Fusing Charles Sanders Peirce's phenomenological categories with Plotinus's Neoplatonic emanations is an intriguing endeavor that seeks to bridge the realms of experience and metaphysics. Here is a brief rundown of what such a fusion might look like:
Firstness and the One: In Plotinus's Neoplatonic philosophy, the One represents the ultimate source of all existence and transcends any categorization. It can be associated with Peirce's Firstness, as it embodies pure potentiality and unmediated unity. The One is the origin of all emanations, the ineffable and indescribable essence from which everything else arises.
Secondness and Emanations: Plotinus describes a hierarchical structure of emanations that flow from the One. These emanations represent the process of differentiation and the manifestation of distinct forms and levels of reality. This can be linked to Peirce's Secondness, as it involves the encounter of distinct entities and the experience of otherness. Each emanation represents a unique level of being, with increasing levels of complexity and differentiation.
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Thirdness and the Forms: Plotinus's emanations include the Forms or Intelligible Realities, which are the archetypes or perfect ideals of all things in existence. These Forms mediate between the One and the material world, providing a bridge between the transcendent and the immanent. This aligns with Peirce's Thirdness, as the Forms establish patterns, generality, and meaning. They represent the realm of concepts, laws, and shared understandings that shape our perception and interpretation of the world.
Unity and Multiplicity: The fusion of Peirce's categories with Plotinus's emanations allows for a synthesis of unity and multiplicity. The One represents the ultimate unity and potentiality, while the emanations and Forms introduce multiplicity and differentiation. This fusion acknowledges the interconnectedness of all things while recognizing the diversity and complexity of existence.
Holistic Understanding: By combining Peirce's phenomenological categories with Plotinus's Neoplatonic emanations, a holistic understanding of reality can be achieved. It integrates the experiential aspects of Firstness, the relational dynamics of Secondness, and the generative patterns of Thirdness with the metaphysical framework of emanations and the transcendent One. This fusion offers a comprehensive perspective that encompasses both the subjective and objective dimensions of existence, providing a richer understanding of the interconnected nature of reality.
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Firstness actually corresponds to the forms, not the One, because firstnesses are “any idea whose being comes from the fact that it is capable of getting represented”. Secondness doesn’t correspond to anything in neoplatonism. Neither, arguably, does thirdness. The One doesn’t have potentiality.
How can you associate firstness with form when thirdness is a much cleaner association? The form of a chair is the general chair-ness of a chair, an accumulated habit. Firstness deals with a quality, a germinal nothing.
>The One doesn't have potentiality
Then what does it have?
it "has" nothing since it is simple. it is also pure actuality of course. at least I was under the impression that this was pretty much a matter of definition.
Firstness deals with possibility so nothing about it is actual. Secondness deals with actuality.
I was talking about the One
because having unrealized potential implies that it is not simple and also that it is not immutable.
Why would you say it is pure act?
Soul is what imparts order onto the universe in neoplatonism, not the forms. the forms are pure being and don't exist in time at all, while thirdness is continuity and the very synthesis of moments of time. when peirce says that thirdness introduces "generality" he is talking more about natural laws and how particulars conform to a general habit, not universals. he actually associates firstness with deduction and the mathematical universe (since mathematical objects are "purely hypothetical" and firstness is potentiality), while thirdness merely combines these potential ideas (firstnesses) with the brute fact of physical reality (secondness). thirdness is about science, not pure reason.
also, there's the obvious fact that the forms are unities, while the being of thirdness is a multiplicity, it is only relative to the two other moments of firstness and secondness. the forms are "above" all sensible reality while thirdness actually "depends" on the "lower" categories.
pic related, he himself says firstness corresponds to the ideas
He's using 'Ideas' here in its (pseudo) Lockean sense as 'internal thoughts of the mind'. Note that here he means Ideas as given, and not reflected upon in anyway, whereas Locke conflates Peirce's First and Second, saying that any received Ideas are capable of instantaneous use in discursive thought, and that the immediately given Idea differs in no way from formerly given Ideas recalled to the present.
>he actually associates firstness with deduction and the mathematical universe (since mathematical objects are "purely hypothetical" and firstness is potentiality),
You mean abductive reasoning, right? Deductive reasoning would be secondness.
No. Deduction is firstness. Induction is secondness. Abduction is thirdness.
Completely wrong. Here's why: abduction deals with possible answers. Abduction is similar to the informal fallacy "affirming the antecedent", except that the "fallacy" is consciously being done with the desire to examine possible causes of a certain event. Meanwhile, deduction deals with matters of "reactive" fact (making it secondness), while induction deals with finding laws to explain a pattern of cases (making it thirdness).
