Very interesting reflections, I enjoyed reading them! Related to your insights about Davidson, let me elaborate on the part you quoted from me.
When I was thinking of the "whole Wittgensteinian hog" that seems irrelevant to linguistics, I was thinking really of a certain kind of post-Wittgensteinian attitude, rather than anything I would regard as a proper consequence of the Investigations. I particularly had in mind an image of Peter Hacker talking about the mereological fallacy in neuroscience (e.g. "the visual cortex 'looked' at the woman") and, in a similar vein, him critiquing Chomsky's cognitivism.
Well, what's the function of such a critique? What's the intent with which it hopes to carry us from one game to another? I've said elsewhere that philosophy is not separate from science but is rather one of scientia's moods, and that to 'correct' scientific practice, even as a philosopher, one must engage with science in furtherance of its goals, rather than standing on the sidelines and saying: this is not consistent with my metaphysics and so on.
So, a clarification of conceptual confusions with the aim of improving the explanatory capabilities of a theory is always welcome. But Hacker has a tendency to say, for example, that the Chomskyan cognitivist vocabulary is wrong because it's not the vocabulary of human beings playing language games, and there I perceive the risk of a very loud quietism which is in search of a final vocabulary.
I'm careful to call it a 'risk' because I neither want to be too simplistic about Hacker's position, nor do I actually feel inclined towards a completely generous pluralism or instrumentalism, which imo have a tendency towards the more crass style of Jamesian 'cash value' pragmatism. I'm conservationist about Chomsky's work because his explanatory fictions have impact, but I also think there are no firm boundaries between our vocabularies, so perhaps now is the time for Wittgenstein's philosophy to finally impinge on linguistics.
In resisting pluralism, and saying that our vocabularies can and should hold sway over each other, I myself incur the risk of tending towards a dualism, because it now becomes tempting to think that the integration of our vocabularies requires a kind of meta-vocabulary - the one that somehow touches reality most closely and can adjudicate what language is needed where. One might say that this is just a fantasy of getting out of language with language - and I tell that story sometimes - but might this fantasy itself have an instrumental purpose? Perhaps because it facilitates a kind of playful exploration that would not be possible if we were always mindful of our practical effects?
I'm a monist through and through but what is one without two? I'm easy about people practising a form of meta-whatever, really - philosophy, metaphysics, self-reflection etc. - so long as it's understood to have a dialectical rather than foundational role. Our problem is not that trying to get outside the frame is futile, but that in exploring that fantasy, we never come back because we end up in the grip of an egoistic neurosis that wants to live in language forever.
Thanks Callum! The practical efficacy of metaphysical *unsound* claims, relatively to a conception of course, is indeed the point of tension between universality and contextualism which in turn touches the idea of what philosophy is. A Wittgensteinan turn in linguistics is something that has to be earned and not taken for granted. To take the PI as a *basis* for dismissing alternative theories in linguistics *without doing the science* is theology-esk practice, a kind of universalizing impulse taking *one* vocabulary to be the foundation, as if evolution cannot be true, because god created us all. Indeed this is a loud quietism! The dismissing of ideas is then generalized beyond it's efficacy-to-be-demonstrated.
I think we had the same arrival point in mind, while starting at differing points. Peter Hacker going from a philosophical point to a scientific practice, me taking Davidsons point of an empirical theory of meaning making *philosophical points*. It is of course very debatable how much influence Davidson had in linguistics, the broader point for me was to dismiss the idea that the results of an enterprise to be by default generalizable to all domains whatsoever. Generizability is always a promise needed to be tested for every instantiation. Funnily this *is* Wittgensteins point concerning rule following. This is the next essay I'm working on. But in brief: he not by accident differentiates between the *interpretation* of following a rule and the *practice* of following a rule, which is closely related to Sellars triadic reflection on rule following in the PI of *obeying* a rule, *conforming* to a rule and pattern governed behavior. Thinking of Wittgenstein as providing a *positive* *vocabulary* instead of a set of new descriptive tools to be used *is* the error. Quietism is then turned into the nothing one can stand on, where we should rather accept the fall.
