List, Clark: > On Mar 26, 2017, at 4:52 PM, CLARK GOBLE <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> On Mar 26, 2017, at 1:45 PM, Jon Awbrey <[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >> >> So, yes, I would have to say that Peirce was a realist about >> possibilities, and patterns of possibilities, from the start. >> That much is simply implicit in his mathematical approach to >> logic, probability, and information. > > Yes, from fairly early on he see mathematics as possibilities. I’m not sure > the date on the earliest he makes that explicit. (Sorry - no time to look it > up right now) >
Clark: This idea of the mathematics and forms of possibility was articulated already by Francis Bacon 1561-1626. see the writings of Graham Rees. (Including Marriage of Physics and Mathematics.) Bacon recognized the possibility of the role of identities in the elective affinities that was later the topic of the novel by Goethe by that name. Note also that this idea is also intrinsic to Leibniz’s notion of calculations of “arguments” by assigning values to ideas. These writings express facets of the basic tensions between the universal concept of mass (as identity of all matter) and the concept of matter based on the chemical elements as the source of identity of all matter. The latter infers valence, a local and contextual attribute of of chemical elements where the assumption is matter combines by compositions of relationships among pairs of elements. (Example: H2O (water) and H2O2, (hydrogen peroxide)). Historically, realists separated the concepts of Aristotelian “atomism” from the concept of identities of matter as atomic numbers.. This logical tension between “mass” and “valence” persists today and is the source of massive mis-communications among the disciplines, in part because the concept of mass is based on continuity and the concept of valence is based on integer units. See my earlier comments on Bosovich and CSP logic of a few weeks ago. Cheers Jerry
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