List,
In a couple of recent threads I’ve been trying to sort out the connections
between Peirce’s concept of “valency” (which he got from chemistry) and (1) the
structure of rhemes (predicates) in the logic of relatives, (2) the
representation of that structure in Existential Graphs, (3) the phaneroscopic
concepts of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, and (4) the “categories” which
are basic to Peirce’s whole philosophical system. The most recent of these
threads, an exchange with John S. regarding Peirce’s application of the term
“medad”, seems to lead up a blind alley (in my opinion); so I think it might
help to go ‘back to basics’ with these four overlapping aspects of Peirce’s
system. For that purpose I’d like to look at a few Peirce texts which throw
some light on the overlaps.
For this post I’ve chosen the following quote from Peirce, which I found in
Ketner’s book His Glassy Essence, p. 327. Ketner identifies it as an
“autobiographical scrap” found among the Max Fisch papers, F64:104. It is
undated but the internal evidence would place it around 1905:
[[ When I was in the twenties I devoted more than two years with all the
passion of that age to the study of phanerochemy (phaneroscopy), in almost
every waking hour and dreaming of nothing else. But I was not to be content
with less than solid truth; and at the end of two years and a half (reduce it
to that by deducting intervals) my situation was this. In regard to the
qualitative differences between the different elements of thought, I had made
out some relations with certainty, much as one can make out some relations
between the different colors. Three pages of letter paper recorded all that I
regarded as relatively certain, together with some things that did not seem
certain. On the whole, I concluded to abandon the research to some greater
genius. But there was a triad of mere differences of quantitative complexity
that did not seem to me to be open to any doubt at all. This was recorded in a
paper printed in the Proc. Am. Acad. Arts & Sci. for May 14, 1867,—“On a New
List of Categories.” During the third of a century and more that has since
elapsed, I have done all that man could to guard myself against self deception.
I have given up years to the operation of instilling pooh-poohs of it into my
soul. I have earnestly striven against the conviction. But for a long time the
game has been quite up. It is too evidently true. ]]
Peirce never used the term “phaneroscopy” before 1904, but he says here that he
was already studying what he now calls phaneroscopy in his twenties, especially
in the period of intense work leading up to the “New List” (1867). The curious
term “phanerochemy” seems to indicate that Peirce at that time was already
applying concepts drawn from chemistry to his study of the phaneron, i.e. to
phenomenology.
Peirce also distinguishes here between “the qualitative differences between the
different elements of thought” on the one hand and the “differences of
quantitative complexity” among these “elements” on the other. This corresponds
to the distinction he makes elsewhere between the “material categories” and the
“formal categories” (or “formal elements” of the phaneron); and as he also says
elsewhere, he abandoned research on the qualitative/material categories, and
from then on devoted his efforts to studying the triad of quantitative/formal
elements of the phaneron.
This is where the connection with chemistry comes in. To put it in simplest
terms (which a physical chemist would no doubt consider oversimplified), the
quantitative/formal aspect of a chemical element is its external relations with
other elements, quantified as the “valency” which determines how its atoms can
combine with other atoms to form molecules. In the periodic table of the
elements, those arranged in each column (not row) have the same valency,
roughly speaking. But the analogy between chemical elements and formal elements
of the phaneron has its limits: for one thing, it is “evident” to Peirce that
there is only a triad of phaneroscopic elements, but the number of valencies in
chemistry can go much higher. My next post will explore how all this translates
into medads, monads, dyads etc. — and into EGs.
Gary f.
} You see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. [Dogen] {
http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ Turning Signs gateway
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