[peirce-l] Re: Sinsign, Legisign, Qualisign - help!

[Jim Piat]

Dear Patrick, Folks--   Whitehead, yes -- and also Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance.  Signs, like thought are more or less continuous and resist our attempts to pigeon hole them. OTOH contrasting mere intellectual associations with triadic thought Peirce says, "But the highest kind of synthesis is what the mind is compelled to make neither by the inward attractions of the feeling or representations themselves, nor by a transcendental force of haecceity, but in the interest of intelligibility, that is, in the interests of the the synthetising 'I think' itself; and this it does by introducing an idea not contained in the data, which gives connections which they would not otherwise have had".   Later in that same paragraph (from A Guess at the Riddle) Peirce continues with a further good word for those who attempt to sort and categories experience saying "Intuition is regarding of the abstract in a concrete form, by the realistic hypostatisation of relations; that is the one sole method of valuable thought.  Very shallow is the prevalent notion that this something to be avoided.  You might as well say at once that reasoning is to be avoided because it has led to so much error; quite in teh same philistine line of thought would that e and so well in accord with the spriit of nominalism that I wonder some one does not put it forward.  The true precept is not to abstain from hypostatisation, but to do it intelligently".     Cheers, Jim Piat --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com