Pynchon & Politics( Lacey essay)

[alice wellintown]

Herbert Marcuse’s “Review of John Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry”

These logical forms arise ‘in operations of inquiry’, ‘inquiry’ is
their ‘causa essendi’. There are no unchangeable, universally valid
and fundamental propositions or categories; the ‘rationality’ of logic
is exclusively a concern of the relationship of ‘means and
consequences’. The fundamental propositions “state habits operative in
every inference that tends to yield conclusions that are stable and
productive in further inquiries” (LW 12:19). Their validity is based
on the “coherency of the consequences produced by the habits that they
articulate” (LW 12:20). Categories obtain their universality and
universal validity as a result of operations, by which it is
established that the determined qualities combined under a concept in
praxis (many different things to one “type”) yields useful
consequences. “Modes of active response” (LW 12:257) are the ground of
the universality of logical forms. As we will see later, ‘praxis’
(actions, modes of operation) for Dewey means fundamentally the praxis
of science (inquiry) or is characterized according to the model of
scientific praxis, once everything has been done in order to adjust
scientific praxis to, on the one hand, everyday experience that lies
in front of us (the world of ‘common sense’) and, on the other hand,
to societal praxis.

Following these theses that logical forms, as the basic principles of
inquiry, arise from the research3 itself, remain referred to the sense
of the research, and—just as much as their ‘subject-matter’— alter
themselves with the research, the ‘components’ of...



On 1/31/13, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
>
>
> 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.
>>>
>>
>