ONT Re: Just In Time Logic
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JITL. Note 5
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| [Lecture on Practical Logic, MS 191, Summer-Fall 1872]
|
| I suppose that the fundamental proposition from which all metaphysics
| takes its rise is that opinions tend to an ultimate settlement & that
| a predestinate one. Upon most subjects at least sufficient experience,
| discussion, and reasoning will bring men to an agreement; and another
| set of men by an independent investigation with sufficient experience,
| discussion, and reasoning will be brought to the same agreement as the
| first set.
|
| Hence we infer that there is something which determines
| opinions and which does not depend upon them. To this
| we give the name of the 'real'. Now this 'real' may
| be regarded from two opposite points of view.
|
| In the first place, to say that thought tends to come to a determinate conclusion,
| is to say that it tends to an end or is influenced by a 'final cause'. This final
| cause, the ultimate opinion, is independent of how you, I, or any number of men
| think. Let whole generations think as perversely as they will; they can only
| put off the ultimate opinion but cannot change its character. So the ultimate
| conclusion is that which determines opinions and does not depend upon them and
| so is the real object of cognition. This is idealism since it supposes the
| real to be of the nature of thought.
|
| But, in the second place, a cause precedes its effect. And moreover the ultimate
| conclusion though independent of this or that mind is not independent of mind in
| general. The real, therefore, which determines thought but does not depend upon it,
| is not the last conclusion but the first premiss or what produces the first premiss,--
| a something out of the mind and incommensurable with thought.
|
| Since experience proceeds from the less general to the more general, the
| last conclusion is general, and so the first view is realistic, while the
| second from a like reason is individualistic. In the first view, the real
| is in one sense never realized since though opinion may in fact have reached
| a settlment in reference to any question, there always remains a possibility
| that more experience, discussion, and reasoning would change any given opinion.
| In the second view also the real is a species of fiction for that which is
| logically singular,-- or is determined with reference to every quality,--
| can from the continual change which is constantly taking place not remain
| for any time however short, (Daniel Webster, for example, is a class embracing
| Daniel Webster under 50 years of age & Daniel Webster over 50 years of age) and
| consequently does not exist as absolutely determinate at all.
|
| Upon either view therefore the real is something ideal and never actually exists.
| But it is true on the one hand that thought tends to a determinate conclusion and
| on the other that if anything is true, true determinations without number are true
| of it. We ought therefore to discard the conception of the real as something actual
| and to say simply that only thought actually exists and it has a law which no more
| determines it than it by the mode in which it acts makes the law. Only this law
| is such that in a sufficient time it will determine thought to any extent.
|
| C.S. Peirce, CE 3, pp. 8-9.
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, MS 191, 1872, ["Lecture on Practical Logic"], pp. 8-9 in:
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 3, 1872-1878',
| Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1986.
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