Over at Garden of Forking Paths there was an interesting discussion of "finks." They were discussing it in the context of the free will debate. However I immediate thought of some interesting implications. (Part of the way I attempt to understand things is by applying ideas outside of where I find them) The GFP discussion arises from a paper by David Lewis “Finkish Dispositions” (Philosophical Quarterly 47: 143-58). The original notion comes from C. B. Martin in "Dispositions and Conditionals" (Philosophical Quarterly 44: 1-8). The basic idea is that a "fink" is something that intervenes to prevent some property or disposition from manifesting itself. The classic example is a wizard who makes glass so it won't shatter if struck. Now in this case is glass fragile or not?
This got me to thinking about Peirce and the pragmatic maxim, roughly that the meaning of a symbol consists of the practical effects to our behavior. That is, in terms of the way we measure something. So "hardness" has its meaning in terms of our ways of measuring hardness and the expected results.
Would finks apply to the pragmatic maxim? Peirce's famous example is that of a diamond. Now for the general case of a diamond it seems finks don't matter too much since they obviously don't always intervene. (The afore mentioned wizard clearly isn't casting spells on most diamonds) So a major objection is that finks are, by their nature, unusual and thus don't affect the pragmatic maxim. And of course Peirce is a thorough-going fallibilist and thus would expect some occasionally odd results. (Thanks to John Collier for this response)
My own sense is that Peirce would be as displeased with "finks" as he is Cartesian doubt. That is it is an extremely "make believe" kind of concern that only a philosopher could come up with. Thus I think he'd put a disapproving eye towards zombies, swamp men, and mad scientists putting choice inhibiters in robber's brains. Wizards casting spells on diamonds is, if anything, far more unbelievable than those thought experiments. I suppose one way of putting this is that some philosophers are concerned with way-layers in our concepts as being definitive of our ideas whereas Peirce, the fallibilist, feels that it is the habitual response that matters most. That is, the most general case.
An other aspect of Peirce's thought we ought throw into the discussion of finks is Peirce's scholastic realism. That is we aren't merely considering whether a diamond is hard in terms of particulars. That would take us to a nominalism Peirce rejected. However Peirce as a scholastic realist thought that "hardness" was a real universal and thus empirically knowable. As such any general knowledge can't be stopped by finks. (More or less my critique above about generals)
The question is whether it would affect our knowledge of a particular diamond and whether it is hard. Now of course Peirce argues that our knowledge is always vague or general. Further in this case we are measuring two things. Hardness and the particular diamond. My sense is that this simply involves trying to know two unknowns simultaneously. If we can't measure the diamond's hardness, would we say it is a diamond? That is we still have an unrealistic situation.
In a more practical (and believable) case though we often do have finks in the biological sciences. Consider a poison that is masked from our ability to detect it. Now the substance is still in the biological system - we just can't know about it. So this ends up getting into the old Berkeley thought experiment about whether a tree in a forest makes a sound if no one hears it. While on a practical level this certainly limits us epistemologically I'm not sure it affects Peirce. Peirce has a faith that all things are knowable "in the long run" even if they may be nearly impossible to know. They are theoretically knowable. So presumably there is some physical way of by-passing the fink. Put an other way, I think Peirce and his holism makes a true fink impossible. (Thanks to Ben Udell for noting the Berkeley parallel)
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