Dear Jon - Welcome back! Yeah, you're absolutely right. I am not averse to common sense arguments - they are often right, but by their very nature not always. Coming to Peirce, most of us have some degree of previous training which has selected and developed and distorted our common sense in different ways - so we hardly share any gold standard of common sense against which to measure our interpretations.
I , for one, think too many people come with a subject-object metaphysics shaped by German idealism which to some extent has managed to sneak its way into parts of analytical philosophy - with the upshot that many ontological issues not easily solved are thrown into epistemology and often further on into psychology. Some even find it a Spartan virtue to make ontology as scraggy as possible, overpopulating psychology with tasks earlier seen as parts of ontology. A prime example which occupied P, of course, was universals - do they exist in reality, and in what sense? - or are they just labels added by the human mind? (P, of course, thought the former). Here, I think a sound sceptisism against the subject-object scheme may vaccinate us against such harsh ontological diet dictates. Best F Den 13/09/2014 kl. 05.41 skrev Jon Awbrey <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> : Peircers, >From time to time I come to the realization that there are ways of reading >Peirce that make no sense to me. When I stop to think about the potential >sources of that evident divergence from common sense, the first thing that >comes to mind is the fact that people come to reading Peirce with so many >different aims, backgrounds, and collateral experiences with the objects that >he wraps his signs and ideas around. Thinking about that leads to all sorts of questions that I see no way of beginning to address with any sense of coherence. All I can do is try to give a good account of what makes sense to me and why. My experience with failures to communicate over many trials tells me that the biggest and most numerous rifts in our several understandings of Peirce all point back to the visions of relations, triadic relations, and triadic sign relations that dance in our various and sundry heads. So that is what I'll take up first ... Jon
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