Helmut, List,
A day in the yard meditatively pulling weeds helped me to clear my head and
I think I can see where this all went agley. I still think that what Harry
wrote is an apt statement of a critical point in Peirce's theory of signs
and I'm sorry if I stepped on it with my nonce-ens words about “ontologism”
so I'll put off the long version explanation of that to another time.
On Edwina's prompting I did take the trouble to look the word up
and I see that it really was already in use, however obscurely,
at least to a non-mediæval scholar like me:
☞ http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11257a.htm
“Ontologism is an ideological system which maintains that God and Divine ideas
are the first object of our intelligence and the intuition of God the first act
of our intellectual knowledge.”
Although I can dimly see, or imagine a link between that ideology
and the ideology I was trying to criticize I think it's probably
best to avoid conflating the two ideas and so I'll go back to
using words like “essentialism” that I've used before, as in
this record of an earlier discussion:
☞ Nominalism and Essentialism are the Scylla and Charybdis that Pragmatism Must
Navigate Its Middle Way Between
(
http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2012/09/21/nominalism-and-essentialism-are-the-scylla-and-charybdis-that-pragmatism-must-navigate-its-middle-way-between/
)
A famous physicist whose name I've forgotten
once said something to the following effect:
“An -ism never did much for science, except for prism.”
To prism I'd add pragmatism and maybe schism but the point is that
I almost always speak of isms in a critical vein, as emphases that
have closed out their complementary emphases or as ideologies that
have taken their initial idea a bridge too far. So I was thinking
of the series ontology, ontologist, ontologism on analogy with the
series science, scientist, scientism.
So it's perfectly okay to say that relations exist in the world and
you can even say that thirdness is the essence of triadic relations,
meaning that all triadic relations have a property in common that
you might as well call “thirdness” as anything else, but when you
turn to saying that thirdness inheres in one of the places of the
relation and not the others then that is a matter of another sort
and it does not automatically follow. Here we risk what I have
called the “Fallacy Of Misplaced Essence” (FOME) and avoiding
that takes quite a bit more care.
Regards,
Jon
On 6/20/2015 2:42 PM, Helmut Raulien wrote:
Jon, Harry, List,
Is ontologism really the problem? John Deely says, that relations are
ontological (so also the triadic relations). Does the FOO claim, that concepts
(eg. mind-relations of relations) are not a part of reality? But to say, that
concepts are part of reality, even in inanimate nature there are concepts too,
or even to say, that maybe conceptuality is a synonym for reality, would be a
kind of ontologism that is in accord with Peirce, or not?
Best,
Helmut
>
"Jon Awbrey" <jawb...@att.net> wrote:
Harry, List,
Yes, that is the core idea of Peirce's approach to semiotics,
critical to his theory of inquiry and the whole perspective
of pragmatism. For the past 15 years or so, unfortunately,
I've watched the "fashion of ontologism" (FOO) obscure his
central insights. I can but hope that the days of FOO are
numbered and will quickly fade into fadish oblivion.
Regards,
Jon
On 6/20/2015 6:51 AM, Harry Procter wrote:
A sign is only a sign to the extent it is construed or interpreted as
a sign. This interpretation connects the sign vehicle with the object.
The three parts are interdependent and only assume their identity in
the context of the three. A truly triadic systemic formulation.
Best,
Harry Procter
-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawb...@att.net]
Sent: 19 June 2015 20:40
To: Helmut Raulien
Cc: Peirce List
Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Survey of Relation Theory • 1
Helmut, List,
I wasn't completely sure about the meaning of your question:
• "Are interpretants an own class?"
Is "own" a translation of "eigen" maybe?
At any rate I went with my best guess and took you to be asking whether
interpretants (and the other two classes) were ontologically distinctive in
some way. I rewrote my last reply as a blog post with this interpretation
in mind:
• Relations & Their Relatives : 9
( http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2015/06/19/relations-their-relatives-9/ )
Please let me know if my reading of your sense is right or not.
Regards,
Jon
--
academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey
my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/
inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
isw: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/JLA
oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey
facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache
-----------------------------
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 .
