> On Jan 14, 2017, at 8:15 AM, Jon Awbrey <[email protected]> wrote: > > But I did find this previous comment on Houser on Forster on Peirce while > I was looking for something else, and it reflects my sense that Peirceans > have more trouble controlling that slippery slide toward what I've called > “essentialism” or “ontologism” than they do checking nominalistic drift.
I find that if we keep front and center Peirce’s notion of habit that this is less of a problem. That said though Peirce also treats structures, essences and similar phenomena through a lens of possibility. That does open up the danger than in adopting a modal realism one is sneaking a near Platonism back in through the window. A similar risk occurs with Peirce’s notion of teleological causation. At times he is anxious to distinguish his sense from the type of necessity that perhaps is closer to Aristotle’s use or among the scholastics. He adopts a kind of Darwinian approach that seeks to avoid this causation. Yet at other times he’ll speak of what is necessary and not just highly probable - perhaps wrapped up in his notion of continuity - which again constantly keeps the threat of Platonism an ever present one. Put an other way, I think you are right but that this difficulty is part and parcel of Peirce’s own writings that reflect this tension.
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