SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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Jim,
I have been assiduous and conscientious about staying on the topic
of Matthew's LIS proposal during the discussion and voting period,
extending for over a month now, and I dare say far moreso on the
average that any other participant in this working group, with
the exception of Matthew himself.
The particular message that you cite here was sent in response
to a message that Mike Pool sent off-list to MW and me, that
came with the SUO prefix at the front of the subject line,
and was not otherwise marked as being off-list. I have
already mentioned to Mike Pool on a previous occasion,
when a series of off-list messages from Pierre Grenon
led to a minor debacle, how much confusion off-list
messages tend to cause in a forum like this, and
I have advised you on several occasions that
I could consider no message from the Chair
of this Official Public Working Group to
be treated as a purely private matter.
You have seized on 1 message out of 99 whose relevance to
the LIS issues that MW and I were discussing may not have
been immediately clear, especially in advance of my later
forwarding of MP's message to the List.
If you have a question about the relevance of any contribution,
aside from the occasional and I daresay increasingly rare bits
of amenities that are customarily exchanged in normal society,
then please be so considerate as to raise this question on the
List, as I will be increasingly selective in responding to any
off-list communications from members of this group, and I will,
at my discretion, forward any such message to the main SUO list,
under the topical heading of an administrative matter.
Thanks In Future,
Jon Awbrey
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jim.s3@juno.com wrote:
>
> Jon,
>
> People are complaining again about the quantity of your posting.
> And I'd think you would agree many are not part of the work efforts of
> this group. I know others also post such things, but if their quanity
> was similar to yours, I'd email them also. Could you either keep within
> appropriate scope or limit your off-topic postings to one per day. And
> if someone reponds to an off-topic posting, that does not grant freedom
> to continue the thread. Thank you in advance for cooperating with this
> request.
>
> Jim
>
> On Sat, 04 Oct 2003 10:48:39 -0400 Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@att.net> writes:
> >
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> >
> > LIS. Discussion Note 95
> >
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> >
> > | I come now to another point. Most systems of philosophy
> > | maintain certain facts or principles as ultimate. In truth,
> > | any fact is in one sense ultimate -- that is to say, in its
> > | isolated aggressive stubbornness and individual reality. What
> > | Scotus calls the haecceities of things, the hereness and nowness
> > | of them, are indeed ultimate. Why this which is here is such as
> > | it is; how, for instance, if it happens to be a grain of sand, it
> > | came to be so small and so hard, we can ask; we can also ask how it
> > | got carried here; but the explanation in this case merely carries us
> > | back to the fact that it was once in some other place, where similar
> > | things might naturally be expected to be. Why IT, independently of
> > | its general characters, comes to have any definite place in the world,
> > | is not a question to be asked; it is simply an ultimate fact. There
> > | is also another class of facts of which it is not reasonable to expect an
> > | explanation, namely, facts of indeterminacy or variety. Why one definite
> > | kind of event is frequent and another rare, is a question to be asked, but
> > | a reason for the general fact that of events some kind are common and some
> > | rare, it would be unfair to demand. If all births took place on a given
> > | day of the week, or if there were always more on Sundays than on Mondays,
> > | that would be a fact to be accounted for, but that they happen in about
> > | equal proportions on all the days requires no particular explanation.
> > | If we were to find that all the grains of sand on a certain beach
> > | separated themselves into two or more sharply discrete classes,
> > | as spherical and cubical ones, there would be something to be
> > | explained, but that they are of various sizes and shapes, of
> > | no definable character, can only be referred to the general
> > | manifoldness of nature. Indeterminacy, then, or pure firstness,
> > | and haecceity, or pure secondness, are facts not calling for and
> > | not capable of explanation. Indeterminacy affords us nothing to
> > | ask a question about; haecceity is the 'ultima ratio', the brutal
> > | fact that will not be questioned. But every fact of a general or
> > | orderly nature calls for an explanation; and logic forbids us to
> > | assume in regard to any given fact of that sort that it is of its
> > | own nature absolutely inexplicable. This is what Kant calls
> > | a regulative principle, that is to say, an intellectual hope.
> > | The sole immediate purpose of thinking is to render things
> > | intelligible; and to think and yet in that very act to
> > | think a thing unintelligible is a self-stultification.
> > | It is as though a man furnished with a pistol to defend
> > | himself against an enemy were, on finding that enemy very
> > | redoubtable, to use his pistol to blow his own brains out
> > | to escape being killed by his enemy. Despair is insanity.
> > | True, there may be facts that will never get explained; but
> > | that any given fact is of the number, is what experience can
> > | never give us reason to think; far less can it show that any
> > | fact is of its own nature unintelligible. We must therefore be
> > | guided by the rule of hope, and consequently we must reject every
> > | philosophy or general conception of the universe, which could ever
> > | lead to the conclusion that any given general fact is an ultimate one.
> > | We must look forward to the explanation, not of all things, but of any
> > | given thing whatever. There is no contradiction here, any more than there
> > | is in our holding each one of our opinions, while we are ready to admit that
> > | it is probable that not all are true; or any more than there is in saying that
> > | any future time will sometime be passed, though there never will be a time when
> > | all time is past.
> > |
> > | C.S. Peirce, CP 1.405, circa 1890.
> > |
> > | C.S. Peirce, "A Guess at the Riddle", 'Collected Papers', CP 1.354-416,
> > | Editors' Note. One of the drafts of this work is headed: "Notes for
> > | a Book, to be entitled "A Guess at the Riddle", with a Vignette of
> > | the Sphynx below the Title".
> >
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