Clark, list - but the breaking up of old habits and the development
of new habits are two separate actions. It could conceivably happen
that the old habits might dissipate - and no 'chance' occurrences
took place to enable new habits [that would be entropic ...and I
posit doesn't happen that often..]
Habits are not merely regularities of belief and behaviour, but
generalizations of belief and behaviour - such that a certain amount
of flexibility of Token [particular instantiation] can take place
without nullifying the Type and its habits.
I don't see that 'repetition depends on chance'. I think that you
are ignoring that Thirdness [the action of developing and taking
habits] is primordial and not a result of another modal category,
i.e., Firstness. [I think that all three modes are primordial; others
see only Thirdness as primordial]
With regard to your quote:
"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”,
My reading of the above is that all three modes are primordial.
Chance or Firstness 'mingles' with Thirdness because all three modes
are primordial [in my view] but this correlation doesn't mean that
Chance CAUSES Thirdness. It co-exists with it and enables new laws to
emerge and develop.
Edwina
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On Fri 07/04/17 2:15 PM , Clark Goble cl...@lextek.com sent:
On Apr 7, 2017, at 11:58 AM, Gary Richmond 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)
Links:
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