Gary R, Clark, Stephen, lists,
Clark, I can't comment on Davidson because I haven't read him. But as for Peirce's usage of "event", it never occurred to me that it means anything different than the usual vernacular meaning: an event is something that actually happens. Gary, this does help to clarify the Peircean notion of causality - which he claims is not peculiar to him, but is shared by "everybody" except Mill and his followers. But I think he's exaggerating there, as I'm sure there are many who speak of 'the cause of an event'. The problem with this is that Peirce regards the totality of what actually happens as a singular, but an exceedingly complex one, so complex that a finite intelligence can only make sense of it by abstracting facts from it and observing (with the help of abduction and induction) schematic patterns in the relationships among those facts. This is what science does, and common sense too, in order to make facts of the future predictable enough to guide our actions (including our inquiries) into that future. The fully determinate universe is so unutterably complex that we can only cope with it by abstracting "facts" and generalizing about "causes." Or that's one way of putting it, anyway. gary f. From: Gary Richmond [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 9-Oct-14 4:34 PM Clark, Gary F, Lists, Something that helped me a great deal in grasping Peirce's sense of causality in the present context (of facts as the "truth-makers" of dicisigns such that ". . .if a dicisign is true, the corresponding fact is the case," NP, p 72) is reading fn 24, p. 74-75, following the sentence: "Scientifically traceable causal relations hold between facts, not between occurrences (NP, 74). Here Peirce argues against J.S.Mill's notion that an occurrence could have a cause. The passage quoted in the note concludes: Mill's not making the needful distinction between Facts and Occurrences drives him to the declaration that the complete cause of any happening is the aggregate of all its antecedents, a principle which, though it is a necessary result of his views, he utterly ignores from the moment of enunciating it; for the excellent reason that its recognition would eviscerate the conception of Cause of all utility." This is to say that if one were to follow Mill's principle that "the complete cause of any happening is the aggregate of all its antecedents" then one would be left with something like the notion that everything preceding it is the cause of any occurrence, which is what I take Peirce to mean in writing that Mill's principle "would eviscerate the conception of Cause of all utility." Elsewhere in KS in a passage not quoted in this section he writes: Mill's singularity is that he speaks of the cause of a singular event. Everybody else speaks of the cause of a "fact," which is an element of the event. But, with Mill, it is the event in its entirety which is caused. The consequence is that Mill is obliged to define the cause as the totality of all the circumstances attending the event. This is, strictly speaking, the Universe of being in its totality. . Or perhaps a simpler and, perhaps, less metaphysical way of looking at this is that although an actual occurrence is most certainly real, "it can never be known or even imagined in all its infinite detail"(from Ms 647, quoted on p. 74) and the same would be the case a fortiori for its "cause". Best, Gary R Gary Richmond Philosophy and Critical Thinking Communication Studies LaGuardia College of the City University of New York C 745 718 482-5690 On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 2:04 PM, Clark Goble <[email protected]> wrote: On Oct 9, 2014, at 8:17 AM, Gary Fuhrman <[email protected]> wrote: Those who find this concept of causality questionable would do well to post their questions now. I confess I've always had trouble with the conception of "events" in philosophy. While I've long loved reading Davidson his events always seemed mysterious to me. I found the idea of fact for Peirce straightforward but exactly what the relationship with events is something I find more difficult. It seems like Peirce's conception here of causality with events is mysterious. It appears that his analysis of causes is less a physical one than a logical one relating facts or true propositions. In that sense there's a certain degree of overlap with how say Davidson conduct's his analysis. For Davidson in notions like his anomalous monism you have different sorts of descriptions of events and (going by distant memory here) causes are between those. This makes translation between the mental to physical difficult for Davidson due to the different sort of descriptions involved. (As I said, my ability to figure out Davidson's events was always weak, so I was never sure if I quite got Davidson even though I always loved reading him) Now Peirce's famous example via continuity on relating causally the mental to the physical and vice versa seems different from Davidson. And there are many other differences. Still I wonder if there's a certain broad similarity at play.
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