#aristotle — Public Fediverse posts

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 3

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson

A more complete excerpt and the translator’s notes are very helpful here.

A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον).  The former is a generally accepted premiss ;  for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability :  e.g., that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.  A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted.1  That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.

An enthymeme is a syllogism from probabilities or signs ;  and a sign can be taken in three ways — in just as many ways as there are of taking the middle term in the several figures :  either as in the first figure or as in the second or as in the third.

• E.g., the proof that a woman is pregnant because she has milk is by the first figure ;  for the middle term is ‘having milk’.  A stands for ‘pregnant’, B for ‘having milk’, and C for ‘woman’.
• The proof that the wise are good because Pittacus was good is by the third figure.  A stands for ‘good’, B for ‘the wise’, and C for Pittacus.  Then it is true to predicate both A and B of C ;  only we do not state the latter, because we know it, whereas we formally assume the former.
• The proof that a woman is pregnant because she is sallow is intended to be by the middle figure ;  for since sallowness is a characteristic of woman in pregnancy, and is associated with this particular woman, they suppose that she is proved to be pregnant.  A stands for ‘sallowness’, B for ‘being pregnant’, C for ‘woman’.

If only one premiss is stated, we get only a sign ;  but if the other premiss is assumed as well, we get a syllogism,2 e.g., that Pittacus is high-minded, because those who love honour are high-minded, and Pittacus loves honour ;  or again that the wise are good, because Pittacus is good and also wise.

In this way syllogisms can be effected ;  but whereas a syllogism in the first figure cannot be refuted if it is true, since it is universal, a syllogism in the last figure can be refuted even if the conclusion is true, because the syllogism is neither universal nor relevant to our purpose.3  For if Pittacus is good, it is not necessary for this reason that all other wise men are good.  A syllogism in the middle figure is always and in every way refutable, since we never get a syllogism with the terms in this relation4 ;  for it does not necessarily follow, if a pregnant woman is sallow, and this woman is sallow, that she is pregnant.  Thus truth can be found in all signs, but they differ in the ways which have been described.

We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index (τεκµηριον)5 (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes6 as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’.  For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics 2.27, 70a3–70b6).

Translator’s Notes

1. If referable to one phenomenon only, a sign has objective necessity ;  if to more than one, its value is a matter of opinion.
2. Strictly an enthymeme.
3. If the signs of an enthymeme in the first figure are true, the conclusion is inevitable.  Aristotle does not mean that the conclusion is universal, but that the universality of the major premiss implies the validity of the minor and conclusion.  The example (<all> those who have honour, etc.) quoted for the third figure contains no universal premiss or sign, and fails to establish a universal conclusion.
4. i.e. when both premisses are affirmative.
5. Signs may be classified as irrefutable (1st figure) and refutable (2nd and 3rd figures), and the name ‘index’ may be attached to their middle terms, either in all figures or (more probably) only in the first, where the middle is distinctively middle.
6. Alternatively the name ‘sign’ may be restricted to the 2nd and 3rd figures, and may be replaced by ‘index’ in the first.

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

cc: Academia.edu • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon
cc: Research Gate • Structural Modeling • Systems Science • Syscoi

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 3

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson

A more complete excerpt and the translator’s notes are very helpful here.

A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον).  The former is a generally accepted premiss ;  for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability :  e.g., that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.  A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted.1  That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.

An enthymeme is a syllogism from probabilities or signs ;  and a sign can be taken in three ways — in just as many ways as there are of taking the middle term in the several figures :  either as in the first figure or as in the second or as in the third.

• E.g., the proof that a woman is pregnant because she has milk is by the first figure ;  for the middle term is ‘having milk’.  A stands for ‘pregnant’, B for ‘having milk’, and C for ‘woman’.
• The proof that the wise are good because Pittacus was good is by the third figure.  A stands for ‘good’, B for ‘the wise’, and C for Pittacus.  Then it is true to predicate both A and B of C ;  only we do not state the latter, because we know it, whereas we formally assume the former.
• The proof that a woman is pregnant because she is sallow is intended to be by the middle figure ;  for since sallowness is a characteristic of woman in pregnancy, and is associated with this particular woman, they suppose that she is proved to be pregnant.  A stands for ‘sallowness’, B for ‘being pregnant’, C for ‘woman’.

If only one premiss is stated, we get only a sign ;  but if the other premiss is assumed as well, we get a syllogism,2 e.g., that Pittacus is high-minded, because those who love honour are high-minded, and Pittacus loves honour ;  or again that the wise are good, because Pittacus is good and also wise.

In this way syllogisms can be effected ;  but whereas a syllogism in the first figure cannot be refuted if it is true, since it is universal, a syllogism in the last figure can be refuted even if the conclusion is true, because the syllogism is neither universal nor relevant to our purpose.3  For if Pittacus is good, it is not necessary for this reason that all other wise men are good.  A syllogism in the middle figure is always and in every way refutable, since we never get a syllogism with the terms in this relation4 ;  for it does not necessarily follow, if a pregnant woman is sallow, and this woman is sallow, that she is pregnant.  Thus truth can be found in all signs, but they differ in the ways which have been described.

We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index (τεκµηριον)5 (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes6 as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’.  For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics 2.27, 70a3–70b6).

Translator’s Notes

1. If referable to one phenomenon only, a sign has objective necessity ;  if to more than one, its value is a matter of opinion.
2. Strictly an enthymeme.
3. If the signs of an enthymeme in the first figure are true, the conclusion is inevitable.  Aristotle does not mean that the conclusion is universal, but that the universality of the major premiss implies the validity of the minor and conclusion.  The example (<all> those who have honour, etc.) quoted for the third figure contains no universal premiss or sign, and fails to establish a universal conclusion.
4. i.e. when both premisses are affirmative.
5. Signs may be classified as irrefutable (1st figure) and refutable (2nd and 3rd figures), and the name ‘index’ may be attached to their middle terms, either in all figures or (more probably) only in the first, where the middle is distinctively middle.
6. Alternatively the name ‘sign’ may be restricted to the 2nd and 3rd figures, and may be replaced by ‘index’ in the first.

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

cc: Academia.edu • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon
cc: Research Gate • Structural Modeling • Systems Science • Syscoi

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 3

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson

A more complete excerpt and the translator’s notes are very helpful here.

A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον).  The former is a generally accepted premiss ;  for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability :  e.g., that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.  A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted.1  That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.

An enthymeme is a syllogism from probabilities or signs ;  and a sign can be taken in three ways — in just as many ways as there are of taking the middle term in the several figures :  either as in the first figure or as in the second or as in the third.

• E.g., the proof that a woman is pregnant because she has milk is by the first figure ;  for the middle term is ‘having milk’.  A stands for ‘pregnant’, B for ‘having milk’, and C for ‘woman’.
• The proof that the wise are good because Pittacus was good is by the third figure.  A stands for ‘good’, B for ‘the wise’, and C for Pittacus.  Then it is true to predicate both A and B of C ;  only we do not state the latter, because we know it, whereas we formally assume the former.
• The proof that a woman is pregnant because she is sallow is intended to be by the middle figure ;  for since sallowness is a characteristic of woman in pregnancy, and is associated with this particular woman, they suppose that she is proved to be pregnant.  A stands for ‘sallowness’, B for ‘being pregnant’, C for ‘woman’.

If only one premiss is stated, we get only a sign ;  but if the other premiss is assumed as well, we get a syllogism,2 e.g., that Pittacus is high-minded, because those who love honour are high-minded, and Pittacus loves honour ;  or again that the wise are good, because Pittacus is good and also wise.

