Re: SUO: Re: Parse Of Things Remembered
Pat,
As Karl Marx once said, "Je ne suis pas Marxiste." There have
been people harping on triadic mysticism to the point where
they turn off many people inlcuding me (and if he were alive)
Peirce as well. Let me try again to explain the point with
as little mysticism about threeness as possible.
>I only ever say it as a response to the endless repetition of a
>mantra about 'irreducible triadicity' by Peircian cultists.
>And such relabelling IS a reduction to binary relations. Whatever
>metaphysical significance y'all think it doesn't have, the fact
>remains that this is a perfectly well-defined transliteration of FOL
>into the sublanguage of FOL which uses only binary relation symbols
>(and if that isn't a reduction to dyads, I have no idea what a dyad
>is.)
Let's drop the term "reduction to dyad" along with the term
"irreducible triadicity" because they sound more high-falutin'
than they deserve to be.
To be as mundane and explicit as possible, let me take the
verb "give", which Peirce, Whitehead, and you have used as
an example, as in "John gave the book to Mary." And let
us try to rephrase that sentence as a conjunction of other
English sentences, which involve no more than two of the three
entities "John", "Mary", and "the book" in any one sentence.
Question: Is it possible to for any such conjunction of
sentences to capture the full meaning of the sentence
"John gave the book to Mary"?
For example: "John dropped the book. Mary picked it up."
This doesn't capture the transfer of ownership involved
in giving.
Example 2: "John renounced ownership of the book. Mary
claimed ownership of the book."
This captures the change of ownership, but not John's
intention of having Mary rather than anyone else assume
ownership.
Example 3: "John initiated an act of giving. The giving
had a book as object. The giving had Mary as recipient."
This example does capture the three-way relationship, but
only by creating another entity "giving", which itself has
the open slots in its definition -- formally speaking,
any representation of "giving" must have "frame-like" or
"lambda-calculus-like" representation, which contains
three inner variables or slots. Then each of the three
sentences instantiates one of those slots.
The only point that Peirce, Whitehead, and I have been trying
to make is that there are concepts in English, such as Give,
which cannot be defined without using a frame, a lambda
expression, or some such formal device that contains three
distinct slots, variables, boxes, or whatever.
Those are things that I called "mediators" in my toplevel
ontology. Furthermore, those mediators keep appearing and
reappearing whenever there is some kind of representation,
perception, intention, or context involved.
For Whitehead's discussion of the point (which has far less
mysticism than any of the other discussions you may have heard)
please go to Ch. 7 of his book _Concept of Nature_:
http://paradigm.soci.brocku.ca/~lward/Whitehead/White1_07.html
Then use the "find" option of your browser to search for
the word "cluster", which should take you to an excerpt
which starts on p. 150 and continues for several more pages.
Following is the beginning of that excerpt.
John
_______________________________________________________________
The difficulties which cluster around the relation of situation arise from the
obstinate refusal of philosophers to take
seriously the ultimate fact of multiple relations. By a multiple relation I
mean a relation which in any concrete instance of
its occurrence necessarily involves more than two relata. For example, when
John likes Thomas there are only two
relata, John and Thomas. But when John gives that book to Thomas there are three
relata, John, that book, and Thomas.
Some schools of philosophy, under the influence of the Aristotelian logic and
the Aristotelian philosophy, endeavour to
get on without admitting any relations at all except that of substance and attribute.
Namely all apparent relations are to be
resolvable into the concurrent existence of substances with contrasted attributes.
It is fairly obvious that the Leibnizian
monadology is the necessary outcome of any such philosophy. If you dislike pluralism,
there will be only one monad.
Other schools of philosophy admit relations but obstinately refuse to contemplate
relations with more than two relata. I
do not think that this limitation is based on any set purpose or theory. It
merely arises from the fact that more complicated
relations are a bother to people without adequate mathematical training, when
they are admitted into the reasoning.
I must repeat that we have nothing to do in these
lectures with the ultimate character of reality. It is quite possible that in
the true philosophy of reality there are only
individual substances with attributes, or that there are only relations with
pairs of relata. I do not believe that such is the
case; but I am not concerned to argue about it now. Our theme is Nature. So
long as we confine ourselves to the factors
posited in the sense-awareness of nature, it seems to me that there certainly
are instances of multiple relations between
these factors, and that the relation of situation for sense objects is one example
of such multiple relations.