Edwina, Jon S, List,
The passage you find puzzling is from Peirce. It can be hard to make out, in part because the suggestion is so rich as a sort of guiding idea for the normative sciences of aesthetics, ethics and semioitics, considered as a whole. There are a number of attempts in the secondary literature to explain what he is claiming. I recommend Terry Moore's Conduct and Community: A Peircean Framework for Moral Philosophy, which is a dissertation on the ethics as seen in the context of his larger normative theory. It is, in my humble estimation, a particular good starting place for understanding what Peirce seems to be suggesting about the "relationship between phenomena and ends." If you don't have access to the dissertation, but would like to take a look, I can help put you into contact with Terry (he often follows these discussions on the list), and he can probably provide a link to a digital copy. --Jeff Jeffrey Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy Northern Arizona University (o) 928 523-8354 ________________________________ From: Edwina Taborsky <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, April 7, 2018 5:50:36 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Order of Determination Jon, list I have no idea what you mean by 'the subject matter of normative science consists of the relations of phenomena to ends'. And I disagree that the 'ideal end of semiosis is the development of habits that would never be confounded by subsequent experience - including, but not limited to, true beliefs'. This is your personal belief and as I said before, it aligns with the Hegelian/theistic focus on 'the final perfection' of synthesis. I don't agree that the formation of such habits is a 'regulative hope' [in whose mind?]. A universe which is immune to experience is the antithesis of Peirce's pragmaticism. I disagree that the habit-taking tendency is the primordial law of mind - and I don't read 6.24-6 as saying that. When Peirce says that 'matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws' [6.26] this was to reject Cartesian dualism of mind and matter with each independent of the other. His rejection of this independence does not mean that habits are primary. And I reject your interpretation that the Sign is an entelechy. Again, with the confusion over the meaning of the term 'Sign' - I don't know whether you are referring to the irreducible triad which is the Sign of DO-[IO-R-II] or only the Representamen. Both the triad and the Representamen necessarily operate in any of the three categorical modes. Edwina On Fri 06/04/18 11:01 PM , Jon Alan Schmidt [email protected] sent: Edwina, List: As I have noted before when making this substitution, Peirce defined logic (in the broad sense) as semeiotic and beliefs as habits. The subject matter of normative science consists of the relations of phenomena to ends, and the ideal end of semiosis is the development of habits that would never be confounded by subsequent experience--including, but not limited to, true beliefs. Again, this is a regulative hope, not something that will ever actually be achieved. Turning to metaphysics, the habit-taking tendency is the primordial law of mind, from which all physical laws--inveterate habits--are derived (cf. CP 6.24-25; 1891). However, as you rightly point out, freedom and spontaneity still prevent their complete induration (cf. CP 6.201; 1898). Hence recognizing that a Sign is an Entelechy (3ns), as Peirce himself explicitly did, does not at all deny the Reality of Form (1ns) and Matter (2ns); on the contrary, I see it as an integral aspect of his robust three-Category realism. Regards, Jon S. On Fri, Apr 6, 2018 at 9:03 PM, Edwina Taborsky <[email protected]<javascript:top.opencompose('[email protected]','','','')>> wrote: Jon, List- With regard to the statement by Jon: "My long-term objective in all of this remains to understand how semeiotic may be defined as the science of the laws of the stable establishment of habits (cf. CP 3.429; 1896). That includes the inveterate habits of matter, as well as the self-controlled habits of Persons." The actual reference to Peirce is not about semeiotic but about logic: "Logic may be defined as the science of the laws of the stable establishment of beliefs". 3.429 Semeiosis is actually a 'far-from-equilibrium' or unstable process, functioning within three, not one, but three modal categories. Only one of them, Thirdness, refers to habits or stability. The vital, absolutely necessary mode of Firstness , inserts the capacity to break up, modify, adapt, change, evolve, those habits. And the equally necessary mode of Secondness locates both Firstness and Thirdness within individual, diverse, local, interactive, networking instantiations of both habits and novelty. To reduce semiosis to only one of the three modal categories is setting up an idealistic ontology - and this is not, in my view, Peircean semiosis. Edwina
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