Thanks, Frederik. I think that to properly call a view Platonist it must reject the existence of particulars in favour of universals. Russell fits this description because fairly early in his (long) career he explicitly rejected particulars, and argued that instances were combinations of "compossible" universals (whence his structuralism, and perhaps a "contraction to individuals"). One can be a Platonist about some domains but not others. For example there are Platonists about numbers and other parts of mathematics (Gödel), and there are the opposite about numbers (Mill and Phillip Kitcher, for example), but not necessarily about scientific laws. Hartrey Field famously rejected numbers altogether, at least with respect to the world of science. His motivation was an extreme nominalism.
Peirce was not a Platonist in the sense above, with his distinction between existing and being real. I suppose (no reason to think otherwise so far) that this extends to signs. But I am not quite sure how he slices it to get a position that is more extreme than (weaker than?) Duns Scotus, which is pretty weak, but still allows universals that are not instantiated. Or perhaps I am missing what he means by 'extreme' here. I parted company with my coauthors of All Things Must Go over the existence of structures that don't interact, for of which in principle we could have no knowledge. This seemed to me to violate a Peircean principle that they started the book with, which is basically the pragmatic principle. In any case, we agree on openness of universals. Regards, John From: Frederik Stjernfelt [mailto:stj...@hum.ku.dk] Sent: March 17, 2015 8:22 AM To: <biosemiot...@lists.ut.ee> Cc: Jon Awbrey; Peirce Discussion Forum (PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu) Subject: [biosemiotics:8114] Re: Pragmatism About Theoretical Entities Dear John, lists, It may not be extreme, but I think that most current realist metaphysicians (ones who accept universals as real, like myself and David Armstrong, for example) take a line closer to the Duns Scotus one. The more extreme view seems to most to be difficult to distinguish from Platonism (e.g., my otherwise hero Bertrand Russell, who came to reject particulars entirely). This isn't to say that universals are not open-ended at any time, and that something can come to fall under a universal. I think the crux about P's realism is exactly this: that universals are "open-ended at any time". He does not himself identify this with Platonism. But what is Platonism exactly, other than a pejorative which many positions use to profile themselves against? However, Frederik, there are two slippery terms in your answer that I would like more elucidation on, "contracted in" and "comprise". My understanding of Armstrong, for example, does not have universals comprised of instances, but their reality does depend on their instantiation. Myself, I take a view slightly weaker than Armstrong in one sense, but stronger in another, and think that universals are made necessary only by logic (including 2nd order logic) or instantiation, in which case they are identical to natural kinds. I would not use the word "comprise" to describe this. Funnily, you address the same terms in my short summary as did Jon Awbrey. "Contracted" is just referring to Peirce - to his late revision of his diamond example from "How to make our ideas clear": "Even Duns Scotus is too nominalistic when he says that universals are contracted to the mode of individuality in singulars, meaning, as he does, by singulars, ordinary existing things. The pragmaticist cannot admit that." (1905, 8.208) Interestingly, a bit later in the same paper he addresses your issue about things, here understood as absolute individuals which he takes not to exist: "For I had long before declared that absolute individuals were entia rationis, and not realities." As to "comprise", I shall not insist on that term, the important idea is just that P takes universals to be continua and so to exceed any possible amount of individual realizations. Best F
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