On 5/18/2019 12:30 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt wrote:
If someone wishes to claim that a particular statement is being taken out of context, then that person has the burden of showing that this is the case, not merely /asserting/ it.
Absolutely! That is an essential part of the methodeutic.
what I see is a Percept that has no parts, which I then interpret by prescinding predicates and abstracting subjects to formulate the Propositional Judgment, "That is a rock.
No. That claim is another example of ignoring the full context. Note that the great majority of Peirce's examples of signs are physical things. Also look at the eleven senses of the word 'sign' that Peirce defined for the Century Dictionary. Each one defines 'sign' as a physical thing. None of them mentions the word 'percept'. If Peirce's technical sense of the word 'sign' were inconsistent with *every* sense by everybody (including himself in nontechnical usage), that would be a gross violation of his ethics of terminology.
if the entire Universe--i.e., all three Universes of Experience, taken together--is a Sign, then what is its Object? Clearly it cannot be anything within any or all of the three Universes, so it must be something outside them.
Wait a minute. In the paragraph above, you denied that physical things can be signs. And in this one, you claim that the physical universe is a sign. You can't have it both ways. In any case, Peirce said "all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs" (CP 5.448). The word 'perfuse' is rare: it only occurs once in CP. The clause beginning with 'if' is tentative, and being composed of signs is not the same as being a sign. Nothing about that quotation is clear, and Peirce did not mention God or any aspect of God in the surrounding context. Finally, since 5.448 is silent about God, a Satanist could take your argument, replace every occurrence of the word 'God' with the word 'Satan' and conclude that Satan is the creator. The ability to derive two contradictory propositions Q and not-Q from P is a reductio ad absurdum that demonstrates the falsehood of P.
To make bald assertions without offering any supporting argumentation violates every principle of responsible scholarship.
I'm delighted that you agree. And as we have seen, there is no supporting argumentation for the claim that CP 5.448 implies that God is the creator. As Stephen said, "Enough already." John
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