In this way syllogisms can be effected ;  but whereas a syllogism in the first figure cannot be refuted if it is true, since it is universal, a syllogism in the last figure can be refuted even if the conclusion is true, because the syllogism is neither universal nor relevant to our purpose.3  For if Pittacus is good, it is not necessary for this reason that all other wise men are good.  A syllogism in the middle figure is always and in every way refutable, since we never get a syllogism with the terms in this relation4 ;  for it does not necessarily follow, if a pregnant woman is sallow, and this woman is sallow, that she is pregnant.  Thus truth can be found in all signs, but they differ in the ways which have been described.

We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index (τεκµηριον)5 (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes6 as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’.  For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics 2.27, 70a3–70b6).

Translator’s Notes

1. If referable to one phenomenon only, a sign has objective necessity ;  if to more than one, its value is a matter of opinion.
2. Strictly an enthymeme.
3. If the signs of an enthymeme in the first figure are true, the conclusion is inevitable.  Aristotle does not mean that the conclusion is universal, but that the universality of the major premiss implies the validity of the minor and conclusion.  The example (<all> those who have honour, etc.) quoted for the third figure contains no universal premiss or sign, and fails to establish a universal conclusion.
4. i.e. when both premisses are affirmative.
5. Signs may be classified as irrefutable (1st figure) and refutable (2nd and 3rd figures), and the name ‘index’ may be attached to their middle terms, either in all figures or (more probably) only in the first, where the middle is distinctively middle.
6. Alternatively the name ‘sign’ may be restricted to the 2nd and 3rd figures, and may be replaced by ‘index’ in the first.

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

cc: Academia.edu • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon
cc: Research Gate • Structural Modeling • Systems Science • Syscoi

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 3

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson

A more complete excerpt and the translator’s notes are very helpful here.

A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον).  The former is a generally accepted premiss ;  for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability :  e.g., that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.  A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted.1  That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.

An enthymeme is a syllogism from probabilities or signs ;  and a sign can be taken in three ways — in just as many ways as there are of taking the middle term in the several figures :  either as in the first figure or as in the second or as in the third.

• E.g., the proof that a woman is pregnant because she has milk is by the first figure ;  for the middle term is ‘having milk’.  A stands for ‘pregnant’, B for ‘having milk’, and C for ‘woman’.
• The proof that the wise are good because Pittacus was good is by the third figure.  A stands for ‘good’, B for ‘the wise’, and C for Pittacus.  Then it is true to predicate both A and B of C ;  only we do not state the latter, because we know it, whereas we formally assume the former.
• The proof that a woman is pregnant because she is sallow is intended to be by the middle figure ;  for since sallowness is a characteristic of woman in pregnancy, and is associated with this particular woman, they suppose that she is proved to be pregnant.  A stands for ‘sallowness’, B for ‘being pregnant’, C for ‘woman’.

If only one premiss is stated, we get only a sign ;  but if the other premiss is assumed as well, we get a syllogism,2 e.g., that Pittacus is high-minded, because those who love honour are high-minded, and Pittacus loves honour ;  or again that the wise are good, because Pittacus is good and also wise.

In this way syllogisms can be effected ;  but whereas a syllogism in the first figure cannot be refuted if it is true, since it is universal, a syllogism in the last figure can be refuted even if the conclusion is true, because the syllogism is neither universal nor relevant to our purpose.3  For if Pittacus is good, it is not necessary for this reason that all other wise men are good.  A syllogism in the middle figure is always and in every way refutable, since we never get a syllogism with the terms in this relation4 ;  for it does not necessarily follow, if a pregnant woman is sallow, and this woman is sallow, that she is pregnant.  Thus truth can be found in all signs, but they differ in the ways which have been described.

We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index (τεκµηριον)5 (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes6 as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’.  For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics 2.27, 70a3–70b6).

Translator’s Notes

1. If referable to one phenomenon only, a sign has objective necessity ;  if to more than one, its value is a matter of opinion.
2. Strictly an enthymeme.
3. If the signs of an enthymeme in the first figure are true, the conclusion is inevitable.  Aristotle does not mean that the conclusion is universal, but that the universality of the major premiss implies the validity of the minor and conclusion.  The example (<all> those who have honour, etc.) quoted for the third figure contains no universal premiss or sign, and fails to establish a universal conclusion.
4. i.e. when both premisses are affirmative.
5. Signs may be classified as irrefutable (1st figure) and refutable (2nd and 3rd figures), and the name ‘index’ may be attached to their middle terms, either in all figures or (more probably) only in the first, where the middle is distinctively middle.
6. Alternatively the name ‘sign’ may be restricted to the 2nd and 3rd figures, and may be replaced by ‘index’ in the first.

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

cc: Academia.edu • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon
cc: Research Gate • Structural Modeling • Systems Science • Syscoi

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 3

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson

A more complete excerpt and the translator’s notes are very helpful here.

A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον).  The former is a generally accepted premiss ;  for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability :  e.g., that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.  A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted.1  That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.

An enthymeme is a syllogism from probabilities or signs ;  and a sign can be taken in three ways — in just as many ways as there are of taking the middle term in the several figures :  either as in the first figure or as in the second or as in the third.

• E.g., the proof that a woman is pregnant because she has milk is by the first figure ;  for the middle term is ‘having milk’.  A stands for ‘pregnant’, B for ‘having milk’, and C for ‘woman’.
• The proof that the wise are good because Pittacus was good is by the third figure.  A stands for ‘good’, B for ‘the wise’, and C for Pittacus.  Then it is true to predicate both A and B of C ;  only we do not state the latter, because we know it, whereas we formally assume the former.
• The proof that a woman is pregnant because she is sallow is intended to be by the middle figure ;  for since sallowness is a characteristic of woman in pregnancy, and is associated with this particular woman, they suppose that she is proved to be pregnant.  A stands for ‘sallowness’, B for ‘being pregnant’, C for ‘woman’.

If only one premiss is stated, we get only a sign ;  but if the other premiss is assumed as well, we get a syllogism,2 e.g., that Pittacus is high-minded, because those who love honour are high-minded, and Pittacus loves honour ;  or again that the wise are good, because Pittacus is good and also wise.

In this way syllogisms can be effected ;  but whereas a syllogism in the first figure cannot be refuted if it is true, since it is universal, a syllogism in the last figure can be refuted even if the conclusion is true, because the syllogism is neither universal nor relevant to our purpose.3  For if Pittacus is good, it is not necessary for this reason that all other wise men are good.  A syllogism in the middle figure is always and in every way refutable, since we never get a syllogism with the terms in this relation4 ;  for it does not necessarily follow, if a pregnant woman is sallow, and this woman is sallow, that she is pregnant.  Thus truth can be found in all signs, but they differ in the ways which have been described.

We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index (τεκµηριον)5 (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes6 as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’.  For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics 2.27, 70a3–70b6).

Translator’s Notes

1. If referable to one phenomenon only, a sign has objective necessity ;  if to more than one, its value is a matter of opinion.
2. Strictly an enthymeme.
3. If the signs of an enthymeme in the first figure are true, the conclusion is inevitable.  Aristotle does not mean that the conclusion is universal, but that the universality of the major premiss implies the validity of the minor and conclusion.  The example (<all> those who have honour, etc.) quoted for the third figure contains no universal premiss or sign, and fails to establish a universal conclusion.
4. i.e. when both premisses are affirmative.
5. Signs may be classified as irrefutable (1st figure) and refutable (2nd and 3rd figures), and the name ‘index’ may be attached to their middle terms, either in all figures or (more probably) only in the first, where the middle is distinctively middle.
6. Alternatively the name ‘sign’ may be restricted to the 2nd and 3rd figures, and may be replaced by ‘index’ in the first.

