List Here is another description in my perhaps futile attempt to show that the Peircean theoretical infrastructure can be used, with excellent results, to examine and explain the real world. That is - the world beyond the seminar room.
An off list reference from a member supplied me with the work of John Dupre, who works in the philosophy of biology at the University of Exeter. Yes - he’s in philosophy but, it’s the philosophy of the real world - where his analysis is tested by its ability to explain that real world. His focus is on ‘pluralistic metaphysics’, against reductionism and against linear determinism, of, eg, matter-to-mind, or mind-to-matter - ie, life/biology can’t be explained by chemistry, or by neurology or by ‘mind’, so to speak. He proposes instead, what he calls ‘promiscuous realism’ or ‘process biology’. He writes: [in Philosophy Now, Vol 133] “Starting with processes on an evolutionary time scale - evolving lineages - these are of course unique processes, and processes with no predetermined trajectory. The constituents of these evolving lineages are individual organisms. These organisms, we now understand, exhibit a high degree of developmental plasticity in themselves, which is to say, they also do not follow a precise preset trajectory in their development. So a species is a set of variable processes interacting to generate a process with a trajectory that is changing unpredictably being independent from one another. The near universality of symbiosis tells us that lineages are deeply intertwined in vital but evolving relations to other lineages. Sometimes this intertwining of processes reaches a point at which we consider the whole to be a single process. IN summary, a world consisting of constantly evolving, constantly intertwined processes is not one that will provide a single privileged set of descriptions of its constituent elements. The pluralist, or promiscuous realist, perspective becomes necessary for any coherent understanding of the actually world” I note that the above is filled with descriptions that fit the semeiosic outline of Peirce’s Three Categories - that constant flittering of openness to deviation that is Firstness, the individual organisms of Secondness - and the deeply intertwined and yet evolving continuity provided by Thirdness. And - this outline further, to my reading, rejects the determinism of any one of these modal categories as dominant or primordial but instead, sets up a self-organized biological reality that requires the functionality of all three. Edwina Sent from my iPad
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