Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2000 11:22:54 -0700
Mr. Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496
| Subject: | Some ideas at the basis of logic (pt. 1) |
Rod:
Here are some jottings in lieu of more on NWO, as I still haven't had time to get back with it and these are just ideas put together in odd moments. I think they are relevant to what we have been talking about though.
Consider this the first part of a lengthier account of some basic ideas in Peirce's logic. I want to go on from this to relate something about his view of the relationship of logical to non-logical thinking, which might add something to the overall KM picture.
What is logic, as Peirce conceived it? Logic is the theoretical account of the norms which control the process of thinking insofar as it is devoted to discovering, maintaining, and conveying truth.
What is truth? It is not necessary to answer that philosophically to understand what he is doing, but it might be helpful to understand that, etymologically, the word "truth" originates in the context of concern with reliability and trust. A true X is an X that one can count on, rely upon, depend upon, put one's trust or confidence in, as when we speak of a true friend. (The word "betrothed" is of the same origin as "truth", by the way, signifying the trust involved in matrimony.) If we apply it to beliefs, opinions, convictions, etc., it means much the same.
This aligns it with the idea of the real, which originally referred to something associated with royalty, or rulership (as in the Spanish phrase "el camino real" -- the royal highway). "Real estate" was originally royal estate i.e. something having the status of royalty, hence the most reliable of all property. The real is that which is there regardless, perhaps with the further connotation of "like it or not".
Although we have a natural tendency to want the truth, i.e. to have beliefs that are reliable, we live in a world in which deception is a constant factor, and the beliefs we acquire are frequently unreliable for just that reason. Deception does not originate in human deviousness. The evolutionary process has resulted in selection for many natural deceptions, such as protective coloration, misleading mimicry, and so forth, which occurs at the most primitive levels of life, e.g. virus behavior can be understood as if it were the behavior of tricksters. This is doubtless why one of the most universal of all mythic figures is the figure of the Trickster. In fact, it could be argued that trickery and the corresponding need to outwit the trickster is the single most important factor driving the historical development of intelligence.
Advertising, public relations, salesmanship, etc., usually tries to justify its deceptive tendencies on the grounds that it stimulates sales and productivity, etc., and there is no doubt something in that, but it could also justify itself as making people more intelligent precisely because it is constantly tricking people. (But being tricksters the advertisers will not of course admit to it but instead try to put forth a mask of complete sincerity!) Looking at it negatively, the biblical words for the devil (diabole in New Testament Greek, as I recall, and satan in Old Testament Hebrew) both refer to a deceiver or liar, specifically, a false accuser. But there is an old adage about the devil to the effect that he always tries to do the bad but always ultimately, and in spite of himself, works for the good instead. I never could understand that until I realized how important the role of the trickster is. Without the trickster, we might not appreciate the truth!
Of course, there are other causes of error, too, and the constant drift in meaning is a major one, as is sheer complexity, and simple lack of the natural physiological resources for detecting error in what we are saying or seeing or doing until it is too late. We naturally want the truth because we want reliability in our understanding, and we must have natural tendencies to correct for error or our species would never have survived in such a tricky world as this is, so we must have a sort of instinctual logical sense. Peirce calls this our "logic in use" ("logica utens" is the usual Latin term for it). But it has its limits. If our "instinctive" logic were adequate we would have no motive to develop a theoretical conception of logic, but of course the many things that make for error, including natural and human trickery, outclass our natural logical tendencies and, as you point out, it has now come to the point that the very products of intelligence have generated such complexity and the lack of available time to reflect critically that we seem to be moving toward a catastrophic crisis of competence in this respect.
We would never think about truth and logic at all if our beliefs were always reliable. In paradise, people have no occasion to so much as think about the difference between the true and the false. it is only in virtue of finding our beliefs unreliable that we are motivated to wonder about how to stabilize them. Peirce regards the course of history as exhibiting the way in which we have tried first one tactic and then another to stabilize our beliefs, and in one of his basic introductory papers he identifies four distinct strategies or methods which we have used historically and use right now to do this.
He presents them in a sequence of increasing complexity, eventuating finally in a tactic or method which we now call "science", which he regards as inseparable from the development of logical understanding. I'll explain those later as I think they can be of some use in KM theory, because the fact is that all of them play some role in it, i.e. KM cannot be properly understood solely in terms of logicality or rationality. One has to accommodate other strategies for achieving stability in understanding as well, though my assumption is that a well-conceived logic has to provide the framework. . .
Before getting into that further , though, it is important to understand that the logical control of thought is not exercised by consciously imposing a form upon it as it proceeds, but rather by reflecting in retrospect when thought that has already occurred is being reviewed because negative feedback has indicated that something has gone wrong. One reason for this retrospective role for logic is that human activity is at its best when it is not self-conscious; hence a logic which attempts to make people constantly conscious in a self-reflective way is not going to produce the desired results. The critical work of logic has to be done when there is time to do it, but done in such a way that future thought is altered by it.
