[Inquiry] Re: Actual, Existent, Real -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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AER.  Discussion Note 10

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GR = Gary Richmond
JA = Jon Awbrey

Re: AER-DIS 8.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-February/002375.html
In: AER-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-February/thread.html#2368

JA: One of the consequences of 3-adic irreducibility is the impossibility
    of adequately describing phenomena that depend on 3-adic relations in
    a language that is wholly lacking or even just radically impoverished
    in terms and concepts for anything but 1-adic and 2-adic relations.
    And yet many so-called "attempts to understand Peirce's thought"
    are really just attempts to re-phrase what demands the terms
    of 3-adic relations in terms of a language that lacks them.

JA: Did Peirce himself contribute to the illusion
    that such a sleight of hand might be possible?

GR: Two quick thoughts after an all too brief meditation.

GR: 1) Perhaps one can say more about generality and continuity and evolution
    and all sorts of 3rdnesses with language than you've suggested, especially
    if one employs metaphors, similes, analogies, examples, etc. as adroitly as
    Peirce did. Few have this gift so fully developed.  And just a brilliant wit
    or a brilliant rhetorical style etc. is insufficient.  You must have something
    of philosophical importance to say or, like Nietzsche, one could finally wonder
    if he were "poet only poet".

GR: 2) That language can't express specifically complex triadic relations with
    much subtlety except poetically, both you and I, for example, in our very
    different ways and styles have turned to diagramming these relationships
    as best we can.

My brain is in its molasses mode today and I cannot say my heart
is really in this anymore, but here are some fragments that have
accumulated in my mind over time, as I have watched all sorts of
people thrash about in their exegeses of Peirce.

I came to Peirce through doors number 3 and 4 of the Collected Papers,
and so I cut my baby teeth on a diet of his early mathematical logic
along with his late offerings on logical graphs.  Many people have
the impression that Peirce developed his ideas about categories,
inquiry, relations, signs, and so on through a type of a priori
logical analysis, but this is only one leg of the mathematical
method, and it does not get very far without working through
lots and lots of concrete examples, only the most elegant
of which, if any, might show up in the finished product.
Consequently, Peirce's early papers are extraordinarily
well-balanced with respect to the trade-off between
extensional and intensional modes of explication,
even if the former is necessarily always shorted
on the amount of detail that readers and editors
will tolerate and has to be left to the implicit
exercise of the reader.  In the vagaries of my
own reading, then, when I finally got around
to the more heady discussions of categories
in the abstract, I always comprehended them
in terms of concrete examples of relations,
1-adic, 2-adic, 3-adic, there to make our
ens, and I heartily recommend this mode
of comprehension to all and sundry folk.

But consider what happens to people who come to the categories first.
We watch them flail about in the void as they vainly try to put some
semblance of substantial foundation under the aery castles that only
the rarest of intellects can inhabit without giddiness for very long.

Speaking of vertigo, I must get me to ground ...

Jon Awbrey

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