Helmut,
No, I don’t think it has anything to do with spatiality or temporality. I was just repeating what Peirce said earlier in Lowell 2: “This sort of conditional says nothing at all about any real connection between antecedent and consequent; but limits itself to saying “If you should find that A is true, then you may know that B is true,” never mind the why or wherefore.”
What we’re analyzing here is “necessary reasoning,” which “can never answer questions of fact. It has to assume its premisses to be true.” When a conditional proposition is scribed on the sheet of assertion, we have to assume unconditionally that it is a true proposition, simply because that’s what it means for any proposition to be scribed on the sheet of assertion. “The universe of our discourse is to be a universe of my imagination, and therefore any graph which I permit to be scribed will be true, unless it is absurd and so amounts to telling you that my universe has no being even in my imagination.” It gives us no information about the spatiotemporal world, the world of sense experience, because knowledge about that is always fallible, and you can’t draw necessary conclusions from fallible premisses.
The question of what “existence” can mean in reference to an imaginary universe will be taken up shortly when we get to the beta part of existential graphs.
Gary f.
From: Helmut Raulien [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 12-Nov-17 15:45
To: [email protected]
Cc: 'Peirce List' <[email protected]>
Subject: Aw: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Lowell Lecture 2.11
Gary, List,
This "we don´t know why", and conditional inesse, but not causality: Is it a kind of modesty or self-restriction of knowledge, regarding merely spatiality (condition as a snapshot), but not temporality (like what was first, what has led to what, causality)? So the concept of existence with existential graphs is existence in the sense of what is or must be a phenomenon for this moment, but not existence as duration or permanence or time span? I find it confusing, that in English "condition" has two meanings: State (which is what we are talking about), and prerequisite (which would have to do with causality). I think, in Latin it is either "conditio" or "condicio", of which two terms the English term, I guess, has fused. In German it is "Zustand" (literally "to-stand", state) and "Bedingung" (lit. "be-thing-ing", prerequisite for a thing).
Best,
Helmut
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