Re: [peirce-l] Book Review: Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism
A Facebook acquaintance posted this on my wall ... Bakhtin Meets Pocahontas -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GITVPh7GVSE Cheers, Jon -- academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ mwb: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey word press blog 1: http://jonawbrey.wordpress.com/ word press blog 2: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/ - You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Re: [peirce-l] Book Review • “Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism”
Peircers, Yet another attack of synchronicity -- I just now happened to be working on the markup of some old work and I ran across this bit where I was trying to puzzle out a sensible picture of how the normative science fit together within a pragmatic perspective on their objects. | Questions about the good of something, and what must be done to get it, | and what shows the way to do it, belong to the normative sciences of | aesthetics, ethics, and logic, respectively. | } Aesthetic knowledge is a creature's most basic sense | of what is good or bad for it, as signaled by the | experiential features of pleasure or pain, | respectively. | | Ethical knowledge deals with the courses of action | and patterns of conduct that lead to these ends. | | Logical knowledge begins from the remoter signs | of what actions are true and false to their ends, | and derives the necessary consequences indicated by | combinations of signs. | | In pragmatic thought, the normative disciplines can be imagined as three | concentric cylinders resting on their bases, increasing in height as they | narrow, from aesthetics to ethics to logic, in that order. Considered with | regard to the plane of their experiential bases, logic is subsumed by ethics, | which is subsumed by aesthetics. And yet, in another sense, logic affords | a perspective on ethics, while ethics affords a perspective on aesthetics. | | http://mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey/Papers/Inquiry_Driven_Systems_:_Part_6#6.2._A_Candid_Point_of_View Regards, Jon -- academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ mwb: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey word press blog 1: http://jonawbrey.wordpress.com/ word press blog 2: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/ - You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Re: [peirce-l] Book Review: Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism
Dear Terry, Gary, Cathy, et al., Thanks for your comments. But I don't think you quite get my point, namely; that the idealizing of the passions, including the idealization of love, as a means of creative agents capable of transforming the world though the active realization of intelligent ideals is wrongheaded. The statement I quoted suggests that narrow model of inquiry (for which it is a good statement) can generalize to become a general vehicle of world transformation. In my view Peirce would suggest that is pushing it too far. I say that it is precisely such idealizing of life to ratiocentric ends that has wrongly put the biosphere in jeopardy today, and nominalistic science has been a key player. Replacing in Forster's words, the vast cosmic mechanism with transforming the world though the active realization of intelligent ideals, may seem a better option, but does not to my mind go to the heart of the problem of idealizing conduct as determinant of practical life. Yes, Gary, I agree that is where the common-sensist element of Peirce's critical common-sensism allows more. Cathy, I don't see a Romantic view of thought and feeling as mutually undermining opposites. Quite the, uh, opposite. The idealizing of the passions by thought, so that sentiment becomes a value rather than passionate reasonableness was part of my criticism. The problem of modern idealization involves what Max Weber called rationalization, but it also involves the colonization of the sentiments by idealizing rationality, in effect, disabling the spontaneous self and its spontaneous reasonableness. The community of variescent life, inclusive of humans, rather than a community of human inquirers, might be the better agent of world transformation. But the human element of it would have to be more than inquirers, in Peirce's sense. It would have to be whole human beings, passionately alive to their living habitats rather than to idealized conduct. That might also be a virtual definition of an artist engaged in creating a work. Consider, Terry, where the gospel of greed that Peirce names in his essay on evolutionary love derives from. Dostoyevsky and D.H. Lawrence understood, in my view, that the idealization of love (and more broadly the idealization of the sentiments) would culminate in its opposite, the idealization of hate or greed. The nominalistic state of nature of Thomas Hobbes seems a good example of that, nature as the warre of every man against every man. Melville in 1851, Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, and Lawrence in various writings, each showed how the idealizing of life and love is a mark of the tragic nature of modern life. But each also showed alternatives, which seem to me congruent with Peirce's larger outlook, involving yes, sociality, but the sociality of the community of the earth and of the spontaneous self. The living self bodying forth here and now and not fixed by some idealized horizon. Lawrence: Every single living creature is a