At 07:44 AM 2/1/2015, Gary Fuhrman wrote:
As for Howard's question here, whole books could be and have been written about it, and we've been through it on the list recently, apparently to no effect as far as Howard is concerned . . .
HP: The list has had no effect because I don't see the epistemic "hard question" addressed. I was hoping to get Frederik to clarify his views which appear to dismiss it. The substance of my question was directed at Frederick's calling the subject/object problem a "hypostatic dualism." If I understand Peirce's hypostasis, this would imply that either the subject or the object or both are abstractions with no physical reality, or at least, as Peirce says, there is no necessity of making a distinction between them.
I agree completely with Gary R's analysis of Peirce's statement. He is talking about logic, not epistemology.
Gary R: "But, I think, in this instance it turns out to be more a logical move in consideration of accurately expressing propositional signs than an epistemic one. . . " and that my [Howard's] concern [and Peirce's] are, "less a matter of 'epistemic distinction' than one of the ethics of terminology in logical notation."
Peirce here is making only a logic distinction, not addressing the epistemic issue. However, Peirce clearly saw the epistemic subject/object problem. It was not a hypostatic dualism; it was real and it was "occult and mysterious."
Peirce: "The result that the chemist observes is brought about by nature, the result that the mathematician observes is brought about by the associations of the mind. . . the power that connects the conditions of the mathematicians diagram with the relations he observes in it is just as occult and mysterious to us as the power of Nature that brings about the results of the chemical experiment." [hhp italics] W:6, 37, Letter to Noble on the Nature of Reasoning, May 28, 1987. (1897)
Howard
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