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

cc: Academia.edu • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon
cc: Research Gate • Structural Modeling • Systems Science • Syscoi

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2026/05/19/icon-likeness-likely-story-likelihood-probability-2-a/

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson
• https://web.archive.org/web/20131211153209/http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/11234
• https://web.archive.org/web/20131211034001/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/11235

I'm still a bit fuzzy on how Aristotle's account relates to Peirce's usage, though I'm pretty sure Peirce must have taken Aristotle's usage into account, but it does seem that Aristotle drew some sort of distinction here, using a term “tekmerion” which gets translated as “index” to make the following remark later on in that chapter.

❝We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index [τεκµηριον] (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’. For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.❞ (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70b1–6).

Reference —

Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource —

Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A
• https://www.academia.edu/5211369/Theme_One_Program_User_Guide

#Aristotle #Peirce #IconIndexSymbol #Semiotics #SignRelations
#Logic #Mathematics #Probability #ProbableReasoning #Induction
#Inquiry #Analogy #Likelihood #LikelyStory #Likeness #Morphism

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2026/05/19/icon-likeness-likely-story-likelihood-probability-2-a/

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson
• https://web.archive.org/web/20131211153209/http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/11234
• https://web.archive.org/web/20131211034001/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/11235

I'm still a bit fuzzy on how Aristotle's account relates to Peirce's usage, though I'm pretty sure Peirce must have taken Aristotle's usage into account, but it does seem that Aristotle drew some sort of distinction here, using a term “tekmerion” which gets translated as “index” to make the following remark later on in that chapter.

❝We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index [τεκµηριον] (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’. For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.❞ (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70b1–6).

Reference —

Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource —

Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A
• https://www.academia.edu/5211369/Theme_One_Program_User_Guide

#Aristotle #Peirce #IconIndexSymbol #Semiotics #SignRelations
#Logic #Mathematics #Probability #ProbableReasoning #Induction
#Inquiry #Analogy #Likelihood #LikelyStory #Likeness #Morphism

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2026/05/19/icon-likeness-likely-story-likelihood-probability-2-a/

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson
• https://web.archive.org/web/20131211153209/http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/11234
• https://web.archive.org/web/20131211034001/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/11235

I'm still a bit fuzzy on how Aristotle's account relates to Peirce's usage, though I'm pretty sure Peirce must have taken Aristotle's usage into account, but it does seem that Aristotle drew some sort of distinction here, using a term “tekmerion” which gets translated as “index” to make the following remark later on in that chapter.

❝We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index [τεκµηριον] (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’. For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.❞ (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70b1–6).

Reference —

Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource —

Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A
• https://www.academia.edu/5211369/Theme_One_Program_User_Guide

#Aristotle #Peirce #IconIndexSymbol #Semiotics #SignRelations
#Logic #Mathematics #Probability #ProbableReasoning #Induction
#Inquiry #Analogy #Likelihood #LikelyStory #Likeness #Morphism

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2026/05/19/icon-likeness-likely-story-likelihood-probability-2-a/

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson
• https://web.archive.org/web/20131211153209/http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/11234
• https://web.archive.org/web/20131211034001/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/11235

I'm still a bit fuzzy on how Aristotle's account relates to Peirce's usage, though I'm pretty sure Peirce must have taken Aristotle's usage into account, but it does seem that Aristotle drew some sort of distinction here, using a term “tekmerion” which gets translated as “index” to make the following remark later on in that chapter.

❝We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index [τεκµηριον] (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’. For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.❞ (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70b1–6).

Reference —

Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource —

Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A
• https://www.academia.edu/5211369/Theme_One_Program_User_Guide

#Aristotle #Peirce #IconIndexSymbol #Semiotics #SignRelations
#Logic #Mathematics #Probability #ProbableReasoning #Induction
#Inquiry #Analogy #Likelihood #LikelyStory #Likeness #Morphism

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 2
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2026/05/19/icon-likeness-likely-story-likelihood-probability-2-a/

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson
• https://web.archive.org/web/20131211153209/http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/11234
• https://web.archive.org/web/20131211034001/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/11235

I'm still a bit fuzzy on how Aristotle's account relates to Peirce's usage, though I'm pretty sure Peirce must have taken Aristotle's usage into account, but it does seem that Aristotle drew some sort of distinction here, using a term “tekmerion” which gets translated as “index” to make the following remark later on in that chapter.

❝We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index [τεκµηριον] (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’. For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.❞ (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70b1–6).

Reference —

Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource —

Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A
• https://www.academia.edu/5211369/Theme_One_Program_User_Guide

#Aristotle #Peirce #IconIndexSymbol #Semiotics #SignRelations
#Logic #Mathematics #Probability #ProbableReasoning #Induction
#Inquiry #Analogy #Likelihood #LikelyStory #Likeness #Morphism

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 2

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson

I’m still a bit fuzzy on how Aristotle’s account relates to Peirce’s usage, though I’m pretty sure Peirce must have taken Aristotle’s usage into account, but it does seem that Aristotle drew some sort of distinction here, using a term “tekmerion” which gets translated as “index” to make the following remark later on in that chapter.

We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index [τεκµηριον] (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’.  For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70b1–6).

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

cc: Academia.edu • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon
cc: Research Gate • Structural Modeling • Systems Science • Syscoi

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 2

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson

I’m still a bit fuzzy on how Aristotle’s account relates to Peirce’s usage, though I’m pretty sure Peirce must have taken Aristotle’s usage into account, but it does seem that Aristotle drew some sort of distinction here, using a term “tekmerion” which gets translated as “index” to make the following remark later on in that chapter.

We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index [τεκµηριον] (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’.  For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70b1–6).

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

cc: Academia.edu • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon
cc: Research Gate • Structural Modeling • Systems Science • Syscoi

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 2

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson

I’m still a bit fuzzy on how Aristotle’s account relates to Peirce’s usage, though I’m pretty sure Peirce must have taken Aristotle’s usage into account, but it does seem that Aristotle drew some sort of distinction here, using a term “tekmerion” which gets translated as “index” to make the following remark later on in that chapter.

We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index [τεκµηριον] (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’.  For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70b1–6).

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

cc: Academia.edu • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon
cc: Research Gate • Structural Modeling • Systems Science • Syscoi

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 2

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson

I’m still a bit fuzzy on how Aristotle’s account relates to Peirce’s usage, though I’m pretty sure Peirce must have taken Aristotle’s usage into account, but it does seem that Aristotle drew some sort of distinction here, using a term “tekmerion” which gets translated as “index” to make the following remark later on in that chapter.

We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index [τεκµηριον] (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’.  For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70b1–6).

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

cc: Academia.edu • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon
cc: Research Gate • Structural Modeling • Systems Science • Syscoi

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 2

Re: Peirce List • Phyllis Chiasson

I’m still a bit fuzzy on how Aristotle’s account relates to Peirce’s usage, though I’m pretty sure Peirce must have taken Aristotle’s usage into account, but it does seem that Aristotle drew some sort of distinction here, using a term “tekmerion” which gets translated as “index” to make the following remark later on in that chapter.

We must either classify signs in this way, and regard their middle term as an index [τεκµηριον] (for the name ‘index’ is given to that which causes us to know, and the middle term is especially of this nature), or describe the arguments drawn from the extremes as ‘signs’, and that which is drawn from the middle as an ‘index’.  For the conclusion which is reached through the first figure is most generally accepted and most true.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70b1–6).

