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Definition / description
Charles Sander Peirce
I need to complain. For me, Peirce's foundational categories are incomprehensible, and it looks to me like following Peirce has led many talented students into an unreconcilable swamp of confusion from which there is no exit.
"The emperor has no clothes"
But these students are convinced he does -- and so every one of them I have looked at is struggling to figure what he is talking about as regards these three major categories.
At at a fundamental level, at least for me, his ideas of "firstness, secondness, thirdness" make no sense, and are inherently undefinable. I have read a number of articles and source on Peirce, and everything I look seems to suffer from the same problem.
These authors and students also do not understand Peirce. They want to follow him, they admire him, they know he was in some sense "a genius" -- but this idea, which he proposed as foundational to everything else -- is incomprehensible, and nobody can explain it in a way that makes sense in the context of modern rationality, of science, or logic, or cognitive science. It is a bottomless and inherently unresolvable and fruitless debate -- like something semi-crazed out of Alice in Wonderland.
But they are all trying to do this anyway -- even though among them there is no clear consensus, and endless sincere discussion or battle in the attempt to establish their hero on a clear foundation from which a world-transforming philosophy can be constructed.
But this foundation is inherently and fundamentally confused to the core. It is vagueness and ambiguity personified. It creates endless uncertainty and unresolvable discussions which continue indefinitely with no hope of resolution. Why are these people doing this? I respect many of these people -- but this is -- bizarre. Is it personality worship -- a cult phenomenon -- maybe comparable in some ways to what is going on in American politics these days, where people are willing to believe impossible or incomprehensible things because a cult figure to whom they have sworn allegiance told them it was true?
This is probably unfair and insulting -- but I don't get it. I could spend three days making this case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categories_(Peirce)
In Aristotle's logic, categories are adjuncts to reasoning that are designed to resolve equivocations, ambiguities that make expressions or signs recalcitrant to being ruled by logic. Categories help the reasoner to render signs ready for the application of logical laws. An equivocation is a variation in meaning — a manifold of sign senses — such that, as Aristotle put it about names in the opening of Categories (1.1a1–12), "Things are said to be named ‘equivocally’ when, though they have a common name, the definition corresponding with the name differs for each". So Peirce's claim that three categories are sufficient amounts to an assertion that all manifolds of meaning can be unified in just three steps.
The following passage is critical to the understanding of Peirce's Categories:
I will now say a few words about what you have called Categories, but for which I prefer the designation Predicaments, and which you have explained as predicates of predicates.
That wonderful operation of hypostatic abstraction by which we seem to create entia rationis that are, nevertheless, sometimes real, furnishes us the means of turning predicates from being signs that we think or think through, into being subjects thought of. We thus think of the thought-sign itself, making it the object of another thought-sign.
Thereupon, we can repeat the operation of hypostatic abstraction, and from these second intentions derive third intentions. Does this series proceed endlessly? I think not. What then are the characters of its different members?
My thoughts on this subject are not yet harvested. I will only say that the subject concerns Logic, but that the divisions so obtained must not be confounded with the different Modes of Being: Actuality, Possibility, Destiny (or Freedom from Destiny).
On the contrary, the succession of Predicates of Predicates is different in the different Modes of Being. Meantime, it will be proper that in our system of diagrammatization we should provide for the division, whenever needed, of each of our three Universes of modes of reality into Realms for the different Predicaments. (Peirce 1906[4]).
The first thing to extract from this passage is the fact that Peirce's Categories, or "Predicaments", are predicates of predicates. Meaningful predicates have both extension and intension, so predicates of predicates get their meanings from at least two sources of information, namely, the classes of relations and the qualities of qualities to which they refer. Considerations like these tend to generate hierarchies of subject matters, extending through what is traditionally called the logic of second intentions,[5] or what is handled very roughly by second order logic in contemporary parlance, and continuing onward through higher intensions, or higher order logic and type theory.
Peirce arrived at his own system of three categories after a thoroughgoing study of his predecessors, with special reference to the categories of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. The names that he used for his own categories varied with context and occasion, but ranged from reasonably intuitive terms like quality, reaction, and representation to maximally abstract terms like firstness, secondness, and thirdness, respectively. Taken in full generality, nth-ness can be understood as referring to those properties that all n-adic relations have in common. Peirce's distinctive claim is that a type hierarchy of three levels is generative of all that we need in logic.
What is a "predicament"? It is the consequence of a predicate. What is a predicate?
Apparently these ideas originate with Aristotle,
They are also confused in Aristotle, at least to read the discussion in the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-categories/
this too, it seems to me, is "deeply confused" -- or more charitably -- deeply confusing.
its unreconcilable. it cannot be interpreted in a certain or clear way. it is an open invitation to bottomless and possibly meaningless debate.
simple bottom line: don't do this.
Wed, Apr 14, 2021
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