> On Nov 23, 2015, at 6:30 AM, Jon Awbrey <jawb...@att.net> wrote: > > On Nov 23, 2015, at 7:05 AM, Sungchul Ji <s...@rci.rutgers.edu > <mailto:s...@rci.rutgers.edu>> wrote: > >> Clark, Søren, lists, >> >> Peirce said: >> >> " . . . While every physical process can be reverse without violation of the >> law of mechanics, (112315-1) >> the law of habit forbids such reversal. ' (CP 8.318) >> >> I am glad you quoted this statement because I wanted to make a comment on it >> when I first read it about a year ago somewhere in CP but could not find it >> again. >> >> It seems to me that the first sentence of this this statement is false even >> based on our common experience: Evaporated perfume cannot be put back into a >> bottle. As we all now know the physical law forbidding the reversal of >> evaporated perfume is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and there >> developed a whole field of scientific studies during the 20th Century on >> such processes called IRREVERSIBLE thermodynamics, for the contribution to >> the establishment of which I. Prigogine (1917-2003) was awarded a Nobel >> Prize in 1977.
> > Peirce is using “mechanics” advisedly there to refer to classical mechanics > as distinguished from thermodynamics. I took him to just be referring to basic mechanics rather than a more holistic treatment of mechanics that includes thermodynamics or statistical mechanics. I’m afraid I don’t know my 19th century physics history well enough to recall when people started thinking of thermodynamics in terms of statistical mechanics. I’m assuming it was Boltzman and thus around the time of Peirce’s formative years. But I might be wrong. I think recognition of reversibility problems despite the laws being reversible would have been known to Peirce. But again we have to distinguish the law from it’s impact on systems in practice. Anyone know the date for CP 8.318? (Or if it’s one of his better known papers, the title?) It’s interesting that while everyone chimed in on the mechanics part of the quote no one clarified to me the more troubling main part on habits being reversible. I suspect, although I don’t know, that he may actually be thinking thermodynamically here and the problem of reversibility there. Yet it seems to me this runs up agains the problem of thermodynamics (in the statistical mechanics version) being due to pure chance. Yet I’m not sure Peirce’s adopting of the Epicurean swerve is pure chance in the same way. That is mind traditionally was seen as something between determinism and pure equally distributed chance. I’ll confess that I can’t recall of a place Peirce addresses this though.
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