Pynchon & Politics( Lacey essay)

[Paul Mackin]

On 1/31/2013 5:11 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
> 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...

logic is just another adaptive trait or characteristic

p
>
>
>
> 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.
>>>>