Before the intermission, I argued that Peirce's Law/pragmatism leads to a realism. I'd like to cap that argument with the mother of all reals: the categories. I hope this won’t take as long as the last post did.
Readers of Peirce are familiar with the three categories – Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. This here is not an exposition of those, but rather a demonstration that the signs we use to refer to them imply that they are real. Peirce argues that they are. It will involve a little of his theory of signs, so bear with me.
Signs involve an object, the sign, and an interpretant. The object can’t be the sign itself; it has to be something else, something other than the sign. Now for interpreting the sign, other signs are referred to. We have to use words to talk about something, and we do the same with the categories. But that has to do with the interpretant. The object is simply the thing pointed at: there's just brute reaction here, no intellectifying.
You: What are you talking about?
Tarzan (pointing): Unh!
The categories are genuine signs. That means they definitely refer to something apart from the signs. By the general structure of the signs, it follows that the categories must be real objects and not nonsense, as he determined the Liar Paradox to be. (For those who care, the Liar is nonsense because it refers exclusively to itself. But as pointed out, a sign cannot refer to itself, so it must be nonsense.[1]) The fact that it is the object of the sign means that it is other.
We further suppose that the object caused the sign, and not the other way around. Thus the sign points toward its cause, meaning it tacitly assumes a causal relation. And if that’s the case, and such a relation implies a cause, it follows that the categories must be real.
Now we can try it another way: by tracing back the logical chain. Start wherever you please: pick a thought, any thought. Call it Q. That idea must have been triggered by something else – an idea, no doubt – so let it be a Q to the P that set it off. Assuming that there is a relation, Peirce’s Law determines that it must have been stimulated by the idea P. You check out the effects of that concept in order to know that concept, meaning you’re killing two birds with one stone. That idea in turn was triggered by another one, leading to the same setup as before. This goes on, ad infinitum.
If we start generalizing, as we sure can with ideas, ultimately we’ll arrive at the simplest ones possible. Peirce will argue that these are the irreducible Big Three: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. This is evidently arrived at by way of the pragmatic maxim/Peirce’s Law.
If the categories are real, everything else has to be too. So this portion of the conjecture should be the clincher. So ballsy conjecture #5 is complete.
Of course I'd like to think all this is correct. But knowing myself, I can't be 100% sure. So I'm airing it out to see what needs fixing. If it doesn't need fixing, maybe it'll be useful to someone.
Be fair. Use, and cite this! Plagiarize me, and I'll have yer damn scalp quicker'n you can say "Ward Churchill!"
[1] This he concludes as early as 1865 (see W1,174), and he reaffirms it in 1903 (see EP2:166–9).
No comments:
Post a Comment