[peirce-l] Re: Existent vs Real
Jim Platt wrote (in part): - Original Message - From: Jim Piat [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Subject: [peirce-l] Re: Existent vs Real Date: Sun, 19 Feb 2006 12:02:23 -0500 Dear Iving, Thanks for those observation. --- It is important to understand that I was running on memory here, and I'm certain that there are plenty of folks on this list who can be of better service in respect to explicating Meinong's ontology. Judging from the growing amount of recent books on Meinong, I would think that his ideas have begun to overcome the stigma attached to them by Russell in On Denoting (1905). I do recommend looking at Meinong's original, before going to the many commentaries. I recall that even Nick Griffin, a respected Russell scholar, published a paper in which he argued that Russell played somewhat fast and loose with Meinong's ideas, both when reviewing Meinong's writings and when working out the theory of descriptions in On Denoting as a way to get rid of existence claims about uch inconvenient entities as round squares, Pegasus and the present King of France. As I recall, the best presentation that Meinong gave of his theory was in his Ueber Gegenstaende hoeherer Ordnung..., the theme of which, if not the opening line of which, ran something like: Es gibt keine Vorstellungen ohne etwas zu vorstellen. Irving Anellis -- ___ Search for businesses by name, location, or phone number. -Lycos Yellow Pages http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10 --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Existent vs Real
Irving Anellis wrote (in part): To be able to formulate the judgment that 'The present King of France is bald' meant for Meinong that the present King of France must have being at some ontological level or another (i.e have some sort of ontological status, even if he does not exist) in order to be able to formulate the judgment, and assert it, that he's bald. The same must hold, Meinong would argue, even if one were to deny the existence of the present King of France, or the round square. Just being able to take it as a subject of a judgment , to be able to represent it, gives it, ipso facto, some ontological status. Thus Meinong. ... And what Moltke Gram once alliteratively called (if I can remember back to 1970) 'Meinong's muddled metaphysical mire'. Dear Iving, Thanks for those observation. I hope it was clear that I side with Meinong on this issue. I think it is better to sort through the ways we actually do deal with various kinds of objects rather than trying to dismiss them by closing our eyes and insisting they don't exist -- as if existence were the only real mode of being. (All the while knowing full well that we have not only the potential to open our eyes but that even while we deny their existence we are mindful of them even with our eyes closed.) So no, I'm not a nominalist. Though I salute the nominalists for first calling to my attention that there was a problem with some of my unexamined assumptions about certain types of objects. Faulty assumptions that later Wittgenstein and Peirce helped me to clarify and to begin to rise above. Or so it seems to me just now. And for the first time in this particular way -- not to put too fine a point on it. Part of my wacky (often exasperating) take on most issues is due to my lack of a historical persepective. My exposure to philosophy and its concerns has been very spotty and is full of large gaps about subjects commonly known to most who have studied philosophy sytematically. Passion refusing to submit to discipline. But I must say that most who have studied philosophy systematically are amazingly tolerant of those of us who have not. The famed philosophical openness is definitely alive and well on the Peirce list. And the passion. And yes the discipline too -- as collectively we strive toward truth. Perhaps passion and error are an individual matter while discipline (in the best dialogical sense) and truth are a communal matter. Thanks again, Jim Piat --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Existent vs Real
For anyone who may have missed it, I'm forwarding Alan Ryan's obituary of P. F. Strawson, as posted on Russell-l. Irving Anellis: Message: 4 From: Kenneth Blackwell [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Obit. of Strawson To: Russell Studies Discussions [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2006 10:09:07 -0500 Here's an obituary of Peter Strawson by Alan Ryan. -- Ken Sir Peter Strawson Distinguished Oxford philosopher whose spare, elegant work made sense of Kant's metaphysics Published: 18 February 2006 Peter Frederick Strawson, philosopher: born London 23 November 1919; Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy, University College of North Wales 1946; John Locke Scholar, Oxford University 1946, Reader in Philosophy 1966-68, Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy 1968-87; Lecturer in Philosophy, University College, Oxford 1947, Fellow 1948-68, Honorary Fellow 1979-2006; FBA 1960; Fellow, Magdalen College, Oxford 1968-87, Honorary Fellow 1989; Kt 1977; married 1945 Grace Hall Martin (two sons, two daughters); died Oxford 13 February 2006. Encountering philosophy as an undergraduate in 1959 was a wonderful and astonishing experience. That was the year in which two philosophical works appeared whose impact on the discipline was out of all proportion to their modest size and unpretentious prose. One was Stuart Hampshire's Thought and Action; the other, by Peter Strawson, was Individuals. Its demure sub-title, An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, gives no hint of the revolution