Jon A., List: I gather that you believe this whole discussion to be misguided, but does that warrant blocking the way of inquiry for those of us who are still interested in exploring it? Perhaps the outcome will be a consensus that it is indeed a mistake to assign categories to rule/case/result at all ... or that it makes no practical difference what assignments we make ... or that the "correct" assignments depend on which aspect of the categories is in focus. Or maybe the outcome will be no consensus at all; the attempt might still be worthwhile anyway.
I tend to "default" to the categories as possibility/actuality/necessity, and that guides where I stand currently on this particular matter. Others might lean more toward quality/relation/representation, or feeling/action/thought, or chance/law/habit. How do we resolve situations when these different characterizations of Peirce's three categories suggest different answers? Per your latest message, what exactly is the "critical question that has to be asked," and at which "step of analysis" should we be asking it? Regards, Jon S. On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 8:24 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 >
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