I have no idea why you've made the associations that you've made, and every single one sounds so wildly wrong given what I've known about Peirce.
Well, in some sense, the One can't be simple, and it can't be immutable, because everything else must "emanate" from it. Otherwise, emanations would be creations ex nihilo, and you would have to explain how something is created from nothing in accordance with your metaphysics.
>Well, in some sense, the One can't be simple, and it can't be immutable, because everything else must "emanate" from it. Otherwise, emanations would be creations ex nihilo, and you would have to explain how something is created from nothing in accordance with your metaphysics.
All I'm saying is that the One is Plotinus is stated, as a matter of definition, as being absolutely simple. The difficulty that you are noting is basically the subject matter of platonic (or classical, really) metaphysics.
>>I have no idea why you've made the associations that you've made, and every single one sounds so wildly wrong given what I've known about Peirce.
lol dude, you are the one who has no idea how Peirce uses the terms Deduction, Induction, and Abduction. Peirce had to redefine induction because it no longer made sense to use it the same way Bacon did after the introduction of abduction. He basically says that induction is the step where you "check" that your abduction was actually true. This is why induction is associated with secondness, because it has to do with the brute actuality of whether the world really behaves habitually in the way the hypothesis predicted, and this fact has to force itself on you as an external force, ala secondness. And again, deduction and firstness are both associated with mathematics, deduction is only "reactive" in the sense that the HYPOTHESIS is already given from which it draws necessary conclusions, but it isn't reactive to brute fact but to pure potentiality. Deduction says IF this is true, then this follows, it never enters the realm of actuality, only induction and abduction do that. With induction redefined, abduction takes a larger role and abduction is actually what introduces "law" and generality into nature, since it is the abducted hypotheses to which nature conforms. The nature of thirdness is to be what it is relative to two others, to synthesize two different things, and the whole purpose of abduction is to combine hypotheses (firstness) with actuality (secondness). This is basically a fact that Peirce associates mathematics and deduction with firstness, though I'm not going to ctrl + f through the collected papers to find all the places he says this, but if you've actually read his writings everything I'm saying is obvious.
>lol dude, you are the one who has no idea how Peirce uses the terms Deduction, Induction, and Abduction.
Your difficulty is that you're probably stuck on an older version of Peirce's ideas as he struggled to find their appropriate place in his grander system. Yes, he swapped things around here and there over the course of his life, but ultimately he settled on the places I've mentioned. And you're also struggling with the prescission of the categories and their incorporation into a tightly-bound hierarchy of categories. If you're sufficiently vague enough, you can place abduction, deduction, and induction within all three categories because secondness includes a degenerate firstness and thirdness includes a degenerate firstness and secondness. Peirce pretty much has all of these problems sorted out by the Harvard lectures.
>He basically says that induction is the step where you "check" that your abduction was actually true.
This happens at the level of deduction because you have to use the scientific method, read, a controlled experiment, where all the "ifs" are (ostensibly) given, allowing you to determine the "then" by collecting your findings. And then you repeat these experiments over time, resulting in controlled cases in which the general law becomes clearer, hopefully voiding most of the problems with induction. But even Peirce would loathe to use a term like "true" because of his cosmological views about how the laws of nature evolve.
>With induction redefined, abduction takes a larger role and abduction is actually what introduces "law" and generality into nature,
Remember, what induction does is that it takes observed cases and "fits" a rule onto them. Induction wasn't redefined in modern times. Induction has been a logical method since the Ancient Greeks (see Aristotle's epagoge, literally meaning "bringing in"). Rather, it was better understood and refined by Bacon, only to be problematized further by David Hume (the problem of induction). Bacon's innovation was the experiment as controlled environment, a belief in "laws of the universe." When you are engaging in induction, you're engaging in thirdness. And it is only through established habits that one is able to make an "educated guess" about something.
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>This is basically a fact that Peirce associates mathematics and deduction with firstness, though I'm not going to ctrl + f through the collected papers to find all the places he says this, but if you've actually read his writings everything I'm saying is obvious.
You (and Peirce, frankly, though no fault to him given the gargantuan scale of his project) are way in over your head with this statement. Mathematics is supposed to be the overarching foundation from which everything else follows. This is a bias of Peirce, inherited partially from Kant and his father, that he never strayed from because of his commitment to avoid "nominalism" and the belief in the reliable truth of mathematics. And even then, Peirce was constantly reconfiguring his architectonic schema of the sciences. From the mathematical root springs philosophy, which is divided into phenomenology (firstness), normative science (secondness, including logic nested here by the way), and metaphysics (thirdness).
