The substitution of thing for firstness in your scheme and of type label
for (legi)sign seems, as well as the application of the three categories
directly to generate other categories rather than mediately through a
typology of sign modalities, seem to me to define its contours relative to
Peirce's more capacious, philosophically grounded semiotic. There is
nothing wrong with this in something designed to assist computer
applications, but an awareness of its limitations is helpful not only on
conceptual grounds but also practically, in knowing when to disable it, as
we shall have to do in most information retrieval and extraction work, and
in putting us on guard against its limitations in natural language work
generally. Saying this in no way detracts from the value, or the
significant intellectual achievement, of providing such a scheme in areas
where it will be helpful.
On the Hegel issues, the matter of the relation of Peirce's categories to
Hegel's moments is much deeper than we can discuss here, and Peirce was
vividly aware of this. Hegel had set forth *in advance* the most telling
criticisms of the quantitative aspect of Peirce's approach, and Peirce
reciprocated with the best statement of which I am aware of the scientific
community's *philosophical* criticism of Hegel. Who has the better of this
argument-- and indeed, whether there really is an argument on pragmatic
grounds-- is not a closed question in my mind. But the much more
superficial point I wanted to make in response to the revised text that
you kindly shared is that one really does need to distinguish genuinely
philosophical difference at a level germane to the problem of the
categories from the sort of polemic in the Russell history or in the
war-crazed Cassirer quotation you cite below.
Perhaps in the next century German philosophy up to the first half of the
19th Century, a truly extraordinary intellectual achievement, will be
appreciated outside the context of the nation-state wars of the 20th.
Lee
On Wed, 22 Apr 1998, John F. Sowa wrote:
> Lee,
>
> >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.)
>
> Yes, but he also qualified that point in the same lectures, when he
> compared the 7 types of metaphysical systems, based on how they
> recognized 1-2-3-ness. He listed Aristotle and Kant as two of the few
> people besides himself who emphasized all three equally. He considered
> Hegel to be someone who approached the level of pure Thirdness to the
> exclusion of the other two. But to soften my remarks a bit, I said
> that Peirce was influenced by both Kant and Hegel:
>
> Like most logicians, Peirce found Hegel's logic repugnant, but he was
> just as intrigued by the patterns of triads in the categories
> of Kant and Hegel.
>
> >... Russell is more a smear artist than a philosophical critic.
>
> Yes, I bought a remaindered copy of Russell's _History of Western
> Philosophy_ for a dollar, which is about all it's worth. He is totally
> unreliable as a source of information about anyone (including himself),
> but the book is useful as a source of witty remarks.
>
> >... And in the case of Hegel he drew further rhetorical fuel
> >from the anti-Germanism of the two World Wars.
>
> In 1943, Ernst Cassirer observed that the war between Germany and Russia
> was a battle between the Hegelians of the right and the Hegelians of
> the left. Many people have noted that a tendency to totalitarianism is
> a danger of Hegel's view of history. Hegel would have disavowed
> the extremes of his followers (as did Marx, who said "Je ne suis pas
> marxiste"), but there is always the danger of Thirdness run amok.
>
> >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....
>
> >.... 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.
>
> In many respects, I regard the pre-twentieth century logic books
> (which are mostly watered-down versions of Peter of Spain's textbook)
> as better balanced treatments of logic and ontology. The first half
> is devoted to the categories with a version of the tree of Porphyry.
> By contrast, a typical modern text like Schoenfield's _Mathematical
> Logic_ devotes about one paragraph to what the symbols represent.
>
> >> I intend my categories to be first and foremost a classification of the
> >> labels we use to describe how we think the world is....
>
> >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....
>
> OK. I revised that discussion to avoid the suggestion that the concept
> type Woman is itself Firstness:
>
> 1. An individual can be recognized as a human being or as a subtype,
> such as man or woman, by sensory impressions (Firstness), independent
> of any external relationships. The type label Woman characterizes
> an individual by properties that can be recognized without regard
> to any relationships to other entities.
>
> 2. The same individual could be classified relative to or in reaction
> with many other things, as in the concept types Mother, Attorney,
> Wife, Pilot, Employee, or Pedestrian. A classification by any
> of those types depends on an external relationship (Secondness)
> to some other entity, such as a child, client, husband, airplane,
> employer, or traffic.
>
> 3. Thirdness focuses on the mediating intention that brings the first
> and second into relation. Motherhood, which comprises the act of
> giving birth and the subsequent period of nurturing, relates the
> mother and the child. The legal system gives rise to the roles
> of attorney and client. Marriage relates the wife and the husband.
> Aviation relates the pilot to the airplane. The business enterprise
> relates the employee to the employer. And the activity of walking
> on a street that is dominated by vehicles relates the pedestrian
> to the ongoing traffic.
>
> >Let me say that I much admire your openness and energy in continually
> >submitting your work to pre-publiication comment.
>
> It's primarily in self defense. I'd rather get the comments and
> complaints while I still have a chance to do something about them.
>
> John
>
>
>