Eric, List: Responses inserted below.
Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt On Mon, Jan 30, 2017 at 10:14 AM, Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles@gmail. com> wrote: > Jon, > As I understand you, a nominalist would say that "possibilities" are not > part of "real" and that "habit/law" is not part of "real". > JAS: My understanding is that a nominalist would say that "possibilities" and "habits/laws" are real *only *to the extent that they are instantiated in *actual *things and events. Peirce would acknowledge that they *exist *only to that extent, but that they are *real* in themselves such that we can meaningfully refer to them as "may-bes" and "would-bes," respectively. Remember, "real" here means "being what it is regardless of how any person or finite group of people thinks about it" and "the object of the final opinion, the consensus of an infinite community after indefinite inquiry." > Does that mean that if I told a nominalist that if I repeatedly shuffled a > deck of cards, and then looked at the top card, there was a 1/4 *chance* > of drawing a heart, they would say I was talking gibberish? > JAS: Probably not; but once you have finished shuffling the cards, there is technically no *objective *chance involved at all; at that point, the top card is in one of the four suits, but you simply do not know which until you look at it. Arguably, there is no objective chance even *before *you shuffle the cards, because the act of shuffling does not make the arrangement of the cards *genuinely *random. It is an *epistemic *limitation that makes it uncertain, rather than an *ontological *limitation. > What if I told them it is likely organisms will exist in 2 million years > with traits that do not exist today? > > What if I told them that, as a general rule, things that are heavier than > the surrounding air sink towards the center of the earth when released? > > Or that, as a matter of habit, I put my right sock on before my left? > > I suspect that the nominalist would not be flustered by such claims, > though they might caveat them in minor ways. > > If I am correct about that, then it is unclear to me what *actual* > happening we could observe, under the circumstances of some to-be-arranged > experiment, to distinguish which approach is correct. > > P.S. I anticipate you might accuse me of begging the question in that last > part (by use of the italicized word), but I am inquiring nonetheless, as it > seems a fair question for a pragmatist to ask. > JAS: I agree that nominalists will not likely be troubled by these kinds of questions. However, they also will not be able to provide explanations for their common-sense answers, other than something like, "Because that is just the way that those individual objects (and ones sufficiently similar to them) happen to behave." Again, Peirce's primary objection to this aspect of nominalism is that it tends to block the way of inquiry; if one does not believe that there are *real *qualities and *real *habits/laws apart from their actualizations, then why go looking for them? The formulation of a "law of nature" as a conditional necessity that governs an inexhaustible continuum of potential cases--e.g., "if I *were *to scratch *any *diamond with a knife, then it *would *remain unmarked"--is unwarranted under nominalism, except as an inexplicable brute fact.
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
