More food for thought, thanks. You are right that I am immersed in Peirce at this point; since philosophy is a hobby for me, my interests tend to run ...
It seems more accurate to say that your activities of moving your body are responses to a prediction of what would be in the future, given your awaren...
, Here is an oversimplified argument for realism that I was contemplating while writing my last few posts: All objects of cognition are generals. Some...
I am not sure how pointing at something qualifies as "primitively quantitative" or "an act of measurement." It is certainly an index in Peirce's termi...
There is a new book out by Aaron Bruce Wilson, Peirce's Empiricism: Its Roots and Its Originality. I have only been able to read snippets via Google B...
If what you mean is that we cannot help but perceive whatever we perceive, and then (initially) judge it to be whatever we judge it to be, then I am i...
Inquiry is the struggle by which we seek to ameliorate the irritation of genuine doubt by achieving the satisfactory fixation of our beliefs - our hab...
Okay, I just wanted to make sure that we were using roughly the same definition of "real." I take it that "real abstracts" would then be mind-independ...
If this were true, then how could we ever know that we have reached the brute fact that has no further explanation? What would be the unmistakable ind...
Got it, thanks. To clarify, would they have to be "real abstracts" in particular minds (i.e., concepts), or could they be real abstracts independent o...
I appreciate it, along with your patience throughout the discussion. I apologize for nitpicking, but moderate realists agree that only particulars exi...
Concepts are particular? My impression is that nominalists agree with realists that all of our knowledge is only of generals; the disagreement is over...
I still do not understand how there can be any predictable regularities/consistencies among particulars that have nothing real in common. If everythin...
No, because the scope of the subjunctive conditional that represents a general property or law of nature is not limited to one particular object. Any ...
We typically call the latter a definition, not a synonym. Besides, you only offered single-word synonyms, plus the multi-word (but not much more helpf...
The idea is that the meaning of any concept is the aggregate of its conceivable practical effects - i.e., the pragmatic maxim. If three different word...
In that case, how do you define qualities/characteristics? Again, to say that something has a quality/characteristic means that if certain conditions ...
In my mind, predictable regularities are what we experience and observe, while real laws of nature are what we hypothesize to explain them. In other w...
Yes, and as is often the case in such circumstances, I have a hard time even imagining what it is like not to find it intuitively obvious. In my mind,...
Just for the record, here is Peirce's conclusion about the rock-dropping example (CP 5.100-101, EP 2:183; 1903, emphases in original): "With overwhelm...
But at least we recognize that there is a real reason why there are regularities between individual things and events. If everything is particular, th...
Right, but the question is how we can know that a counterfactual claim is true, if - as the nominalist asserts - there are no real laws of nature, jus...
Nominalism treats predictable regularities as inexplicable brute facts, and thus does not seek an explanation for them. Realism, on the other hand, ex...
I agree with you about certainty, but my question boils down to why induction is so successful as a mode of inference. Is this just another brute fact...
I know that this is getting repetitive, but I still would like to know - on your view, what warrants our confident predictions that particulars will "...
In that case, are you saying that nothing warrants our confident assertions about the future, including law-like counterfactual claims? In other words...
Are you saying that you do not see how real laws of nature would work to cause predictable regularities? It seems to me that they would be final cause...
Then what (if anything) does warrant our confident assertions about the future, which we make all the time? Specifically, are law-like counterfactual ...
You have missed the whole point of the P/not-P discussion. We are no longer talking about a boundary between an area that is purple and an area that i...
The problem that I am having is understanding how this statement is somehow denying the reality of a (general) law of nature. If everything is particu...
As I said before, this entails that what we call "free will" is an illusion. If there are no real possibilities, then whatever actually happens had to...
On the view that I am exploring, it is the other way around - the actuality is based in a continuum of real possibilities, like a single point that is...
This implies that the only real possibilities are those that are actualized - i.e., determinism; there are no genuine alternatives when we make choice...
A key difference between universals and particulars is that no universal is determinate, while all particulars are determinate. A lion in general is n...
No realists (except maybe some Platonists) believe that universals are determinate individuals. Because the particulars are being governed by a real u...
You still seem to be treating a universal as another kind of individual - "something separate" - that is somehow "in" particulars. In this case, it is...
But that sounds just like a universal, except for the "brute" part. Why would particular matter in particular dynamic relations predictably behave in ...
No, not given the technical distinction between real/reality and actual/existence. The whole point of making the distinction is to clarify that the tw...
Not all Lutherans believe this; in fact, some Lutheran pastors consume all of the remaining elements at the end of the distribution, so that the quest...
Sorry, I just assumed that you were reading all of the posts in this thread. Briefly, reality means being whatever it is regardless of whether any per...
But that is certainly not the technical definition within philosophy, especially in the context of the debate over the reality of universals, which is...
Or an objective idealist, such that "matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws." Peirce sometimes defined reality as that which ...
I mentioned the Higgs boson, since it was one of your own examples. Scientists posited its existence as a plausible explanation of certain surprising ...
Doesn't this requirement effectively beg the question, since realists affirm that our only "contact" with universals is via the mind? In fact, realist...
What would you count as an example of each? Abduction happens every time someone devises a new theory. Induction happens every time someone experiment...
Peirce independently and contemporaneously achieved the same thing - the introduction of quantifiers and bound variables. He wrote voluminously about ...
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