Helmut et al.,
Regarding Ben Novak’s post, it’s vintage Chesterton, but how it relates to Peirce’s cosmology is not very clear to me. Perhaps the point is that Peirce’s cosmology is part of his metaphysics and is therefore based on logic, not on physics. But I’m only guessing. Maybe Kirsti can explain. My own responses are inserted below … Gary f. From: Helmut Raulien [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 16-Jul-16 13:19 Dear Gary F., list, you wrote: "Peirce says here that ‘the law of habit’ – as opposed to the ‘fundamental law of mind,’ which is the tendency of all things to take habits – ‘is a simple formal law, a law of efficient causation.’". Gf: My guess is that if you want to understand what Peirce means by saying that the “law of habit is a simple formal law, a law of efficient causation,” you need to work your way through his 1898 lecture on “Causation and Force” (RLT 197ff., also CP 6.66ff.). This statement by Peirce in Baldwin’s Dictionary made me do a double-take, because it’s my habit to associate habit with Thirdness and efficient causation with Secondness. My insertion setting the “law of mind” in opposition to “the law of habit” is my way (as of this week) of making sense of what Peirce says here, and results from my recent study of the Cambridge Lecture I just cited. I am not sure how much sense it makes. I donot think, that things can take habits. I think, only organisms can. Gf: I assume you’re responding to Peirce’s assertion of “the tendency of all things to take habits.” But your response assumes that organisms are not “things,” an assumption that Peirce does not make in this context. In fact Peirce consistently rejects a sharp distinction between living and nonliving systems. If by “things” you mean inanimate physical material entities, Peirce would say that those “things” generally do NOT take habits, because they are already “habit-bound.” But Peirce doesn’t use the word “thing” that way, at least not in cosmology. Also I think, that efficient cause cannot form a habit, but only final cause can, which final cause is only a cause of organisms, but not of inanimate nature. Gf: To me, a habit IS a kind of final cause, so I can make no sense of the either proposition, that efficient cause can or cannot “form a habit.” Nor can I comprehend a cause causing another cause. Sorry. (and example cause too, nervous animals/brain, but that is only my hobby topic). Ok, the whole universe may well be an organism (and something comparable to a brain animal too), but then it is the universe, that takes habits, not the things. By the way: What about binary laws, eg. the conservation laws, that only make sense if being exact? (Energy is exactly conserved). Gf: Sorry again, I have no idea why you think the conservation of energy would only make sense if it’s exact. There is no way for them to might have evolved by growth of any kind. They are, if habits, saltatory emergent ones. So habits, if you want to expand the term like Peirce did, are not only growth affairs, but can be emergent too. Gf: You don’t see emergence as a kind of growth? Again you seem to be making a sharp distinction that Peirce was unwilling to make — and I agree with him on this point. I think the great debates that used to rage among evolutionary theorists concerning “gradualism” vs. “saltationism” (or “catastrophism” as Peirce called it) are rather silly. It’s just a matter of degree and time scale. See my last post in the thread "the autors claim...". Binary laws cannot be due to "ever so minute changes", and if Peirce has claimed that, he was wrong, I think. Imagine a universe, in which energy is not exactly conserved, but increases: This universe would glow white hot and explode in nearly no time. If energy would decrease, it would immediately shrink, cool down, and vanish. Gf: I’m no physicist, so I’ll leave it to others to judge your reasoning here; I can’t follow it at all. I should mention though that, according to Peirce, the spontaneous deviations from physical laws are (at this stage in the development of the universe) pretty much undetectable, because they are smaller than probable errors in those measurements which furnish our data. Peirce is not an overwise guru, he might have been wrong in one or the other minor aspect, but all in all he did a good job, and was right. But in this case, there is a problem, I think. So please do not answer with Peirce-quotations, but with your own thoughts. Can things take habits?? Gf: My short answer is above; if you want a more complete one from me, you’d best get it from my online book Turning Signs, http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/TWindex.htm, especially Chapters 3-4 and 7-11. By the way, the final Peirce quote in my post is from “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (which is in EP1), not “Reply to the Necessitarians” as my post said. I made that corrected that mistake on my website later on the day I posted it.
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