Many thanks for your thoughtful response. The problems of popularization
of philosophy are well known, but as you have been an important
introduction to Peirce for a computer-literate audience, it does not seem
wrong to bring the references on Peirce-Hegel relationship up to the level
of those on Kant-Peirce. Some interlinear remarks to that end below:
On Fri, 17 Apr 1998, John F. Sowa wrote:
> Lee,
>
> Thank you for your comments. They are very well taken, but they illustrate
> the enormous difficulty or perhaps impossibility of trying to characterize
> various philosophies accurately and briefly.
>
> I realize that Hegel only used the terms thesis-antithesis-synthesis
> once in his opera omnia, when he explicitly criticized them. I was going
> to mention Fichte, but I decided not to confuse the reader with any more
> names than necessary. But I disagree with the claim that Peirce considered
> Hegel "perhaps the greatest philosopher who had ever lived." He explicitly
> mentioned Aristotle and Kant as two of the greatest, but his opinion of
> Hegel's logic was similar to Russell's (who is not one of my (or Peirce's)
> favorite philosophers, but who is someone you can always count on for a
> clever, but devastating put-down).
Peirce's actual quotation (Collected Papers 1.524) was to call Hegel "in
some respects the greatest philosopher that ever lived". This came late
in Peirce's life (the 1903 Lowell lectures) and contrasts, by Peirce's
own admission, with the contempt with which he held Hegel as a young man
in the 1860s (when his knowledge came second-hand through a French book on
Hegel's philosophy.)
One of the advantages that is emerging from Indiana University Press' new
chronological edition of Peirce's work is that it enables scholars to
trace the development of his thought. The Harvard edition, which I have
cited, juxtaposes excerpts from different decades if they address the same
nominal topic and thus encourages in the secondary literature quotation
without due regard for context.
As he grew older, Peirce grew in respect for Hegel, and as a result had
much more devastating things to say about Hegel than Russell. (When it
comes to writers who might be associated with Bradley, Russell's fallen
idol, Russell is more a smear artist than a philosophical critic. And in
the case of Hegel he drew further rhetorical fuel from the anti-Germanism
of the two World Wars. The only less reliable 'classic' writers on Hegel
of whom I am aware are Marx and Karl Popper, though Hegel seems to attract
polemic as surely as Peirce has attracted neglect and unacknowledged
borrowings.)
Peirce studied Hegel profoundly, understood his own philosophy as
resuscitating Hegel "though in a strange costume" (1.42), and recognized
in Hegel the same dissatisfactions and reflections upon Kant's
Transcendental Analytic that had consumed him as a young man. At the same
time, he saw Hegel as exemplifying the evils of "seminary" as opposed to
"laboratory" philosophy, and the followers of Hegel as having gone off on
a dead end, slavishly following the forms rather than the evolutionary and
(by Peirce's definition) realistic spirit of Hegel's work.
A good case can be made that with respect to the categories Peirce saw
himself as the next stage in philosophical development beyond Hegel,
profoundly differing from Hegel by grounding his categories in scientific
method and accepting the independent validity of brute fact.
With respect to Hegel's "logic" Peirce had split views. It was clearly
not logic in the positive sense of a science of the norms for drawing
valid inferences. Indeed, it undermined such a science by its shifting,
literary and idiosyncratic use of terms. On the other had, it was logic
in the broader sense of addressing the limits of thought, without
descending into psychologism. At one point Peirce consciously adopted
Hegel's term "objective logic" for this broader inquiry, which he saw as
continuing the scholastic tradition of speculative rhetoric. Later he
spoke of "objective rhetoric" for this broader inquiry, a term which I
prefer.
>
> >... Peirce uses them to generate his system of sign-types but not an
> >ontology. The best one can do with them ontologically is to use them in
> >one aspect to discuss "modes" of being. The reason for this is that the
> >very notion of being presupposes the Peircean categories, and every
> >representation of being is done in signs that can themselves be modally
> >distinguished into types in which the categories will recursively appear.
> >But to skip the intervening mediation of signs and to speak of the
> >Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness of e.g. "woman", does not really
> >reflect what Peirce is about. On the other hand, analyzing signs of woman
> >as icon-index-symbol or as tone-token-type is a Peircean way of proceeding.