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

cc: Academia.edu • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Mathstodon
cc: Research Gate • Structural Modeling • Systems Science • Syscoi

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 1
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2026/05/17/icon-likeness-likely-story-likelihood-probability-1-a/

Here's a likely locus classicus for “icon” in its logical sense —

❝A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον). The former is a generally accepted premiss; for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability:

❝For example, that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.

❝A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted. That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.❞ (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70a3–10).

Reference —

Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource —

Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A
• https://www.academia.edu/5211369/Theme_One_Program_User_Guide

#Aristotle #Peirce #IconIndexSymbol #Semiotics #SignRelations
#Logic #Mathematics #Probability #ProbableReasoning #Induction
#Inquiry #Analogy #Likelihood #LikelyStory #Likeness #Morphism

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 1
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2026/05/17/icon-likeness-likely-story-likelihood-probability-1-a/

Here's a likely locus classicus for “icon” in its logical sense —

❝A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον). The former is a generally accepted premiss; for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability:

❝For example, that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.

❝A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted. That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.❞ (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70a3–10).

Reference —

Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource —

Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A
• https://www.academia.edu/5211369/Theme_One_Program_User_Guide

#Aristotle #Peirce #IconIndexSymbol #Semiotics #SignRelations
#Logic #Mathematics #Probability #ProbableReasoning #Induction
#Inquiry #Analogy #Likelihood #LikelyStory #Likeness #Morphism

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 1
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2026/05/17/icon-likeness-likely-story-likelihood-probability-1-a/

Here's a likely locus classicus for “icon” in its logical sense —

❝A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον). The former is a generally accepted premiss; for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability:

❝For example, that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.

❝A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted. That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.❞ (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70a3–10).

Reference —

Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource —

Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A
• https://www.academia.edu/5211369/Theme_One_Program_User_Guide

#Aristotle #Peirce #IconIndexSymbol #Semiotics #SignRelations
#Logic #Mathematics #Probability #ProbableReasoning #Induction
#Inquiry #Analogy #Likelihood #LikelyStory #Likeness #Morphism

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 1
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2026/05/17/icon-likeness-likely-story-likelihood-probability-1-a/

Here's a likely locus classicus for “icon” in its logical sense —

❝A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον). The former is a generally accepted premiss; for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability:

❝For example, that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.

❝A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted. That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.❞ (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70a3–10).

Reference —

Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource —

Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A
• https://www.academia.edu/5211369/Theme_One_Program_User_Guide

#Aristotle #Peirce #IconIndexSymbol #Semiotics #SignRelations
#Logic #Mathematics #Probability #ProbableReasoning #Induction
#Inquiry #Analogy #Likelihood #LikelyStory #Likeness #Morphism

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 1
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2026/05/17/icon-likeness-likely-story-likelihood-probability-1-a/

Here's a likely locus classicus for “icon” in its logical sense —

❝A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον). The former is a generally accepted premiss; for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability:

❝For example, that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.

❝A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted. That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.❞ (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70a3–10).

Reference —

Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource —

Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A
• https://www.academia.edu/5211369/Theme_One_Program_User_Guide

#Aristotle #Peirce #IconIndexSymbol #Semiotics #SignRelations
#Logic #Mathematics #Probability #ProbableReasoning #Induction
#Inquiry #Analogy #Likelihood #LikelyStory #Likeness #Morphism

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 1

Here’s a likely locus classicus for “icon” in its logical sense —

A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον).  The former is a generally accepted premiss;  for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability:  e.g., that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.  A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted.  That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70a3–10).

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

Related Discussion

• Peirce List • Benjamin Udell • Michael Shapiro

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 1

Here’s a likely locus classicus for “icon” in its logical sense —

A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον).  The former is a generally accepted premiss;  for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability:  e.g., that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.  A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted.  That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70a3–10).

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

Related Discussion

• Peirce List • Benjamin Udell • Michael Shapiro

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 1

Here’s a likely locus classicus for “icon” in its logical sense —

A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον).  The former is a generally accepted premiss;  for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability:  e.g., that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.  A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted.  That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70a3–10).

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

Related Discussion

• Peirce List • Benjamin Udell • Michael Shapiro

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 1

Here’s a likely locus classicus for “icon” in its logical sense —

A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον).  The former is a generally accepted premiss;  for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability:  e.g., that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.  A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted.  That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70a3–10).

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

Related Discussion

• Peirce List • Benjamin Udell • Michael Shapiro

Icon, Likeness, Likely Story, Likelihood, Probability • 1

Here’s a likely locus classicus for “icon” in its logical sense —

A probability (εικος) is not the same as a sign (σηµειον).  The former is a generally accepted premiss;  for that which people know to happen or not to happen, or to be or not to be, usually in a particular way, is a probability:  e.g., that the envious are malevolent or that those who are loved are affectionate.  A sign, however, means a demonstrative premiss which is necessary or generally accepted.  That which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being.  (Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 2.27.70a3–10).

Reference

• Aristotle, “Prior Analytics”, Hugh Tredennick (trans.), pp. 181–531 in Aristotle, Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London, UK, 1938.

Resource

• Theme One Program • User Guide • Appendix A

Related Discussion

• Peirce List • Benjamin Udell • Michael Shapiro

“…to young children should be imparted only such kinds of knowledge as will be useful to them without making mechanics of them. And any occupation, art, or science, which makes the body or soul or mind of the freeman less fit for the practice or exercise of excellence, is mechanical; wherefore we call those arts mechanical which tend to deform the body, and likewise all paid employments, for they absorb and degrade the mind.”
Politics, #aristotle

Yep.

#philosophy

Readings shared May 9, 2026. https://jaalonso.github.io/vestigium/posts/2026/05/10-readings_shared_05-09-26 #AI4Math #ATP #Aristotle #CompSci #CoqProver #FunctionalProgramming #Haskell #History #ITP #IsabelleHOL #LeanProver #Logic #Math #Mizar #Ocaml #RocqProver

Readings shared May 9, 2026. https://jaalonso.github.io/vestigium/posts/2026/05/10-readings_shared_05-09-26 #AI4Math #ATP #Aristotle #CompSci #CoqProver #FunctionalProgramming #Haskell #History #ITP #IsabelleHOL #LeanProver #Logic #Math #Mizar #Ocaml #RocqProver

Readings shared May 9, 2026. https://jaalonso.github.io/vestigium/posts/2026/05/10-readings_shared_05-09-26 #AI4Math #ATP #Aristotle #CompSci #CoqProver #FunctionalProgramming #Haskell #History #ITP #IsabelleHOL #LeanProver #Logic #Math #Mizar #Ocaml #RocqProver

Readings shared May 9, 2026. https://jaalonso.github.io/vestigium/posts/2026/05/10-readings_shared_05-09-26 #AI4Math #ATP #Aristotle #CompSci #CoqProver #FunctionalProgramming #Haskell #History #ITP #IsabelleHOL #LeanProver #Logic #Math #Mizar #Ocaml #RocqProver

Readings shared May 9, 2026. https://jaalonso.github.io/vestigium/posts/2026/05/10-readings_shared_05-09-26 #AI4Math #ATP #Aristotle #CompSci #CoqProver #FunctionalProgramming #Haskell #History #ITP #IsabelleHOL #LeanProver #Logic #Math #Mizar #Ocaml #RocqProver

Episode 110 of The Secular Foxhole. https://www.thesecularfoxhole.live/aristotles-impact-on-modern-science/

#podcast #podcasting #Aristotle #value4Value

Episode 110 of The Secular Foxhole. https://www.thesecularfoxhole.live/aristotles-impact-on-modern-science/

#podcast #podcasting #Aristotle #value4Value

#Averroes wrote more than 30 detailed explanations of #Aristotle’s ideas.

