inconvenience

[ish mailian]

Nor must any synechist say, “I am altogether myself, and not at all
you.” If you embrace synechism, you must abjure this metaphysics of
wickedness. In the first place, your neighbors are, in a measure,
yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in
psychology, you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to
attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of
vanity.

-C.S. Peirce, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism” (1893)

The Continuity of Being: C.S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Synechism

By Brian Kemple


https://epochemagazine.org/the-continuity-of-being-c-s-peirces-philosophy-of-synechism-9fa5c341247e

On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:51 AM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> from Menand's _The Metaphysical Club_
>
> p. 177  The law of errors arose out of two closely related bodies of
> thought, both of which had their origins in the seventeenth century:
> probability theory, which sought to understand chance events, such as
> throwing dice, and statistics, which sought to measure large-scale
> fluctuating phenomena, such as birthrates and life expectancies.
> These two lines of thought converged around 1800 in the field of
> astronomy.
>
>
>
> p. 186  What made the law of errors so important to nineteenth-century
> thought, though, was not only its application to the study of nature.
> The realization that even “errors,” even the unpredictable and
> accidental fluctuations that make phenomena seem to deviate from their
> normal “laws,” are themselves bound by a statistical law thrilled
> scientists.  But what captivated, and sometimes appalled, the popular
> imagination was the application of the law of errors—hinted at by
> Laplace in his discussion of dead letters and marriage rates—to the
> study of human beings.  What scandalized people about the Peirces’
> testimony in the Howland will case was their apparent reduction of a
> human activity—signing one’s name—to a set of numbers.  For in the
> 1860s such reductions had a particular philosophical implication.
> They were understood to point toward determinism.
>
>
>
> p. 195  Charles Peirce was an enemy of economic individualism.  He was
> also an enemy of determinism.  He did not believe that evidence of
> statistical regularity licensed individual self-interest, and he did
> not believe that the universe is a machine.  He thought that life is
> everywhere, and that life means spontaneity.  He believed that the
> universe is charged with indeterminacy; like his father, though he
> also believed that the universe makes sense, and he devoted his life
> to devising a cosmology that would show how both of those things—the
> indeterminacy and the intelligibility—could be the case.  He never
> abandoned his father’s faith that the world is constructed to be known
> by the mind—that, in Benjamin Peirce’s words, “the two are wonderfully
> matched.”  But he worked with scientific concepts predicated on a
> fundamentally different conception of the universe.