Dear Gary,
In a general sense, Peirce did indeed anticipate the possibility of
non-equilibrium thermodynamics. The possibility of new types of order in
far-from-the-equilibrium situations was something Peirce definitely had
in mind. Already in "Design and Chance" he talks about this possibility.
He saw that the global dissipation of energy is compatible with a local
increase of ordered structures. The second law of thermodynamics
concerns only closed systems. But is the universe a closed system? When
you think of the evolution of order in terms of involving and involved
neigborhoods there might be an unlimited, irreversible non-equilibrium
growth of ordered structures although the dissipation of energy in the
involving neighborhood is always increasing. In "Design and Chance"
Peirce claims exactly this: "The dissipation of energy by the regular
laws of nature is by those very laws accompanied by circumstances more
and more favorable to its reconcentration by chance." Priogine's studies
of chemical clocks deals exactly with those local, chance events which,
at some bifurcation points, give rise to ordered sequences of events.
This is what I pointed out to him and in his preface to my German
edition of Peirce's writings on evolution and signs Prigogine pointed
out that in the passage quoted above Peirce had clearly understood the
need of new sort of physics that deals with processes in
non-equilibirium situations.
Helmut Pape
gnusystems schrieb:
Helmut, thanks very much for this (quoted below) -- it definitively
answers the question of how Prigogine and Stengers managed to quote from
an unpublished Peirce manuscript in their 1984 book.
Somewhat more vague, it seems to me, are the "similarities between his
approach in non-equilibrium thermodynamics esp. the order-creating power
of dissipative structures and Peirce's ideas about the constitutive
relation between chance-processes and the constitution of new habits."
I'm pretty well convinced now that this emphasis on the creative power
of chance, if i may call it that, is what Prigogine and Peirce had in
common. It also seems clear that the *dissipative* (order-destroying,
entropy-producing) aspect of the habit-taking process was *not*
emphasized (or perhaps even mentioned) by Peirce, so in that sense he
did not anticipate later developments in non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
Regarding the rest of this thread -- i'm now back from the road trip
that took me out of the conversation, but it will take awhile for me to
catch up with it and come up with responses (if any are required).
gary
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, April 29, 2006 9:18 AM
To everybody interested in the Prigogine / Peirce issue:
in 1981 I visited Prigogine at the universite libre in
Bruxelles. I told about some similarities between his approach in
non-equilibrium thermodynamics esp. the order-creating power of
dissipative structures and Peirce's ideas about the constitutive
relation between chance-processes and the constitution of new habits. I
made accessible to him some of the unpublished MSs, esp. "Design and
Chance". And Prigogine wrote for me a preface to a German edition of
Peirce's writings on cosmology and philosophy of nature (title:
Naturordnung und Zeichenprozess). So from that time onwards he was
pretty well-informed about Peirce's thought.
Helmut Pape
Director
Peirce Edition Project Bamberg
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