He wrote short summaries, medium-length breakdowns, and long guides that went line by line through the text.

Because of this work, scholars in Europe gave him a special nickname: “The Commentator.”

My sibling in Dionysus. 👊

#history #language #philosophy

#Averroes wrote more than 30 detailed explanations of #Aristotle’s ideas.

He wrote short summaries, medium-length breakdowns, and long guides that went line by line through the text.

Because of this work, scholars in Europe gave him a special nickname: “The Commentator.”

My sibling in Dionysus. 👊

#history #language #philosophy

#Averroes wrote more than 30 detailed explanations of #Aristotle’s ideas.

He wrote short summaries, medium-length breakdowns, and long guides that went line by line through the text.

Because of this work, scholars in Europe gave him a special nickname: “The Commentator.”

My sibling in Dionysus. 👊

#history #language #philosophy

#Averroes wrote more than 30 detailed explanations of #Aristotle’s ideas.

He wrote short summaries, medium-length breakdowns, and long guides that went line by line through the text.

Because of this work, scholars in Europe gave him a special nickname: “The Commentator.”

My sibling in Dionysus. 👊

#history #language #philosophy

#Averroes wrote more than 30 detailed explanations of #Aristotle’s ideas.

He wrote short summaries, medium-length breakdowns, and long guides that went line by line through the text.

Because of this work, scholars in Europe gave him a special nickname: “The Commentator.”

My sibling in Dionysus. 👊

#history #language #philosophy

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain

— Aristotle

#Stoic #Stoicism #Aristotle

Mel Nathanson — How Harmonic's Aristotle solved some of my problems. https://gist.github.com/kim-em/20212c66bd144c5d3fa3b044402e2092 #LeanProver #ITP #Aristotle #AI4Math

Mel Nathanson — How Harmonic's Aristotle solved some of my problems. https://gist.github.com/kim-em/20212c66bd144c5d3fa3b044402e2092 #LeanProver #ITP #Aristotle #AI4Math

Mel Nathanson — How Harmonic's Aristotle solved some of my problems. https://gist.github.com/kim-em/20212c66bd144c5d3fa3b044402e2092 #LeanProver #ITP #Aristotle #AI4Math

Mel Nathanson — How Harmonic's Aristotle solved some of my problems. https://gist.github.com/kim-em/20212c66bd144c5d3fa3b044402e2092 #LeanProver #ITP #Aristotle #AI4Math

Mel Nathanson — How Harmonic's Aristotle solved some of my problems. https://gist.github.com/kim-em/20212c66bd144c5d3fa3b044402e2092 #LeanProver #ITP #Aristotle #AI4Math

What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

What the first photographers knew, and what their mockers missed, is the subject of this article. An aphorism is a short saying that compresses a big idea into a single sentence, the sort of thing that fits on a poster or a coffee mug. The one I started with proposes that science is the discovery of what was true before anyone said so, and art is the act of bringing into existence what was never there. The aphorism has a problem its critics quickly identify. Most of what we call art does not require originating an unprecedented thing. A choir performing Mozart is making art without inventing anything. A workshop apprentice executing a Madonna in the master’s style is operating within a tradition. The strict reading of the aphorism would disqualify them both, and that contradicts how galleries and concert halls use the word.

So here is the refined position the photography story points toward. The originating act is what art and science share. Both fields contain a small number of moments when a particular human consciousness brings into existence a thing or a method or a way of seeing that was never there before, followed by an enormous number of practitioners who apply the new thing well or badly. Niépce making the first surviving heliograph in 1826 was an artist because the act of fixing a stable image with light had never been done. Daguerre refining the process into commercial viability in 1839 was an artist because the daguerreotype as a finished method had never existed. The studio photographer in 1860 producing his ten thousandth carte de visite was a craftsman applying invented technique. Same physical action, different category. The originating moment is what carries the honor.

The same cut runs through science. Newton’s invention of the calculus was an originating act; the engineer applying calculus to bridge stress in 1955 was a competent technician. Mendel’s first articulation of inheritance ratios was an originating act; the corn breeder applying Mendelian principles in 1962 was a working agronomist. The radiologist who first describes a previously unrecorded lesion pattern is doing what Mendel did. The radiologist applying established categories to the morning’s queue is doing what the agronomist did. The cut runs through both fields. This is the position photography forces us to, and it is the position I have been calling the Scientific Aesthetic across this network for fifteen years: the claim that science is itself a form of art, and that arts and sciences converge through a shared originating operation.

Consider a thought experiment that sharpens it further. I own a camera and take a position near the Eiffel Tower. After pressing the button, I hand the camera to you. You stand exactly where I stood and produce a second exposure. The photographs are identical. Who is the artist? Whose work is it? Does the camera’s owner have a stronger claim than the button-presser? Does the second photograph constitute imitation of the first, or are they both equally derivative of the tower itself? The thought experiment exposes that pressing the button was never the originating act. The originating act was Niépce’s, then Daguerre’s, then a long succession of inventors who established lenses, film stocks, exposure indices, and the conventions of framing. By the time you and I arrive at the spot and produce identical images, the originating work was done a century earlier. We are operating an invented machine within an invented set of conventions. Neither of us is making art in the strict sense; we are tourists with a camera doing what tourists do.

Copyright law, which has to give a practical answer, gives a strange one. Each of us would own the copyright in the photograph our hand caused to exist, and the copyrights would coexist for identical images. This is legally coherent and philosophically unsatisfying. Coherent because intellectual property law tracks proximate cause, and our fingers are the proximate cause of the shutters. Unsatisfying because it locates art in the trigger pull, which is exactly the location the painters of 1839 mocked and were partly right to mock. Where the painters were wrong was in thinking that no photographer had ever done the originating work. Niépce had. The 1839 mockery had the wrong target. The studio operators churning out cartes de visite were the proper subject of the criticism; the inventors of the medium had earned exemption. The same distinction applies inside painting itself, where the first to use linear perspective was making art and the thousandth competent perspective drawer was making decoration.

Now the harder example. Karl Barth wrote that Bach went to heaven while Mozart came from heaven. The distinction is real and worth holding up to the light. Bach as the worker who climbed the structure of counterpoint until it produced sublime architecture, every voice mathematically accounted for, every chorale prelude a piece of theological engineering. Mozart as the channel through which finished music seemed to arrive, the manuscripts famously cleaner than they should have been, the working method opaque even to his contemporaries. Both originated. Bach invented the practical possibilities of equal temperament and brought the fugue to a development nobody had imagined. Mozart developed the mature Classical style and pushed forms in opera and symphony to a depth that shaped the next century. By the originating-act test, both are artists in the strictest sense.

Yet the heaven attribution tracks something the originating-act test does not capture. It tracks the phenomenology of the artist’s experience of making. Bach made through labor. Mozart made through reception. The work appeared to arrive through Mozart from somewhere beyond him, and his role was to be present, conscious, equipped to receive what came. This Romantic conception of genius as channel has been mocked too, especially by twentieth-century critics who wanted to demystify the artist and rehabilitate the worker. But the distinction is not mystical, even if the metaphor is. Some originators labor toward what they make. Others find what they make arriving in them already largely formed. Both kinds of originator are artists. The distinction is internal to the category, and both kinds satisfy the originating-act test.

