Re: Rigid Properties
At 08:36 PM 7/17/00 -0400, Christopher A. Welty wrote:
>At 9:44 -0400 4-07-2000, John F. Sowa wrote:
>[...]
>>During the Heidelberg meeting, Husserl's distinction of dependent vs.
>>independent was accepted by everyone as an important distinction, but
>>I kept insisting that it represented only the first two parts of a triad.
>>Some people suggested that the third part might be defined as "dependent
>>on more than one other", but that trivializes the third to the point
>>where it has lost the most significant aspect: mediation between the
>>others.
>
>I think perhaps you're stuck on triads.
>[...]
>Here you should read Randal Dipert's work on Artifacts (don't have
>the reference in front of me), which is about 10 years old and at the
>time was hailed as the only work on artifacts....
Randy Dipert has been a Peirce scholar for a long time, specifically a
student of Peirce's logic and "categories": Firstness, Secondness and
Thirdness. It would surprise me if his Artifacts work (which I haven't
seen, but would like to) did not use Peirce's notion of Secondness for
role-defined object classes.
John Sowa is right that being foundationally dependent (in the Husserl
sense) on more than one other existing object is a trivialization of
Thirdness; it's a necessary but not sufficient (nor especially important)
condition for Thirdness, I think. It does mean that a
dependent/independent distinction can be made at a more general level than
the Secondness/Thirdness distinction, thus pushing
Firstness/Secondness/Thirdness down from the top spotlight.
Yours truly, Fritz Lehmann
Fritz Lehmann, Cycorp, 3721 Executive Center Dr., Austin, TX 78731 USA
email: fritz@cyc.com telephone: (512) 342-4013 fax: (512) 342-4040
======================================================================