Gary,
There are many ways of interpreting the theories of science. Uninterpreted
observations are firsts. Statements about observations are seconds.
Interpretations are thirds.
All scientists of any stripe make interpretations. Pure nominalists say that
the there are no *laws* of nature, there are only regularities. Peirce and most
practicing scientists believe that there are laws governing the universe and
most of the things that scientists call laws of nature are indeed close
approximations to what Peirce would call a law of nature.
Re Big Bang: The evidence for something Big and Bang-like happening around
13,7 billion years ago is overwhelming. And Peirce, as a former astronomer,
would be very eager to learn as much about it as he could. And he would
certainly revise his earlier comments to adapt them in a way that would
accommodate the Big Bang..
What Peirce wrote in 1898 is interesting. But he certainly would have written
much more today, and what he wrote would be quite diferent from what he wrote
then. The major questions for us and our contemporaries are How and Why they
would be different.
Please remember that Peirce is ignored al APA sessions, except for those that
are designated as Peirce sessions. If we want people to consider Peirce's
ideas relevant today, we have a responsibility to show how and why tit would be
important to apply his ideas to current issues.
John
From: "Gary Richmond"
Jon, Gary F, List,
One of the most revelatory passages -- at least for me -- relating to the
origin of the cosmos is the following (from Reasoning and the Logic of Things,
CP 6.191 - 198, emphasis added). Reading it supported my growing sense at the
time, several decades ago, that not only was 'Big Bang' theory nominalistic,
materialistic, irrational and, therefore, wholly inadequate as a postmodern
origin story, but that a cosmic theology on scientific principles was indeed
possible, and that Peirce had done yeoman's work outlining it. Here's that
'outline' with key passages in bold. GR
Looking upon the course of logic as a whole we see that it proceeds from the
question to the answer -- from the vague to the definite. And so likewise all
the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite. The
indeterminate future becomes the irrevocable past. In Spencer's phrase the
undifferentiated differentiates itself. The homogeneous puts on heterogeneity.
However it may be in special cases, then, we must suppose that as a rule the
continuum has been derived from a more general continuum, a continuum of higher
generality.
>From this point of view we must suppose that the existing universe, with all
>its arbitrary secondness, is an offshoot from, or an arbitrary determination
>of, a world of ideas, a Platonic world; not that our superior logic has
>enabled us to reach up to a world of forms to which the real universe, with
>its feebler logic, was inadequate.
If this be correct, we cannot suppose the process of derivation, a process
which extends from before time and from before logic, we cannot suppose that
[this process of derivation] began elsewhere than in the utter vagueness of
completely undetermined and dimensionless potentiality.
The evolutionary process is, therefore, not a mere evolution of the existing
universe, but rather a process by which the very Platonic forms themselves have
become or are becoming developed.
We shall naturally suppose, of course, that existence is a stage of evolution.
This existence is presumably but a special existence. We need not suppose that
every form needs for its evolution to emerge into this world, but only that it
needs to enter into some theatre of reactions, of which this is one.
The evolution of forms begins or, at any rate, has for an early stage of it, a
vague potentiality; and that either is or is followed by a continuum of forms
having a multitude of dimensions too great for the individual dimensions to be
distinct. It must be by a contraction of the vagueness of that potentiality of
everything in general, but of nothing in particular, that the world of forms
comes about.
We can hardly but suppose that those sense-qualities that we now experience,
colors, odors, sounds, feelings of every description, loves, griefs, surprise,
are but the relics of an ancient ruined continuum of qualities, like a few
columns standing here and there in testimony that here some old-world forum
with its basilica and temples had once made a magnificent ensemble. And just as
that forum, before it was actually built, had had a vague underexistence in the
mind of him who planned its construction, so too the cosmos of sense-qualities,
which I would have you to suppose in some early stage of being was as real as
your personal life is this minute, had in an antecedent stage of development a
vaguer being, before the relations of its dimensions became definite and
