> On Feb 10, 2017, at 9:03 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]> > wrote: > > I think that you have put your finger on the key question. What exactly does > it mean to say that a general is real (or not)? Alternatively, since > generality is logically the same as continuity (RLT 190), what exactly does > it mean to say that a continuum is real (or not)?
It’s worth noting that we shouldn’t treat these issues separate from the type of analysis one is doing. A general can be real in one sense but not in an other. Symbols are a great example of that. The original idea for questions of realism is really just what is mind-idependent or not. Fictions, as someone earlier said, are a great example. Yet many philosophical stances (such as variants of empiricism) tend to put more in that camp due the theory-tied nature of of consciousness. That is when we talk about objects what we’re really talking about is what is in our mind which is tied to those theories and thus not real. The way to avoid this was to create various correspondence theories. Peirce somewhat splits the difference. He recognizes there are mind-like aspects but things those can be repeated in various ways. This issue of repetition ends up being pretty significant philosophically. Of course the token/type distinction got picked up in the 20th century from Peirce. But the question of how repetition works ends up being trickier than it appears. (Although oddly this was primarily an issue in continental philosophy rather than analytic philosophy which tended to just take it for granted) The way Peirce deals with it is that a general can be an object of a sign. So long as the referenced general is repeated it is real because the universe itself is mindlike and can repeat it without the problems that certain physicalist theories have. (Memes are the equivalent in more physicalist conceptions) By having symbols, icons and indices I think Peirce ends up avoiding a lot of the problems in both continental philosophy and even analytic philosophy (the whole positing aspect of positivism was problematic here but it persisted in some ways even after positivism was dead). So when we talk about realism all we’re really talking about is whether the object of a sign is finitely tied to brains or not. We have to be careful since for Peirce, even fictions in theory could be replicated infinitely such that they aren’t tied to particular minds. We then have to ask what the being of the object is. Fictions along with quite a few other things really don’t have grounds outside of finite minds. If the structures are mind-independent (i.e. persist independent of being thought about in more traditional philosophical ontologies) then their ground is outside of a mind. So say the law of gravity is mind-independent but my liking ice cream isn’t. If you don’t keep track carefully of the type of analysis being done it’s pretty easy to get confused in a Peircean model because of that ability to shift to new contexts as well as the universe being mind like.
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