> On Aug 25, 2016, at 8:20 AM, [email protected] wrote: > > I don’t think so. What makes a Dynamic Object dynamic — and efficient — (as > in “efficient cause”) — is its genuine Secondness to the sign, and the > Immediate Object has only a degenerate secondness to it. I think the specific > example that Peirce gave in a 1909 letter to James is a good test case for > applying these terminologies:
This seems right and also highlights why some of Peirce’s odder and more controversial views can be so important. For instance nominalists have a difficult time explaining how physical entities not in causal interaction can be tied together. This leads to various claims about sets of entities being put together only by minds. (Here thinking of some of Davidson’s points about language) If there are real generals and they can be in efficient causation with us, then a lot of the construction of sets becomes less problematic. (IMO) Again the nominalist tendency in philosophy makes much of this hard to figure out. This in turn leads to lots of pseudo-problems in places like reference and sense. All that said, I confess I don’t like thinking in efficience causation since in one sense it leads to problems due to the common nominalism it’s found within. I think an implication of Peirce’s semiotics is to subtly reshape how Aristotle’s categories of causation function. (This is nowhere more apparent than with teleology)
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