On 3/23/06, Benjamin Udell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi, Il-Young,
>
> Thank you for the clarification. Now I understand, too, what you mean about
> an effort for which science is ill equipped, an effort more philosophical,
> and an "infinite regress" in thirdness, i.e., the scientific enterprise as
> studying itself.
>
> This seems to happen in any field of research into reason & reason's
> crackups, and the fields themselves have sometimes been called disciplinally
> ill-equipped, dysfunctional, and, at any rate, "cracked up" into schools.
> Maybe it's the nature of the problems, something to do with the reflexivity,
> the researcher as part of the subject matter, inferential & ratiocinative
> processes. My guess is that the psychological & social studies have it worst,
> studies of rational beasts by rational beasts, with philosophy coming in a
> close second with its indeterminately or multiply answerable questions and
> problems inverse to those of deductive theory of logic. Deductive theories of
> logic, and of ordered structures & math-induction applicability, seem divided
> into schools at least in terms of infinities, the intuitionist minority,
> etc., though I haven't heard of these researches being characterized as
> "disciplinally dysfunctional" in the way that happens to the more obviously
> reflexive researches such as philosophy & the social & psychological studies.
>
> ***
>
> Peirce means what he says about mind and matter. He holds that matter is
> "congealed" mind, "effete" mind -- "effete" meaning spent, played out,
> exhausted, all birthed-out. According to Peirce, physical laws are habits
> into which mind has settled & rigidified. At the same time, people, and the
> scientific enterprise, embody a process of growing thirdness amid the decay.
> Peirce held that God is "real" and that it's a "fetich" to persist on the
> question of whether God is "actual." (See "A Neglected Argument for the
> Reality of God," where he discusses his three-way being-actuality-reality
> distinction.)
>
> Actual is that which reacts or resists, as in an experiment.
>
> Real is that which is independently of what you or I or any finite community
> of minds (scientific or otherwise) thinks of it, but is also that which would
> be reached by research sooner or later and which would necessarily be reached
> by research prolonged indefinitely. Laws & habits can be quite real without
> being concrete reactive objects.
>
> 1. The possible, -- being (in the broadest sense)
> |> 3. The (conditionally) necessary ("would have to" approx. = "should"), --
> the real
> 2. The actual, the reactive/resistant, -- the existent
>
> Best, Ben
>
Hello Ben,
Thank you for that bit of information and citation. I will search for
that article at the library tomorrow. But, let me respond to this
issue of "mind over matter". It is still not completely clear to me
what he means by mind and matter in this case although it is becoming
more clear with your help and my own research into the matter (no pun
intended). I am becoming more convinced that it is not quite correct
to interpret Peirce's statement quoted by Gene previously with
traditional (read: dualist) meaning of matter and mind. Let me quote
a rather long passage from Peirce's essay "What Pragmatism Is"
verbatim. It will serve to make my point a bit more clear.
"As to reality, one finds it defined in various ways; but if that
principle of terminological ethics that was proposed be accepted, the
equivocal language will soon disappear. For realis and realitas are
not ancient words. They were invented to be terms of philosophy in the
thirteenth century, and the meaning they were intended to express is
perfectly clear. That is real which has such and such characters,
whether anybody thinks it to have those characters or not. At any
rate, that is the sense in which the pragmaticist uses the word. Now,
just as conduct controlled by ethical reason tends toward fixing
certain habits of conduct, the nature of which, (as to illustrate the
meaning, peaceable habits and not quarrelsome habits), does not depend
upon any accidental circumstances, and in that sense, may be said to
be destined; so, thought, controlled by a rational experimental logic,
tends to the fixation of certain opinions, equally destined, the
nature of which will be the same in the end, however the perversity of
thought of whole generations may cause the postponement of the
ultimate fixation. If this be so, as every man of us virtually assumes
that it is, in regard to each matter the truth of which he seriously
discusses, then, according to the adopted definition of "real," the
state of things which will be believed in that ultimate opinion is
real. But, for the most part, such opinions will be general.
Consequently, some general objects are real. (Of course, nobody ever
thought that all generals were real; but the scholastics used to
assume that generals were real when they had hardly any, or quite no,
experiential evidence to support their assumption; and their fault lay
just there, and not in holding that generals could be real.) One is
struck with the inexactitude of thought even of analysts of power,
when they touch upon modes of being. One will meet, for example, the
virtual assumption that what is relative to thought cannot be real.
But why not, exactly? Red is relative to sight, but the fact that this
or that is in that relation to vision that we call being red is not
itself relative to sight; it is a real fact."
I think this passage makes a bit more clear what he has in mind which
is described in the sequel. In the context of Peirce, I think one can
make an analogy between mind/matter relationship (in Peircean sense)
and universal/particular relationship (or "reality" and
"existence/actuality"). What he seems to be espousing in his
description of reality is nothing less than the methodology with which
one arrives at a stable belief (a "fixation of belief") about some
concept informed by evidential support. In particular, he seems to be
describing the methodology of science (as it is ideally conceived, see
E. T. Jaynes' "Logic of Science" for an example of formalizing such a
methodology). In other words, he is describing the limiting process
of abduction (and thought/mind as what generates, conceives, and
processes the hypothesis, concepts, and "experiential evidences" of
the abductive process). In this way, what he states seems quite a bit
more modest (in modern scientific context) than explicit re-reversing
of post-Lamarckian (biogenic) epistemology. What is "real" is the
kind of generalized concepts that scientific theories posits and that
are well supported by evidential logic (the limiting process of
abduction). What "exists" is the particular experiences we have of
the phenomena arising in the world ("aspects of the world") informed
by our scientific concepts. Only in this sense is what I currently
believe is what Peirce meant by "all matter is really mind".
---
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