By the way, I will offer the fact that Peirce often can't decide whether deduction or induction belongs to secondness or thirdness, but he never strays from abduction being in firstness to my knowledge.
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>Mathematics is supposed to be the overarching foundation from which everything else follows
No, it's not. Mathematics is merely the process of deduction. Nothing about the physical universe "follows" from mathematics because secondness and thirdness don't follow from firstness - they are each irreducible.
>the belief in the reliable truth of mathematics
Peirce doesn't believe mathematics provides reliable truth about anything because its subject matter is completely made up. It's only the induction and abduction that gives mathematics any power.
>From the mathematical root springs philosophy
Philosophy is based on sense data. this is the essence of phaneroscopy. philosophy only USES mathematics as a TOOL to examine phenomenological experience and then eventually pass over into SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY which will eventually give you metaphysics.
>but ultimately he settled on the places I've mentioned.
dude, you literally attributed abduction to firstness, I don't see how Peirce could ever imagine that
> If you're sufficiently vague enough, you can place abduction, deduction, and induction within all three categories because secondness includes a degenerate firstness and thirdness includes a degenerate firstness and secondness.
ok, but firstness doesn't include a degenerate secondness or thirdness, so you can't move them around when it comes to firstness.
>This happens at the level of deduction because you have to use the scientific method, read, a controlled experiment, where all the "ifs" are (ostensibly) given
Peirce says over and over and over again that deduction and mathematics are PURELY HYPOTHETICAL. the ifs are given by secondness. and a controlled experiment is not necessary, as in the case of astronomy or the discovery of evolution, since these are cases of pure abduction. Yes, the deduction tells you that the facts will lead to this, but it's the induction that tells you the facts are, and the abduction that provides you with the suitable hypothesis to perform deduction on in the first place.
>And then you repeat these experiments over time, resulting in controlled cases in which the general law becomes clearer, hopefully voiding most of the problems with induction
This is not how Peirce says induction works. It's extremely important that you have the abducted hypothesis before you perform the induction, then you use probabilities to determine the level of certainty provided by your induction. I'm pretty sure he talks about this with a good example in the doctrine of necessity examined. I honestly don't know where you're getting all this from. You're still stuck on the Baconian notion of induction which really mixed up induction and abduction.
>what induction does is that it takes observed cases and "fits" a rule onto them
IN THE BACONIAN MODEL. most of the role induction played in Baconian thought was subsumed by abduction. I think you're reading a lot of secondary sources and getting confused because you can't differentiate how Peirce uses terms and how everyone else does.
>Bacon's innovation was the experiment as controlled environment
Bacon did not contribute this at all, he never wrote about a "controlled experiment." the baconian method was basically to collect a shit ton of data and tables about nature, actually almost none of the scientific method was developed by Bacon.
>When you are engaging in induction, you're engaging in thirdness
when you're engaging in the part of baconian induction that is actually abduction.
> but he never strays from abduction being in firstness to my knowledge
abduction has TWO PARTS. it has the FIRSTNESS aspect because it generates HYPOTHESES. It has the SECONDNESS aspect because it generates them from ALREADY ACQUIRED SENSE DATA - SECONDNESS. This is thirdness - it is relative to the first and second
>dude, you literally attributed abduction to firstness, I don't see how Peirce could ever imagine that
Why not? Abduction only deals with possible explanations. You are retroactively looking for possible explanations to explain why something happened. Firstness deals with possibility, spontaneity, feeling, instinct, etc. If anything, it is the most clear.
You might find this article helpful: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40320413
>Peirce says over and over and over again that deduction and mathematics are PURELY HYPOTHETICAL. the ifs are given by secondness. and a controlled experiment is not necessary, as in the case of astronomy or the discovery of evolution, since these are cases of pure abduction. Yes, the deduction tells you that the facts will lead to this, but it's the induction that tells you the facts are, and the abduction that provides you with the suitable hypothesis to perform deduction on in the first place.
Peirce also says that secondness deals with what is actual, force, reaction, and the main shtick of his philosophy is to overcome the subject-object distinction by showing how the entire universe is connected in a grand evolutionary project. Deduction "generates" effects given a cause and a prior list of laws. I promise you, if you order the forms of logic any other way, you end up with a scientific method that doesn't make sense.
>IN THE BACONIAN MODEL.
... in every model since it was isolated as a form of logic in ancient Greece. Even Peirce.