Being conservative about Chomskys work *because* it has impact is the right thing to do. That is why engineers still apply Newtonian statistics without needing to add "you know, *actually* this is not true, we have better theories now, this is just a very good heuristic." The point is only to reject the default expansion of the validity of one enterprise to encompass all others. Plurality is found in irreducibility of aim and scope, the unity of discourse *is* the performative synthesis in bringing all points together - painting a picture in which red cannot be substituted for blue. I'm neither a monist, dualist or pluralist concerning all this as this, for me at least, feels like wanting to have the cake and eat it too. I'm agnostic as I think reference is not even a good tool to be generalized, while it is of course practical effective in clarifying stuff like ostension.
To pick your last sentence out:
> Our problem is not that trying to get outside the frame is futile, but that in exploring that fantasy, we never come back because we end up in the grip of an egoistic neurosis that wants to live in language forever
I'd say that getting outside the frame *is* the Chimera and we can substitute this romantic idea of transcendence for an indeterminate expansion of our interpretive horizons. Of course we *can* treat our endeavors guided by this metaphor while being aware of it's mythological character, but it will be a tripping point, I'm sure.
There is so much more to be said. I also think there is some value in reflecting on the metaphysical necessity for false metaphysical ideas which pave the road for an expansion of inquiry, but I have to let this be at the acknowledgement, that I'm very much with you on this point.
Excuse me for these weeks of silence. It’s going to be much tougher for me to catch up to Davidson that I had thought. I keep running into detours.
One of these detours, which you had astutely pointed me toward, is the Rorty-Ramberg “admission.” Apparently, it’s being used as an excuse for analytic pragmatism to “backslide” into the comfort of “getting the world right.” Apparently, triadic descriptive vocabularies support Tarski-esque hypotheses, and this suggestion of neo-empiricism is overly-exciting English-speaking philosophers.
I think this backsliding is behind your concern that Davidson is inviting a new duality of description vs. norm, in place of appearance vs. reality.
Triadic descriptive vocabularies might readily reduce to triadic logic (as described by Peirce). Perhaps Rorty is not admitting the inescapable normativity of language, but is admitting the inescapability of the triadic, *logical inference* as a basis for truth-as-justification. (We need to 'keep Rorty pure.')
So I’ve been plowing back into Peirce, especially his 1903 Harvard lectures. I’m trying to understand Peirce’s stunning thesis that "the pragmatic maxim is the logic of abduction.” After that, I’ll move on to Brandom, et al., Ramberg, and the backsliding. Then I should be ready for Davidson. Thanks for setting me straight.
Thank you for your beautiful and deeply reflected comment, Paul. I think you are right about Rorty and how we would need to see the triangulative situation. I'll do a little polemics on those now for shortcutting to my position: only because triangulation may become the new base beyond which one cannot imagine something more fundamental does not change its epistemological status: it is still a contingent resting and starting place. Rorty misread Davidson exactly in this way, where I take that Davidson still inhabits certain traditional impulses and reacts to Rortys comments exact in those ways. Impulses like extrapolating the general concept of truth as a *necessary* posit for his theory of radical interpretation for all cases whatsoever.
All those dualities pretty much boil down to some kind of Stress between sign and signified, between rule and it's following, between representation and the presented. I think the polemic that we can get the world right could be easily stated in solely negative terms: the way we think does not immediately affect and effect the object of thought. But this is slightly confusingly put by me as I attempt to reject the *object* entirely, not only epistemologically. And that because I take Wittgenstein serious and that what we are doing with language is *play*, something we *do*. Next to the dualities, I think also triadic relationships do not help for getting "closer" to how it is.
If you get through Peirces philosophy though, as I have to shamefully admit that I read not much by him, I would be glad to hear more from you (and him as a result)!
My provisional thinking is that logic underpins the phenomenal. Logic studies the structure of the *cognizable, and therefore it reveals the malleable limits of human thought itself. Peirce's logic (abduction, deduction, and induction), abduction in particular, is the equivalent of the pragmatic maxim. (Peirce’s argument in this regard takes a lot of unraveling.)
Justification and logical validity are joined at the hip, and so Rorty’s “truth as justification” is a logical question. And the triadic obviates the binary (perhaps). My gut tells me that Peirce’s logic is profoundly anti-rational, but it has been neglected in favor of Peirce’s triadic *semiotics, his “meta-rationalism,” which is probably one of the reasons Rorty didn’t much like Peirce.
I’m no logician nor Peirce scholar, but my next article is about triadic logic. (A sure bet for three Likes or less!) I can’t scratch the surface of logic in 3,000 words, but I’ve figured out a tidy way to diagram the triadic logic idea, and that “gets my foot in the door.”
