Jon, you’re having a busy day here!
I see where you’re coming from now, but I can’t go there myself because that would deny the reality of Secondness (or else deny that a relation of Secondness can subsist between a sign and its object). I think our problem may be that we’re not using the term “general” in the same way. I’m trying to observe what Peirce calls “the proper distinction between the two kinds of indeterminacy, viz.: indefiniteness and generality, of which the former consists in the sign's not sufficiently expressing itself to allow of an indubitable determinate interpretation, while the latter turns over to the interpreter the right to complete the determination as he pleases” (EP2:394). He “completes the determination” by selecting an individual from the universe of discourse defined by the general term, and that individual is the dynamic object of the sign. We may also be using the term “collective” differently. In Peirce’s letter to Welby (CP 8:366) a “collective” is a kind of sign, one whose dynamic object is a collection. Obviously your usage comes from somewhere else. Anyway I’m out of time for a day or two … Gary f. From: Jon Alan Schmidt [mailto:jonalanschm...@gmail.com] Sent: 24-Jan-17 12:43 To: Gary Fuhrman <g...@gnusystems.ca> Cc: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu Subject: Re: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Universal/General/Continuous and Particular//Singular/Individual Gary F., List: I acknowledge that I may be confused here, but how can a sign that is general have an object that is not general? My understanding is that all concepts are legisigns/types, which requires that all of their objects are collectives. Are you suggesting that some concepts are qualisigns/marks or sinsigns/tokens? According to Peirce, the Universe of Necessitants "includes whatever we can know by logically valid reasoning" (EP 2:479; 1908). I take this as encompassing all real objects of concepts, since Peirce held that there is nothing real that we cannot (in principle) come to know. Aaron Bruce Wilson makes a similar point in his recent book, Peirce's Empiricism: Its Roots and Its Originality. ABW: ... if knowledge of reality is possible, then there must be real generals. [Peirce] argues: "[S]ince no cognition of ours is absolutely determinate, generals must have a real existence" (5.312/W2:239). By "no cognition of ours is absolutely determinate" I take him to mean that no object of cognition is absolutely determinate ... Peirce argues that we can cognize or represent only things possessing some indeterminate qualities because if one were to cognize something determinate in every respect, one would "have the material in each such representation for an infinite amount of conscious cognition, which we yet never become aware of" (5.305/W2:236). For any given property, it seems that there is always some further property that is a further determination of it ... At some point, our minds simply fail to be powerful enough to represent any further determination, and must leave some property indeterminate ... either the properties of objects that we actually perceive are not real--and we have no empirical knowledge of reality--or they are real indeterminate properties or qualities and, thus, real generals. (pp. 63-64) Regards, Jon
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