>This is not how Peirce says induction works. It's extremely important that you have the abducted hypothesis before you perform the induction
... which is why induction clearly belongs in thirdness, since it requires both the causes and effects to generate the according law.
>Bacon did not contribute this at all, he never wrote about a "controlled experiment." the baconian method was basically to collect a shit ton of data and tables about nature, actually almost none of the scientific method was developed by Bacon.
Aristotle was all about "gathering a shit ton of data", and his volumes of work on biology attest to that fact. That's not the prime distinction. Bacon may have never used the terminology, but he divorced himself from Aristotelian science in exactly the way I described. Aristotelian science views the world in the lens of "natural motion", where every object has its own unique tendencies, while Baconian science views the world without natural motion, with each object's unique tendencies operating merely in accordance with universal laws. Bacon wanted a rigorous science that could crack open nature's laws.
>abduction has TWO PARTS. it has the FIRSTNESS aspect because it generates HYPOTHESES. It has the SECONDNESS aspect because it generates them from ALREADY ACQUIRED SENSE DATA - SECONDNESS. This is thirdness - it is relative to the first and second
I see the problem. You're confusing the phenomenological for the logical order. The categories have both.
dude... it's impossible to perform retroduction without sense data... it's retroactive BECAUSE you need actual sense data to do it. That's secondness. It clearly involves both secondness and firstness. You think that just because abduction involves firstness it is associated with firstness, but it is literally the essence of thirdness to involve both the first and second.
>Deduction "generates" effects given a cause and a prior list of laws
chronologically, retroduction comes first, the deduction on the retroducted hypotheses, then induction. I can see how this might lead you to think retroduction is firstness, but it's obviously not, because there were all the steps that occurred before you even started the retroduction - acquiring the sense data that you generate the hypothesis to explain in the first place.
>Aristotle was all about "gathering a shit ton of data"
no, he wasn't. Bacon's entire criticism of Aristotle is that Aristotelian induction happens too fast - nous perceives a particular and basically immediately "arrives" at the corresponding (quasi-platonic) universal.
>his volumes of work on biology attest to that fact
he wouldn't have conceptualized biology as theoria at all. his work on physics attests to the OPPOSITE because he clearly believed pure reason could give you insight into physics.
>You're confusing the phenomenological for the logical order. The categories have both.
I don't know exactly what you mean by this or how it's relevant.
>I see the problem. You're confusing the phenomenological for the logical order. The categories have both.
To add to this (because I swear you're going to have a panic attack if I don't explain this), the categories both have a "logical" order, by which inquiry proceeds, and a "factual" order, which is what grounds inquiry through a continuity between the past, present, and future.
I'm not going to debate the logical order, for if you understand both what the categories seek to explain and what abductive, deductive, and inductive reasoning is, then it makes sense why it has to be this way. You start with an intuitive guess. You rigorously test the guess in a controlled setting. Then you reveal tendencies which either confirm or reject the guess. Repeat ad nauseum, hopefully with greater nuance and precision. This order works because of some innate organization of phenomenology However, you're perfectly reasonable in asking how it is possible to perform abduction or deduction without having previous knowledge of "laws", how it is possible to perform abduction or induction without perceiving "effects", etc.
The problem, which I think you've severely overlooked, is that Peirce is operating within and trying to break free from the Kantian and ultimately Cartesian worldview to generate an optimistic method of inquiry. This also bothers Peirce in his attempt to rigorously critique Kant's metaphysics, what's left after he's slashed away intuition after intuition, category after category. Where is the grounding intuition? Peirce, being the radical skepticist he is, will admit that, ultimately, there's often no apparent "good" reason to commit to any base at all. Leave it to Peirce to master Bayesian reasoning, then say that "all priors" are baseless!
The solution ends up being mostly cosmological and coming from a quasi-mystical turn towards the end of his life. Peirce takes a cue from Galileo and admits of "il lume naturale", a sort of primordial intuition that has, by necessity, some sort of connection to the evolving order of the universe itself. Then, returning to the "logical" versus "factual" ordering of the categories I mentioned earlier, you can think of the scheme as simultaneous "rising" and "falling" through the categories, respectively. Without this full schema, the intuition, the rise, and the fall, you have severe holes. Here, at least, we have something resembling a complete architectonic system that can put the greatest of the philosophers to shame.
