> On Jan 25, 2017, at 8:28 PM, Stephen C. Rose <stever...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Peirce was more than a pingpong ball in a long and repetitive exegetical > battle involving I suppose the core group of this forum. But I have had > enough. I simply will not open mail from the correspondents until something > that is not a bnary ether-or argument that dwells on "what Peirce thinks" as > though he has not changed himself in a century. Sorry for the rant and if I > am alone in my reaction then I will willingly confess to having lost patience > and being somewhat saddened by it all.
It would be nice to push on to some other topics. Sorry for my part I may have played in all this. My own interests are philosophical. So while getting what Peirce said is important it’s more the philosophical arguments that matter to my eyes. To that line since I think we all agree that Peirce is at the end of life a modal realist, it’d be interesting trying to think through how one might respond to criticisms of modal realism. I’m here thinking less of what Peirce did say but how one might apply a Peircean inspired response to critics. The usual reason people don’t like modal realism is just that it seems inherently unintuitive. My sense is that usually that’s because they want to think in nominalistic terms of real material objects rather than recognizing possibilities aren’t mind-dependent. Often there’s also a kind of latent remnant of 19th century determinism at play. That is there’s an assumption that to be real is to be actual. A stronger reason to be skeptical of modal realism is ontological simplicity. Ockham’s Razor is often brought up which is funny given Ockham’s nominalism. Lewis’ approach here is to say he’s not asking you to believe in more things of a different kind merely more things of the same kind. I’ll confess that seems a bit of a dodge. Here again I think the issue is in assuming realism of possibilities is creating a new ontological entity. I’m not sure it is if we already have the notion of possibilities. That is there seems to be some sneaky shifting of possibility to possible world as if the two were ontologically different. That is again I think nominalism is sneaking in. To say something is real but not actual avoids the problem. That’s because all you are really saying is whether its being depends upon a finite number of minds, not what its being is.
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