This matters because it tells us what the consciousness contributes. If Mozart was a channel, what he contributed was the readiness, the trained ear, the mind shaped by every piece of music he had absorbed since childhood, the working hand fast enough to capture what arrived. The channel had to be made before anything could come through it. The making of the channel was the labor; what came through it was the work. By this account, even the channel-artist is doing work; the work is just earlier in the process. Mozart’s effort had been spent before the moment of composition. Bach’s was spent during. Both consciousnesses originated, and the difference is the timing of the labor.

Hold this conclusion against the AI question, because it does work the older formulations cannot do. A language model produces text that no human assembled before. By the strict never-before-existed test, the output qualifies as PhD thesis. By the originating-act test, the output qualifies as imitation. The model invented nothing. Researchers invented its architecture. Human writers produced the training corpus. The inference itself is the application of an existing method to an existing prompt. The model occupies the position of the 1880 studio photographer, two generations downstream from Niépce. It plays the engineer’s role to Newton’s mathematics. The output may be useful, beautiful, even surprising, but it is not the originating act of a particular consciousness, because there is no consciousness in the model to do the originating. There may eventually be one, and that day will require revisiting this argument, but the present-day large language model is a competent technician of an invented process.

The first person to use a language model in a way nobody had used one before may have done something originating. Someone who discovers that a particular kind of prompt produces a particular kind of result, then builds a body of work around that discovery, may be an artist by the test I am proposing. The millionth person to type a prompt and accept the output is no more an artist than the millionth person to photograph the Eiffel Tower. This is consistent with the photography case. The category of the new medium has room for originators and for technicians, and most users in either field will be technicians.

A final consequence. The originating-act test resists political abuse better than the discovery-creation aphorism does. Authoritarian regimes police the canon by rewriting who counts as the first, the true, the founding artist or scientist. Entartete Kunst was an attempt to remove modernist innovators from the canon of true German art and replace them with academic painters of approved subjects. Lysenko was promoted as the first practitioner of authentically Soviet biology, with Mendel’s followers cast as bourgeois imitators of foreign error. The Cultural Revolution displaced the founding figures of Chinese music and physics in favor of approved rivals. Each regime understood that controlling the canon means controlling who is remembered as the originator and who is dismissed as the imitator. The originating-act test gives us a tool for resisting this. Every claim about who was first is a historical question with material evidence behind it. Niépce’s 1826 plate exists in a museum in Texas. Newton’s papers exist in Cambridge. Mendel’s notebooks exist in Brno. The canon can be argued from material evidence. The aphorism, by contrast, gives us no way to argue. It only gives us a slogan to either accept or reject.

So here is the position the photography story, the identical photograph thought experiment, and the Bach-Mozart distinction together support. Science is the revelation by a particular consciousness of something that was true before that consciousness named it. Art is the bringing into existence by a particular consciousness of something that was not there before that consciousness made it. Both fields contain a few originators and many imitators. The honor in both fields belongs to the originators. The imitators do necessary and sometimes excellent work, but they are not the artists or the scientists in the strict sense the words deserve. This is more austere than the everyday use of the words, and it is closer to what we mean when we say someone was a great artist or a great scientist. We mean they were the first. Competent application of established method has its own honor and its own name, and that name is craft. Together they constitute the Scientific Aesthetic, the position this whole article has been working toward.

The painters of 1839 looked at the daguerreotypists and saw machine operators. They were right about most of them and wrong about the founders. The same vision will be required for AI. Most outputs will be the work of technicians applying an invented process. A few may be the work of someone who saw what nobody had seen before about what the new instrument could do. Distinguishing the two is the task that always falls to the next generation, and the next generation is usually slow about it. We are slow about it now. We will be less slow if we hold the originating-act test in mind and apply it ruthlessly, to ourselves and to everyone else.

The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory is available now from David Boles Books. The paperback runs four hundred ninety-five pages and the Kindle eBook is also for sale through Amazon. Readers who prefer screen reading, home printing, or an editable archive copy will find a website-download PDF and a DOCX safety file at BolesBooks.com on the title’s landing page. The audiobook is in production and will follow.

What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

What the first photographers knew, and what their mockers missed, is the subject of this article. An aphorism is a short saying that compresses a big idea into a single sentence, the sort of thing that fits on a poster or a coffee mug. The one I started with proposes that science is the discovery of what was true before anyone said so, and art is the act of bringing into existence what was never there. The aphorism has a problem its critics quickly identify. Most of what we call art does not require originating an unprecedented thing. A choir performing Mozart is making art without inventing anything. A workshop apprentice executing a Madonna in the master’s style is operating within a tradition. The strict reading of the aphorism would disqualify them both, and that contradicts how galleries and concert halls use the word.

So here is the refined position the photography story points toward. The originating act is what art and science share. Both fields contain a small number of moments when a particular human consciousness brings into existence a thing or a method or a way of seeing that was never there before, followed by an enormous number of practitioners who apply the new thing well or badly. Niépce making the first surviving heliograph in 1826 was an artist because the act of fixing a stable image with light had never been done. Daguerre refining the process into commercial viability in 1839 was an artist because the daguerreotype as a finished method had never existed. The studio photographer in 1860 producing his ten thousandth carte de visite was a craftsman applying invented technique. Same physical action, different category. The originating moment is what carries the honor.

The same cut runs through science. Newton’s invention of the calculus was an originating act; the engineer applying calculus to bridge stress in 1955 was a competent technician. Mendel’s first articulation of inheritance ratios was an originating act; the corn breeder applying Mendelian principles in 1962 was a working agronomist. The radiologist who first describes a previously unrecorded lesion pattern is doing what Mendel did. The radiologist applying established categories to the morning’s queue is doing what the agronomist did. The cut runs through both fields. This is the position photography forces us to, and it is the position I have been calling the Scientific Aesthetic across this network for fifteen years: the claim that science is itself a form of art, and that arts and sciences converge through a shared originating operation.

Consider a thought experiment that sharpens it further. I own a camera and take a position near the Eiffel Tower. After pressing the button, I hand the camera to you. You stand exactly where I stood and produce a second exposure. The photographs are identical. Who is the artist? Whose work is it? Does the camera’s owner have a stronger claim than the button-presser? Does the second photograph constitute imitation of the first, or are they both equally derivative of the tower itself? The thought experiment exposes that pressing the button was never the originating act. The originating act was Niépce’s, then Daguerre’s, then a long succession of inventors who established lenses, film stocks, exposure indices, and the conventions of framing. By the time you and I arrive at the spot and produce identical images, the originating work was done a century earlier. We are operating an invented machine within an invented set of conventions. Neither of us is making art in the strict sense; we are tourists with a camera doing what tourists do.

Copyright law, which has to give a practical answer, gives a strange one. Each of us would own the copyright in the photograph our hand caused to exist, and the copyrights would coexist for identical images. This is legally coherent and philosophically unsatisfying. Coherent because intellectual property law tracks proximate cause, and our fingers are the proximate cause of the shutters. Unsatisfying because it locates art in the trigger pull, which is exactly the location the painters of 1839 mocked and were partly right to mock. Where the painters were wrong was in thinking that no photographer had ever done the originating work. Niépce had. The 1839 mockery had the wrong target. The studio operators churning out cartes de visite were the proper subject of the criticism; the inventors of the medium had earned exemption. The same distinction applies inside painting itself, where the first to use linear perspective was making art and the thousandth competent perspective drawer was making decoration.