>also, I don't have access to jsotr.
homie, make a free account or copy paste it into sci-hub. it's that easy
are you just putting my posts into ChatGPT or something? you've already made two blatant historical errors about bacon and aristotle, but you still keep trying to recontextualize the conversation into something about his historical development when all we're talking about is the logical structure of scientific reasoning. The last two paragraphs of this posts don't even have anything to do with anything I said. Obviously, I know that he thinks that retroduction requires a deus ex machina to explain how our guesses works. But that is only because of the vast number of hypotheses that could explain any situation, not because retroduction is an arbitrary nothing of pure firstness that comes out of nothing. I've explained multiple times why retroduction requires both firstness and secondness, whereas if retroduction was firstness, it would be able to stand on its own. You haven't addressed this. You keep using the term induction like Bacon would use it, neglecting the fact that if you have both baconian induction and perceian abduction, there is a massive overlap between both concepts that makes one or the other a redundant concept unless you redefine one of them. you won't address this either. You say that your logical ordering is the only way to make science work, but you are basically committing the same error as Bacon and attributing everything to induction while ignoring abduction. the entire point of Peirce's inventing abduction was to point out that retroductive reasoning is actually where the most important scientific reasoning takes place, and induction is only an aspect of it.
>are you just putting my posts into chatgpt or something? you've already made two blatant historical errors about bacon and aristotle,
No, I've actually *read* the works. You have the weird pop-philosophy understanding of them. You probably think that Aristotle never conducted an experiment and that Galileo was able to prove that feathers fall with the same gravitational acceleration as a bowling ball or something.
>I've explained multiple times why retroduction requires both firstness and secondness, whereas if retroduction was firstness, it would be able to stand on its own. You haven't addressed this.
My last post was solely dedicated towards addressing this lol. That was the whole point of the logical versus factual distinction. You're not even reading what I'm writing now.
>The last two paragraphs of this posts don't even have anything to do with anything I said.
Look man, you're stuck in some weird Dunning-Kruger peak. If you have a hard time linking Kant to Peirce, then you have no business talking about Peirce lol. Study some metaphysics then get back to me.
Sorry, but I don't see this being a fruitful discussion anymore. You lack the sufficient background knowledge to talk about this topic.
P.S. Retroduction also requires thirdness, not just firstness and secondness. You need an established body of habits in order to retroductively explain new observations or even make new hypotheses intelligible. But I'm sure that was just a mere oversight on your part, right?
rich
all this implies is scholastic realism, it doesn't change anything i said.
>all this implies is scholastic realism
And you know how much Peirce loves them, right?
I mean, just look at Einstein. the Inductive step was literally looking at an eclipse through a telescope. EVERYTHING ELSE was retroduction, and then deduction on his ideas leading to the mathematical formulation of his hypotheses. all the inductive step entailed was observing that a single fact was actual. Or look at Kepler. It's the identical scenario, Peirce said Kepler's work on elliptical orbits was the greatest work of retroduction ever. It was NOT a work of induction, it was purely kepler coming up with a hypothesis to explain the orbits. same with Darwin.
I mean, just try to explain this: what makes the theory of evolution viable, when Darwin didn't perform a SINGLE "controlled experiment"? YOU are the one who can't get a viable scientific method if you can't explain this.
also, I don't have access to jsotr.
This Peirce categories stuff is interesting, I never knew about this. I just know about his infinite semiosis, pragmatic theory of truth, and that he worked on semiotics and logic. Apparently the article where he first discusses these categories isn't even in the collection of Peirce writings I own, that sucks, but I downloaded a pdf to read later.
Idk. I can see elements of firstness, secondness, and thirdness in the Neoplatonic hierarchy, but not necessarily grouped in the same way.
Probably because Peirce himself stated that there were two sets of categories. One were formal, universal, and quantitative—the famous firstness, secondness, and thirdness categories that his phenomenological research was based upon. But he also conceived of “material”, particular categories that spanned across the formal categories too. In fact, one might conceive of both categories as spanning across each other. Peirce didn’t make much conceptual headway into this theory, but it’s worth considering.
What are those qualitative categories?
have a nice day
Augustine is sort of in the space between the two. He was very into his triads, especially in De Trinitate, where he is essentially doing dialectical.
He was also the first thinker to really explore semiotics, a passion of Pierce's. While he started off trying to bridge the gap between Plotonius and Christianity, using a binary semiotic in Christ the Teacher (Father as the One, Christ, the Logos, as our bridge to Nous), the mature Augustine seems to be working with a tripartite semiotics along the line of Pierce with the Father as the object, Son as the symbol, and Holy Spirit as interpretant. De Trinitate explores this at a psychological level; man is trinitarian because man is created in the image of God.
>classical sculpture
>vandalized by Yahweh freaks
the history of the West in one image