ONT Re: New List & Classification of Signs

[Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>]

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| 15.  Revision of the Categories (cont.)
|
| In keeping with his architectonic hypothesis, Peirce attributed his revision
| of the categories to his logic.  But I think there are other and more important
| reasons for this revision.  As we have seen in some detail in Chapter 7, Peirce's
| theory of reality had run into serious difficulties in the late 1870's.  This
| theory of reality is a direct result of the categorical theory of the "New List"
| and the cognitive theory of the 1868 papers.  By denying the existence of first
| impressions of sense, Peirce had completely sundered the real from perception,
| so that direct acquaintance with reality cannot be gained by going to the source
| of our cognitions.  The only alternative left therefore was to locate the real at
| the end of the series of cognitions by defining reality as that which is thought
| in the final opinion to which inquiry will lead.  But Peirce then found himself
| unable to prove that in fact inquiry will ever lead to any final result and
| accordingly unable to prove that there is any reality.  As a result, Peirce's
| position degenerates into an extreme form of subjectivism in which we are
| lost in a phantasmagoric maze of our own concepts.  For one who called
| himself a realist, such a development was intolerable.  (MGM, p. 301).
| 
| Murray G. Murphey,
|'The Development of Peirce's Philosophy',
| first published, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1961.
| reprinted, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, IN, 1993.

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