single creative unit, a unique, incommutable self. Primarily, in its own spontaneous reality, it knows no law. It is a law unto itself. Secondarily, in its material reality, it submits to all the laws of the material universe. But the primal, spontaneous self in any creature has ascendance, truly, over the material laws of the universe; it uses these laws and converts them in the mystery of creation. Lawrence's philosophy of living spontaneity is of a piece with Peirce's outlook on this one point in my opinion-despite Peirce's antipathy to the literary mind-each allowing qualitative uniqueness and a living spontaneity. Perhaps there is similarity of Lawrence's idea of an incommutable, non-idealizing spontaneous self, in Peirce's idea of Now it is energetic projaculation (lucky there is such a word, or this untried hand might have been put to inventing one) by which in the typical instances of Lamarckian evolution the new elements of form are first created. Habit, however, forces them to take practical shapes, compatible with the structures they affect, and, in the form of heredity and otherwise, gradually replaces the spontaneous energy that sustains them. Gene Halton From: C S Peirce discussion list [mailto:PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] On Behalf Of Catherine Legg Sent: Sunday, March 25, 2012 9:42 PM To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU Subject: Re: [peirce-l] Book Review: Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism Tom that is a great quote in this context, thank you! Gene your passionate warning against a Pyrrhic victory of eviscerated, abstract intelligence in the service of ideals is important I think. It would seem that Peirce did criticize himself along these lines at one point where he compared his character unfavorably with that of James as a mere table of contents...a snarl of twine (or similar words). Having said that, however, I worry that your
Re: [peirce-l] Book Review: Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism
On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 9:23 AM, Gary Richmond gary.richm...@gmail.comwrote: I want to conclude this note with a passage near the end of the book which I very much liked and have been reflecting on since. Forster writes: On [Peirce's] view, human beings are not cogs in a vast cosmic mechanism, but rather are free, creative agents capable of transforming the world though the active realization of intelligent ideals. The ultimate fate of the world is indeterminate and there is no guarantee that the forces of reasonableness will triumph. Nevertheless, the potential for victory is there. All it requires, he thinks, is a community of individuals who devote their energy to the pursuit of truth and goodness, a community united, not by mutual self-interest, but by a common love of reasonableness (Forster, op. cit., 245). Cathy, this brought to my mind the discussion of Peirce's esthetics following Tom Short's fine talk in the Robin session at SAAP. Any thoughts on that in this connection? *** Yes that discussion was interesting - I wish we had had the time to pursue it further. This might not mean so much to people who were not at the talk (perhaps Tom Short might be persuaded to post a copy of it here). But anyway, Tom claimed the subject matter of Peirce's aesthetics was not the beautiful but the *admirable*. To test this, and because I was worried that the talk had mainly spoken at the general level, I asked about a specific example - the Mona Lisa, and whether a Peircean aesthetics as described by Tom might have anything to say about that work, and if so, what. I was worried it looked like I hadn't really understood the very point Tom was trying to make, and Tom suggested that a painting of a beautiful woman is not the sort of thing Peirce has in mind, but Felicia Cruse said she wanted to hear what Tom had to say about it, and artworks in general. Then Rosa Mayorga pointed out that Peirce himself describes the subject matter of aesthetics as 'the growth of concrete reasonableness' (here is the connection Gary is pointing out) so we should work with that. So I guess the question is whether a painting by Leonardo da Vinci might somehow contribute to the growth of human concrete reasonableness. Doesn't seem to me it couldn't. That painting in particular, apparently people have been known to stand in front of it for hours and not necessarily be able to articulate why. I hope I have captured an accurate enough snapshot of the discussion as memory of such things is inevitably selective. Regards to all, Cathy - You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Re: [peirce-l] Book Review: Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism
Terry, Gene, Jon, List, Methinks that you are quite correct, Terry, about reasonableness in Peirce being centered on the social principle, and not just for science. Critical commonsense ought play a significant role in all our endeavors in Peirce's view. And Gene, while I enjoy the passion of your rants (and passion *is* I think missing from too much of contemporary philosophizing), and while Peirce certainly made it clear that philosophy (one of the first sciences in his classification of the sciences, one should note) ought only very gradually be brought to bear on questions of vital interest (see the first of his 1898 Lectures), still, he *was* for all intents and purposes a practicing scientist, and a philosopher and logician. While he apparently loved the theater and music, etc., he did not consider himself to be at all an artist, but always and predominantly a scientist. In my view the problem is not science, but the misuse of science (and technology). Here I'd have to get into political-economic questions which I'm not prepared to do. Art is important, and science is important, and political-economy is important--and for all, as Terry suggested, the 'social principle' could be--should be--be prominently in play, the ideal of the community ought to be love, and that would constitute our summum bonum: our ideal. That kind of ideal plays a significant role in Peirce's pragmatism--it is a very humane idea. Jon, thanks for the link to the lovely song by Paul Simon. Best, Gary On 3/25/12, Terry Bristol bris...@isepp.org wrote: Methinks that the Peirce's 'reasonableness' is based on what he calls the 'social principle' and that it is the reasonableness of evolutionary love. The ideal of the community is love. Terry On Mar 25, 2012, at 11:54 AM, Eugene Halton wrote: Forster: On [Peirce's] view, human beings are not cogs in a vast cosmic mechanism, but rather are free, creative agents capable of transforming the world though the active realization of intelligent ideals. The ultimate fate of the world is indeterminate and there is no guarantee that the forces of reasonableness will triumph. Nevertheless, the potential for victory is there. All it requires, he thinks, is a community of individuals who devote their energy to the pursuit of truth and goodness, a community united, not by mutual self-interest, but by a common love of reasonableness (Forster, op. cit., 245). I could not think of anything worse than a community transforming the world through intelligent ideals, and I do not think the statement accurately represents Peirce. This Pyrrhic victory of eviscerated, abstract intelligence in the service of ideals would be ruinous to life, just as Teilhard de Chardin's concept of a noosphere (in the sense of atmosphere, stratosphere) is, a film of planetary intelligence in which life's domain would be ruled by reason. Life from the neck up is ruinous to life: the noose sphere. Peirce, it seems to me, understood the limited place of science in the practice of life, which is why he thought pragmatically that science is impractical. Other people, such as Dostoyevsky and Melville and D. H. Lawrence, saw more deeply into the problem of the idealization of life than Peirce did, perhaps because they were artists. Life cannot be lived by ideals for long; life can be lived with ideals, never sustainably by them. Our age today, with its ideal religions and ideal science and technology, is fast realizing ideal ruination of the biosphere. We have butchered our spontaneous souls into ether, we have butchered our minds into believing that our bodies are machines and the universe is a machine, and we have butchered the earth: The poisoned fruit of our science and its cultural legacy. Scientific self-correction may be a matter of the long run. Hooray for it. The problem is that life is also a matter of once for all time. Cut its cord and it's gone. Creation issues forth as non-ideal spontaneous reasonableness, which may be an aspect of Peirce's understanding of the aesthetic as more encompassing than the ethical or logical and their concerns with the good and the true. The admirable, literally that which one wonders at, as an understanding of aesthetic (a word which means to perceive or feel), seems to have moved from its literal meaning of wonder toward one of idealizing, perhaps as an aspect of our idealizing, anesthetic age. Gene Halton - You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU - You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the
Re: [peirce-l] Book Review: Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism
Here is a somewhat corrected version of my reply to Terry. Best, S I have little place for ethics in such a system as I have. I see ethics as secondary to the willed application of values to the making of decisions. To me the question is what are the ontological values. My pragmatic answer came in the 1970s when a colleague and I taught a group of teenagers the Gospel of Mark (the text of which I had turned into songs) and saw the actual results of this process in events in their lives and those related to them. I concluded that the ontological values can be described by the words tolerance, democracy, helpfulness and that the overarching value in which these rest is non-idolatry. I feel these are a reasonable approximation of the active, accessible realities that - when activated by individual will - create history. Insofar as history is a vale of tears it is because we do not honor these values. Non-idolatry incidentally is the basis of scientific method IMO. The good and justice are descriptions of the goals of living, but the values I have named can be explicitly willed by the individual. Insofar as they are understood and willed together, they create a somewhat iconoclastic sort who is pragmatic and at the same time actively promoting tolerance, democracy and helpfulness. All of the movers of history on the just and good side have cleaved to these values. Since individuals do possess will and this the freedom to embrace these values, they can be spread by ... identifying them and activated in a process that certainly can include reason but also involves what we call passion or commitment or conscience or even impulse. When I resigned from my fraternity at Williams in 1958 it was the result of a triad 1. My experience of racial unity 2. The resistance of St. Anthony Hall to considering an applicant from Jamaica and 3. My resignation when I was told, If I believed that, I did not belong there. This helped set off a train of events which led to the removal of fraternities from Williams. Such an event resides in the realm of willed values not ethics. Ethics would be the consideration of what course of action would yield up whatever one designated as the goal of ethics - the good, justice. In other words, ethics is secondary to the exercise of willed values which is essentially impulsive. It is a corrective exercise. *ShortFormContent at Blogger* http://shortformcontent.blogspot.com/ - You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Re: [peirce-l] Book Review: Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism
If the way history is made is through willed values, those values were there before we were. They are ontological. I think the confusion in Peirce is his relegation of ethics to the aesthetic. Kierkegaard did a similar thing when he essentially sidelined the ethical. I muse that the semiotic realm is infused with ontological values (the foundation of ethics) and that history is made by the values we will. By our fruits we are known. Why is it I feel I understand Peirce when I have a dunce's capacity for math and science? It is because he fits in to my evolving understanding of how to see the world and particularly how to identify and deal with the nominalist binary consciousness that essentially has allowed us to arrive at the ethical morass we are in. This is the century when we have t advance out of that and achieve what Derrida called the unprecedented. *ShortFormContent at Blogger http://shortformcontent.blogspot.com/* On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Gary Richmond gary.richm...@gmail.comwrote: Michael, Cathy, List, Michael, I also want to thank you for posting the link to Nathan Houser's review of Forster's *Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism*. I had begun reading the book a few week's before you sent the review and had gotten a bit bogged down, mainly in the style, I think. There is, in my opinion, a tendency in it towards unnecessary repetition, for example. I also think Nathan' criticisms in the last paragraph of his mainly positive review are on target: namely, that Forster mixes references to Peirce's early and late work, neglects some of his more developed ideas (such as the work he did in semeiotic in the 20th century), centering his argumentation around the icon/index/symbol distinction, while neglecting the two later trichotomies of signs (so neglecting arguments as well as other types of qualisigns). Nathan also correctly notes that Forster concentrates almost exclusively on Peirce's earliest proof of pragmatism in that discussion. Still, the review encouraged me to finish reading the book, and I'm certainly glad that I did! One sees, finally, just how central the nominalism/realism question is for Peirce--and, I'd hold, ought to be for us. I want to conclude this note with a passage near the end of the book which I very much liked and have been reflecting on since. Forster writes: On [Peirce's] view, human beings are not cogs in a vast cosmic mechanism, but rather are free, creative agents capable of transforming the world though the active realization of intelligent ideals. The ultimate fate of the world is indeterminate and there is no guarantee that the forces of reasonableness will triumph. Nevertheless, the potential for victory is there. All it requires, he thinks, is a community of individuals who devote their energy to the pursuit of truth and goodness, a community united, not by mutual self-interest, but by a common love of reasonableness (Forster, op. cit., 245). Cathy, this brought to my mind the discussion of Peirce's esthetics following Tom Short's fine talk in the Robin session at SAAP. Any thoughts on that in this connection? Best, Gary On 3/13/12, Michael DeLaurentis michael...@comcast.net wrote: Glad to hear, Cathy - thanks. I agree with your assessment and, based only on what Houser presents, his criticisms. The book itself is probably a worthwhile read, perhaps worthy of further review here. From: C S Peirce discussion list [mailto:PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] On Behalf Of Catherine Legg Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 4:43 PM To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU Subject: Re: [peirce-l] Book Review: Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism Michael I just read the book review from Nathan Houser you shared - it is lucidly written over 6 pages and gives a commanding overview of Peirce's realism. I really enjoyed reading it, thanks for posting it. Cathy On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 6:13 PM, Michael DeLaurentis michael...@comcast.net wrote: If there has already been a post about this, my apologies. Book review just in on CSP and nominalism. Michael J DeLaurentis - You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU - You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Re: [peirce-l] Book Review: Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism
A couple of comments on this passage from Forster and relating to S. Rose's response: 1. The 'plan' by which the universal intelligence works is not a 'fixed' or time(-space)-invariant 'plan'; (cf. likewise in Plato's Timaeus). There is no way to reason forward to 'deduce' a better world without experimenting. We learn was is more valuable (better) only by a sort of blind effort. What is 'really' valuable – the good – is inherently, by its very nature, incomprehensible. (Kantian insight) (Incomprehensible because it develops qualitatively; the good keeps getting better. Socrates speech in Symposium: Love is never satisfied (closed). 2. The ultimate fate is not 'indeterminate' just locally 'underdetermined' – which is tied up with the developmental framework. Each stage enables the exploration of the next possible stage of betterment. The 'plan' and the 'intellect' self-referentially and recursively develop. They emerge so that the important problems and questions for each generation are new and different yet built on previous advances. Like intellectual history – each advance is a sort of convergence and yet it opens new 'types of questions' and so is qualitatively emergent. So the issues facing each generation are always qualitatively different. The continuity of the narrative – what holds it (each generation and each era) together is what Hegel called the 'unfolding of an idea' – and the idea is freedom. Freedom is the ability to bring novel value into the world – to make the world better. Dewey later called this – the construction of the good.' Terry On Mar 22, 2012, at 1:23 PM, Gary Richmond wrote: On [Peirce's] view, human beings are not cogs in a vast cosmic mechanism, but rather are free, creative agents capable of transforming the world though the active realization of intelligent ideals. The ultimate fate of the world is indeterminate and there is no guarantee that the forces of reasonableness will triumph. Nevertheless, the potential for victory is there. All it requires, he thinks, is a community of individuals who devote their energy to the pursuit of truth and goodness, a community united, not by mutual self-interest, but by a common love of reasonableness (Forster, op. cit., 245). - You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Re: [peirce-l] Book Review: Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism
It seems to me that if there is a conflict between nominalism and realism/idealism which plays out in history that it is important to delve deeper. Peirce made spiritual or transcendent or musement matters subject to experiment - human progress had to be real. Where I think I disagree is in not venturing to say what the ethical values are that are ontological and that therefore might we seen as an image of where we are meant to go. The plan is not invariant but the values may be - and the good is not a value but a description of what happens when these values are enacted. If as I maintain we do not learn, we already know. The values are not novel. Nor are they characteristics or virtues. The construction of the good has always been possible in every generation because the values are ontological and universal. I think this rises as much from what can be drawn from Pierce as anything else. *ShortFormContent at Blogger* http://shortformcontent.blogspot.com/ On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 8:54 PM, Terry Bristol bris...@isepp.org wrote: A couple of comments on this passage from Forster and relating to S. Rose's response: 1. The 'plan' by which the universal intelligence works is not a 'fixed' or time(-space)-invariant 'plan'; (cf. likewise in Plato's Timaeus). There is no way to reason forward to 'deduce' a better world without experimenting. We learn was is more valuable (better) only by a sort of blind effort. What is 'really' valuable – the good – is inherently, by its very nature, incomprehensible. (Kantian insight) (Incomprehensible because it develops qualitatively; the good keeps getting better. Socrates speech in Symposium: Love is never satisfied (closed). 2. The ultimate fate is not 'indeterminate' just locally 'underdetermined' – which is tied up with the developmental framework. Each stage enables the exploration of the next possible stage of betterment. The 'plan' and the 'intellect' self-referentially and recursively develop. They emerge so that the important problems and questions for each generation are new and different yet built on previous advances. Like intellectual history – each advance is a sort of convergence and yet it opens new 'types of questions' and so is qualitatively emergent. So the issues facing each generation are always qualitatively different. The continuity of the narrative – what holds it (each generation and each era) together is what Hegel called the 'unfolding of an idea' – and the idea is freedom. Freedom is the ability to bring novel value into the world – to make the world better. Dewey later called this – the construction of the good.' Terry On Mar 22, 2012, at 1:23 PM, Gary Richmond wrote: On [Peirce's] view, human beings are not cogs in a vast cosmic mechanism, but rather are free, creative agents capable of transforming the world though the active realization of intelligent ideals. The ultimate fate of the world is indeterminate and there is no guarantee that the forces of reasonableness will triumph. Nevertheless, the potential for victory is there. All it requires, he thinks, is a community of individuals who devote their energy to the pursuit of truth and goodness, a community united, not by mutual self-interest, but by a common love of reasonableness (Forster, op. cit., 245). - You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU - You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Re: [peirce-l] Book Review: Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism
Stephen – Your points are well taken. Might we say that we 'know' the eternal good by our very nature without being able to articulate it or convince others 'rationally'. I am a little unclear what you mean by 'ethics' here. I guess I must side with Nietzsche and Royce (and Rorty) here and the recent formulation of Essentially Contested Concepts (viz coined by pragmatist, W.B. Gallie, 1956; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentially_contested_concept). The good and justice are ECCs. Here is an image, a sort of thought experiment: If you put a group of republicans on an island they will soon divide into republicans and democrats and likewise if you put a group of democrats on an island. Each of their (perhaps) complementary themes are successful special cases in the emergence of the good. As Connally puts it: enlightened dialogue begins with everyone realizes that the each approach is valuable yet incomplete – viz when the two sides recognize that the good and justice are ECCs. (Think of the Parliamentary Attitude: accepting that folks that don't even seem to make sense are still treated as 'the loyal opposition'.) ((Notably – I think – the new physics (qm and relativity) arises from failure of the interface of the two most highly successful research programs – Newtonian and Maxwellian. The consequence of accepting Bohr's complementarity can be characterized as accepting that 'physical reality' is a ECC.)) Think of life and the way forward to a better world as a path. The problem, so to speak, is to stay on the winding path. One ideology says when in doubt always turn left – the complementary ideology says always turn left. These ideologies self-destruct. The path forward, given the ECC nature of the good, requires respectful dialogue – the middle-way, which is always somewhat experimental. The way forward is always a sort of compromise in the sense of accepting that your current understanding of how to move forward is inherently incomplete – as are all current understandings. The way forward requires a judgment – a creative third; (Cf. Stephen Covey's recent book, The Third Alternative. Incidentally I think Covey is one of the best, yet unrecognized American Pragmatists. I don't think he sees this either.) The way forward involves the formation of qualitatively novel win-win progressive relations (viz. ontology of love?). Since these are emergent there is no way to 'logically' reason the way forward. The way forward then is, as you say Stephen, in some sense always the same and yet always different because always novel and open-ended. Perhaps the way forward, the creative formation of these novel social relations (viz 'reasoning' in terms Peirce's 'social principle') – is what Peirce was pointing at in his theory of evolutionary love. Terry === On Mar 22, 2012, at 6:16 PM, Stephen C. Rose wrote: It seems to me that if there is a conflict between nominalism and realism/idealism which plays out in history that it is important to delve deeper. Peirce made spiritual or transcendent or musement matters subject to experiment - human progress had to be real. Where I think I disagree is in not venturing to say what the ethical values are that are ontological and that therefore might we seen as an image of where we are meant to go. The plan is not invariant but the values may be - and the good is not a value but a description of what happens when these values are enacted. If as I maintain we do not learn, we already know. The values are not novel. Nor are they characteristics or virtues. The construction of the good has always been possible in every generation because the values are ontological and universal. I think this rises as much from what can be drawn from Pierce as anything else. ShortFormContent at Blogger On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 8:54 PM, Terry Bristol bris...@isepp.org wrote: A couple of comments on this passage from Forster and relating to S. Rose's response: 1. The 'plan' by which the universal intelligence works is not a 'fixed' or time(-space)-invariant 'plan'; (cf. likewise in Plato's Timaeus). There is no way to reason forward to 'deduce' a better world without experimenting. We learn was is more valuable (better) only by a sort of blind effort. What is 'really' valuable – the good – is inherently, by its very nature, incomprehensible. (Kantian insight) (Incomprehensible because it develops qualitatively; the good keeps getting better. Socrates speech in Symposium: Love is never satisfied (closed). 2. The ultimate fate is not 'indeterminate' just locally 'underdetermined' – which is tied up with the developmental framework. Each stage enables the exploration of the next possible stage of betterment. The 'plan' and the 'intellect' self-referentially and recursively develop. They emerge so that the important problems and questions for each generation are new and different yet built on
Re: [peirce-l] Book Review: Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism
Michael I just read the book review from Nathan Houser you shared - it is lucidly written over 6 pages and gives a commanding overview of Peirce's realism. I really enjoyed reading it, thanks for posting it. Cathy On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 6:13 PM, Michael DeLaurentis michael...@comcast.netwrote: If there has already been a post about this, my apologies. Book review just in on CSP and nominalism. ** ** Michael J DeLaurentis ** ** ** ** ** ** - You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU - You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
