> On Jan 9, 2017, at 1:58 PM, Benjamin Udell <baud...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I always liked his use of "general" since the word "universal" unqualified in > English seems to mean true of absolutely everything, and that's certainly not > what Aristotle meant by the Greek word traditionally translated as > "universal". But it seems like I'm the only person who minds this, so maybe > Peirce was just concerned with the idea of allowing exceptions in a given > class to which a general is applied, rather than avoiding the sense in which > "universal" evokes "maximally general".
Pedagogically I think it’s a problem in trying to teach the concept to undergrads. I remember being terribly confused by ‘universal’ when I learned about it as a student. It tends to bias people towards nominalism. > On Jan 9, 2017, at 1:40 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com> wrote: > (quoting Peirce) > > Then the reasoning: "It will serve to show that almost every proposition of > ontological metaphysics is either meaningless gibberish,—one word being > defined by other words, and they by still others, without any real conception > ever being reached,—or else is downright absurd; so that all such rubbish > being swept away, what will remain of philosophy will be a series of problems > capable of investigation by the observational methods of the true > sciences,—the truth about which can be reached without those interminable > misunderstandings and disputes which have made the highest of the positive > sciences a mere amusement for idle intellects, a sort of chess,—idle pleasure > its purpose, and reading out of a book its method. I think the interesting question is what metaphysical questions we could rescue and how we could rescue them. I’m not sure most are gibberish even if we can’t work out a test for them. But thinking through why that would be the case raises interesting difficulties. The extended metaphysical arguments Peirce gives either are the argument from musement (for a certain aspect for God) or his interesting argument for the quasi-platonic origin of the three categories as foundational cosmology. The latter in particular seems an argument from possibility. >From what I can see his main argument is really that we have to make clear >what we’re talking about and metaphysics typically doesn’t do that. (To which >I agree - especially regarding 19th century and earlier philosophy) Yet he >elsewhere notes that we can’t escape from metaphysics. He has a somewhat >famous quote to this point. (Well famous among those who read Peirce anyway) Find a scientific man who proposes to get along without any metaphysics -- not by any means every man who holds the ordinary reasonings of metaphysicians in scorn -- and you have found one whose doctrines are thoroughly vitiated by the crude and uncriticized metaphysics with which they are packed. We must philosophize, said the great naturalist Aristotle -- if only to avoid philosophizing. Every man of us has a metaphysics, and has to have one; and it will influence his life greatly. Far better, then, that that metaphysics should be criticized and not be allowed to run loose. (Peirce, CP 1.129) Here metaphysics seems important if only to show what hidden premises undergird our thinking. It’s also possible that he might mean approaching metaphysics in a somewhat transcendental approach akin to Kant’s various transcendental arguments. i.e. for this to be true these must be true. Yet if one does that form of argument one quickly realizes a certain undecidability inherent to working backwards. That is more than one metaphysics can usually account for the phenomena in question. It’s this thinking (criticizing) of metaphysics that is important. How the pragmatic maxim with its emphasis on difference and testing for meaning isn’t completely clear to me.
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