> On Jun 10, 2016, at 5:57 AM, [email protected] wrote: > > Clark, very nice collection of excerpts you posted there. I think my blog > post for today is roughly in the same ballpark:
Wow, that’s a really interesting quote I don’t think I’d seen before. > In the end is the beginning. Along the way, though, we have to acknowledge > the difference between real occurrences and real facts. > > An Occurrence, which Thought analyzes into Things and Happenings, is > necessarily Real; but it can never be known or even imagined in all its > infinite detail. A Fact, on the other hand[,] is so much of the real Universe > as can be represented in a Proposition, and instead of being, like an > Occurrence, a slice of the Universe, it is rather to be compared to a > chemical principle extracted therefrom by the power of Thought; and though it > is, or may be Real, yet, in its Real existence it is inseparably combined > with an infinite swarm of circumstances, which make no part of the Fact > itself. It is impossible to thread our way through the Logical intricacies of > being unless we keep these two things, the Occurrence and the Real Fact, > sharply separate in our Thoughts. [Peirce, MS 647 (1910)] > > An Occurrence is necessarily real but never completely known; a Fact, being a > sign, is not necessarily real, but is necessarily incomplete, since it cannot > represent the ‘swarm of circumstances’ inseparable from whatever reality it > has. A Fact is ‘supposed to be an element of the very universe itself’ > (EP2:304), and this ‘supposing,’ though fallible, is necessary to any inquiry > which hopes to arrive at even a partial truth. I’d note that this is very similar to what you see in the continental phenomenology tradition with figures like Derrida with his near real structures always being a matter of more and less when represented or Marion in terms of the saturated phenomena. Derrida’s focus is often how context and representation are tied to objects. Thanks for that. It definitely is quite close, if not identical to his distinction between being and being represented.
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