[Inquiry] Re: Utter Indetermination -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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UI.  Discussion Note 8

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JA = Jon Awbrey
KM = Kirsti Määttänen

Re: UI-DIS 6.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-October/003125.html
In: UI-DIS.    http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-October/thread.html#3092

Kirsti, Peirce List,

Comments interspersed ...

JA: You seem to have assumed that determination falls under the category
    of secondness, that is, the category of 2-adic relations.  Perhaps
    this arises from taking determination only in its causal sense --
    I can but guess about that -- but I see no justification in
    Peirce's writing for limiting his sense of determination
    to a purely 2-adic cause-effect relationship

KM: No, I was not taking determination in its causal sense.  I was
    considering how generality, vagueness, and determination are
    related in terms of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness,
    taking Thirdness as Mediation (in a triad).  -- Which
    was prompted by your claim:

JA: Peirce is sometimes precise in his technical distinction between
    general and vague, and sometimes not -- as a general rule I think
    that we can regard "indeterminate" as the most general concept of
    the three, regarding "general" as "to be determined in extension"
    and "vague" as "to be determined in comprehension".

KM: So, I too do not see any justification for
    limiting determination to purely 2-adic
    cause-effect relationships.

JA: Okay, that's a start.  I should say that I did not see any reason for
    lining up vagueness, determination, generality with the categories in
    the way that you did here:

KM: To my mind the adequate way to approach the three concepts
    is take the categories as a methodical starting point,
    and ask:  Do these three form a triad?  If so, how?

KM: To me the answer seems clear:

    Vagueness -- Firstness,

    Determination -- Secondness, and

    Generality -- Thirdness.

KM: So the relation of vagueness and determination is (or becomes) mediated
    by generality.  It is only within the triad involved in the second aspect,
    that of determination, that your distinction "extensively undetermined",
    "intensively undetermined" seems to me to apply as you claim. --
    The general methodic rule being:  every angle of a triad involves
    a triad -- which then involves a triad and so forth.  And what is
    involved may be evolved, some time.  What needs to be evolved
    depends on the questions posed.

JA: Generally speaking, I do not see the use of the categories to be a method
    for finding a unique one-to-one correspondence between every set of three
    things that Peirce happens to mention, and the philosophical project that
    tries to do just that is not implied by Peirce's method, so I do not take
    it as automatic or given that there always has to be such correspondences.
    Life is just not that simple.

KM: Where in earth do you get this interpretation of my claiming the 
    categories to be a method of finding a unique one-to-one(etc)???
    Can't help thinking it must be a projection, in the psychoanalytic
    sense.  What you end up doing with -- well -- anything, is mapping
    something to something into one-to-one correspondence.

Well, yes, like my analyst always told me, projection,
in any sense of the word, is a perfectly respectable
source of hypotheses about what another person is
thinking, especially when lacking anything better.
One projects from one's experience with one's own
past or present thinking process or else from one's
experience of some third party's past communications
about what they were thinking in a similar situation.
All subject to test, of course, and confirmation or
infirmation, as to whether one's projectiles have
struck any targets in reality.

Since you do not give me any reasons for the particular
correspondence you outline, or cite any arguments from
Peirce on its behalf, I am reduced to guessing on the
basis of things that I've heard people say before.

KM: What you below say "on these issues" betrays you have a (too) full 
    confidence on having all the understanding there ever needs to be.
    So you must have risen well above the level Peirce ever attained. --
    Good luck in keeping up there!

Sorry if I seem impatient, but the topic of detemination is one that we
discussed at length 4 years ago -- the Peirce List archive is opaque to
search engines, but there are some bits of it at the Arisbe-Dev archive:

E.g.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/arisbe/2001-May/thread.html#489

That is not to say that consensus was reached, not by a long projection,
of course, and I see that it may be possible to subtilize ad infinitum,
but I did sum up my last best hope of what I can understand of it all
in what I wrote the first time on this thread.

Speaking of this current thread, I remember starting it when I saw
some new hope of clarifying some of the things that Peirce said at
the end of the KS/NE draft, about a spectrom of indeterminations,
as I understood it.  I do not know if assigning the concepts of
determination, general terms, and vague terms to categories has
any consequences for this question, but I tend to doubt it.

If nothing else, I think my somewhat incidental observation that
"Peirce is sometimes precise in his technical distinction between
general and vague, and sometimes not --" is now amply demonstated
by the course our own discussion.  Indeed, how could he be precise
in his technical distinction if they form a Many instead of a One?

I will collect my thoughts, and try to return to the original impetus:

UI.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-October/thread.html#3088

Jon Awbrey

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