Looking at it another way, people do not think in logical form, except accidentally. The use of special logical forms is to be able to recognize in retrospective critical review what went wrong and what went right. This involves an ideal reconstruction of what was thought which leaves out those aspects of it not relevant to logical validity in order to focus on those aspects that are and to see to what extent the thought being reviewed can be regarded as embodying the valid form or failing to do so.
Thus when we are in conversation with someone and we say something like "What I understand you to be saying is that _____" (fill in the blank with some content), we do not repeat verbatim what the person said but reformulate it instead, often in a very abbreviated way, and treat that abbreviated rewording as if it were what was originally said because we are regarding it as equivalent for present purposes. The idea of something being equivalent for the purpose at hand is indispensable in understanding the logical point of view. This is what enables us to take standard forms, like the simple syllogistic form, say, as representing someone's thinking, though nobody ever thinks in syllogisms. If we couldn't do that then there would be no way to develop effective criticism of thinking processes because of the infinite variety of ways that things can be said or in terms of which they can be thought about. Logic has to simplify.
This bears on the importance in management of keeping a record of what has been said, agreed upon, promised, etc., by recording the gist of it in a memo, preferably one which is verified as correct by the people who said it or promised it or came to the agreement. Without a record the attempt to reconstruct it later will typically involve so much disagreement about what it was that it becomes impossible to go anywhere from it and further progress becomes impossible or disagreements are gratuitously generated in trying to pin it down. Again, this is no news to you.
A further comment on this, though, which might not have occurred to you: We typically regard what we have said at a given time as having a definite meaning at that time which can, in principle, be retrieved later and examined critically. This is not literally true but is a kind of fiction we maintain in order to simplify things enough to proceed without undue reflection. What we actually do is to say things which we hope will make sense both to the other person and to ourselves, and then allow the subsequent course of conversation to fix the earlier meaning by interpreting it in a way advantageous to the aims of the communication. This is NOT a flaw in discourse or a kind of falsification.
It is not in itself what you are concerned with as "drift in meaning", though it helps in understanding how drift in meaning can occur and also what stops it, insofar as it can be stopped. Thinking of it positively, is what enables us to talk about things we do not initially understand without our talk being meaningless; we keep it from being meaningless through the ongoing course of communication and interpretation in which we firm up the meaning of what we said earlier.
I say something, for example, and when you respond in a certain way, interpreting what I said, I may find that your interpretation agrees with what I want to say, though it never occurred to me before this that it might mean what you took it to mean. But seeing that it could mean that, I allow it to mean that by accepting your interpretation. And I do that simply by moving on ahead, relying upon what has been said earlier as a basis, and talking just as if that was what I meant from the beginning. Again, this is not a falsification. If I say, "Yes, that's what I meant", it IS what I meant. It is just that I didn't know what I meant until you understood me in a certain way, and I understood you to have understood me in that way.
Of course it could turn out that the subsequent flow of conversation will suddenly reveal that there was a systematic misunderstanding going on all the while. This happens. Life is inherently chancy. But that is no objection to it. And, frequently, when that happens, we can keep on talking until we retrospectively firm up the entire course of conversation so that the misunderstanding itself is in a sense eliminated. (Spontaneous music making, such as jazz, relies upon the fact that the meaning of a note is not in itself but in what follows it, so even if a major blunder is made -- or what might seem like one -- the opportunity is always there to redeem it in what occurs later. It is the same principle that is at the basis of the practice of changing a bug into a feature when programming!)
Word meaning is a bootstrap operation in a sense very similar to that which the word "bootstrapping" was originally based on, namely, Baron von Munchhausen's fabulous claim to be able to lift himself by tugging on his own bootstraps. There are several types or dimensions of meaning, but the sort of meaning which is most prominent in words -- symbolic meaning, in Peirce's terminology -- is essentially a bootstrapping.
So the upshot is that although it is true that symbolism is what enables us to bring things together, tie them down, fix their meaning, it is also true that we do this by a constant bootstrapping.
This is the dimension of adventure in thinking, I believe, and shows that people who try to handle dangerous contingencies by clamping down and trying to keep change from occurring by fixing it at a given time are in fact insuring that the change which occurs will be catastrophic. Somehow the key to intelligence lies both in being paranoid (like the CEO you mention) and being adventurous, which seems at first like a paradox but really isn't.
Texas Tech University
Dept of Philosophy
Joe Ransdell
Joseph Ransdell
ransdell@door.net
Joseph.Ransdell@ttu.edu
806 742-3275 Home: 806 797-2592
http://www.door.net/arisbe (Peirce Gateway website)
http://www.door.net/arisbe/homepage/ransdell.htm