John,
Thanks for this, it’s helpful in reducing somewhat the vagueness of Peirce’s references to physics and chemistry in Lowell 3.4 — and answering the question I posed, which was badly put in the first place. What I was trying to “get” was why Peirce would focus on “substances” of this particular kind to argue for the reality of Thirdness. There is certainly a conceptual connection between Thirdness and life, and the phenomenon of chirality doesn’t strike me as especially exemplary of that connection. But now I see the historical context these lectures as an earlier stage in the gradual shift from conceiving the essence of life as a substance (such as “protoplasm” or in this case “active substance”) to conceiving it as a process (such as Maturana/Varela’s “autopoiesis” or Kaufmann’s “autocatalysis” or Deacon’s “teleogenesis”). Nowadays we all see an intimate connection between semiosis and the life process, but we forget that Peirce did not introduce the term “semiosis” until 1907. MS 318, where he introduced it, is perhaps a better example of what Peirce was driving at in Lowell 3.4. [[ (It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects,— whether they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient, entirely or partially,— or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by “semiosis” I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs. Σημείωσις in Greek of the Roman period, as early as Cicero’s time, if I remember rightly, meant the action of almost any kind of sign; and my definition confers on anything that so acts the title of a “sign.”) ]EP2:411] But I don’t think anybody sees the “three-body problem” in astrophysics, for instance, as embodying the kind of complexity we see in a semiotic or a living process; so it’s not just the interaction of any three subjects that constitutes Thirdness. “The third Universe comprises everything whose Being consists in active power to establish connections between different objects, especially between objects in different Universes” (EP2:435, emphasis mine). I don’t suppose that I’m telling readers of this list anything they don’t already know, I’m just trying to articulate it in a way that seems clearer to me than Lowell 3.4 does. Perhaps others can clarify it better. Gary f. -----Original Message----- From: John F Sowa [mailto:s...@bestweb.net] Sent: 14-Dec-17 15:27 To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Lowell Lecture 3.4 On 12/13/2017 7:56 AM, <mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca> g...@gnusystems.ca wrote: > Peirce is referring to /organic/ compounds as “such active substances.” > But I still don’t know what he’s referring to as “those substances > which rotate the plane of polarization to the right or left.” What > would those be called by chemists today? Many kinds of crystals and solutions rotate the plane of polarized light. But organic molecules tend to be more complex than inorganic molecules, and they frequently come in pairs that are identical, except for *chirality* (left or right handedness). The formulas of the L- and R- versions are identical, but because of the geometry of the molecules, they differ in exactly the same way as the right and left hands. When light passes through solutions of those molecules, it reacts differently with the two kinds, but the difference is only detected when the light happens to be polarized. The two kinds of molecules are called *enatiomers* of each other. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiomer> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiomer See below for an excerpt from the Wikipedia article about splitting sucrose into *invert sugar*, a mixture of glucose and fructose. John ___________________________________________________________________ >From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_sugar_syrup> >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_sugar_syrup The term "inverted" is derived from the practice of measuring the concentration of sugar syrup using a polarimeter. Plane polarized light, when passed through a sample of pure sucrose solution, is rotated to the right (optical rotation). As the solution is converted to a mixture of sucrose, fructose and glucose, the amount of rotation is reduced until (in a fully converted solution) the direction of rotation has changed (inverted) from right to left. C12H22O11 (sucrose, Specific rotation = +66.5°) + H2O (water, no rotation) → C6H12O6 (glucose, Specific rotation = +52.7°) + C6H12O6 (fructose, Specific rotation = −92°) net: +66.5° converts to −19.65° (half of the sum of the specific rotation of fructose and glucose)
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