[Inquiry] Re: Blocks On The Road Of Inquiry -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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BOTROI.  Discussion Note 1

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TG = Tom Gollier

Re: http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2004-March/001869.html
Or: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2004-March/001282.html

TG: Being brought up in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, I used to think
    "reification" was a bad word too.  But Peirce convinced me that such
    markings-off -- as shallow, nominalistic, and/or imperialistic as they
    may be to begin with -- have a "dormitive virtue".

TG: However, you're probably right with regard to the categories. 
    Peirce has already reified them, and we should be more concerned 
    with continuing his efforts to wake them up.

Tom,

You have put your finger on the very touchstone of the matter.
It is one of a short list of reasons that I have been forced
to revise my estimation of just how hard the ROC really is.
I have -- a bit reluctantly -- come to accept the brutally
hard truth that the ROC is far more adamant, recalcitrant,
refractory, just plain stubborn, and much more difficult
to dissolve than I ever imagined just a few years ago.

Now you know that I'm just about the last person in the world
who is going to throw stones at "hypostatic abstraction" (HA),
per se, at any rate, if the hypostasis is duly cast, which is,
by the way, a test that's duly to be made and a matter that's
fully settled only after the fact, after the fall, as it were.

So if abstractions, of either stripe, and reifications, in particular,
are not essentially good, bad, or ugly in and of themselves, then how
do we tell their instrumental utility from their in-essential mis-use?

Ay, there's the rub ...

Jon Awbrey

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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
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