Davidson, like Peirce, is a tough read. I need to get psyched-up, before I read Davidson. But if I can eventually get a few good inklings of the logic-linguistics connection, I hope it will expand my poetry.
(Please excuse my long-windedness. I had been talking to myself for 30 years. I’m really grateful that folks like you and Callum are out there!)
You don't have to excuse yourself for that, I'm in the same boat for approx. The past 12 years and substack is my first real outlet. What I'm really curious is what you mean by saying that Peirce's logic is anti-rational!
I'm just a little bit cautious with the idea that logic is the study of the structure of what is cognizable. I think putting it like that just shifts the idea of authority to which we must obey from the non-linguistic to the "underlying" conceptual practices. At least I can't conceive it in a different way. If we do that, I think we must keep in mindat least three demands (which come spontaneously to mind, maybe more!) which we have to take on in order to see it like that: reducibility, transmissibility and universality. *If* logic is the underlying structure of the cognizable, then the structure must be in some way universal - as it defines the limits of what we can know. Also it must constitute the reduction basis to which all sentences can be reduced, and thirdly emerging from that, we must be able to transmit validity from the underlying structure to the emergent structure. There again is that authoritarian structure and with that a dualism at play. I think I'm a little bit too Wittgensteinan for that. I think that the connections we draw between logical - or may I say everything we say - entities are mere *Gepflogenheiten* (excuse me for that, I do not know the proper translation adhoc). And to bring everyday sentences into logical form is more an interpretation of what is said than a translation. Translation here thought as the transmission of the intension into different cloth. But I'm always open for being wrong here!
To say, as I did, that ‘logic is the study of the structure of what is cognizable,’ was a bit overblown, especially without context. Pierce defined logic more modestly as ‘the classification of inferences.’ I hope to make the larger point that cognition is a sequence of relational inferences, and that the inference is the essence of a justificatory process. I’m trying to blend the classification of inferences with the neo-pragmatic notion of knowledge-as-justification.
I sure don’t want to suggest that we need to ‘answer to logic.’ I need to look out for that. We are answerable to nothing in the world, but we *are answerable to each other, and we do so by ‘justifying’ arguments to each other. If we can keep 'the real world’ or 'the structure of logic’ out of justification, that will go far to get rid of dualism.
‘Rationalism’ is Rorty’s catch-all for the tradition exemplified by Plato-Descartes-Kant, which is characterized by representationalism, the correspondence theory of truth, and human answerability to a non-human authority. So when I carelessly say that Peirce is ‘anti-rational,’ I meant to say ‘anti-rationalistic’ in that broader sense. Peirce concludes that *abduction is the ‘logic of pragmatism,’ and for Rorty, neo-pragmatism and anti-rationalism are synonymous.
Thank you so much for your reply! This cleared a lot for me and I just had to nod along with everything you wrote. I'm excited for your piece about Peirce!
*in a few areas. I think a few of his ideas are very valuable! The rejection of the scheme/content distinction, the rejection that “there are languages as philosophers conceive them,” rejection of conventions as determining language usage are very valuable ideas I think
Wow. I'll need a couple of days to chew on this (and Callum's before-and-after contributions). I'll get back to you.
But briefly: We must embrace the sort of abbreviated writing that has you (and all of us) a bit worried. I think ex-academe, online philosophy will always be characterized by the 3,000-word article, rather than the peer-reviewed, 20,000 word essay. It's a new, rapid-fire context for "unfinished" philosophizing, much more free of polemical inhibitions, and thus, very promising. (But how do we filter out all the fluff and nonsense out there--including our own--without setting up committees and departments?)
Callum's tolerance of pragmatists is a good example of the beneficial effects of this new, social media platform for philosophizing. (How fortunate we are to live in the midst of such theoretical AND practical paradigm shifts!) Callum has yet to meet a scientifically acceptable, rational structure that he didn't like, but I suspect that there is a significant, pragmatic aspect to his thinking. He might be thinking, along with Peirce, that rational structures are phenomenal, not physical. I sense that he is not reflexively dismissive of Peirce's strongly instrumental notion of logic. I've got a lot to learn from Callum, you, et al.
Very interesting reflections, I enjoyed reading them! Related to your insights about Davidson, let me elaborate on the part you quoted from me.
