"On Methods of Inference": Notes For Review And Discussion (Including David Sedley Article: "On Signs")

Page 261 and 262 are very dense where Sedley is asking why the Epicureans seemed to concede a part of the argument.

We'll ask Don to comment particularly on that one!

What's going through my mind too is that these are the 70 BC Roman Epicureans like Torquatus who were willing to deviate from Epicurus, so I wouldn't concede that any concessions made by them were necessarily made by Epicurus himself.

Not gonna get off on this right now, but we ought to make note that if this assertion is correct it plays into "isonomia" and probably "nature never makes only a single thing of a kind." I haven't looked up this reference in Lucretius:

Lucretius V.526-33

This only do I show, and follow on
To assign unto the motions of the stars
Even several causes which 'tis possible
Exist throughout the universal All;
Of which yet one must be the cause even here
Which maketh motion for our constellations.
Yet to decide which one of them it be
Is not the least the business of a man
Advancing step by cautious step, as I.

Ok having read to the end of Sedley's article I think he acquits himself well and his whole article is in my view supportive of Epicurus. It's also in my view largely consistent with De Lacey.

I don't think this was the target of the article and so I don't criticize him for it, but it seems to me that Sedley dives deeper and deeper into detail without ever coming back at the end of the article to discuss why the whole issue is significant.

That is OUR task, to clarify and articulate the important lessons to be learned from the fight between Stoic and Epicurean methods of "logic."

And at the moment I am not inclined to think I need to change my assessment that DeLacey has the practical importance of the issue well summarized here:

Thus the Epicureans were at war with those (Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics) who held that inferences from signs ( i.e., true opinions) are not reliable unless they can be stated into formal logically valid syllogisms. In other words, the ability to play games with words to make up a logically consistent assertion is not what establishes truth for us. Rather, its always the ability to judge the contours of truth by our canonical faculties is what establishes truth for us.

So the reverse of the Stoic position is actually the case and seems to be the position the Epicureans took: it is only when an opinion can be confirmed through repeated and reliable observations of the canonical faculties that something is established as true for us.

Well thanks for the kind words, but I think a large part of the issue is that Sedley and De Lacey and most of the rest probably have a different goal than I do. They seem to be writing for each other in the Academic world, in which the people writing their books are expected to be familiar with the state of academic writing and be familiar with the arguments. So they end up chasing each other further and further down rabbit holes which are indeed worth exploring, but they aren't writing to try to focus on and to "popularize" the main take-home points of the philosophy to everyday people. Once they describe the details the academics think (and maybe rightly so) that their job is done. They aren't paid and they aren't claiming to be social reformers.

As a secondary factor I think there is a lot of pressure in Academia to toe the establishment line on the value of formal logic and to maintain respect for the core Greek authorities (of whom they don't number Epicurus, except to the extent they can force him into the Stoic mold with "absence of pain" analysis).

In all fairness to them they've built up a lot of good information, but it's long past time for people outside of academia to realize what the issues are and run with them. This issue of the role of "logic" is explosively counter-trend to the majority viewpoint, and is equal if not more serious than the views of religion and pleasure. In many ways a form of "atheism" is standard now in academia, and the academics are very familiar with unconventional views of pleasure as well. But I actually think that this "logic" analysis challenges the what they see as the real keys of their kingdom, so it doesn't get nearly as much notice as it should.

And of course as you're saying in your comments, it IS very dense and complex, so it takes some work to ferret out what's really going on here.

OK back to the topic because I want to compare my views with what others are seeing.

Ok this is from the second article that Don linked, so there's definitely a revised edition of the De Lacey translation which we need to get our hands on:

It's interesting that the correct title of the book may be "On Signs and Sign Inferences"

I'm just a fountain of random points of interest tonight!

THIS is interesting in asserting that the enemy was not the Stoics but the Academics. I don't know that I have a dog in that fight (Stoics vs Academics) because I think it's important to see that they were all generally allied against Epicurus (not just the Stoics).

Well THIS certainly has my "red alert" alarm jumping and on the lookout for deviations by later Epicureans. Maybe i haven't been radical enough in thinking that Epicurus was on the warpath against formal logic:

This formulation here sounds reasonable to me, and I begin to get the strong feeling that Epicurus would have disapproved a lot of these arguments, as per the Elizabeth Asmis note just above. I am getting the feeling that a lot of these arguments are unwise and similar to Torquatus thinking that he needed an elaborate and abstract argument about the nature and role of pleasure. All of this "necessity" and "essentialism" argument does not seem to me consistent with Epicurus' original position, so i suspect the comment highlighted below here is correct:

Additional Resource: Asmis - Epicurus' Scientific Method (Article on which her later book of the same name was based).