it wrought. Almost any student fresh from school at the end of the Fifties would have thought that philosophy in England was defined by Bertrand Russell and A.J. Ayer, that metaphysics was the name of something foreign and obscure, and that a thinker such as Immanuel Kant was wilfully opaque and unreadable. It turned out that the attempts of English empiricists to build the world out of sense-data wouldn't wash; and it soon became possible to read Kant with pleasure - or at any rate to see in Kant some of what Strawson had so usefully taught us to see in Kant's work. For most of his career in Oxford, Peter Strawson defined what philosophy was, and how it should be practised; he had already acquired a considerable reputation by the time he published Individuals and it was succeeded in 1966 by The Bounds of Sense, which remains one of the best ways in to the vertiginous difficulties of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Strawson was born in west London in 1919 and attended Christ's College, Finchley (followed by his younger brother, the future Maj-Gen John Strawson); from there he went to St John's College, Oxford in 1937. Unlike most Oxford philosophers of his day, he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics rather than Greats. It was still regarded as a scandal 20 years later that the examiners gave him a second class degree when he graduated in 1940. The tale went that Isaiah Berlin had very much admired his brisk and combative philosophy papers and had given them clear first class marks, but that Sandy Lindsay, the Master of Balliol, and a survivor from the days of Oxford Idealism, had found them brash, and too dismissive of philosophers he admired, and had marked them down accordingly. The Second World War was on, Berlin was heading for the United States, there were no viva voce examinations, and the old Oxford rule that the lower mark prevailed cost Strawson his First. It was rumoured among the undergraduates of the Sixties that Berlin had anyway left the scripts in a taxi . . . At all events, Strawson went off to war, first in the Royal Artillery and then in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He was demobilised as a captain in the REME. In 1945, he married Grace Hall Martin - universally known as Ann - with whom he would have two daughters and two sons. After the war, he was appointed to an assistant lecturership in philosophy at the University College of North Wales at Bangor. He returned to Oxford almost immediately; in 1946 he won the John Locke Scholarship, and in 1947 became a lecturer in philosophy at University College, Oxford. The following year he was elected to a permanent fellowship in philosophy at the college. During the 20 years he was there, the fellows of University College were strikingly more interesting than most of their peers, and part of the reason was the high standard set by Peter Strawson. He was courteous, urbane and readily amused - he frequently looked as though he was sharing some small joke with the Almighty while he conversed with his colleagues - but, without ever insisting on it, he left one in no doubt that he expected intelligent conversation. Those were the qualities he brought to his work as an undergraduate tutor and a graduate supervisor; like some other very distinguished philosophers, he was as good at getting through to the less philosophically talented as he was at stimulating the very brightest. He never looked for, and never attempted to make, disciples, and
[peirce-l] Re: Existent vs Real
Dea Folks, I'm thinking it might be helpful to try to distinguish between the notions of real and true. One can contrast real with imaginary and true with false. Some further preliminary thoughts below. As in maybe--- Peirce proposes that being comes in three modes -- the potential, the actual and the tending toward. He calls all three modes real -- as opposed to mere fictions, figments of the imagination, or as some might say nominally real or real in name only. So then what is a fiction? Fictions, in my view, are category mistakes. As when when we mistake one catergory of reality for another. For example, when we miscategorize something that is potentially real as something that is actually real. Mistaking one form of reality for another is the sort of category mistake we call a fiction. However if we examine the sort of error we can make within each category of being we come upon the notion of truth vs falshood. For example to mistake the impossible for the potential is a falsehood within the potential mode of being. Likewise to mistake what has occured for what has not occured is a falsehood within the actual/perceptual mode of being. Finally to mistake the tending toward for what is not being tended toward is a falsehood within the category of science. The distinction between real and true, that arises from the above viewpoint, becomes a matter or how both the real and the true are established. Real is established by dtermining not whether something conforms to fact or reason but whether or not it has been rightly classified as potential, actual or tending toward. True, on the other hand, is a matter that depends upon determining whether something conforms to observation and logic. Put still another way -- Being is divided into three kinds of reality and within each of these real modes of being (feeling, reactions, and thoughts) truth can be established by appeals to observation and logic. To say something is unreal is to say it has been miscatergorized. To say something is untrue is to say it has been mistakenly observed or reasoned. Maybe-- Cheers, Jim Piat And Ben -- I would still want to argue that all of these errors are at root instances of the general rule that all error is a matter of mistaking the whole for the part. Error lies not in misperception but in drawing a false conclusion. And overgeneralizing from one's personal limited experience to god's will is in my limited experience the universal error underlying all errors. In this way all we experience is both true but not the whole truth. No one is wrong -- but neither is any individual by his or herself entirely correct. By its very nature of affording more than one POV the ultimately truth of reality is a property of the whole and error of the part. Perhaps. --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Existent vs Real
