperbolic doubt,[10] and said, in order to understand a
conception in a fruitful way, "Consider the practical effects of the
objects of your conception. Then, your conception of those effects is
the whole of your conception of the object",[11] which he later called
the pragmatic maxim. It equates any conception of an object to a
conception of that object's effects to a general extent of the
effects' conceivable implications for informed practice. It is the
heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental
reflection arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable
confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances — a method hospitable
to the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the
employment and improvement of verification. Typical of Peirce is his
concern with inference to explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual
foundational alternative between deductivist rationalism and
inductivist empiricism, although he was a mathematical logician and a
founder of statistics.



Scientists are free to use whatever resources they have — their own
creativity, ideas from other fields, induction, Bayesian inference,
and so on — to imagine possible explanations for a phenomenon under
study. Charles Sanders Peirce, borrowing a page from   **Aristotle
(Prior Analytics, 2.25)**   described the incipient stages of inquiry,
instigated by the "irritation of doubt" to venture a plausible guess,
as abductive reasoning. The history of science is filled with stories
of scientists claiming a "flash of inspiration", or a hunch, which
then motivated them to look for evidence to support or refute their
idea. Michael Polanyi made such creativity the centerpiece of his
discussion of methodology.

William Glen observes that

the success of a hypothesis, or its service to science, lies not
simply in its perceived "truth", or power to displace, subsume or
reduce a predecessor idea, but perhaps more in its ability to
stimulate the research that will illuminate … bald suppositions and
areas of vagueness.[56]

In general scientists tend to look for theories that are "elegant" or
"beautiful". In contrast to the usual English use of these terms, they
here refer to a theory in accordance with the known facts, which is
nevertheless relatively simple and easy to handle. Occam's Razor
serves as a rule of thumb for choosing the most desirable amongst a
group of equally explanatory hypotheses.

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On 1/30/13, Bled Welder <bledwelder at gmail.com> wrote:
> Al: Not AI, get your head out of the gutter:
>
> "Just because a person uses logic, or computation, or even if she works to
> revolutionize logic, does not mean that her method is logistic."
>
> You can say that only because "logistic" is a word that that's not actually
> a word.  It could possibly benefit from an 's' or on 'al' tacked to it's,
> very square, hind-end.
>
> Anyway the whole statement is absurd.  Imagine some poor sap, oh say Lord
> Russell, who works to revolutionize the whole industry of logic without
> ever once being the least bit logical about the whole business.
>
> I think form his Analysis of Mind, something around page 467ish:
> "That which has hitherto been called, 'logical', is really it's opposite:
> not logical, or as we like to call it down at The Lords' Pub, it is absurd.
>  In other
> words, that which is absurd, is logical, and that which is logical, is
> absurd.  Which is logical by virtue of its being, well, absurd.  Cheers."
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 5:58 PM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com
>> wrote:
>
>> > Pierce is very logistic. That is the nature of his " analysis". He
>> revolutionized Logic.
>>
>> OK. But I stick to what I wrote. It's a matter of terms. Just because
>> a person uses logic, or computation, or even if she works to
>> revolutionize logic, does not mean that her method is logistic.
>> Descartes' method is logistic. He, like Peirce wrote about his search
>> for and use of his method. Peirce, pardon the pun, doubted Descartes
>> doubting, and this because he disentangled it, he used his method, not
>> computation or logic, but analytic.
>>
>