[PEIRCE-L] Re: Time and ITR (Irreducible Triadic Relation)
Hi Ed, *(1) On what real grounds does it make sense to claim that there may be three types of times? * Time is a sign, and all signs are relations among three entities -- sign itself (or representamen), the object the sign is referring to and the effect the sign has on the mind of the interpreter of the sign, called the interpretant, which can be represented diagrammatically thus: f g Object --- Representamen --- Interpretant | ^ | | |_| h Figure 1. A diagrammatic representation of the Peircean sign. f = sign production; g = sign interpretation; h = information flow. grounding, or correspondence. Since there is no doubt that time is a sign, it must possess three irreducible aspects which I identified as real time, physical time, and formal time. Furthermore, I suggest that real time can be identified with processes occurring in nature, and physical time is identical with measured time, and formal time is a theoretical model of the real time. *(2) As you speak of the real and the physical: Is physical time not real for you? Why not?* To me, physical time is measured or lived time, whereas real time is something present even before measurement and acting as the source of physical time. *(3) If you just admit that somebody, for example Isaac Newton, may already have solved the enigma of time: Would it not make sense to explore this solution, instead of continuing to consider alternative hypotheses? Why not ask your students if they have ever read Newton, and what they would think of the reversibility or irreversibility of a second law that reads a change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed? * I am interested in exploring the concept of time based on the principle of irreducible triadic relation (ITR) that Peirce formulated that seems to apply universally, far more universally than any physical laws, including Newtonian laws of motion (NLM). For example, ITR applies to linguistics and self-organizing chemical reactions, but NLM does not. *(4) The simple fact that you again and again quote Newton's second law of motion (while actually referring to Euler's law) as a time-reversible example demonstrates the importance of this example for your argument. Of course, if there should be an irreversible law of motion at the very basis of science, your considerations would prove at least superfluous.* Remember that my argument is based on ITR, not NLM. Even if NLM is time-irreversible as you claim, that would not affect my argument, as long as there are other laws of physics that are time-reverse invariant. *(5) Please will you finally see that it is not my version of the second law which I ask you to respect but Newton's. If you would read him, you would learn that there is no dualism of absolute and formal time but of absolute time and relative times: the absolute and infinite time serving as the invariant standard of measurement of the finite times of physical experience, which relative times then are evidently the real physical times which you're missing in Newton's law as you're insisting to misread it. What sense does it make to impute to Newton a concept of time-reversibility that (as everybody knows) proves totally absurd and nonsensical with respect to reality? Do you not think that this means to make dubious the reputation of a colleague, and should therefore be considered very carefully before doing so?* It may be that NLM requires only two types of time, whereas ITR predicts three types of time. Perhaps NLM times are a reduced version of the ITR times, just as the Saussurean DYADIC sign can be viewed as a reduced version of the Peircean TRIADIC sign ? *(6) Perhaps your object of study is not reality but Peircean metaphysics. In this case, we would be speaking about different things. My object of study is reality, the reality of time, which is physical and real insofar as it is measurable, and which, in order to be measurable, requires absolute invariant standards for determining the measurable things relative to that standards, as it happens in every real process of measurement (not only of times). So there are in reality two (not three) types of time: (1) the absolute standard, and (2) the times measured relative to that standard. You have both types before your eyes should you use a traditional analogue watch with a face and hands to show you the actual time. There is the scaled round of 24 hours on the face, representing the standard of measurement, or the absolute time; and there are the real physical times that you are measuring relative to that standard, as they are given through the position of the watch's hands relative to the said standard of measurement. That's it. And that's
[PEIRCE-L] Apologies
Gary R, Ben, List members, A few weeks ago, Ben, as the co-manager of the list, had asked me to refrain from sending emails with attachments, to which I had agreed. But, in many of my recent emails, I failed to keep my promise, for which I feel sorry and would like to apologize. From now on, I will keep my post to PEIRCE-L free of any attachments, and, if necessary, they will be uploaded to my web site, http://www.conformon.net, following Ben's original suggestion. All the best. Sung -- Sungchul Ji, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy Rutgers University Piscataway, N.J. 08855 732-445-4701 www.conformon.net - PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on Reply List or Reply All to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
