> On Jan 24, 2017, at 4:11 PM, Gary Richmond <gary.richm...@gmail.com> wrote: > > In response I'd say that it is true that, as Peirce's own realism deepened in > the late 19th, early 20th century into an 'extreme scholastic realism' that, > as you noted, even his own earlier analyses of realism are revised in the > light of it (consider the famous revision of the diamond thought experiment, > for famous example). But it is not true in my view that he deemed other > philosophical stances and philosophers as nominalistic because "he disagreed" > with their views. Indeed, he draws philosophically a little or a lot from > most all of them, including Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, etc.
An interesting book a few years back came out on this called Reading Peirce Reading. I confess I loved that book a lot. One chapter is about Peirce reading Mill who I think we can all agree is extremely nominalistic. Yet Peirce got a lot out of his close readings. With regards to Duns Scotus I think Peirce ended up seeing nominalism there simply because Peirce came to see his system demanded the realism towards possibilities. That is what in contemporary terms we’d call a modal realist. I’d say the elements of this are in his earliest writings and it is interesting it took so long for him to deal with this. Even his discussions of frequentism vs. bayesianism strongly lead one towards modal realism long before he fully embraced it. Eventually this allowed him to return to some elements of his early neoplatonic appropriations of Kant. That is he ends up being a neoPlatonic realist because he comes to see the forms as mind independent possibilities. Once he makes that move that then transforms how he sees his three types of causality: necessity, chance and agapism or teleology. Teleology ends up coming out of this pre-established sets of possibilities. Again, for some pretty compelling reasons even today modal realism is pretty problematic. But it does avoid a lot of problems particular in science. I recognize there are still those who see a tension between the pragmatic maxim and modal realism but to my eyes they end up going hand in hand.
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