Gary, All,
I should have thought another old-timer would've recognized
the allusion to Simon & Garfunkel's "Dangling Conversation":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nntOYUODSV0
Seeing as how this thread has been one of the more dangling conversations
we've had on the Peirce List in a very long time. At any rate, I think
a careful reading of what I carefully wrote would show that I am hardly
saying that analysis of any kind has no value, but simply that there's
a critical question that has to be asked at a certain step of analysis.
Regards,
Jon
On 5/2/2016 11:22 AM, Gary Richmond wrote:
Jon A.,
Since we've been through this many times before, and I haven't time or
patience to argue with you about it, I am going to let my response be a
snippet (from an off-list email to a friend who is also a member of this
list on the topic) and leave it at that. I wrote:
"As to the current discussion of categoriality, while I couldn't care much
about any given example of categorial analysis, it's irksome for Jon A (who
subtitled his subject line today, "Can Categorial Analysis Be Worthwhile?")
to suggest there's no value to it. I don't suppose it would make any
difference to remind him that Peirce did vast quantities of categorial
analysis himself and, in fact, planned an entire book, A Guess at the
Riddle, meant to be categorial analysis in all the sciences, one expected
to have a profound effect on the future of thinking most generally, and
based exactly on categoriality."
Obviously, I have zero interest in participating in this discussion any
further than my comment above would suggest.
Best,
Gary R
[image: Gary Richmond]
*Gary Richmond*
*Philosophy and Critical Thinking*
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On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 9:24 AM, Jon Awbrey <[email protected]> wrote:
Jon S.,
Most of the old timers on this List have already heard
and ignored this advice more times than I could care to
enumerate but since you and maybe a few other onlookers
may not have heard it before, I will give it another try.
Peirce's categories are best viewed as categories of relations.
To a first approximation, firstness, secondness, thirdness are
simply what all monadic, dyadic, triadic relations, respectively,
have in common. (At a second approximation, we may take up the
issues of generic versus degenerate cases of 1-, 2-, 3-adicity,
but it is critical to take the first approximation first before
attempting to deal with the second.)
In that light, thirdness is a global property of the whole triadic
relation in view and it is a category error to attribute thirdness
to any local domain or any given element that participates in that
relation.
As it happens, we often approach a complex relation by picking one of
its elements, that is, a single tuple as exemplary of the whole set of
tuples that make up the relation, and then we take up the components of
that tuple in one convenient order or another. That method lends itself
to the impression that k-ness abides in the k-th component we happen to
take up, but that impression begs the question of whether that order is
a property of the relation itself, or merely an artifact of our choice.
Failing to examine that question puts us at risk for a type of error
that I've rubricized as the “Fallacy Of Misplaced Abstraction” (FOMA).
As I see it, there is a lot of that going on in the present discussion,
arising from a tendency to assign Peircean categories to everything in
sight, despite the fact that Peirce's categories apply only to certain
levels of structure.
Regards,
Jon
On 5/1/2016 11:54 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt wrote:
Jerry R., List:
The surprising fact, C, is observed;
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course [because B];
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.
This is propositional logic, so as you anticipated, we have to convert it
into predicate logic--a syllogism in the strict, deductive sense--in order
to assign the various terms as you have requested. By doing so, we
construct the very syllogism that Peirce invoked in "A Neglected Argument
for the Reality of God" (EP 2.441). With S=subject (these beans),
P=predicate (white), and M=middle (beans from this bag) ...
A = credible conjecture = Case = minor premiss = S is M.
B = circumstances of occurrence = Rule = major premiss = M is P.
C = surprising fact = Result = conclusion = S is P.
I do not believe that any of this is controversial, nor (it seems)
is assigning B to Thirdness; someone will no doubt correct me if I am
wrong
about this. :-) What is still on the table is whether A is Firstness (Jon
S.) or Secondness (Gary R.), and thus whether C is Secondness (Jon S.) or
Firstness (Gary R.).
Regards,
Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA
Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman
www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
--
academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey
my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/
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