Re: [PEIRCE-L] More Peirce MSS posted online by Harvard, incl [Reasoning and Instinct] - MS 831.. Difference between Logic and Reasoning
Ben, List: On Jul 26, 2015, at 9:29 AM, Benjamin Udell wrote: Jerry, you're simply using the word 'individual' in another way than Peirce does. When Peirce uses the word 'individual' he generally means something such as this horse (Bucephalus), that building (the Empire State Building), yonder tree (located on 7th St. in Manhattan), etc. In Nomenclature and Divisions of Triadic Relations, as Far as They Are Determined (starting on p. 289 in EP 2, also appearing in CP 2.233-72) Peirce introduces his 10-class system made out of three trichotomies of signs; he recapitulates it in a 1904 letter to Lady Welby in CP 8.327-41. In that system, any individual serving as a sign is a sinsign; also in that system, all symbols are legisigns, none are sinsigns, i.e., no symbols are individuals. He's explicit about it. Peirce also discusses there and elsewhere how the same sign can incorporate icons, indices, symbols. You see a chemical analogy with Peirce's sign classifications, but if the analogy puts you at odds with what Peirce said in plain English, then your analogy isn't quite working. Trying to get me to be less rigid in my interpretation of Peirce won't help your analogy if I'm correct about Peirce. Anyway, Peirce may have been inspired by some chemical analogies, and his meditations on complex chemical structures surely helped him think more skillfully about other complex structures, but he was quite explicit about not basing philosophical semiotic (or any other kind of cenoscopy) _logically_ on any idioscopic principles or theories (such as physics or chemistry). Ben, I find your thinking to be utterly confused. You are not distinguishing between a sin-sign, as a specific object with predicates (such as indices) from the broad generalities of the broad concepts used to classify related terms. Your attempt, several months ago, to use set theory to analyze CSP texts shows, to me at least, such a rigid and and not pragmatic perspective. In my opinion, CSP logic is remote from the propositions of set theory. The trichotomy itself, not the extension to classes of signs, is composed of nine interrelated semantic and rhetorical terms. The entelechy, the goal, the purpose of the trichotomy was to express a consistent form of argument, not to classify or categorize. The magnitude of this categorical error is for you to decide. CSP's form of argument (in the trichotomy) was not derived from either De Morgan nor Boole. But it was, never-the-less, a consistent, complete and decidable (in the sense of Hilbert) form of argument, or at least, that is CSP's assertion. This is expressed very directly and with logical import in his development of his view of graphs as contrasted with sets. It is also expressed with his rejection of the Kempe approach to spots and relations. One must note that 5 of the nine terms were created by CSP! That is, he was creating a language for argumentation that he designed to be coherent with the rhetoric of scientific logic with the complete absence of direct reference to mathematics. This fact is amazing. How does one account for this? Set theory and NP of FS ignore CSP's basic concern with the scientific argumentation style that the trichotomy develops. One must further note that all the terms must contain information about the sin-sign otherwise the trichotomy would not work as a rhetoric system of thought. One must further note that this rhetorical scheme follows CSP's view that information is implication (1860's). That is, each of the rhetorical terms must contribute to the argument. Modal logic? I didn't mention species, but since you bring it up: The word 'species' in Peirce's time was taken to refer to a _kind_ as opposed to a total population of that kind. There is a relatively recent shift of meaning, as John Collier has pointed out, by some biologists to refer by the word 'species' not just to the species as a kind but to the species' total population during the course of the species' existence - that total population as a somewhat scattered and long-existent collective individual - sort of like an individual swarm or flock, etc., but with much more dispersion, longevity, and turnover in membership. In that sense, the sense of a concrete individual (soever scattered, etc.), a species is an individual even in Peirce's sense. Is that your sense of 'biological species'? Meanwhile, I look up 'chemical species' and find that definitions vary on whether it is an _ensemble_ of identical atoms or identical molecules or identical ions etc. under observation, or whether it is simply the unique _kind_ to which the identical atoms or identical molecules, etc. belong. An individual ensemble is a collective individual, as far as I can tell. But if 'chemical species' just means the kind to which identical atoms (or the like) belong, then it is not an individual in
