Pynchon & Politics( Lacey essay)

[Paul Mackin]

On 1/31/2013 4:28 AM, alice wellintown 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


Rules out Descartes.

P

> ,[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.
>>>