Gary, Lists, Real generals can be abstractions. This goes back to Locke’s partial consideration, and is the pre-answer to Berekely’s objections to Locke’s approach to ideas. Berkeley objected that if we think of a man it must have a specific number of legs, etc. Locke’s pre-answer is that we ignore those things that very (partial consideration) when we think of a man in a non-specific way. Peirce’s “precision” is the same idea, I think, though he nowhere credits Locke to the best of my knowledge. So, horse as a general is abstract, which doesn’t preclude its being real. Hence my problem about abstractions as objects that determine representamens.
Unfortunately I deal mostly with scientists and analytic philosophers who most definitely use the notion of determination similarly to the way I do. In any case, neither your nor Ben’s clarification of the use of determine in Peirce’s sense helps with the problem in the last sentence of the paragraph above, at least for me. It just replaces something I don’t understand to my satisfaction with a word that I don’t understand to my satisfaction. An interesting question, I think, is how many real and fundamental generals are there. I am inclined to think there is one, distinction. I’ve written a little about this. Stephen Wolfram, Seth Lloyd, John Wheeler, Murray Gell Mann and a host of others have proposed that as well. If there is any number of real and fundamental generals, we might as well be nominalists. Such are my worries. John From: Gary Fuhrman [mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca] Sent: January 31, 2015 7:11 PM To: 'Peirce Discussion Forum'; biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] FW: [biosemiotics:8047] Re: Triadic Relations John, OK, I think this gets us to the heart of the disagreement. You say that “Peircean objects are often abstractions that we can only grasp through signs. This is not the case, I think, with gravity.” I think differently. Like Peirce, I think that all cognition is through signs — more specifically, through those copulations of icons and indices which Peirce called Dicisigns, or “natural propositions” as Frederik Stjernfelt calls them. All facts are abstractions drawn from a vastly complex and multidimensional reality, and are ipso facto signs. “Gravity” too is a sign, and an abstraction, but the dynamic object of a proposition in which that word plays a necessary part is no abstraction; it’s a real general that we can only grasp through such signs. All scientific inquiry is semiotic; experiments too are signs, questions put to nature. I doubt that we can grasp the reality of gravitation, or any other type of phenomenon, without experiments of some kind. You may be right about “the usual notion of determining in both logic and science.” I’m not expert enough in those fields to say, and maybe the dictionaries I cited are wrong. But it’s clear from the above that your usage habits also differ from mine with respect to the words “object” and “sign”. Polyversity strikes again! All I can say is that the usage habits I’ve acquired under the influence of Peirce make sense to me, and serve my communicative purposes well enough that I’m not about to abandon them. I suppose you can say the same of your own usage habits, acquired under other influences. And I can’t argue with that. gary f. } A path is made by people walking on it; things are so because they are called so. [Chuangtse 2] { www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm<http://www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm> }{ gnoxics From: John Collier [mailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za] Sent: 31-Jan-15 10:19 AM To: Gary Fuhrman; Peirce Discussion Forum (PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu<mailto:PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu>); 'biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee' Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] FW: [biosemiotics:8047] Re: Triadic Relations My problem, Gary, is that Peircean objects are often abstractions that we can only grasp through signs. This is not the case, I think, with gravity. Personally, I have adopted what I call “dynamical realism”, the idea that only those things are real that are dynamical, or can be explained in dynamical terms. This is a program, not a definition of what is acceptable. If we can take what appear to be abstractions and give them a dynamical explanation (which can then be tested in principle, because we have interactive access only to dynamical things, and to dynamical things because they can be interacted with), then I have no problem. But before that is carried out, as it has been with gravity, I don’t think we can understand what it means for an abstraction to determine anything. And I don’t think we should talk about what we don’t understand the meaning of, except maybe to express a wish and a hope. I see Ben’s reference to evolution in his response to me as one way of cashing out this hope, which is in many cases not adequately satisfied (a lot of bad evolutionary psychology out there, which I am taking a long time to try to avoid in my work on evolutionary moral realism). I don’t have a problem with talk of objects determining if it is a wish and a hope in many cases, but in many cases, where we have not yet cashed out abstractions I think that is all it is, basically a promissory note. I take my fallibilism very seriously. I do disagree with you on difference from other logicians. I think that sufficiency is the usual notion of determining in both logic and science. There are, of course, all other things being equal assumptions (often called auxiliary assumptions). It applies to the gravity case, for example. The meaning is clear in the case of logical (in the broad sense) and causal consequence. But objects determining seems quite opaque to me until something like one or the other of these is cashed out. For the time being I intend to avoid it as too opaque to be particularly useful. I think I have done that successfully before without finding an equivalent substitute, but rather by stating the issues involved differently. John
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