When I was thinking of the "whole Wittgensteinian hog" that seems irrelevant to linguistics, I was thinking really of a certain kind of post-Wittgensteinian attitude, rather than anything I would regard as a proper consequence of the Investigations. I particularly had in mind an image of Peter Hacker talking about the mereological fallacy in neuroscience (e.g. "the visual cortex 'looked' at the woman") and, in a similar vein, him critiquing Chomsky's cognitivism.
Well, what's the function of such a critique? What's the intent with which it hopes to carry us from one game to another? I've said elsewhere that philosophy is not separate from science but is rather one of scientia's moods, and that to 'correct' scientific practice, even as a philosopher, one must engage with science in furtherance of its goals, rather than standing on the sidelines and saying: this is not consistent with my metaphysics and so on.
So, a clarification of conceptual confusions with the aim of improving the explanatory capabilities of a theory is always welcome. But Hacker has a tendency to say, for example, that the Chomskyan cognitivist vocabulary is wrong because it's not the vocabulary of human beings playing language games, and there I perceive the risk of a very loud quietism which is in search of a final vocabulary.
I'm careful to call it a 'risk' because I neither want to be too simplistic about Hacker's position, nor do I actually feel inclined towards a completely generous pluralism or instrumentalism, which imo have a tendency towards the more crass style of Jamesian 'cash value' pragmatism. I'm conservationist about Chomsky's work because his explanatory fictions have impact, but I also think there are no firm boundaries between our vocabularies, so perhaps now is the time for Wittgenstein's philosophy to finally impinge on linguistics.
In resisting pluralism, and saying that our vocabularies can and should hold sway over each other, I myself incur the risk of tending towards a dualism, because it now becomes tempting to think that the integration of our vocabularies requires a kind of meta-vocabulary - the one that somehow touches reality most closely and can adjudicate what language is needed where. One might say that this is just a fantasy of getting out of language with language - and I tell that story sometimes - but might this fantasy itself have an instrumental purpose? Perhaps because it facilitates a kind of playful exploration that would not be possible if we were always mindful of our practical effects?
I'm a monist through and through but what is one without two? I'm easy about people practising a form of meta-whatever, really - philosophy, metaphysics, self-reflection etc. - so long as it's understood to have a dialectical rather than foundational role. Our problem is not that trying to get outside the frame is futile, but that in exploring that fantasy, we never come back because we end up in the grip of an egoistic neurosis that wants to live in language forever.
Thanks Callum! The practical efficacy of metaphysical *unsound* claims, relatively to a conception of course, is indeed the point of tension between universality and contextualism which in turn touches the idea of what philosophy is. A Wittgensteinan turn in linguistics is something that has to be earned and not taken for granted. To take the PI as a *basis* for dismissing alternative theories in linguistics *without doing the science* is theology-esk practice, a kind of universalizing impulse taking *one* vocabulary to be the foundation, as if evolution cannot be true, because god created us all. Indeed this is a loud quietism! The dismissing of ideas is then generalized beyond it's efficacy-to-be-demonstrated.
I think we had the same arrival point in mind, while starting at differing points. Peter Hacker going from a philosophical point to a scientific practice, me taking Davidsons point of an empirical theory of meaning making *philosophical points*. It is of course very debatable how much influence Davidson had in linguistics, the broader point for me was to dismiss the idea that the results of an enterprise to be by default generalizable to all domains whatsoever. Generizability is always a promise needed to be tested for every instantiation. Funnily this *is* Wittgensteins point concerning rule following. This is the next essay I'm working on. But in brief: he not by accident differentiates between the *interpretation* of following a rule and the *practice* of following a rule, which is closely related to Sellars triadic reflection on rule following in the PI of *obeying* a rule, *conforming* to a rule and pattern governed behavior. Thinking of Wittgenstein as providing a *positive* *vocabulary* instead of a set of new descriptive tools to be used *is* the error. Quietism is then turned into the nothing one can stand on, where we should rather accept the fall.
Being conservative about Chomskys work *because* it has impact is the right thing to do. That is why engineers still apply Newtonian statistics without needing to add "you know, *actually* this is not true, we have better theories now, this is just a very good heuristic." The point is only to reject the default expansion of the validity of one enterprise to encompass all others. Plurality is found in irreducibility of aim and scope, the unity of discourse *is* the performative synthesis in bringing all points together - painting a picture in which red cannot be substituted for blue. I'm neither a monist, dualist or pluralist concerning all this as this, for me at least, feels like wanting to have the cake and eat it too. I'm agnostic as I think reference is not even a good tool to be generalized, while it is of course practical effective in clarifying stuff like ostension.
