> On Nov 23, 2015, at 1:44 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote: > > Clark - i'm quite confused by this. Where do you get the idea that habits are > reversible? I would consider that they are non-reversible. To have reversible > habits - whew- that would deny adaptation, evolution, Thirdness as > Mind....it would make everything almost pure mechanics…
Beliefs are habits. Beliefs change and it’s not at all uncommon to return to an original belief after being persuaded of a different conclusion. Now one way to deal with this is to make a distinction between Peirce’s early period and his conception of habit (say up through the late 1870’s) as compared to his mature thought in the late 1890’s onward. My own view is that we have to think of habit as a matter of degree and thus reversibility as a matter of degree. Quite concrete habits are thus far less likely to be reversed. This makes sense considering habits not just at the individual level but at the social level. Thus the mechanistic conception of physics was rather congealed and took a while to really shift with the rise of quantum mechanics. One might say though that perhaps we should distinguish between epistemology where reality is acting upon us to lead us to permanence and ontological conceptions of basic cosmology where laws are developing in nature itself. While that is a natural distinction to raise, I’m not sure Peirce ultimately makes it. I’m open to being wrong on habits, but I confess I can’t see how to square that circle without either rejecting the reversibility thesis or rejecting the equating of beliefs as habits.
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