> On Apr 5, 2017, at 2:27 PM, Edwina Taborsky <[email protected]> wrote: > > Clark, list: Hmm - it's always interesting to read how others view oneself. > > I hadn't thought that I was saying that " that thinking of all this in the > idealist ways Peirce did is wrong. That is we should appropriate Peirce more > in a materialistic way" > > I don't know what the above actually means - 'idealist' and 'materialist > way'. > > My frustration on this list often comes because of the focus on 'pure > philosophy' so to speak - and I see Peircean semiosis as operating in the > material as well as the conceptual world. What interests me is 'how does a > morphological organism develop and function in this world' - and I consider > that it does so by Peircean semiosic principles. That is, I think we can > understand how plants interact and informationally network with each other - > by semiosis - and thus are not simple mechanical systems. > >
Right. More or less all I’m saying is you can do the analysis you want to but that the ontological questions (which Peirce was emphatically interested in) don’t apply. The reason I think you get frustrated with what you see as terminological issues is simply because Peirce often was speaking of ontology. When you try and relate these ontological uses of the terminology to your own project problems results. Really all I’m doing is explaining why there are these terminological issues. That is when one is talking about human concepts, one is no longer speaking of ontology and we have to be careful not to appply ontological passages. Likewise once we’re talking about substances, such as in biology, we’re no longer doing ontology. Most of the disagreements ultimately are just taking passages that are extremely general or even ontological and applying them inappropriately. I think this leads people to talk past one an other. As I’ve been at pains to point out, we have to be clear about the type of analysis we’re doing. Often that changes how we talk about it. So I’m really just trying to clear for you a space of why your terminology works. But I had be sure what you’re talking about. That was why I originally asked about entropy. You’re using firstness in a much more narrow sense for a particular phenomena in biology. I’ll probably go quiet again for a little bit — but I am reading an enjoying the discussion.
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