To pick your last sentence out:
> Our problem is not that trying to get outside the frame is futile, but that in exploring that fantasy, we never come back because we end up in the grip of an egoistic neurosis that wants to live in language forever
I'd say that getting outside the frame *is* the Chimera and we can substitute this romantic idea of transcendence for an indeterminate expansion of our interpretive horizons. Of course we *can* treat our endeavors guided by this metaphor while being aware of it's mythological character, but it will be a tripping point, I'm sure.
There is so much more to be said. I also think there is some value in reflecting on the metaphysical necessity for false metaphysical ideas which pave the road for an expansion of inquiry, but I have to let this be at the acknowledgement, that I'm very much with you on this point.
Excuse me for these weeks of silence. It’s going to be much tougher for me to catch up to Davidson that I had thought. I keep running into detours.
One of these detours, which you had astutely pointed me toward, is the Rorty-Ramberg “admission.” Apparently, it’s being used as an excuse for analytic pragmatism to “backslide” into the comfort of “getting the world right.” Apparently, triadic descriptive vocabularies support Tarski-esque hypotheses, and this suggestion of neo-empiricism is overly-exciting English-speaking philosophers.
I think this backsliding is behind your concern that Davidson is inviting a new duality of description vs. norm, in place of appearance vs. reality.
Triadic descriptive vocabularies might readily reduce to triadic logic (as described by Peirce). Perhaps Rorty is not admitting the inescapable normativity of language, but is admitting the inescapability of the triadic, *logical inference* as a basis for truth-as-justification. (We need to 'keep Rorty pure.')
So I’ve been plowing back into Peirce, especially his 1903 Harvard lectures. I’m trying to understand Peirce’s stunning thesis that "the pragmatic maxim is the logic of abduction.” After that, I’ll move on to Brandom, et al., Ramberg, and the backsliding. Then I should be ready for Davidson. Thanks for setting me straight.
Thank you for your beautiful and deeply reflected comment, Paul. I think you are right about Rorty and how we would need to see the triangulative situation. I'll do a little polemics on those now for shortcutting to my position: only because triangulation may become the new base beyond which one cannot imagine something more fundamental does not change its epistemological status: it is still a contingent resting and starting place. Rorty misread Davidson exactly in this way, where I take that Davidson still inhabits certain traditional impulses and reacts to Rortys comments exact in those ways. Impulses like extrapolating the general concept of truth as a *necessary* posit for his theory of radical interpretation for all cases whatsoever.
All those dualities pretty much boil down to some kind of Stress between sign and signified, between rule and it's following, between representation and the presented. I think the polemic that we can get the world right could be easily stated in solely negative terms: the way we think does not immediately affect and effect the object of thought. But this is slightly confusingly put by me as I attempt to reject the *object* entirely, not only epistemologically. And that because I take Wittgenstein serious and that what we are doing with language is *play*, something we *do*. Next to the dualities, I think also triadic relationships do not help for getting "closer" to how it is.
If you get through Peirces philosophy though, as I have to shamefully admit that I read not much by him, I would be glad to hear more from you (and him as a result)!
My provisional thinking is that logic underpins the phenomenal. Logic studies the structure of the *cognizable, and therefore it reveals the malleable limits of human thought itself. Peirce's logic (abduction, deduction, and induction), abduction in particular, is the equivalent of the pragmatic maxim. (Peirce’s argument in this regard takes a lot of unraveling.)
Justification and logical validity are joined at the hip, and so Rorty’s “truth as justification” is a logical question. And the triadic obviates the binary (perhaps). My gut tells me that Peirce’s logic is profoundly anti-rational, but it has been neglected in favor of Peirce’s triadic *semiotics, his “meta-rationalism,” which is probably one of the reasons Rorty didn’t much like Peirce.
I’m no logician nor Peirce scholar, but my next article is about triadic logic. (A sure bet for three Likes or less!) I can’t scratch the surface of logic in 3,000 words, but I’ve figured out a tidy way to diagram the triadic logic idea, and that “gets my foot in the door.”
