PEIRCE-L Digest for Sunday, December 08, 2002.
[NOTE: This record of what has been posted to PEIRCE-L
has been nodified by omission of redundant quotations in
the messages. both for legibility and to save space.
-- Joseph Ransdell, PEIRCE-L manager/owner]
1. Re: New ideas about a Wold War III ( was: Re- posted
message :Peirce triplets)
2. online digests
3. Re: online digests
4. Re: Relevance of Peircean Semiotic to Computational Intelligence Augmentation
5. Re: Identity & Teridentity
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Subject: Re: New ideas about a Wold War III ( was: Re- posted
message :Peirce triplets)
From: Patrick Coppock <
Alexandre, you wrote:
* Can deflation trigger a new Word War III ?
* Can Peircean grammar explain deflation ?
* If not, can we understand deflation in the context of firstness, secondness and thirdness ?
And , in the second time I assign:
* Firstness => concupiscence of the goods;
* Secondness => the human race submitted inexorably to earthly attachments and worldly desires;
* Thirdness => deflation.
*At least and in an animist way, just for the sake of argumentation, I attribute intelligence to thirdness and name it The Devil.
Now, I will really need help from others in the list to figure out with ones are the categories , that doesn't fit well with Peirce's ideas, so, we could change then, and become able to apply the Peircean's philosophic tools to the questions.
It occurred to me on re-reading your message that maybe you might have been trying to start up your project here a bit at the "wrong end" of things...
You might perhaps like to have a look (if you haven't already, that is) at Peirce's article "Evolutionary Love", the online version of which you can find a link to here:
http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/bycsp.htm
There Peirce notes, amongst other things:
" The nineteenth century is now fast sinking into the grave, and we all begin to review its doings and to think what character it is destined to bear as compared with other centuries in the minds of future historians. It will be called, I guess, the Economical Century; for political economy has more direct relations with all the branches of its activity than has any other science. Well, political economy has its formula of redemption, too. It is this: Intelligence in the service of greed ensures the justest prices, the fairest contracts, the most enlightened conduct of all the dealings between men, and leads to the summum bonum, food in plenty and perfect comfort. Food for whom? Why, for the greedy master of intelligence. I do not mean to say that this is one of the legitimate conclusions of political economy, the scientific character of which I fully acknowledge. But the study of doctrines, themselves true, will often temporarily encourage generalizations extremely false, as the study of physics has encouraged necessitarianism. What I say, then, is that the great attention paid to economical questions during our century has induced an exaggeration of the beneficial effects of greed and of the unfortunate results of sentiment, until there has resulted a philosophy which comes unwittingly to this, that greed is the great agent in the elevation of the human race and in the evolution of the universe."
He goes on to write later in the same piece that:
" Here, then, is the issue. The gospel of Christ says that progress comes from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his neighbors. On the other side, the conviction of the nineteenth century is that progress takes place by virtue of every individual's striving for himself with all his might and trampling his neighbor under foot whenever he gets a chance to do so. This may accurately be called the Gospel of Greed.
Much is to be said on both sides. I have not concealed, I could not conceal, my own passionate predilection. Such a confession will probably shock my scientific brethren. Yet the strong feeling is in itself, I think, an argument of some weight in favor of the agapastic theory of evolution -- so far as it may be presumed to bespeak the normal judgment of the Sensible Heart. Certainly, if it were possible to believe in agapasm without believing it warmly, that fact would be an argument against the truth of the doctrine. At any rate, since the warmth of feeling exists, it should on every account be candidly confessed; especially since it creates a liability to one-sidedness on my part against which it behooves my readers and me to be severally on our guard. "
Having thus introduced the basic notion of an "agapastic" understanding of evolution, he later goes on to introduce two others: anacastic and tychastic evolution:
" Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. We may term them tychastic evolution, or tychasm, anancastic evolution, or anancasm, and agapastic evolution, or agapasm. The doctrines which represent these as severally of principal importance we may term tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism. On the other hand the mere propositions that absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love are severally operative in the cosmos may receive the names of tychism, anancism, and agapism."
These three categories, or "modes of evolution", standing for "absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love" as principles of an evolutionary "developmental teleology" can be quite easily seen as directly related to Peirce's ontological/ phenomenological categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness.
A useful book in this connection is Carl Hausman's "Charles S. Peirce's evolutionary Philosophy"
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521597366/104-0258059-1020774?vi=glance
I have often found that trying to understand Peirce's evolutionary philosophy has provided a useful gateway to a better understanding of his categories and general sign theory.
All best for now
Patrick
--
Patrick J. Coppock
Researcher: Theory and Philosophy of Language
Department of Social, Cognitive and Quantitative Sciences
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
Reggio Emilia
Italy
email: coppock.patrick[…]unimo.it
www: http://coppock-violi.com/work/
Faculty: http://www.cei.unimo.it---
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Subject: online digests
From: Jon Awbrey <