Comunicação e Ética: O sistema semiótico de Charles ... - Ubi Thesis

✐✐✐✐90 Anabela GradimOutro argumento importante relacionado com a concepção semiótica doprocesso do pensamento está na prova de que todo o pensamento humanopode ser reconduzido a inferências. Peirce tivera contacto com a tese, opostaà sua, que toda a inferência lógica, especialmente a sintética, que conduz àexpansão do conhecimento, pode ser reduzida a leis psicológicas de associaçãode impressões dos sentidos. Discordando, esforça-se por demonstrar queestas chamadas leis de associação devem, pelo contrário, ser reconduzidas àstrês formas de inferência. O seu argumento essencial ao fazê-lo é a tese de quenão pensamos por meio de imagens recordadas, mas antes em quase-conceitosabstractos. Esta linha de argumentação está intimamente relacionada com asua concepção realista dos Universais. O homem não está limitado a pensarobjectos completamente determinados; pelo contrário, o pensamento operaprimariamente por abstracções vagas. Uma das consequências para a sua filosofiadesta reinterpretação da psicologia nominalista da associação segundoa sua teoria realista dos Universais é o novo conceito de hábito que emergedo processo. Hume reduz as leis da natureza a meros hábitos, a hábitos ac-(. . . ) But to the psychologist an argument is valid only if the premisses from which the mentalconclusion is derived would be sufficient, if true, to justify it, either by themselves, or by theaid of other propositions which had previously been held for true. But it is easy to show thatall inferences made by man, which are not valid in this sense, belong to four classes, viz.: 1.Those whose premisses are false; 2. Those which have some little force, though only a little;3. Those which result from confusion of one proposition with another; 4. Those which resultfrom the indistinct apprehension, wrong application, or falsity, of a rule of inference. For, ifa man were to commit a fallacy not of either of these classes, he would, from true premissesconceived with perfect distinctness, without being led astray by any prejudice or other judgmentserving as a rule of inference, draw a conclusion which had really not the least relevancy.(. . . ) If it is of the third class and results from the confusion of one proposition with another,this confusion must be owing to a resemblance between the two propositions; that is to say, theperson reasoning, seeing that one proposition has some of the characters which belong to theother, concludes that it has all the essential characters of the other, and is equivalent to it. Nowthis is a hypothetic inference, which though it may be weak, and though its conclusion happensto be false, belongs to the type of valid inferences; and, therefore, as the nodus of the fallacylies in this confusion, the procedure of the mind in these fallacies of the third class conforms tothe formula of valid inference. If the fallacy belongs to the fourth class, it either results fromwrongly applying or misapprehending a rule of inference, and so is a fallacy of confusion, orit results from adopting a wrong rule of inference. In this latter case, this rule is in fact takenas a premiss, and therefore the false conclusion is owing merely to the falsity of a premiss. Inevery fallacy, therefore, possible to the mind of man, the procedure of the mind conforms to theformula of valid inference”, in Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce: A Chronological Edition,ed. FISCH, Max, et al., Bloomington, Indiana University Press, vol. II.www.labcom.pt✐✐✐✐