> On Mar 25, 2017, at 8:54 AM, Jon Awbrey <jawb...@att.net> wrote: > > I declared myself long ago as one who sees more continuity > of development than radical shift in Peirce's thought over > his lifetime. What I do see changing through the years is > the greater diversity of his audiences as the river of his > work flows from its constant sources to the alluvial delta > he left for us to sift. The greatest share of variance in > what he writes is explained more by variations in the whom > he is addressing than the what he is trying to communicate.
I certainly don’t dispute that - it’s completely my view as well for the most part. With regards to modal realism I suspect the question is when did he have something like modal realism - which seems there by the early 1890s and perhaps 1880s - and when is it full bodied modal realism. It’s a difficult question and since there are almost always explicit references from the late 1890’s onward it’s just easier to use those and avoid controversy. My own feeling is that most of the mature view was in place by the time he switched the pragmatic maxim to counterfactuals even if he didn’t necessarily treat those possibilities as real in a robust sense. I think the logic of his work pushed him there. Put an other way he may not necessarily have thought through all the implications of his logic or, as you note, simply didn’t have the right audience to make them clear. While the logic of modal realism is in place with the shift of the maxim to counterfactuals, it seems to me it’s his thinking through the issues of universals to particulars where he saw Berkeley and even Scotus as too nominalistic that I think the full transformation occurs. But it seems a gradual one of recognition rather than substantial change to the logic of his argument. (IMO) But of course his main engagement with Berkeley is quite early - 1871. http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/v2/w2/w2_48/v2_48.htm <http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/v2/w2/w2_48/v2_48.htm> Is this sufficient for full bodied modal realism? Perhaps we can read it that way although I’m not sure I’d want to defend the thesis. (I’m open if others have defended it for the period prior to 1897)
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