RE: ONT Re: De In Esse Predication
See below.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawbrey@att.net]
Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2003 3:42 PM
To: Tom Johnston
Cc: Ontology; SemioCom; Inquiry
Subject: Re: ONT Re: De In Esse Predication
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Tom,
This started out as an attempt to track down a 30 year old memory,
having to do with the phrase "predication (de?) inesse", which
I thought I saw first in Peirce, supposed that he got from
Leibniz (who I also read a lot of in those days), and had
a "clear and distinct" idea (the worst kind) that it was
an "intensional" account of predication. I used to have
access to the microfilm manuscripts of Peirce's nachlass
at that time, and if it's there I probably won't get back
to it. From what I have uncovered this time around, I seem
to be correct about the significance that Leibniz attached to
the phrase -- will have to check again -- but all I find so far
in the CP is 'conditio/consequentia simplex de inesse' that Peirce
say he got from Ockham and Petrus Hispanus. I will probably have to
go about the mindless data collection for a while longer before I try
to draw a conclusion, but in the meantime I have become more intrigued
with the connection to Peirce's theory of information as the third quid
between extension and intension, and relative to states of which the
entire spectrum of modalities is refracted before our minds' eyes.
TJ: I like that last sentence, and look forward to finding out what it
means.
In the spirit of an even wilder guess, I think that he would say that there
is a difference between what we are destined to believe about, for example,
the objective referent, if any, of the phrase "physical causality" at the
"end of inquiry" (EOI) and what we are likely to believe in that respect
at the present time -- time being relative, too, off course -- and that
it may form a useful analytic ideal or a "hypostatic independentity",
to coin a phrase, to think of this "physical_causality_EOI" as being
there all along, or not being there all along, waiting for us to
discover the quantum of truth in the sign "physical causality".
Just my guess ...
TJ: Perhaps I should know better than to ask this, but what the heck: (a)
What marks the EOI? No more disagreements among members of the relevant
community of inquiry (physicists, biologists, etc)? (b) Assuming we do reach
an EOI in some subject area, what accounts for it? Why have we stopped
disagreeing? Is it that, guided by the pragmatic principle, we have finally
arrived at a set of statements that accurately represent/describe things as
they really are?
Jon Awbrey
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