Now the harder example. Karl Barth wrote that Bach went to heaven while Mozart came from heaven. The distinction is real and worth holding up to the light. Bach as the worker who climbed the structure of counterpoint until it produced sublime architecture, every voice mathematically accounted for, every chorale prelude a piece of theological engineering. Mozart as the channel through which finished music seemed to arrive, the manuscripts famously cleaner than they should have been, the working method opaque even to his contemporaries. Both originated. Bach invented the practical possibilities of equal temperament and brought the fugue to a development nobody had imagined. Mozart developed the mature Classical style and pushed forms in opera and symphony to a depth that shaped the next century. By the originating-act test, both are artists in the strictest sense.

Yet the heaven attribution tracks something the originating-act test does not capture. It tracks the phenomenology of the artist’s experience of making. Bach made through labor. Mozart made through reception. The work appeared to arrive through Mozart from somewhere beyond him, and his role was to be present, conscious, equipped to receive what came. This Romantic conception of genius as channel has been mocked too, especially by twentieth-century critics who wanted to demystify the artist and rehabilitate the worker. But the distinction is not mystical, even if the metaphor is. Some originators labor toward what they make. Others find what they make arriving in them already largely formed. Both kinds of originator are artists. The distinction is internal to the category, and both kinds satisfy the originating-act test.

This matters because it tells us what the consciousness contributes. If Mozart was a channel, what he contributed was the readiness, the trained ear, the mind shaped by every piece of music he had absorbed since childhood, the working hand fast enough to capture what arrived. The channel had to be made before anything could come through it. The making of the channel was the labor; what came through it was the work. By this account, even the channel-artist is doing work; the work is just earlier in the process. Mozart’s effort had been spent before the moment of composition. Bach’s was spent during. Both consciousnesses originated, and the difference is the timing of the labor.

Hold this conclusion against the AI question, because it does work the older formulations cannot do. A language model produces text that no human assembled before. By the strict never-before-existed test, the output qualifies as PhD thesis. By the originating-act test, the output qualifies as imitation. The model invented nothing. Researchers invented its architecture. Human writers produced the training corpus. The inference itself is the application of an existing method to an existing prompt. The model occupies the position of the 1880 studio photographer, two generations downstream from Niépce. It plays the engineer’s role to Newton’s mathematics. The output may be useful, beautiful, even surprising, but it is not the originating act of a particular consciousness, because there is no consciousness in the model to do the originating. There may eventually be one, and that day will require revisiting this argument, but the present-day large language model is a competent technician of an invented process.

The first person to use a language model in a way nobody had used one before may have done something originating. Someone who discovers that a particular kind of prompt produces a particular kind of result, then builds a body of work around that discovery, may be an artist by the test I am proposing. The millionth person to type a prompt and accept the output is no more an artist than the millionth person to photograph the Eiffel Tower. This is consistent with the photography case. The category of the new medium has room for originators and for technicians, and most users in either field will be technicians.

A final consequence. The originating-act test resists political abuse better than the discovery-creation aphorism does. Authoritarian regimes police the canon by rewriting who counts as the first, the true, the founding artist or scientist. Entartete Kunst was an attempt to remove modernist innovators from the canon of true German art and replace them with academic painters of approved subjects. Lysenko was promoted as the first practitioner of authentically Soviet biology, with Mendel’s followers cast as bourgeois imitators of foreign error. The Cultural Revolution displaced the founding figures of Chinese music and physics in favor of approved rivals. Each regime understood that controlling the canon means controlling who is remembered as the originator and who is dismissed as the imitator. The originating-act test gives us a tool for resisting this. Every claim about who was first is a historical question with material evidence behind it. Niépce’s 1826 plate exists in a museum in Texas. Newton’s papers exist in Cambridge. Mendel’s notebooks exist in Brno. The canon can be argued from material evidence. The aphorism, by contrast, gives us no way to argue. It only gives us a slogan to either accept or reject.

So here is the position the photography story, the identical photograph thought experiment, and the Bach-Mozart distinction together support. Science is the revelation by a particular consciousness of something that was true before that consciousness named it. Art is the bringing into existence by a particular consciousness of something that was not there before that consciousness made it. Both fields contain a few originators and many imitators. The honor in both fields belongs to the originators. The imitators do necessary and sometimes excellent work, but they are not the artists or the scientists in the strict sense the words deserve. This is more austere than the everyday use of the words, and it is closer to what we mean when we say someone was a great artist or a great scientist. We mean they were the first. Competent application of established method has its own honor and its own name, and that name is craft. Together they constitute the Scientific Aesthetic, the position this whole article has been working toward.

The painters of 1839 looked at the daguerreotypists and saw machine operators. They were right about most of them and wrong about the founders. The same vision will be required for AI. Most outputs will be the work of technicians applying an invented process. A few may be the work of someone who saw what nobody had seen before about what the new instrument could do. Distinguishing the two is the task that always falls to the next generation, and the next generation is usually slow about it. We are slow about it now. We will be less slow if we hold the originating-act test in mind and apply it ruthlessly, to ourselves and to everyone else.

The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory is available now from David Boles Books. The paperback runs four hundred ninety-five pages and the Kindle eBook is also for sale through Amazon. Readers who prefer screen reading, home printing, or an editable archive copy will find a website-download PDF and a DOCX safety file at BolesBooks.com on the title’s landing page. The audiobook is in production and will follow.

What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

What the first photographers knew, and what their mockers missed, is the subject of this article. An aphorism is a short saying that compresses a big idea into a single sentence, the sort of thing that fits on a poster or a coffee mug. The one I started with proposes that science is the discovery of what was true before anyone said so, and art is the act of bringing into existence what was never there. The aphorism has a problem its critics quickly identify. Most of what we call art does not require originating an unprecedented thing. A choir performing Mozart is making art without inventing anything. A workshop apprentice executing a Madonna in the master’s style is operating within a tradition. The strict reading of the aphorism would disqualify them both, and that contradicts how galleries and concert halls use the word.

So here is the refined position the photography story points toward. The originating act is what art and science share. Both fields contain a small number of moments when a particular human consciousness brings into existence a thing or a method or a way of seeing that was never there before, followed by an enormous number of practitioners who apply the new thing well or badly. Niépce making the first surviving heliograph in 1826 was an artist because the act of fixing a stable image with light had never been done. Daguerre refining the process into commercial viability in 1839 was an artist because the daguerreotype as a finished method had never existed. The studio photographer in 1860 producing his ten thousandth carte de visite was a craftsman applying invented technique. Same physical action, different category. The originating moment is what carries the honor.

The same cut runs through science. Newton’s invention of the calculus was an originating act; the engineer applying calculus to bridge stress in 1955 was a competent technician. Mendel’s first articulation of inheritance ratios was an originating act; the corn breeder applying Mendelian principles in 1962 was a working agronomist. The radiologist who first describes a previously unrecorded lesion pattern is doing what Mendel did. The radiologist applying established categories to the morning’s queue is doing what the agronomist did. The cut runs through both fields. This is the position photography forces us to, and it is the position I have been calling the Scientific Aesthetic across this network for fifteen years: the claim that science is itself a form of art, and that arts and sciences converge through a shared originating operation.

Consider a thought experiment that sharpens it further. I own a camera and take a position near the Eiffel Tower. After pressing the button, I hand the camera to you. You stand exactly where I stood and produce a second exposure. The photographs are identical. Who is the artist? Whose work is it? Does the camera’s owner have a stronger claim than the button-presser? Does the second photograph constitute imitation of the first, or are they both equally derivative of the tower itself? The thought experiment exposes that pressing the button was never the originating act. The originating act was Niépce’s, then Daguerre’s, then a long succession of inventors who established lenses, film stocks, exposure indices, and the conventions of framing. By the time you and I arrive at the spot and produce identical images, the originating work was done a century earlier. We are operating an invented machine within an invented set of conventions. Neither of us is making art in the strict sense; we are tourists with a camera doing what tourists do.

