First of all, I want to congratulate you and all of your efforts. I've been working through these posts and your YouTube videos. I have had a longstanding interest in Peirce; even though his writing is often quite difficult to understand — "flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! " as his friend William James said — nonetheless I frequently find myself startled by the depth and power of his insights.
I wish I knew of a book that I could recommend to others as a cogent introduction to his ideas, but I am unaware of one. My own understanding, as limited as it is, has come from undisciplined wandering about in his primary writings, with a little help from scholars.
Your ability to communicate these ideas is remarkable, and I hope you are considering putting your writings together into a popularly accessible book. I think the world could very much profit.
If I had one suggestion, it might be to more frequently point out things about which you are unsure, or where Peirce has been ambiguous. The allure of a complete system like his architectonic is seductive, but fallibilism, to which you subscribe, should I think be invoked more often to enhance your credibility. But there is power in tracing a bright through-line amidst his welter of ideas and not get lost in critiques and comparisons with other thinkers along the way, and you have done an astonishingly good job of this.
I wrote about related ideas in my blog https://anordinarydoctor.substack.com in the posts "The Immaterial World" which perhaps you would be interested to see. I will go back to it and think about how I might recast it using some of your ideas here.
Thank you for your kind words! I have seriously thought about writing a book. But for now that is just and idea. Before that book I have many posts to write.
I consider myself a fallibilist and these post are are a place for me to express ideas that are not fully developed. But, at same time, I believe in the semiotic logic discovered by Vinicius Romanini to be true, and in that sense the logic has a certain structure and completeness to it.
Furthermore, I believe that we must go beyond Peirce. Peirce was never completely satisfied with his work, and therefore we can't just endlessly read his writings and speculate what Peirce meant by this or that. The truth that Peirce sought is not fully contained in his writings. We must look beyond the manuscripts.
For me the main thing is the vision Peirce had. What was the teleological pull that was pulling him? What was the thing he was aiming for? I try to tune to that. There is a living force that guided Peirce's work and thought, and it is still there, living in our midst. That is the thing that fascinates me.
Yes, and one of the implications of his thinking is that in some sense, truth is objective. I can see no reason why this wouldn't extend to ethics and esthetics as well as logic. This is, by today's standard, quite a radical idea. How do we go about figuring out what is admirable in itself? How might we guide AI to understand this, in order to avoid catastrophe? So many fascinating, and profoundly important, questions.
There are so many aspects to what you have written that I love. .... 'Place'. I often talk about placement. 'Continuity of irritations'. An excellent choice of words! ........ But "recognizing the particular meaning of some concrete sign"; This is where I struggle with humanity's skewed understanding due to nominalism. Particular to whom? Perhaps this is where we need to include an injection of horizon that compliments the verticalness. As I always say, 'There is no 'I' without the 'Not I'. ;-)
I agree with your strict anti-nominalist stace. The word "particular" is there to - hopefully - communicate the idea, that this is a recognition of something "here and now" at one distinct moment. What some particular thing, here and now, means. Of course metaphysically or ontologically that particular thing fundamentally is part of the continuum of reality, but attention abstracts something to be the focus of our perception.
First of all, I want to congratulate you and all of your efforts. I've been working through these posts and your YouTube videos. I have had a longstanding interest in Peirce; even though his writing is often quite difficult to understand — "flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! " as his friend William James said — nonetheless I frequently find myself startled by the depth and power of his insights.
I wish I knew of a book that I could recommend to others as a cogent introduction to his ideas, but I am unaware of one. My own understanding, as limited as it is, has come from undisciplined wandering about in his primary writings, with a little help from scholars.
Your ability to communicate these ideas is remarkable, and I hope you are considering putting your writings together into a popularly accessible book. I think the world could very much profit.
If I had one suggestion, it might be to more frequently point out things about which you are unsure, or where Peirce has been ambiguous. The allure of a complete system like his architectonic is seductive, but fallibilism, to which you subscribe, should I think be invoked more often to enhance your credibility. But there is power in tracing a bright through-line amidst his welter of ideas and not get lost in critiques and comparisons with other thinkers along the way, and you have done an astonishingly good job of this.
I wrote about related ideas in my blog https://anordinarydoctor.substack.com in the posts "The Immaterial World" which perhaps you would be interested to see. I will go back to it and think about how I might recast it using some of your ideas here.
Thank you for your kind words! I have seriously thought about writing a book. But for now that is just and idea. Before that book I have many posts to write.
I consider myself a fallibilist and these post are are a place for me to express ideas that are not fully developed. But, at same time, I believe in the semiotic logic discovered by Vinicius Romanini to be true, and in that sense the logic has a certain structure and completeness to it.
Furthermore, I believe that we must go beyond Peirce. Peirce was never completely satisfied with his work, and therefore we can't just endlessly read his writings and speculate what Peirce meant by this or that. The truth that Peirce sought is not fully contained in his writings. We must look beyond the manuscripts.
For me the main thing is the vision Peirce had. What was the teleological pull that was pulling him? What was the thing he was aiming for? I try to tune to that. There is a living force that guided Peirce's work and thought, and it is still there, living in our midst. That is the thing that fascinates me.
Yes, and one of the implications of his thinking is that in some sense, truth is objective. I can see no reason why this wouldn't extend to ethics and esthetics as well as logic. This is, by today's standard, quite a radical idea. How do we go about figuring out what is admirable in itself? How might we guide AI to understand this, in order to avoid catastrophe? So many fascinating, and profoundly important, questions.
There are so many aspects to what you have written that I love. .... 'Place'. I often talk about placement. 'Continuity of irritations'. An excellent choice of words! ........ But "recognizing the particular meaning of some concrete sign"; This is where I struggle with humanity's skewed understanding due to nominalism. Particular to whom? Perhaps this is where we need to include an injection of horizon that compliments the verticalness. As I always say, 'There is no 'I' without the 'Not I'. ;-)
I agree with your strict anti-nominalist stace. The word "particular" is there to - hopefully - communicate the idea, that this is a recognition of something "here and now" at one distinct moment. What some particular thing, here and now, means. Of course metaphysically or ontologically that particular thing fundamentally is part of the continuum of reality, but attention abstracts something to be the focus of our perception.