I hope you don’t mind if I open up a tangent from those last posts of mine. I’ve long thought the question of being to be a fundamental one in philosophy. It’s interesting to me seeing Peirce’s use of being (aka the copula) in various texts. I think Kelly Parker’s book actually does grapple with this well even if I might disagree on some points. His recognition of the neoplatonic element in Peirce along with seeing how Peirce’s doctrine of continuity is so key to his thought opens up a lot of issues.
I was reading through some of the past discussions over the years since I first joined Peirce-L. I’d love to hear some discussions on this. One interesting think in Parker’s book is the cosmological element in the development of the categories. Most of this was broken out into his paper “Peirce as Neoplatonist” which is available freely online. http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/csp-plot.html <http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/csp-plot.html> Parker makes a big deal of how Peirce, in his early more Kantian phase, emphasizes Being and Substance as the limits of development. Being is pure potency while substance is pure determinacy. However after 1867 he ceases to talk about Being and Substance in quite that way. Commenting on this Joseph Ransdell said the following (1/25/05) I don't think they disappear. The concept of substance becomes or is replaced by its near equivalent, the concept of the real or dynamical object -- not the correlate -- and the concept of the correlate becomes the basis for the conception of the immediate object. The concept of being is, of course, the concept of the copula and that simply disappears into the conception of the rheme as he develops the new view of the logical term as what is now called a propositional function. That is Joe saw the change more as a different way of talking about the notions in Peirce’s mature thought. Moving on let me quote Peirce Neither the predicate, nor the subjects, nor both together, can make an assertion. The assertion represents a compulsion which experience, meaning the course of life, brings upon the deliverer to attach the predicate to the subjects as a sign of them taken in a particular way. This compulsion strikes him at a certain instant; and he remains under it forever after. It is, therefore, different from the temporary force which the hecceities exert upon his attention. This new compulsion may pass out of mind for the time being; but it continues just the same, and will act whenever the occasion arises, that is, whenever those particular hecceities and that first intention are called to mind together. It is, therefore, a permanent conditional force, or law. The deliverer thus requires a kind of sign which shall signify a law that to objects of indices an icon appertains as sign of them in a given way. Such a sign has been called a symbol. It is the copula of the assertion. (3.435 — 1896) Then one more from his mature period. ... the essential office of the copula is to express a relation of a general term or terms to the universe. The universe must be well known and mutually known to be known and agreed to exist, in some sense, between speaker and hearer, between the mind as appealing to its own further consideration and the mind as so appealed to, or there can be no communication, or "common ground," at all. The universe is, thus, not a mere concept, but is the most real of experiences. (CP 3.621 — 1902) Getting back to the issue between KP and FS my sense is that the issue is why the copula (even when hidden as in a single term) relates replicas rather than the original object. Effectively it is because of Peirce’s recognition of difference between the dynamic object and immediate object. The immediate object will be a general in order to function before the mind. While there is an essential indexical relationship between the dynamic and immediate objects what the copula acts on is bringing these together. Further, because the indexical role of the copula can only work on these replicas (icons) this means the path back to the original object can only be given by a guess. (This is something Peirce emphasizes quite particularly in his letter to Lady Welby which contains the best discussion of his view of signs IMO) The original originating object is present in our signs, but only in a trace as a icon. More importantly (and this was something I spent years studying until I finally was comfortable with Peirce’s answer) when things are repeated it’s this relationship between generals that gets repeated and not the pure original objects. This is very important in understanding how both writing but more importantly logic functions. What seems key to me in Peirce is that the copula function is present even when it seems like it is not. That is even in a single term it is functioning. This has big implications in logic - particularly boolean logic. One obvious place this pops up is in what Peirce calls the “copula of inclusion” which he represents with -< and that is important in Peirce’s diagrams. This gets into the distinction between identity and inclusion which I think is important to think about relative to Being. For those not as familiar this difference is the difference between “any A is any B” versus “any A is B.”
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