Peirce: CP 8.194 Cross-Ref:††
“A questioner to whom pragmaticism comes as a novelty will naturally ask, "Do you mean to say that you do not believe there has been any past?" To which the pragmaticist will reply, -- and note well his answer, because it is analogous to the answer he will give to a host of questions to which no further allusion will be made, -- "Why, I believe in the reality of the past just as completely as you do, and just in the way that you do, except that either you or I perhaps do not describe correctly the intellectual side of [its] real meaning. To any memory [of] the past, there attaches a certain color, -- a certain quality of feeling, -- just as there does to the sight of a Jacqueminot rose.†5 Ontological metaphysicians usually say that 'secondary sensations,' such as colors, are delusive and false; but not so the Pragmaticist. He insists that the rose really is red; for red is, by the meaning of the word, an appearance; and to say that a Jacqueminot rose really is red means, and can mean, nothing but that if such a rose is put before a normal eye, in the daylight, it will look red. Just so, the feeling qualities attaching to memories are entirely true and real, though obviously relative, as pastness itself obviously is relative."
Best, Helmut
"John F Sowa" <s...@bestweb.net>
wrote:
> I think, that a memory of the past is not the same as the past itself
But that is true of everything.
Our experience of anything and everything (past or present) is not
the same as the thing itself.
What Peirce added: " To any memory [of] the past, there attaches
a certain color, -- a certain quality of feeling..."
Two different people who have similar memories of a past event
may have totally different feelings about it. Those feelings
cause them to highlight, emphasize, or interpret the event
in very different ways.
John
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