I have no problem with this, Thomas, as showing the need for the distinction of the existent vs. the real, but then I wasn't really putting the need for it in question but only intending to indicate that I don't always understand how to apply it effectively. Joe Ransdell - Original Message - From: Thomas Riese [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Peirce Discussion Forum peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2006 1:52 AM Subject: [peirce-l] Existent vs Real Joe, I propose, to fix our ideas, that we try our hands at the following: (from Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism; 1906) [CP 4.546] Let us begin with the question of Universes. It is rather a question of an advisable point of view than of the truth of a doctrine. A logical universe is, no doubt, a collection of logical subjects, but not necessarily of meta-physical Subjects, or substances; for it may be composed of characters, of elementary facts, etc. See my definition in Baldwin's Dictionary. Let us first try whether we may not assume that there is but one kind of Subjects which are either existing things or else quite fictitious. Let it be asserted that there is some married woman who will commit suicide in case her husband fails in business. Surely that is a very different proposition from the assertion that some married woman will commit suicide if all married men fail in business. Yet if nothing is real but existing things, then, since in the former proposition nothing whatever is said as to what the lady will or will not do if her husband does not fail in business, and since of a given married couple this can only be false if the fact is contrary to the assertion, it follows it can only be false if the husband does fail in business and if the wife then fails to commit suicide. But the proposition only says that there is some married couple of which the wife is of that temper. Consequently, there are only two ways in which the proposition can be false, namely, first, by there not being any married couple, and secondly, by every married man failing in business while no married woman commits suicide. Consequently, all that is required to make the proposition true is that there should either be some married man who does not fail in business, or else some married woman who commits suicide. That is, the proposition amounts merely to asserting that there is a married woman who will commit suicide if every married man fails in business. The equivalence of these two propositions is the absurd result of admitting no reality but existence. If, however, we suppose that to say that a woman will suicide if her husband fails, means that every possible course of events would either be one in which the husband would not fail or one in which the wife would commit suicide, then, to make that false it will not be requisite for the husband actually to fail, but it will suffice that there are possible circumstances under which he would fail, while yet his wife would not commit suicide. Now you will observe that there is a great difference between the two following propositions: First, There is some one married woman who under all possible conditions would commit suicide or else her husband would not have failed. Second, Under all possible circumstances there is some married woman or other who would commit suicide, or else her husband would not nave failed. The former of these is what is really meant by saying that there is some married woman who would commit suicide if her husband were to fail, while the latter is what the denial of any possible circumstances except those that really take place logically leads to [our] interpreting (or virtually interpreting), the Proposition as asserting. [CP 4.547] In other places, I have given many other reasons for my firm belief that there are real possibilities. I also think, however, that, in addition to actuality and possibility, a third mode of reality must be recognized in that which, as the gipsy fortune-tellers express it, is sure to come true, or, as we may say is destined,(n1) although I do not mean to assert that this is affirmation rather than the negation of this Mode of Reality. I do not see by what confusion of thought anybody can persuade himself that he does not believe that tomorrow is destined to come. The point is that it is today really true that tomorrow the sun will rise; or that, even if it does not, the clocks or something, will go on. For if it be not real it can only be fiction: a Proposition is either True or False. But we are too apt to confound destiny with the impossibility of the opposite. I see no impossibility in the sudden stoppage of everything. In order to show the difference, I remind you that impossibility is that which, for example, describes the mode of falsity of the idea that there should be a collection of objects so multitudinous that there would not be characters enough in the universe of characters to distinguish all those things from one another. Is
