Clark, list,
One of the points I've been trying to make all along is that a person
doesn't normally need to make a working assumption explicit when it's
understood by all practitioners in a given practical setting as being
implicit in that practice. It becomes necessary and pertinent to do so
only when a working assumption stops working or when one needs to lay out
the rationales of that practice to others who may not be familiar with it.
As long as Peirce was writing for readers with relevant backgrounds
in the practice of math and science it wasn't really necessary and
would even have been considered impertinent for him to waste words
on points that everyone in that audience would regard as routine.
Does that have any bearing on questions about the reality of generals?
It's hard to say. I guess it's bound up with the reasons I think the
only real realists I know and the only practicing pragmatists I know
are all mathematicians, or at least scientists who use mathematics,
for the moments they are immersed in doing so.
Referring again to the figure I drew for Peirce's classification
of sciences, most of our theories on the mathematical side will
have both individual terms and general terms, categorized not
absolutely but in relation to each other in a given context.
So the distinction between individual and general does not
align with the distinction between phenomena and theory.
The whole theory is judged (by us arbiters) according
to how well it guides our transactions with the whole
phenomenal domain in question.
We do not know whether anything like predicates and subjects,
generals and particulars, waves and particles, or whatever,
exists in the reality that generates the phenomenal world.
It is entirely conceivable that none of those terms will
appear in the final account of things. All we have to
decide, as Gandalf says, is what to do with the time
that is given to us.
Regards,
Jon
On 3/26/2017 5:52 PM, CLARK GOBLE wrote:
On Mar 26, 2017, at 1:45 PM, Jon Awbrey <jawb...@att.net> 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)
I think my point about modal realism is more that connection between universals
and particulars. Does he make that connection with mathematics early on? Again
I don’t know. It’s one thing to speak about the nature of mathematics as
possibilities and quite an other to speak about the relationship of mathematics
to particulars. The old “why is the universe so mathematical.” Again I confess
I’ve just not investigated the historical question here being more interested
in the philosophy questions. If anyone else knows I am curious. That’s why I
mentioned the review on Fraser since it seems to me his criticism of Berkeley’s
platonism as nominalistic that gets at that issue.
--
inquiry into inquiry: https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/
academia: https://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey
oeiswiki: https://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey
isw: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/JLA
facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache
-----------------------------
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 .
