> On Oct 25, 2016, at 10:00 AM, Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> 
> CP 6.185-213 is the manuscript text for the eighth and final Cambridge 
> Conferences lecture and actually dates from 1898, not 1892-1893--thus coming 
> after Peirce became a full-blown three-category realist, according to Fisch.  
> The PDF that you linked is how it appears in the stand-alone volume 
> containing those lectures, Reasoning and the Logic of Things, edited by 
> Ketner and Putnam.
> 

Yeah I was confused on that. I have Reasoning and the Logic of Things and knew 
the delivery date. But the introduction for the CP 6 put the date as earlier. 
So I started to think it was a preliminary text. (I’m at work so I don’t have 
access to my library - I usually prefer to quote from EP 2 or RLT rather than 
CP for reasons like this. (It’s just a pain to figure out the dates - although 
perhaps that’s me) Thanks for clearing that up. That explains why it’s so modal 
realist.

> Is there a plausible way to integrate the two mentions of a blackboard into a 
> single diagram?  Could it be that the one in NEM 4.345 (RLT 162-163) 
> corresponds to "a Platonic world" in CP 6.203-208 (RLT 261-263)?  In other 
> words ...
> The "clean blackboard" represents "a continuum of some indefinite multitude 
> of dimensions" [3ns] (CP 6.203).
> The initial chalk mark represents "a springing up of something new" [1ns] 
> whose continuity "is nothing but the original continuity of the blackboard 
> which makes everything upon it continuous" (CP 6.203).
> Persistent groups of such chalk marks represent "reacting systems" [2ns] that 
> result when "the generalizing tendency [3ns] builds up new habits from chance 
> occurrences [1ns]" (CP 6.206).
> Some of these "reacting systems" aggregate together into multiple "Platonic 
> worlds" (CP 6.207-208).
> Eventually, "a discontinuous mark" [2ns] is differentiated out of one of them 
> as "this [determinate] Universe of Actual Existence" (CP 6.208, NEM 4.345).

I think it does given the explicit reference to platonism.

> What I have in mind here is Peirce's notion that every part of a true 
> continuum is itself a true continuum.  Since each Platonic world is 
> represented by a merged collection of marks on the blackboard, the latter is 
> also a blackboard; or perhaps we should distinguish it, for the sake of 
> clarity, by calling it a "whiteboard" whose own continuity is derived from 
> and dependent on that of the underlying blackboard.  It is then "a 
> discontinuous mark" on the whiteboard, which is itself a merged collection of 
> white marks on the original clean blackboard, that represents "this Universe 
> of Actual Existence."

Yes I think this is right. It gets at the issues we’ve been discussing. 
Although I hasten to add I’ve not read the full exchange from last week yet.
-----------------------------
PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L 
to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To 
UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the 
line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at 
http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .




Reply via email to