Also: According to the second link Don posted, this is a very important article, and corrects mistakes made by Barnes in Barnes' own article. But I am not sure it is going to be something we can find. Anyway, this is one I'd love to have, since i am almost as much a fan of AA Long as I am of David Sedley.

I've now read the two articles posted by Don and they have been very helpful so thank you Don! Now it's time for me to drop back and get some comments from others in here!

We had a bit of a slog through this very question during the podcast recording on Sunday. I was 'off my game' Sunday morning...hopefully with Cassius and Martin engaged in the discussion we managed to produce something intelligible

I still haven't read anywhere near enough of David Sedley's work, so I won't be much help here either!

Yes indeed Joshua is right but I am thinking of he was off his game I am sure my wandering in the topic contributed to it. I will get it edited into something coherent as soon as possible but in the meantime Godfrey I do think that a "position on the role of logic" (rather than logic itself) does fall under the "canonical" heading.

I presume you're reading other recent threads like the one by Eric and my goal is that we come up with a presentation on these issues understandable enough for the average junior high age student.

The physics gets combined with the logic I think mainly because a theory of how the senses work (including "images") is tied to physics so that's the intersection point.

That intersection is probably also a key to our answer on how speculative logical assertions must necessarily be given a secondary role to that which we derive from things that are perceptible, but that's the link that needs further work to articulate. WHY is that the case? Why should speculation without evidence be seen as a waste of time or even harmful or at least viewed with suspicion?

These are questions addressed by Lucretius in book 4 so we have some answers, but we need to draw them out and highlight them with greater force.

My own suspicion is that the confusion here comes in because logic is rather 'slippery'. It is a very powerful tool of cognition. It is absolutely critical to the field of computer science:

Quote

A computer is a digital electronic machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically.

We know that it works. But that is a separate question to the one we're really asking: Is logic a source of direct knowledge?

That's the question that it is difficult to get a hold on. Logic is amazingly flimsy stuff when it doesn't rest on something solid--which is to say, something known. When Thomas Aquinas set out to prove the existence of a god, he could not rest his proof on the evidence of his senses; his senses furnished no evidence of god. So he employed instead the twin vacuous pillars of faith and logic; his Five Ways to prove the existence of god do not stand up to even slight scrutiny, as some honest Christians will admit. He started with nothing, and logic took him nowhere fast.

Epicurus was neither strictly an empiricist, nor anything like a rationalist; but he was far closer to the former than to the latter, which is part of the reason he rejected geometry. This chart does a fair job, I think:

Quote from Godfrey

. Or are you saying that logic belongs in the canon? I've understood logic, or reasoning, as a process that we use to evaluate our sensations, anticipations and feelings. Is logic/reasoning then "mental focusings"

I think Joshua's answer is the right track with the word "slippery."

What I am concluding is that the word "logic" is like the word "reason" in the way we use them colloquially.

From a technical point of view (I know Martin uses the term this way) "logic" has a very precise meaning, but both terms can be used colloquially to refer generally to a "manner of thinking," and I think this is where the confusion is arising.

Used colloquially there does seem indeed to be a "Stoic logic" as opposed to an Epicurean view of logic, and so the words "logic" and "reason" are not precise enough for our needs.

To me the key issue seems to be that to be considered persuasive any form of reasoning must be tied to premises thst can be verified perceptually through the three canonical faculties. It seems to me that logical or reasoning constructions that are internally valid, but not tied to perceptual data, are being held by Epicurus to be in a category of their own and especially dangerous to practical living. Epicurus seems to be warning us to specifically identify this activity as uniquely threatening to sound principles of living. However it looks to me like we today are so conditioned agsinst this by the arbitrariness and wishful thinking of religion, combined with a radical skepticism in which, because science is moving so fast that we have come to accept the appearance that everything we understand today will be necessarily understood differently tomorrow. Therefore we have come to think that radical skepticism has forever won the philosophical battle, and that the worst sin is to ever consider anything to be certain.

So I think the challenge is that of avoiding the Frances Wright "I don't care" position and instead articulating in understandable form the areas that can and do change (practical or applied science, for lack of better term) vs a set of metaphysical assumptions that do not change (the universe as whole is eternal; death is the end of our unique consciousness; there are no "absolute" standards of the way to live / virtue; nature gives us only pleasure and pain as ultimate guides; maybe a few more).

These are not ethical positions but in fact "natural science" positions that have to be viewed as entitles to a special place in our thinking, a special place that gives them a status in which we regard them as inherently unchallengable by non-perception-based theorizing and speculation.

That's the best way I can articulate this at present.