> On Apr 7, 2017, at 11:58 AM, Gary Richmond <[email protected]> wrote: > > But, as I see it, this is not at all the case. Chance may break up old > habits--and this is essential, for example, for evolution to occur
Breaking up habits to create new habits is habit creation. The key point of habit is repetition. But the repetition itself depends upon chance. This is best seen at the cosmological level where Peirce makes this argument explicitly. Out of the womb of indeterminacy we must say that there would have come something, by the principle of Firstness, which we may call a flash. Then by the principle of habit there would have been a second flash. Though time would not yet have been, this second flash was in some sense after the first, because resulting from it. Then there would have come other successions ever more and more closely connected, the habits and the tendency to take them ever strengthening themselves, until the events would have been bound together into something like a continuous flow. The quasi-flow which would result would, however, differ essentially from time in this respect, that it would not necessarily be in a single stream. Different flashes might start different streams, between which there should be no relations of contemporaneity or succession. So one stream might branch into two, or two might coalesce. But the further result of habit would inevitably be to separate utterly those that were long separated, and to make those which presented frequent common points coalesce into perfect union. Those that were completely separated would be so many different worlds which would know nothing of one another; so that the effect would be just what we actually observe. (CP 1.412) This habit taking is later explained. all things have a tendency to take habits. . . . [For] every conceivable real object, there is a greater probability of acting as on a former like occasion than otherwise. This tendency itself constitutes a regularity, and is continually on the increase. . . . It is a generalizing tendency; it causes actions in the future to follow some generalizations of past actions; and this tendency itself is something capable of similar generalizations; and thus, it is self-generative. (CP 1.409 emphasis mine) Quoting Kelly Parker on this point: The character of such things, and consequently the relations and modes of interaction among them, would be extremely irregular at first. The principle of habit-taking has the effect of making events in the Universe of Actuality more stable and regular. It underlies the emergence of permanent substances, as we have seen. Beyond this, it has the effect of stabilizing the kinds of reaction which tend to occur among different substances. Nothing forces there to be a tendency toward regularity in the Universe of Actuality, for the notion of force implies necessity, an advanced variety of the regularity we are trying to explain (CP 1.407). Regularity, like possibility and particularity, must appear in the evolving cosmos by chance. But just as we have seen the tendency to take habits operate on Firstness to establish the Universe of Ideas and on Secondness to establish the universe of Actuality, so does it operate on Thirdness, on itself, to establish a universe dominated by Thirdness, lawfulness, order, and reasonableness. Law is habit and Peirce is explicit in “A Guess at the Riddle” that law comes out of chance. We are brought, then, to this: conformity to law exists only within a limited range of events and even there is not perfect, for an element of pure spontaneity or lawless originality mingles, or at least must be supposed to mingle, with law everywhere. Moreover, conformity with law is a fact requiring to be explained; and since Law in general cannot be explained by any law in particular, the explanation must consist in showing how law is developed out of pure chance, irregularity, and indeterminacy. (“A Guess at the Riddle”, CP 1.407)
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