Jeff, list: Peirce considers this situation, as I read it, in his continued examination of the categories, see 5.90-92.
He imagines a dissnter with an attack on his views: "We fully admit that you have proved, until we begin to doubt it, that Secondness is not involved in Firstness nor Thirdness in Secondness and Firstness. But you have entirely failed to prove that Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness are independent ideas for the obvious reason that it is as plain as the nose on your face that the idea of a triple involved the idea of pairs, and the idea of a pair the idea of units. Consequently, Thirdness is the one and sole category. This is substantially the idea of Hegel and unquestionably it contains a truth. Not only does Thirdness suppose and involve the ideas of Secondness and Firstness, but never will it be possible to find any Secondness or Firstness in the phenomenon that is not accompanied by Thirdness". This is the argument of ' The Dissenter' - who follows Hegel in positing the primacy of the continuous order of Thirdness. Then, Peirce himself writes: 5.91 "If the Hegelians confined thmselves to that position they would find a hearty friend in my doctrine. But they do not. Hegel is possessed with the idea that the Absolute is One. Three absolutes he would regard as a ludicrous contradiction in adjecto. ...... Peirce continues on [I only have time to write part of this long paragraph]..."Thirdness it is true involves Secondness and Firstness, in a sense. That is to say, if you have the idea of Thirdness you must have had the ideas of Secondness and Firstness to build upone. But waht is required for the idea of a genuine Thirdness is an independent solid Secondness and not a Secondness that is a mere corollary of an unfounded and inconceivable Thirdness; and a similar remark may be made in reference to Firstness." 5.92 "Let the Universe be an evolution of Pure Reason if you will. Yet if, while you are walking in the street reflecting upon how everything is the pure distillate of Reason, a man carrying a heavy pole suddenly pokes you in the small of the back, you maythink there is something in the Universe that Pure Reason fails to account for; .........you will be perhaps disposed to think that Quality and Reaction have their independent standing in the Universe". My reading of the above is that two independent random points, the stick and a man's back can have no ordered relation - other than an accidental, unordered one. In addition, the power of chance and spontaneity in generating relations and thus evolving the habits - and these include novel habits- of Thirdness is, I think, a powerful force within the Peircean semiosis. Edwina On Sun, Nov 6, 2016 at 8:15 PM, Jeffrey Brian Downard <[email protected]> wrote: Jon S, List, For the sake of clarity, let me point out that the interpretative hypothesis I have been exploring is quite limited. The claim is that, on its face, it appears that some dyadic relations are not, in themselves, ordered. This is brought out in those that are classified as accidental and unordered (both materially and formally). I was extending the claim to degenerate triadic relations based on the general tenor of his remarks about such degenerate relations in "The Logic of Mathematics, an attempt..." The points you are making about different sorts of collections and other kinds of groupings (including those that are based on some shared negative character) all seem to involve genuine triadic relations that apply to the collection as a whole. As far as I can tell, all such genuine triads essentially involve ordered relations. So, to make the point clearer, a set consisting of members that are two distinct dots on a page is ordered if there is some general characteristic that applies to the set as a whole. Having said that, it does not follow that every sort of degenerate dyadic relation or degenerate triadic relation that holds between two dots is an ordered relation. The general property that makes the set the kind of thing that it is necessarily involves a genuine triadic relation. That is what is involved in all such generalities. You seem to be claiming that every relation, regardless of how degenerate it may be, must involve some sort of order--otherwise the relation would not be intelligible. If this is your claim, you may be right, but I'm trying to explore a different line of interpretation. --Jeff Jeffrey Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy Northern Arizona University (o) 928 523-8354 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------------- 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 .
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