List, Howard: On May 11, 2015, at 9:15 AM, Gary Fuhrman wrote:
> In W6:37, Peirce says that two subjects are “occult and mysterious.” One is > “the power of nature that brings about the result of the chemical experiment” > – or more generally, causality in the physical universe. This is “mysterious” > because it is unobservable in itself, yet we are forced by this “power” to > admit that there must be a system of regular relations between (a) the causes > and conditions constituting the experiment and (b) the result of it, and we > can only guess what that regular relation is in itself. > Beware of Gary's falsification of the CSP's meaning by his ill-conceived generalization when he writes about causality in the physical universe where causality is mostly viewed as the regularity of continuous functions. 1. Chemical observations are observed. Without observations of physical matter, the entire chemical plexus of material existences would not have come to be. Gary's ratiocination of the meaning of chemical symbols is absurd. 2. Chemistry and the entire plexus of observable bodies, save the atomic numbers, are IRREGULAR. As you well know, the regularity of the atomic numbers is a physical construct. The irregularity of the structures of molecules is well known and the antecedent of CSP logic, as illustrated by such terms as index (rather than such terms as count or number), rhema and dicisign. The overt chemo-centricity of CSP thinking leads him to the structures of his various graphs as related to copulas / medads. By his own words these graphs were his crowning achievement. What is "occult and mysterious" to me is how he conjoined these many semantic/rhetoric parts into a coherent whole WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF CONTINUITY. CSP's logical and rhetorical transition from the regularity of mathematics to the irregularity of chemistry (and hence to the irregularity of biology and medicine is a wide open question. This question itself seems to be beyond the grasp of many CSP scholars. Can anyone offer an opinion on how he engineered this transition? Cheers The HAPPY CHEMIST
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