12/2/11

Elizabeth Warren will win in Massachusetts

Elizabeth Warren will win in Massachusetts in a walk. What the Wall Street K Street folk are doing by fighting her to the wall is opening up the field for every other Democrat in the country who lines up with her POV. This will be the year that Elizabeth Warren reduced the GOP to impotence. The deal is done. You hear it now. Even Obama will be thanking her after his victory.

GOP Candidates Should Boycott Trump Debate



The headline says it all. This should be a dividing line between the serious and the wingnuts.

Huntsman has declined this one. Good for him.

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Of the three Universes of Experience

"A Neglected Argument" (1908 _Hibbert Journal_, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 90-112) Section 1


CP 6.455.

Of the three Universes of Experience familiar to us all †1, the first comprises all mere Ideas, those airy nothings to which the mind of poet, pure mathematician, or another _might_ give local habitation and a name within that mind. Their very airy-nothingness, the fact that their Being consists in mere capability of getting thought, not in anybody's Actually thinking them, saves their Reality. The second Universe is that of the Brute Actuality of things and facts. I am confident that their Being consists in reactions against Brute forces, notwithstanding objections redoubtable until they are closely and fairly examined. The third Universe comprises everything whose being consists in active power to establish connections between different objects, especially between objects in different Universes. Such is everything which is essentially a Sign — not the mere body of the Sign, which is not essentially such, but, so to speak, the Sign's Soul, which has its Being in its power of serving as intermediary between its Object and a Mind. Such, too, is a living consciousness, and such the life, the power of growth, of a plant. Such is a living institution — a daily newspaper, a great fortune, a social "movement."

Cap tip Ben

The perfect truth cannot be stated

From "Truth and Falsity and Error" in _Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology_ vol. 2 (1902) pp. 718-20.

CP 5.567.
These characters equally apply to pure mathematics. Projective geometry is not pure mathematics, unless it be recognized that whatever is said of rays holds good of every family of curves of which there is one and one only through any two points, and any two of which have a point in common. But even then it is not pure mathematics until for points we put any complete determinations of any two-dimensional continuum. Nor will that be enough. A proposition is not a statement of perfectly pure mathematics until it is devoid of all definite meaning, and comes to this — that a property of a certain icon is pointed out and is declared to belong to anything like it, of which instances are given. The perfect truth cannot be stated, except in the sense that it confesses its imperfection. The pure mathematician deals exclusively with hypotheses. Whether or not there is any corresponding real thing, he does not care. His hypotheses are creatures of his own imagination; but he discovers in them relations which surprise him sometimes. A metaphysician may hold that this very forcing upon the mathematician's acceptance of propositions for which he was not prepared, proves, or even constitutes, a mode of being independent of the mathematician's thought, and so a _reality_. But whether there is any reality or not, the truth of the pure mathematical proposition is constituted by the impossibility of ever finding a case in which it fails. This, however, is only possible if we confess the impossibility of precisely defining it.

Cap tip Ben

Fallacies in pure mathematics

From "Reasoning" in _Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology_, vol. 2 (1902), pp. 426-28

from CP 2.778

Fallacies in pure mathematics have gone undetected for many centuries. It is to ideal states of things alone — or to real states of things as ideally conceived, always more or less departing from the reality — that deduction applies.

Cap tip Ben

Approximation to reality and absolute reality itself are two different things

From "Intended Characters of this Treatise," ch. 1 of the "Minute Logic" (1902).
Quoted under "The logician and the real" by Joseph Ransdell

http://www.cspeirce.com/rsources/quotes/quotes.htm

CP 2.64

Whether or not there is, at all, any such thing as Reality, the logician need not decide. He cannot hide from himself, any more than another man can, that objects very nearly like real things there are; and he cannot pretend to doubt it. But he sees, perhaps more clearly than other men, that approximation to reality and absolute reality itself are two different things. The mathematicians' _i_, of which the square is negative unity, _approximates_ to reality. All that it is incumbent upon the logician to learn is what inferential habits are conducive to knowledge, and to positive knowledge, in case there be any reality of which it is possible to have positive knowledge, and are conducive to such semblance of positive knowledge as we can have, in case there is no perfect reality or in case otherwise true positive knowledge is impossible. But in order to solve even that problem, he has first to ascertain, in case there be any successful quest for knowledge, what the nature of knowledge would be; and for his purpose, knowledge may be something written down in a book.

