Jon S., Most of the old timers on this List have already heard and ignored this advice more times than I could care to enumerate but since you and maybe a few other onlookers may not have heard it before, I will give it another try.
Peirce's categories are best viewed as categories of relations. To a first approximation, firstness, secondness, thirdness are simply what all monadic, dyadic, triadic relations, respectively, have in common. (At a second approximation, we may take up the issues of generic versus degenerate cases of 1-, 2-, 3-adicity, but it is critical to take the first approximation first before attempting to deal with the second.) In that light, thirdness is a global property of the whole triadic relation in view and it is a category error to attribute thirdness to any local domain or any given element that participates in that relation. As it happens, we often approach a complex relation by picking one of its elements, that is, a single tuple as exemplary of the whole set of tuples that make up the relation, and then we take up the components of that tuple in one convenient order or another. That method lends itself to the impression that k-ness abides in the k-th component we happen to take up, but that impression begs the question of whether that order is a property of the relation itself, or merely an artifact of our choice. Failing to examine that question puts us at risk for a type of error that I've rubricized as the “Fallacy Of Misplaced Abstraction” (FOMA). As I see it, there is a lot of that going on in the present discussion, arising from a tendency to assign Peircean categories to everything in sight, despite the fact that Peirce's categories apply only to certain levels of structure. Regards, Jon On 5/1/2016 11:54 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt wrote:
Jerry R., List: The surprising fact, C, is observed; But if A were true, C would be a matter of course [because B]; Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true. This is propositional logic, so as you anticipated, we have to convert it into predicate logic--a syllogism in the strict, deductive sense--in order to assign the various terms as you have requested. By doing so, we construct the very syllogism that Peirce invoked in "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" (EP 2.441). With S=subject (these beans), P=predicate (white), and M=middle (beans from this bag) ... A = credible conjecture = Case = minor premiss = S is M. B = circumstances of occurrence = Rule = major premiss = M is P. C = surprising fact = Result = conclusion = S is P. I do not believe that any of this is controversial, nor (it seems) is assigning B to Thirdness; someone will no doubt correct me if I am wrong about this. :-) What is still on the table is whether A is Firstness (Jon S.) or Secondness (Gary R.), and thus whether C is Secondness (Jon S.) or Firstness (Gary R.). Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
-- 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 .
