Frances to William the almost realist... (1) The norm or normal or normative is what ought to be, and not what was or is or will be or must be. The normal does not mean the perfect or the absolute. The norm is what stuff seems to sense by way of signs to be. (2) All objective things that may be found as ideal and pure or sure that humans mentally engage are degraded and degenerative versions. The perfect ideal as sensed is the imperfect real of that ideal. The ideal is degenerative because sense in mind must use signs that moderate the ideal, and signs will or must be used to infer the ideals felt to be real. In necessarily using signs, mind must necessarily interpret stuff that is given uncontrolled to it. What is known of perfect ideals or of any existent objects for that matter is the result of sensing an indirect phenomenal representation of that stuff, so that signing and seeming yield what ought to be given to sense. The making of the real to stand for the ideal is an attempt by the idea of it in mind to control sense, so that the real might conform to the ideal as well as possible. The mind becomes a law that tries to assure sense that some degree of normality can be expected of phenomena that represents perfect ideals. The normal is what the perfect ought to be in mind, and not what it actually is, because the perfect ideal is only as real as the norm of sense. (3) By the dispositional process of purposive evolution, the inclined fate of stuff is to be a sign, and the inclined duty of sense is to guess that the sign seems to be of the right stuff. Sensible ideals so far found include for example creative freedom and infinite continuity and eternal time and perpetual space and constant gravity. These ideals are realized in mind only as existent metaphysical objects, and all objects have the fated purpose to be signs and will also be signs of other objects by the representational process of telic design. (4) To believe in the metaphysical ontic reality of perfect continuing ideals to the extent that they can be sensed at all, need not entail any notion of theism or deism. Any scientist and philosopher can also be religious without compromising their field of study; and if any person is religious, then this belief furthermore need not entail laity or theity or deity whatsoever. (5) My present task is to attempt a correction and an application of this philosophic mist into possibly framing a sound global theory of architecture. The tentative assumption would now be that there are preexisting ideal paradigms or engrained belief systems that subliminally steer designers into their architectural practices of projects and processes and products.
William partly wrote... Thus for Frances, normal means perfect, a state rarely if ever attained... There is something likable in pretending that a perfect object is also its normal state. Yesterday, in walking a prairie with a color chart of wildflowers in hand, we noticed many imperfect examples of the spider wort in bloom, at least in comparison to the illustration in the guide. Was the illustration wrong or was each plant just a bit off? During the best days of the Renaissance, artists regarded it as their duty to "perfect" nature's yearning to fulfill God's plan and thus represented objects with that extra touch of divinity enabled by their own greater proximity to the Creator and their invention of genius as a spark of the divine? It's no surprise that Frances takes this notion of normal as equivalent to perfect because it's the thesis of her master, Peirce, who was aiming to bridge his scientific outlook with a religious conviction. But what happens to her arguments when we read the word perfect whenever she writes the word normal? Frances to William and Cheerskep with respect... In realist philosophy, the normal is the ideal norm and this normative norm is simply what ought to be, while the abnormal is what ought not to be. The normal is thus not the ordinary nor is it the average. The idea of the abnormal being deemed a handicap or a disadvantage seems to be beyond what ought not to be. The normal norm is thus not what was or is or could be or will be or would be or even must be, but what might be found as being loosely what should be. The norm is an objective logical construct, but one realized indirectly and subjectively in mind, which mentality of mind happens to make pure objective logic degenerative, and thus what ought to be. If my profoundly and multiplicitously muddled assertion, that art and science are both acts of only normal humans, and tend to be engaged in naturally by instinct without any undue nurturing, needs to be clarified in regard to the term normal without resorting to some unclear synonym like ordinary or common or average, then perhaps some correction might be offered. The normal for constructs like buildings in architectural theory after all seems to be of some importance for experts in the field.
