> On Apr 7, 2017, at 2:05 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote: > > "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. > I don’t quite understand that reading I confess. Chance isn’t separate from thirdness. This is really explicit in the other quotes I gave from Peirce’s cosmology. Again, I don’t think we have to agree with Peirce there. I have my doubts. But I’m not quite sure I see how to read him as asserting what you are claiming. Particularly when he explains the origin of firstness, secondness and thirdness out of “the womb of indeterminacy.”
If law were primordial it wouldn’t need to be explained whereas Peirce is explicit that it must be explained. Now I’m more with you in that I’m not sure I buy Peirce’s neoplatonism here. I’d much rather favor the three be primordial and irreducible. That makes far more sense to me. But that doesn’t appear to be Peirce’s position.
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