Re: Deja Vu All Over Again • A Question About Peirce's Categories

Peircers,

Then again ...

> [Arisbe] A Question About Peirce's Categories
> Jon Awbrey jawbrey at att.net
> Wed Mar 14 15:12:14 CDT 2012
> 
> On the third hand ...
> 
> | We may say that the bulk of what is actually done consists of Secondness — or better, Secondness
> | is the predominant character of what ''has been'' done.  The immediate present, could we seize it,
> | would have no character but its Firstness.  Not that I mean to say that immediate consciousness (a
> | pure fiction, by the way), would be Firstness, but that the ''quality'' of what we are immediately
> | conscious of, which is no fiction, is Firstness.
> |
> | But we constantly predict what is to be.  Now what is to be, according to our conception of it, can
> | never become wholly past.  In general, we may say that ''meanings'' are inexhaustible.  We are too apt
> | to think that what one ''means'' to do and the ''meaning'' of a word are quite unrelated meanings of the
> | word “meaning”, or that they are only connected by both referring to some actual operation of the mind.
> | Professor Royce especially in his great work ''The World and the Individual'' has done much to break up
> | this mistake.
> |
> | In truth the only difference is that when a person ''means'' to do anything he is in some state
> | in consequence of which the brute reactions between things will be moulded [in] to conformity to
> | the form to which the man's mind is itself moulded, while the meaning of a word really lies in the
> | way in which it might, in a proper position in a proposition believed, tend to mould the conduct of
> | a person into conformity to that to which it is itself moulded.
> |
> | Not only will meaning always, more or less, in the long run, mould reactions to itself,
> | but it is only in doing so that its own being consists.  For this reason I call this
> | element of the phenomenon or object of thought the element of Thirdness.  It is that
> | which is what it is by virtue of imparting a quality to reactions in the future.
> |
> | Peirce, CP 1.343

I think the lesson here is this:

I have seen reasonable people -- well, moderately reasonable people --
argue for their pet correspondences between any given couple of 3-sets
until the cows come home.  That is a symptom of the very real possibility
that there is no necessary correspondence that rules over every application
but that different associations may have their uses in different situations.

Given that possibility, which appears very likely at this point in the game,
the question we need to ask is -- What are the conditions of its possibility?

Regards,

Jon

-- 

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