> On Nov 30, 2015, at 11:40 AM, Jerry LR Chandler <[email protected]> > wrote: > > I am uncertain with regard to the meaning of this sentence. > The term "middle voice" suggests utterances and hence a relation to grammar > and rhetoric and logic.
Originally yes. However it related to how we ascribe being and thus properties to objects in the medieval era. See my last post for more info. It’s important around the era of Scotus due to Ockham and others saying it has to be part of logic as a way of using the logic and grammar of analogy against Scotus’ realism. Latin has no middle voice so translations often simply used passive voice. But this isn’t quite right. English has both passive and middle voice but the latter is rarely used. Passive is bad because it’s unclear who the actor is. Middle is more interesting as the actor/subject of an action are the same. That’s why it’s significant philosophically. Middle voice is important in 20th century Continental phenomenology as it allows a happening not fully external and not fully internal. It’s a third way between physicalism and more Cartesian like types of internalism. It also suggests a stronger interdependence than traditional philosophy had. It also gets used as a kind of undecidable point or aporia - what makes possible both activity and passivity. The criticism of a lot of interpretations of middle voice is to simply see it as a third path of “in between” rather than a true active/passive within a single subject. So it’s definitely not a clear cut way to approach things. Peirce is aware of middle voice and discusses it in various places. (Say Chronological Writings 2:91) Noting a logic where there’s both an active and passive voice he says, “but now it is also necessary to have a species of non-relative terms derived from relatives, which correspond to the middle voice.” This discussion is a complex bit of logic and is from his early period. (1868) Some take this to imply an early logic of continuity and a new logic of being. See Fernando Zalemea’s “Plasticity and Creativity in the Logic Notebook” for more on this. http://lnx.journalofpragmatism.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/6_zalamea.pdf But while one might see this in his logic of continuity and mature view of signs he doesn’t really use the term middle voice in his mature works that I could see. > Are you suggesting this as an alternative world view relative to physical > "laws", e.g., the absence of order? No, far from it. Rather the argument would be this is what enables laws to develop.
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