Davidson, like Peirce, is a tough read. I need to get psyched-up, before I read Davidson. But if I can eventually get a few good inklings of the logic-linguistics connection, I hope it will expand my poetry.
(Please excuse my long-windedness. I had been talking to myself for 30 years. I’m really grateful that folks like you and Callum are out there!)
You don't have to excuse yourself for that, I'm in the same boat for approx. The past 12 years and substack is my first real outlet. What I'm really curious is what you mean by saying that Peirce's logic is anti-rational!
I'm just a little bit cautious with the idea that logic is the study of the structure of what is cognizable. I think putting it like that just shifts the idea of authority to which we must obey from the non-linguistic to the "underlying" conceptual practices. At least I can't conceive it in a different way. If we do that, I think we must keep in mindat least three demands (which come spontaneously to mind, maybe more!) which we have to take on in order to see it like that: reducibility, transmissibility and universality. *If* logic is the underlying structure of the cognizable, then the structure must be in some way universal - as it defines the limits of what we can know. Also it must constitute the reduction basis to which all sentences can be reduced, and thirdly emerging from that, we must be able to transmit validity from the underlying structure to the emergent structure. There again is that authoritarian structure and with that a dualism at play. I think I'm a little bit too Wittgensteinan for that. I think that the connections we draw between logical - or may I say everything we say - entities are mere *Gepflogenheiten* (excuse me for that, I do not know the proper translation adhoc). And to bring everyday sentences into logical form is more an interpretation of what is said than a translation. Translation here thought as the transmission of the intension into different cloth. But I'm always open for being wrong here!
To say, as I did, that ‘logic is the study of the structure of what is cognizable,’ was a bit overblown, especially without context. Pierce defined logic more modestly as ‘the classification of inferences.’ I hope to make the larger point that cognition is a sequence of relational inferences, and that the inference is the essence of a justificatory process. I’m trying to blend the classification of inferences with the neo-pragmatic notion of knowledge-as-justification.
I sure don’t want to suggest that we need to ‘answer to logic.’ I need to look out for that. We are answerable to nothing in the world, but we *are answerable to each other, and we do so by ‘justifying’ arguments to each other. If we can keep 'the real world’ or 'the structure of logic’ out of justification, that will go far to get rid of dualism.
‘Rationalism’ is Rorty’s catch-all for the tradition exemplified by Plato-Descartes-Kant, which is characterized by representationalism, the correspondence theory of truth, and human answerability to a non-human authority. So when I carelessly say that Peirce is ‘anti-rational,’ I meant to say ‘anti-rationalistic’ in that broader sense. Peirce concludes that *abduction is the ‘logic of pragmatism,’ and for Rorty, neo-pragmatism and anti-rationalism are synonymous.
Thank you so much for your reply! This cleared a lot for me and I just had to nod along with everything you wrote. I'm excited for your piece about Peirce!
rejecting received practices is always useful in philosophy!
Yes! And this is the most valuable portion about Davidson. Thank God it is most of his work!
the only issue I have is never accepting most of this stuff to begin with, which makes the argumentation irrelevant for me
*Why Davidson should have been quiet
*in a few areas. I think a few of his ideas are very valuable! The rejection of the scheme/content distinction, the rejection that “there are languages as philosophers conceive them,” rejection of conventions as determining language usage are very valuable ideas I think
Wow. I'll need a couple of days to chew on this (and Callum's before-and-after contributions). I'll get back to you.
But briefly: We must embrace the sort of abbreviated writing that has you (and all of us) a bit worried. I think ex-academe, online philosophy will always be characterized by the 3,000-word article, rather than the peer-reviewed, 20,000 word essay. It's a new, rapid-fire context for "unfinished" philosophizing, much more free of polemical inhibitions, and thus, very promising. (But how do we filter out all the fluff and nonsense out there--including our own--without setting up committees and departments?)
Callum's tolerance of pragmatists is a good example of the beneficial effects of this new, social media platform for philosophizing. (How fortunate we are to live in the midst of such theoretical AND practical paradigm shifts!) Callum has yet to meet a scientifically acceptable, rational structure that he didn't like, but I suspect that there is a significant, pragmatic aspect to his thinking. He might be thinking, along with Peirce, that rational structures are phenomenal, not physical. I sense that he is not reflexively dismissive of Peirce's strongly instrumental notion of logic. I've got a lot to learn from Callum, you, et al.