Aw: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Defining Continuity

[Helmut Raulien]

 

 

Supplement: To get back to the topic, I would ask, if common sense itself is discontinuous, because it consists of discrete feelings caused by discrete taxonomic classes, can then be there a common sense about continuity? I guess not, and suspect, that continuity is a mathematical concept, whose fundamental and total appliance to reality is not proven.

John, list,

 

I would rather guess, that common sense is feeling learned or inherited from a community, like for example: Learned from family, friends, culture, scientific community, epigenetically and genetically inherited from ancestors, genetically inherited from species (humans), and the other taxonomic class communities apes, primates, mammals, vertebrates, animals, organisms, and physicochemical realm.

 

But on the other hand, a taxonomic class is not a community, because the ancestors from whom the feeling is inherited, are not alive anymore. Nevertheless the feeling still applies to the alive members of the class, whether they know each other (are a community) or not. Or maybe, to be a community does not have to mean knowing each other?

 

Best,

Helmut

 

 13. September 2019 um 17:08 Uhr
 "John F. Sowa" <s...@bestweb.net>
wrote:

Jon, List

 

Common sense is what a child learns before the age of six.  The innovations of one generation become the common sense of the next generation.

 

The common sense of European culture is based on a version of Plato-Aristotle that has been absorbed into the European languages and life.  For Peirce, common sense included the New England version as enhanced with his father's tutoring in Greek, Latin, and mathematics.

 

JAS:  I believe that my proposed terminology is more consistent with the common-sense notion of continuity that Peirce persistently sought to capture.

 

For Peirce, diagrammatic reasoning is the one and only method of reasoning.  It involves analogies -- matching signs (diagrams or patterns) from memory to signs in the phaneron.  There is no difference in principle between the most precise pattern matching in mathematics and the looser pattern matching in everyday life.

 

Whenever Peirce made any statement about continuity in ordinary English, all his mathematical patterns were in the back of his mind.  Even in the most informal comments, they served as a filter that blocked the typical mistakes of the "loose thinkers"  and "metaphysicians" he was constantly criticizing.

 

Fundamental principle:  It's possible to get a rough idea of what Peirce meant by reading his words.  But it's not possible to understand his words in depth or to make accurate inferences from them without understanding the details of the mathematics that blocked the mistakes.

 

John

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