[MD] Where does logic itself belong inside the MOQ?

[John Carl]

Greetings Magnus,


"Royce insisted that the pragmatists, whose fundamental expediency provides
no guide for making qualitative value judgements of one ideal over another,
must choose his acts on the basis of the mere quantities of value available,
thus, he is one who cries "cash, cash" in a world that is morally bankrupt.
The Philosophy of Loyalty warns that there are no ideals, fractional or
otherwise, that can exist outside the human will whose commitment gives them
life."

John Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce,




> Thanks for the pointer to Royce, I didn't find any direct writing by him
> online, but others have explained the gist of his investigations and that
> makes me think it's not really applicable to the MoQ, i.e. our reality.
>


Well... I respectfully disagree with a few aspects of your statement there
Magnus.  First off, how can "others" explain the gist of his investigations
without reading him?  And nobody's read Royce in depth or at all, as far as
I've seen for the months I've been poking him into the conversation.  He's
prolific, deep and sometimes difficult, so I'm skeptical anyone out there is
any sort of authority that you should take their word.

There's quite a bit online by Royce, The World and the
Individual<http://www.giffordlectures.org/Browse.asp?PubID=TPWTIT&Volume=0&Issue=0&TOC=TRUE>,
is a good comprehensive work of his that's available, but his main logical
work wasn't, last I checked.  My intro to Royce was when I was working on a
mural at the Grass Valley Library, named for him and curious about him, I
found some striking parallels in his Metaphysics with Pirsig's.  And then,
there was a lot of debate between him and W James that piqued me more.

>From the SEP <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/royce/#Log>

"It is clear that after *The World and the Individual* Royce was ever more
deeply interested in logic and mathematics. Precisely how and to what extent
his philosophical work was based upon logical and mathematical concepts, or
how his logical writings might clarify and extend ideas developed in his
other works, will require a much more comprehensive examination and analysis
of the logical writings than has yet been undertaken. At this point,
scholars interested in Royce's logic may refer to the selection of original
works published in Robinson (1951) and to chapters 9 through 11 of Kucklick
(1985). Such a line of research appears promising, if only because of the
assessment by C. I. Lewis that Royce's system of formal logic, conceived as
a "general science of order," may be preferable, for some uses, to that
developed by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in*Principia
Mathematica*. (Lewis 1916, 419).."


> As I understood it, Royce was trying to capture all of our reality,
> including human behavior such as religion, in terms of logic. You don't
> really have to understand the finer details of what a Boolsk algebra, or
> isomorphism is. What matters is that human behavior is just as foreign to
> logic as the rules of a stock exchange is to the law of gravity.


Well, no, I must insist that your understanding of Royce is way off.  But I
do agree with your point about the applicability of logic to human affairs.

The way I use "logic" is there are different logics, just like there are
different geometrys.  The logic of human affairs certainly doesn't follow
the cause and effect rules of logic on the inorganic level, but there are
observable rules, just the same.  "Do unto others as you would have them do
unto you."  Is a rule of social logic, for instance.



> The stumble block is the levels and their borders, each level has its own
> rules and they can *not* be expressed in terms of each other's rules. That's
> what the MoQ adds to the equation of our reality and SOM and other systems
> seems to have missed. Reality is simply much more complex than others seem
> to think, and the levels are what makes it that much more complex.
>
>

Perhaps the levels create more complexity in the study of reality as a
whole, but they make comprehension at the discrete level, much simpler, imo.

Good to hear from you Magnus; do you all you "old hands" usually drop in
around New Years to touch bases?  It's interesting to see so many popping
in.

John