>
> Yes, I agree with that point. But there is no way that I can possibly
> say all of that in one intelligible paragraph. The excerpt that I sent
> around yesterday was part of a summary of 2,500 years of philosophy in
> eight pages. I avoided saying Peirce's categories were ontological, and
> in Section 2.3 of the book (which follows that 8-page summary) I explicitly
> built up my own selection of categories, which I said were "inspired by"
> the various philosophers, but not directly taken from them.
>
> In my crystal lattice of Figure 2.6, I had earlier used the labels
> Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. I have now replaced them with
> the labels Thing, Reaction, and Mediation, which are more in keeping
> with the level of the other labels without making an identification
> of these labels with Peirce's.
Sorry, I was remembering the earlier drafts that I first encountered at
ICCS'95. Thing, of course, is a far cry from Firstness, in my
understanding of it, but Reaction and Mediation do capture Secondness and
Thirdness. The contribution of the revised lattice is thus to bridge
a modal and the natural-kind way of thinking (as exemplified in Cyc's use
of Thing as the top of their lattice).
>
> Throughout the book, I say that the character strings that appear inside
> my concept boxes are _type labels_. I definitely do not claim that they
> represent the way the world "is", but that they are convenient signs that
> we put together in order to build diagrams that represent some aspect of
> how we talk about the world. On page 1 of the book, I say "Plato's
> student Aristotle shifted the emphasis from the nature of knowledge to
> the less controversial, but more practical problem of representing knowledge."
>
> One of the major questions that has always been asked about Aristotle is
> whether he thought of his categories as characterizations of how the world
> is or as a classification of how we talk about the way we think the world is.
> Aristotle himself never made that point clear in any of his writings, but
> his student Theophrastus said that he had intended his categories to be
both.
As Aristotle was pioneering a stable theoretical language from a
previously conversational ("dialectical" in the root sense) mytho-poetical
one, the Janus-faced character is inevitable. Peirce's take on this, as I
remember, is that Aristotle had not yet come to a firm enough distinction
between logic and language, and that his work on the categories was a
straddle that would require further development and clarification.
> I intend my categories to be first and foremost a classification of the
> labels we use to describe how we think the world is. That is a point that
> is hard to get across to philosophers, but I actually think that it is easier
> for computer programmers, who primarily think in terms of character strings
> without attributing any deeper meaning to them.
Hence my uneasiness with the firstness of woman example, which remains
from the earlier draft and suggests essences and attributes rather than
signs and modalities. What you describe as a difference between dumb
philosophers and smart programmers helps to explain why both are coming to
the belated discovery of Peirce (and perhaps through him of the
*formalitates* of the scholastic realists). By analyzing the sign
relationship modally, without tieing it to things or natural kinds, Peirce
provides the philosophical ground to resolve many dilemmas and temper many
pretensions of Artifical Intelligence (which in an aside you recognize in
a manuscript draft by noting that the Peircean term for AI would be
"computational semiotic".)
>
> >.... The advantage I find in preserving the integrity of
> >Peirce's approach-- the pragmatic justification, if you will-- is that his
> >categories preserve a point of view from which we may continually revise
> >systems that attempt to harden the flow of experience into set forms.
>
> Yes, I agree with that point wholeheartedly. I do give a summary of
> Peircean semeiotic in Section 6.6 of the book. But as you well know,
> CSP himself was not able to get a clear conception of his point of view
> across to very many, if any of his contemporaries, not even to his closest
> friend William James (who was probably at least as smart as the average
> reader that I am trying to address). In this book, I am trying to get
> some ideas across to readers who do not have much, if any philosophical
> background in a way that is as accurate as I can be without losing them
> completely.
There are many people who would never have heard of Peirce but for your
work, John. But after a hundred years, and some very valuable
scholarly/editorial work to collect Peirce's writings, we have advantages
that James and other contemporaries did not. Only a small portion of
Peirce's work was published during his lifetime-- not that this would have
helped James much, as his considerable gifts were not on the same
wavelength as those of his eponymous friend Charles Santiago (St.
James) Peirce.
>
> And by the way, I also corrected another inaccuracy in that excerpt:
> In the answer to Exercise 2.5, I said that the objects were sorted by
> weight. I have changed that to mass and added the following note:
>
> From an earth-centric point of view, weight could be considered
> an inherent property of an object, but more accurately, weight
> is the result of a reaction of an object's mass to the gravitational
> attraction of another object.
>
> John
>
Let me say that I much admire your openness and energy in continually
submitting your work to pre-publiication comment.
Lee