It's quite a stretch to read [the Peirce quote] as an assertion that "the subject-object relation" is "obscure and mysterious," and it has nothing to do with the "mind-matter problem" which is the legacy of Cartesian dualism.
What is the stretch? Your statement makes no sense to me. The quote is explicit. It is about the relation between the mathematical symbols in the chemist's mind (the subject), and the chemical matter in nature (the object). The relation between subject and object (or image and object, mind and matter or symbol and matter, observer and observed or the knower and the known, etc.) are all cases of the same old epistemic problem -- the relation of observed shadows (in Plato's cave) to the light of reality. Here is the quote again:
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."
HP: Peirce clearly distinguishes the mind of the observer from natural matter that is observed. I call this an epistemic mind-matter problem. (Descartes substance dualism is irrelevant.) All epistemic concepts like detection, observation, measurement, etc. do not make any sense without separating the categories of subject and object. This distinction is not just a metaphysical principle. It is a pragmatic empirical necessity that all sciences require.
Metaphysically lumping "matter as effete mind" still leaves Peirce making the same basic epistemic subject-object distinctions: "A sign is a thing which serves to convey knowledge of some other thing, which it is said to stand for or represent. This thing is called the object of the sign; the idea in the mind that the sign excites, which is a mental sign of the same object, is called an interpretant of the sign.
I don't see why Peirce would have any problem with modern empiricism, other than his irrefutable and unfalsifiable metaphysics of "matter as effete mind."
Howard
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