Re: SUO: Re: Membrance Of Things Peirced
>
> > He seems to have thought that the associations between relations
> > and their instances, which he was encoding as arcs in his graphs,
> > were like valency in chemistry, so that relations (including that
> > of identity) had a kind of intrinsic associated 'atomic number',
> > from which it follows that the relation of two things being
> > identical has to be different from that of three things being
> > identical. This particular analogy was similar in some ways
> > to Kepler's idea that the planetary distances from the sun
> > arose from packing the regular solids into nesting spheres:
> > neat, ingenious, apparently successful; but wrong.
>
>Do you get all your history from Classic Comics, or something?
>Yeah, this gullible old dodder Peirce, who worked out a version
>of non-standard analysis that compares favorably in its rigor
>and its scope with those devised thirty years later, was so
>easily suckered by this or that half-baked analogy. Really!
Notice I said 'seems to have thought'. The above is admittedly
something of a guess, but it is one that I adduced from reading
Peirce's own writings on the topic. I have a great deal of respect
for Peirce, but unlike some folk, I do not worship him, and I do not
think that to say he made a few mistakes is somehow to commit
blasphemy. He was very prescient, very clever, and wrote (though
didnt publish) a great deal of interesting stuff. He also wrote some
nonsense.
I will refrain from taking the particular debate any further on the SUO list.
Pat Hayes
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