Patrick, Jean-Marc.
On Jun 28, 2006, at 7:27 AM, Jean-Marc Orliaguet wrote:
Patrick Coppock wrote:
At 0:11 -0400 25-06-2006, Jerry LR Chandler wrote:
I will be at the Whitehead Conference in Salzburg next week so I
do not anticipate much time for replies.
...
However, for us to believe that Firsts, Seconds and Thirds
actually "exist", beyond their being mere transitory events in an
ongoing semiosic process, would be fallibilistic in Peirce's
terms, or a "Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness" in Whitehead's terms.
Not at all.
Peirce was a "three-category realist", acknowledging the reality fo
Firsts, Seconds and Thirds early on. What you call "Fallacy of
Misplaced Concreteness" is just another word for "nominalism" in
that context. Peirce was not a nominalist.
Peirce acknowledge the reality of actuality or of secondness
(around 1890). Look for "outward clash", or "Scotus" in the CPs
and his criticism of Hegel's idealism.
He acknowledged the reality of firsts (the universe of
possibility), and of course the reality of thirdness (the universe
of thought or signs) I don't have the exact references, but that's
not too difficult to find if you go through the Collected Papers,
look for "nominalism", "realism", "idealism" ...
However he wrote that some thirds and seconds are degenerate,
meaning that they have no real existence.
Regards
/JM
Thanks for your stimulating comments.
My take on the distinctions between Peirce and Whitehead is rather
different.
In early Peirce (1868), the analogy with distance functions and
branching was the given basis for distinguishing paths of logic,
relation to chemical valence and the more general concept of
extension. The later writings of Peirce describing "division" of a
sign in natural language is not a crisp way of looking at the
concept of extension. (One might substitute for the term "division"
such terms as partition, trichotomy, lattice, subtraction, incomplete
parts, lack of additivity, and so forth; but I do not see how that
would create a coherent concept of relational extension.)
In late Whitehead, Process and Reality, he gets into bed with set
theory and never re-emerges from this highly restrictive view of
extension. In modern chemistry, a multitude of possibilities for
extension exist . (The flow of passions in a bed are great, but they
should not be conflated with the light of reason. :-)
One might say that modern chemistry has in richer view of extension -
valence is richer than -1,2,3- and it is richer than set theory by
using irregularity as a basis of calculation.
Also, the propensity of process philosophers to neglect the concept
of inheritance of properties in time restricts the potential
correspondence between process philosophy and scientific philosophy.
A modern philosophy of chemistry must cope with numbers of relations
grater than three and also recognize that islands of stability exist
within the torrential seas of change.
(I repeat my earlier disclaimer - I am neither a philosopher nor
mathematician, my background is in biochemistry and genetics - so
everyone ought to take my conjectures in these fields that are remote
my personal area of concentration with a huge grain of salt.)
BTW, the Whitehead conference includes sessions on Mathematics,
Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Several abstracts were quite novel
and may be of interest to readers of this listserve.
see:
http://www2.sbg.ac.at/whiteheadconference/index2.html
Cheers
Jerry LR Chandler
(PS: Patrick, if you know David Lane, please convey my personal
greetings to him.)
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