List,
For the development of his argument, probably the crucial sentence here is the one Peirce repeats almost verbatim: “The very being of the General, of Reason, consists in its governing individual events.” The mode of being of an individual event, of course, is Secondness, so Reason in this very broad Peircean sense is pretty much synonymous with Thirdness, defined as “that whose being consists in its bringing about a secondness” (EP2:267). It’s this Reason (insofar as we can comprehend it) that Peirce proposes to investigate with his Existential Graphs, by analyzing it as a process into its simplest steps. But the most startling assertion here, for me anyway, comes at the end of the passage. I never would have guessed that “what we mean by “not” is “every proposition would be true if it were.” By “not hard” we mean “every proposition would be true if it were hard.” I’ve been using the word “not” for about 70 years, and it never occurred to me that what I meant by it was “every proposition would be true if it were.” It strikes me as a very complicated way of saying “not” — but as we’ll see in his next lecture, this is one of the key ideas behind the design of Existential Graphs, which Peirce considered his greatest contribution to logic (and thus to ethics, of which logic is a special case). If one of the logicians aboard this trip through the Lowell Lectures could explain that idea in a way that’s easier for intuition to grasp, I’d appreciate it! Gary f. From: g...@gnusystems.ca [mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca] Sent: 8-Oct-17 07:29 To: 'Peirce List' <peirce-l@list.iupui.edu> Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Lowell Lecture 1.8 Continuing from Lowell 1.7 (CP 1.614, EP2:254): 615. Consider, for a moment, what Reason, as well as we can today conceive it, really is. I do not mean man's faculty which is so called from its embodying in some measure Reason, or Νοῦς, as a something manifesting itself in the mind, in the history of mind's development, and in nature. What is this Reason? In the first place, it is something that never can have been completely embodied. The most insignificant of general ideas always involves conditional predictions or requires for its fulfillment that events should come to pass, and all that ever can have come to pass must fall short of completely fulfilling its requirements. A little example will serve to illustrate what I am saying. Take any general term whatever. I say of a stone that it is hard. That means that so long as the stone remains hard, every essay to scratch it by the moderate pressure of a knife will surely fail. To call the stone hard is to predict that no matter how often you try the experiment, it will fail every time. That innumerable series of conditional predictions is involved in the meaning of this lowly adjective. Whatever may have been done will not begin to exhaust its meaning. At the same time, the very being of the General, of Reason, is of such a mode that this being consists in the Reason's actually governing events. Suppose a piece of carborundum has been made and has subsequently been dissolved in aqua regia without anybody at any time, so far as I know, ever having tried to scratch it with a knife. Undoubtedly, I may have good reason, nevertheless, to call it hard; because some actual fact has occurred such that Reason compels me to call it so, and a general idea of all the facts of the case can only be formed if I do call it so. In this case, my calling it hard is an actual event which is governed by that law of hardness of the piece of carborundum. But if there were no actual fact whatsoever which was meant by saying that the piece of carborundum was hard, there would be not the slightest meaning in the word hard as applied to it. The very being of the General, of Reason, consists in its governing individual events. So, then, the essence of Reason is such that its being never can have been completely perfected. It always must be in a state of incipiency, of growth. It is like the character of a man which consists in the ideas that he will conceive and in the efforts that he will make, and which only develops as the occasions actually arise. Yet in all his life long no son of Adam has ever fully manifested what there was in him. So, then, the development of Reason requires as a part of it the occurrence of more individual events than ever can occur. It requires, too, all the coloring of all qualities of feeling, including pleasure in its proper place among the rest. This development of Reason consists, you will observe, in embodiment, that is, in manifestation. The creation of the universe, which did not take place during a certain busy week, in the year 4004 B.C., but is going on today and never will be done, is this very development of Reason. I do not see how one can have a more satisfying ideal of the admirable than the development of Reason so understood. The one thing whose admirableness is not due to an ulterior reason is Reason itself comprehended in all its fullness, so far as we can comprehend it. Under this conception, the ideal of conduct will be to execute our little function in the operation of the creation by giving a hand toward rendering the world more reasonable whenever, as the slang is, it is “up to us” to do so. In logic, it will be observed that knowledge is reasonableness; and the ideal of reasoning will be to follow such methods as must develop knowledge the most speedily. [CP 1.615 ends here; the rest of this paragraph is from EP2:255.] The logicality of the judgment that a stone cannot be at once hard and not hard does not consist, as Sigwart and other German logicians say it does, in its satisfying our feeling of logicality, but consists in its being true; for everything that is true is logical, whether we know it or not. But this we know to be true, not at all by means of any peculiar feeling it excites in us,— we might argue from that feeling, it is true, but any feeling may be deranged,— and we know it much more certainly from this, that when we say that it is true that “a stone cannot be at once hard and not hard,” what we are talking of is not what interpretation somebody might put upon that assertion, but what we mean by it. Now what we mean by “not” is “every proposition would be true if it were.” By “not hard” we mean “every proposition would be true if it were hard.” So to say that “a stone is at once hard and not hard” is to say that if it is hard every proposition is true, and it is hard. Accordingly this would be to assert that every proposition is true,— a superHegelian position that directly denies the distinction of truth and falsity, which, we are fully satisfied, exists. http://gnusystems.ca/Lowells.htm }{ Peirce’s Lowell Lectures of 1903
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