- Peirce on existence and reality
- Charles Sanders Peirce and John Duns Scotus
- Signs, Perception and Consciousness
- Peirce on Mind and Matter
- Soren Brier: Science and Religion by Peirce
- Peirce on Heat Death
Peirce on existence and reality
In Cornelis de Waal, Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed, it was written that Peirce has distinguished between real and existing. On biosemiotics list, Gary Richmond quoted Peirce:
“[. . .] I call your attention to the fact that reality and existence are two different things.”
“Existence [. . .] is a special mode of reality, which, whatever other characteristics it possesses, has that of being absolutely determinate. Reality, in its turn, is a special mode of being, the characteristic of which is that things that are real are whatever they really are, independently of any assertion about them. If Man is the measure of things, as Protagoras said, then there is no complete reality; but being there certainly is, even then. ” CP 6.349
“[. . . ] It will not be necessary to go into that question, which is one of great delicacy. It will be sufficient to point out certain respects in which reality and existence differ. Let us suppose two seeds to be exactly alike. I do not say that two seeds ever are so; but we are now merely considering the meanings of two words, and, therefore, we are free to imagine any state of things we can. We will suppose, then, that not merely to our senses, but to any conceivable senses, those seeds are precisely alike, except that they are in different places. But now we will suppose that I am really resolved to plant those two seeds in such different soil, and to treat them so differently, that they will grow into plants whose flowers will have different colors. They really will be different, whatever anybody may say or think. I have made certain dispositions, so that I myself could not now have it otherwise. Their future difference is then a reality, already. For the time has already passed at which anybody’s dictum could make the fact otherwise. Yet I have not decided what the colors of the flowers of each are to be; for one of the two seeds will be taken at random, and placed in one soil and the other in another. Now, when it comes to the existence of those flowers, the colors will be absolutely what they will be. There can be no uncertainty or ambiguity about existence. The reality, however, of my determination of the colors is not altogether certain.” CP 6.349
Charles Sanders Peirce and John Duns Scotus
Ronald Jeffrey Grace, The Realism of John Duns Scotus in the Philosophy of Charles Peirce, 2000
A conclusion from that paper:
“In light of this, it seems appropriate to ask the question “In what sense can Peirce be identified as someone influenced by the philosophy of Scotus?” It certainly doesn’t seem possible to maintain that Peirce developed Scotus’ philosophy from its conclusions. It’s probably more accurate to say that he adopted a position that Scotus developed, the formal distinction, and then built something new from there. He is therefore “Scotistic” in the sense that he adopted a Scotistic framework but managed to work out a philosophy that might have made Scotus a bit uncomfortable.
It’s really hard to say what Scotus would think of Peirce’s work, however, for Peirce himself points out that he is working with tools that simply weren’t available to Scotus, new developments in logic being one. When all is said and done, however, I’m sure Scotus might have been fascinated by such a supreme elucidation of the possible as we find in Charles Sanders Peirce.”
Signs, Perception and Consciousness
A quote from Frederik Stjernfelt, Natural Propositions: The Actuality of Peirce’s Doctrine of Dicisigns
p. 4 “Dicisigns, like other signs, are conceived of as independent of the particular mental, psychological or other apparatus supporting them. Thus, Peirce’s position shares a fundamental anti-psychologism with Frege and Husserl. But unlike them, his is an anti-psychologism without the linguistic turn. It is not (only) to language that we should turn in order to find logic and cognitive structure not psychologistically – it is to signs and as vehicles for thoughts in general. Thus, signs are not analyzed as derivatives of more primary perceptions, like the narrow, phenomenological notion of signs found e.g. in Husserl and much philosophy of mind. Rather, many signs are indeed simpler that perceptions, as evidenced particularly by the biosemiotic signs use in simple animals without full perceptual field, sensory integration, central nervous systems, etc. Perception and consciousness are rather to be seen as evolutionary later, more complicated phenomena, probably evolved so as to scaffold and enhance cognitive semiotic processes already functioning.”
p. 107 “If no universals refer to real structure, then all universals are but labels invented by the human mind. If propositions do not exist in reality they, as well, must be creations of the human mind. … The implication is that on the one hand, we get an emaciated natural world consisting of isolated particulars only, bereft of any generality. On the other hand, in the very same universe, one particular, strange kind of object is supposed to stand out – the mind – which alone has the ability to create general objects and syntheses, namely those labels assumed identical from one use to the next, the names of the nominalists. So ontological stinginess as to the natural world automatically seems to imply the abnormal and extreme ontological overpopulation of the human psyche – otherwise assumed to form part of the very same natural world. Philosophers may be satisfied with bracketing that psyche, leaving the problem to psychologists – but that only leaves the road open for exactly psychologism, the tendency to locate ontological and logical structure in the mind of the beholder and take psychology to be the science studying them. So nominalism and psychologism often, if not always, go together.”
Peirce on Mind and Matter
Peirce’s quote that I have found in Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake:
“Matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit to the point where the breaking up of this habits is very difficult.”
Below is another quote given by Søren Brier on the biosemiotics list:
“But what is to be said of the property of feeling? If consciousness belongs to all protoplasm, by what mechanical constitution is this to be accounted for? The slime is nothing but a chemical compound. There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements; and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm. No doubt, then, it would feel. To hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra-puerile. By what element of the molecular arrangement, then, would that feeling be caused? This question cannot be evaded or pooh poohed. Protoplasm certainly does feel; and unless we are to accept a weak dualism, the property must be shown to arise from some peculiarity of the mechanical system. Yet the attempt to deduce it from the three laws of mechanics, applied to never so ingenious a mechanical contrivance, would obviously be futile. It can never be explained, unless we admit that physical events are but degraded or undeveloped forms of psychical events.” (CP 6. 264)
Søren Brier: Science and Religion by Peirce
Two messages from Søren Brier to peirce-l (De Waal seminar)
God is real but does not exist: so the best way to worship him is through the religion of science
https://list.iupui.edu/sympa/arc/peirce-l/2014-05/msg00145.html
Why a concept of the divine supplements the idea and functioning of science
https://list.iupui.edu/sympa/arc/peirce-l/2014-05/msg00208.html
Peirce on Heat Death
From Helge Kragh, Entropic Creation: Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology, 2008
p. 187-188 “In 1891 he [Peirce] described his hypothesis as follows:
‘The state of things in the infinite past is chaos … the nothingness of which consists in the total absence of regularity. The state of things in the infinite future is death, the nothingness of which consists in the complete triumph of law and absence of all spontaneity. Between these, we have on our side a state of things in which there is some absolute spontaneity counter to all law, and some degree of conformity to law, …’
This picture, starting from chaos and ending in an ordered and symmetrical system, turns the ordinary interpretation of the second law on its head. Some years earlier, in a 1884 lecture on ‘Design and Chance’, he declared that the heat death – in which ‘there shall be no force but heat and the temperature everywhere the same’ – was unavoidable. Confusingly, the next year he rejected the global heat death scenario, retracting to a position similar to that of many other evolutionary progressivists of the Victorian era: ‘But, on the other hand, we may take it as certain that other intellectual races exist on other planets, – if not of our solar system, then of others; and also that innumerable new intellectual races have yet to be developed; so that on the whole, it may be regarded as most certain that intellectual life in the universe will never finally cease.’ Perhaps he thought, such as he said in his ‘Design and Chance’, that the living universe would be saved by what he called ‘chance’, an influence he considered to be opposite to dissipative forces, of what some later authors referred to as ‘entropy’.”
08.09.2018. See also: Andrew Reynolds, Peirce’s Cosmology and the Laws of Thermodynamics, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Summer, 1996), pp. 403-423