Cap tip Ben

A degenerate form of observation

From "Index (in exact logic)" in _Dictionary of Philosophy & Psychology_, vol. 1, 1901, p. 531-2.http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Baldwin/Dictionary/defs/I2defs.htm#Indexi

From CP 2.305

The above considerations might lead the reader to suppose that indices have exclusive reference to objects of experience, and that there would be no use for them in pure mathematics, dealing, as it does, with ideal creations, without regard to whether they are anywhere realized or not. But the imaginary constructions of the mathematician, and even dreams, so far approximate to reality as to have a certain degree of fixity, in consequence of which they can be recognized and identified as individuals. In short, there is a degenerate form of observation which is directed to the creations of our own minds--using the word observation in its full sense as implying some degree of fixity and quasi-reality in the object to which it endeavours to conform. Accordingly, we find that indices are absolutely indispensable in mathematics; and until this truth was comprehended, all efforts to reduce to rule the logic of triadic and higher relations failed; while as soon as it was once grasped the problem was solved. The ordinary letters of algebra that present no peculiarities are indices. So also are the letters _A, B, C,_ etc., attached to a geometrical figure. Lawyers and others who have to state a complicated affair with precision have recourse to letters to distinguish individuals. Letters so used are merely improved relative pronouns. Thus, while demonstrative and personal pronouns are, as ordinarily used, "genuine indices," relative pronouns are "degenerate indices"; for though they may, accidentally and indirectly, refer to existing things, they directly refer, and need only refer, to the images in the mind which previous words have created.

Cap tip Ben

Mathematics is not a positive science

From "The Regenerated Logic", _The Monist_, vol. 7, pp. 19-40, (1896)

From CP 3.428 & Monist v. 7 p. 24

Mathematics is not a positive science; for the mathematician holds himself free to say that A is B or that A is not B, the only obligation upon him being, that as long as he says A is B, he is to hold to it, consistently. But logic begins to be a positive science; since there are some things in regard to which the logician is not free to suppose that they are or are not; but acknowledges a compulsion upon him to assert the one and deny the other. Thus, the logician is forced by positive observation to admit that there is such a thing as doubt, that some propositions are false, etc. But with this compulsion comes a corresponding responsibility upon him not to admit anything which he is not forced to admit.

GOP Criminality Running Rampant

The Republican Effort to Restrict Voting Rights | Protectingthevote.com:

In at least 40 states, Republicans have introduced laws that would make voting more difficult for everyone -- particularly minorities and young voters.

Coincidence? Of course not. It's all for partisan gain. GOP leaders have said it themselves: They do better when fewer people show up to vote.

That's right: Right here in America, some people are actually trying to make sure fewer people show up at the polls next year.

Cap tip Debbie

First they ruin the lives of the poor and middle class and now they want to hallow their crimes by restricting the number who can vote to see that they never hold office again.

Experience is Double

From "Introduction, Association of Ideas," c.1893, from _Grand Logic_, Widener IB2-1

CP 7.440.

"Experience is double, as much as reality is. That is, there is an _outward_ and an _inward experience_. Under the latter head ought particularly to be reckoned a mathematical experience, not usually so called, which has compelled the development of pure thought to take a determinate course." -- Charles Sanders Peirce

Cap tip Ben

Heaven might be beyond our universe

Winning The War Within Collected Sonnets:

Heaven might be beyond our universe
Heaven might be our most amazing dream
Heaven might save us from the primal curse
Heaven might be the crystal fountain’s stream
The heaven that is most real is revealed
When Abba’s home within us is unsealed



'via Blog this'


Global Online Privacy

The world has changed since Pattern Language appeared in 1977

Beyond Pattern Language: Urban amenities everywhere: "The world has changed since Pattern Language appeared in 1977. There was a lovely site called downlode.org that explained the original patterns but it was zapped for what I regard as silly copyright reasons. All told, the only references to pattern language I see are rip-off declensions that do not relate to Alexander's subject which is the creation of human living arrangements, cities, settlements, regions - things widely ignored in contemporary thinking (or else horrendously realized with apt publicity from antedeluvian journals like the NYT)."

'via Blog this'

More at the site noted above.

We need a wall of anger at Congress

We need a wall of anger at Congress
We need to say no holiday  for you
If they go home press them to go on back
Say vote for jobs or we will vote you out

We need a wall of anger tall and strong
Of righteous indignation on behalf
Of all their NO will leave without a job
Whose holidays are turned to mourners days

We need an end to criminal mentality
That masks such sad hypocrisy

We need a wall of anger at Congress
So that the miscreants can't  leave
Until they do the minimal we ask

And all who flaunt and lie and hurt and maul 
The poor and weak
Will not return 
Their evils yet to wreak

Fight them with strong nonviolence 
Stand
Occupy
And say
This wall is anger
Mend your ways

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Words are a sword as sharp as fine-filed steel

Abba's Way:

"Those wars which have no weapons, none left dead,
Can be as virulent as killing wars.
Words are a sword as sharp as fine-filed steel,
And pierce as deep as daggers into flesh."



'via Blog this'

Global Online Privacy

Pathological Narcissism and The End of Freud


For Chris Matthews

Freud has been absorbed into the mix
Some live on some are absorbed
Leaving some lingo to describe our sin
That's right 
Sin is still here in everyone
Incipient idolatrous deadly

Surviving  lingo pins it most sagely
The universal tightrope we live on 
Tipping betwixt
Our narcissism and 
Our sweet empathy

When faced with Oswald or Hinckley
Our best admission is
There but for grace
Go we

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RECCMENDATION Richard Gordon Quantum Touch

The Slow as Molasses Press