[Inquiry] Re: Sign Relations -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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SR.  Discussion Note 21

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JA = Jon Awbrey
KM = Kirsti Määttänen

Re: SR-COM 26.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-October/003083.html
In: SR-COM.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-October/thread.html#3083

JA: One of the fonder illusions of nominal thinking is that there is 
    an absolute distinction between generals and individuals, beyond 
    any that are relative to the conventions of a particular context. 
    On the contrary, the relativity of this distinction to a context 
    of interpretation, in other words, to a particular sign relation, 
    means that 3-adic relations are the minimal context in which one 
    can talk about qualities and reactions. 

KM: Yes, I've always thought so.  But how do you
    relate what you have written on idiosyncracy
    to this?

Kirsti, Peirce List,

I've forgotten the occasion on which we last spoke of idiosyncrasy,
and so I'll just have to whip up a fresh batch of ideas on the spur
of the moment.  I always think of the word "idiosyncrasy" in linkage
with a couple of old Greek themes:  (1) there is the "krater", a kind
of mixing bowl or jar, and the "someone left the cake out in the rain"
idea that chance mixtures, without the benefit of their precise recipes,
tend to fall among those irreproducible results with which our real life
is so rife, and (2) there is the obsession of the Pythagorean sectarians
with the idea that irrational numbers would puncture their surest proof
of reincarnation, to wit, the circumstance that in a wholly rational
cosmos every state of the universe, no matter how crass or peculiar
the mix of its elements, would of necessity be eternally recurrent.

But this is another one of those places where the early Peirce
appears to have been even more prescient than the later Peirce,
where he found, if not fully following through, the middle way
that guides life between the gelid crystal and the vapid chaos.

Jon Awbrey

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