Copyright law, which has to give a practical answer, gives a strange one. Each of us would own the copyright in the photograph our hand caused to exist, and the copyrights would coexist for identical images. This is legally coherent and philosophically unsatisfying. Coherent because intellectual property law tracks proximate cause, and our fingers are the proximate cause of the shutters. Unsatisfying because it locates art in the trigger pull, which is exactly the location the painters of 1839 mocked and were partly right to mock. Where the painters were wrong was in thinking that no photographer had ever done the originating work. Niépce had. The 1839 mockery had the wrong target. The studio operators churning out cartes de visite were the proper subject of the criticism; the inventors of the medium had earned exemption. The same distinction applies inside painting itself, where the first to use linear perspective was making art and the thousandth competent perspective drawer was making decoration.

Now the harder example. Karl Barth wrote that Bach went to heaven while Mozart came from heaven. The distinction is real and worth holding up to the light. Bach as the worker who climbed the structure of counterpoint until it produced sublime architecture, every voice mathematically accounted for, every chorale prelude a piece of theological engineering. Mozart as the channel through which finished music seemed to arrive, the manuscripts famously cleaner than they should have been, the working method opaque even to his contemporaries. Both originated. Bach invented the practical possibilities of equal temperament and brought the fugue to a development nobody had imagined. Mozart developed the mature Classical style and pushed forms in opera and symphony to a depth that shaped the next century. By the originating-act test, both are artists in the strictest sense.

Yet the heaven attribution tracks something the originating-act test does not capture. It tracks the phenomenology of the artist’s experience of making. Bach made through labor. Mozart made through reception. The work appeared to arrive through Mozart from somewhere beyond him, and his role was to be present, conscious, equipped to receive what came. This Romantic conception of genius as channel has been mocked too, especially by twentieth-century critics who wanted to demystify the artist and rehabilitate the worker. But the distinction is not mystical, even if the metaphor is. Some originators labor toward what they make. Others find what they make arriving in them already largely formed. Both kinds of originator are artists. The distinction is internal to the category, and both kinds satisfy the originating-act test.

This matters because it tells us what the consciousness contributes. If Mozart was a channel, what he contributed was the readiness, the trained ear, the mind shaped by every piece of music he had absorbed since childhood, the working hand fast enough to capture what arrived. The channel had to be made before anything could come through it. The making of the channel was the labor; what came through it was the work. By this account, even the channel-artist is doing work; the work is just earlier in the process. Mozart’s effort had been spent before the moment of composition. Bach’s was spent during. Both consciousnesses originated, and the difference is the timing of the labor.

Hold this conclusion against the AI question, because it does work the older formulations cannot do. A language model produces text that no human assembled before. By the strict never-before-existed test, the output qualifies as PhD thesis. By the originating-act test, the output qualifies as imitation. The model invented nothing. Researchers invented its architecture. Human writers produced the training corpus. The inference itself is the application of an existing method to an existing prompt. The model occupies the position of the 1880 studio photographer, two generations downstream from Niépce. It plays the engineer’s role to Newton’s mathematics. The output may be useful, beautiful, even surprising, but it is not the originating act of a particular consciousness, because there is no consciousness in the model to do the originating. There may eventually be one, and that day will require revisiting this argument, but the present-day large language model is a competent technician of an invented process.

The first person to use a language model in a way nobody had used one before may have done something originating. Someone who discovers that a particular kind of prompt produces a particular kind of result, then builds a body of work around that discovery, may be an artist by the test I am proposing. The millionth person to type a prompt and accept the output is no more an artist than the millionth person to photograph the Eiffel Tower. This is consistent with the photography case. The category of the new medium has room for originators and for technicians, and most users in either field will be technicians.

A final consequence. The originating-act test resists political abuse better than the discovery-creation aphorism does. Authoritarian regimes police the canon by rewriting who counts as the first, the true, the founding artist or scientist. Entartete Kunst was an attempt to remove modernist innovators from the canon of true German art and replace them with academic painters of approved subjects. Lysenko was promoted as the first practitioner of authentically Soviet biology, with Mendel’s followers cast as bourgeois imitators of foreign error. The Cultural Revolution displaced the founding figures of Chinese music and physics in favor of approved rivals. Each regime understood that controlling the canon means controlling who is remembered as the originator and who is dismissed as the imitator. The originating-act test gives us a tool for resisting this. Every claim about who was first is a historical question with material evidence behind it. Niépce’s 1826 plate exists in a museum in Texas. Newton’s papers exist in Cambridge. Mendel’s notebooks exist in Brno. The canon can be argued from material evidence. The aphorism, by contrast, gives us no way to argue. It only gives us a slogan to either accept or reject.

So here is the position the photography story, the identical photograph thought experiment, and the Bach-Mozart distinction together support. Science is the revelation by a particular consciousness of something that was true before that consciousness named it. Art is the bringing into existence by a particular consciousness of something that was not there before that consciousness made it. Both fields contain a few originators and many imitators. The honor in both fields belongs to the originators. The imitators do necessary and sometimes excellent work, but they are not the artists or the scientists in the strict sense the words deserve. This is more austere than the everyday use of the words, and it is closer to what we mean when we say someone was a great artist or a great scientist. We mean they were the first. Competent application of established method has its own honor and its own name, and that name is craft. Together they constitute the Scientific Aesthetic, the position this whole article has been working toward.

The painters of 1839 looked at the daguerreotypists and saw machine operators. They were right about most of them and wrong about the founders. The same vision will be required for AI. Most outputs will be the work of technicians applying an invented process. A few may be the work of someone who saw what nobody had seen before about what the new instrument could do. Distinguishing the two is the task that always falls to the next generation, and the next generation is usually slow about it. We are slow about it now. We will be less slow if we hold the originating-act test in mind and apply it ruthlessly, to ourselves and to everyone else.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-- Aristotle

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #Aristotle #Education

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Sunset #Clouds #Iowa

‘Can a conqueror remain a true student of virtue? Does political power inevitably corrupt the soul?’ https://greekreporter.com/2025/12/07/alexander-the-great-rebuked-aristotle-hidden-teachings/

Clearly Trump is not. His soul has been corrupted and not just by embezzlement and undermining the independence of the executive, legislative and judiciary. To be fair he didn’t have or has anyone like Aristotle for his teacher. Neither is he like Alaxander the Great, a pupil who built an Empire. Therefore the facts support the truth that he must be the destroyer of an Empire. Most definitely he is not the leader, creator, financier or the worker of a Federation. #EmpireVsFederation #Philosophy #DialecticalInference #DialecticPrinciple #Aristotle #AlexanderTheGreat

‘Can a conqueror remain a true student of virtue? Does political power inevitably corrupt the soul?’ https://greekreporter.com/2025/12/07/alexander-the-great-rebuked-aristotle-hidden-teachings/

Clearly Trump is not. His soul has been corrupted and not just by embezzlement and undermining the independence of the executive, legislative and judiciary. To be fair he didn’t have or has anyone like Aristotle for his teacher. Neither is he like Alaxander the Great, a pupil who built an Empire. Therefore the facts support the truth that he must be the destroyer of an Empire. Most definitely he is not the leader, creator, financier or the worker of a Federation. #EmpireVsFederation #Philosophy #DialecticalInference #DialecticPrinciple #Aristotle #AlexanderTheGreat