> On Nov 3, 2016, at 1:50 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com> wrote: > > ET: Of course I didn't mean an individual [human or god] force by the term > of 'chance'!. I find that Jon jumps to disagree with me as a matter of habit. > Either that, or his tendency to read in a literal manner leads him to such > conclusions. I meant 'chance or Firstness or spontaneity as a causal force - > and there's plenty of comments in Peirce on just this state. > > No, I understood exactly what you meant. My disagreement is that I take > "chance" (in Peirce's usage) to be freedom or spontaneity, rather than > randomness or inexplicability; and it is certainly not something that could > ever be "a causal force." I even quoted Peirce to support this view, but you > refer to my "tendency to read in a literal manner" as if it were a bad thing! >
Again I think we’re all talking past one an other by equivocating over the term ‘cause.’ In a certain cause pure freedom or spontaneity isn’t causal and in an other sense it must be. Effectively each firstness is its own unmoved mover. The problem is that making sense of causality at all when little is necessary and most things are underdetermined is problematic. I think causality is problematic for a variety of other reasons too. For instance in terms of physics we could oppose the classic Newtonian formulation of mechanics in terms of forces and masses to the Hamiltonian or Lagrangian forms. They’re mathematically equivalent yet metaphysically quite conceptually different. The Hamiltonian is the evolution of the wave function (what in quantum mechanics becomes the Dirac or Schrodinger equation) and it’s hard to make sense of causality in terms of it. Likewise again turning to Duns Scotus we have classic arguments against causality being continuous. (Basically part of the same extended argument I linked to earlier for a first cause) For Peirce where any sign can be divided it’s worth asking if we have causality at all. Despite these problems of causality we all use the term causality. > He referenced the same series of articles in what was probably his very first > draft of "A Neglected Argument" (1908), and made a few other comments about > it that are relevant to this discussion. > > CSP: I there contended that the laws of nature, and, indeed, all > experiential laws, have been results of evolution, being (such was my > original hypothesis,) developments out of utterly causeless determinations of > single events, under a certain universal tendency toward habit-forming ... > But during the long years which have elapsed since the hypothesis first > suggested itself to me, it may naturally be supposed that faulty features of > the original hypothesis have been brought [to] my attention by others and > have struck me in my own meditations. Dr. Edward Montgomery remarked that my > theory was not so much evolutionary as it was emanational; and Professor > Ogden Rood pointed out that there must have been some original tendency to > take habits which did not arise according to my hypothesis; while I myself > was most struck by the difficulty of so explaining the law of sequence in > time, if I proposed to make all laws develope from single events; since an > event already supposes Time. (R 842, emphasis added) I think this might be better read as there being no cause for firstness not that firstness can’t be seen a not causal. Again I suspect we’re talking past one an other again but the mere fact firstness can be an element in a triadic sign more or less entails a certain sense of causation. (Although I prefer Peirce’s term determination although that too has the genealogy in problematic metaphysical understanding) I should add that this problem of language for this foundational event isn’t new. You see similar debates in late antiquity over whether the platonic One is one or ought to be considered two emanation steps. While I’ll confess to finding such matters idle talk there’s usually a logical reason for the analaysis. (Much like the whole disparaged “how many angels could dance on a pin” makes sense in the context of the debates over kinds in medieval scholasticism)
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