Re: Peirce List • Helmut Raulien

Dear Helmut,

It’s one of the occupational hazards of the classifying mind that one can start out consciously characterizing aspects of real situations and end up unwittingly thinking one’s gotten everything under the sun sorted into mutually exclusive bins.

Once the idols of compartmentality and the illusions of autonomous abstraction get their hold on our minds it is almost impossible to reconstitute or synthesize what we’ve torn asunder, if only in our own minds.  The ounce of prevention here is always keeping in mind that from which all abstractions are abstracted — living experience.

Reference

• Eisele, C. (1982), “Mathematical Methodology in the Thought of Charles S. Peirce”, Historia Mathematica 9, pp. 333–341.  Online.  PDF.

cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog • Peirce List (1) (2) (3) • Structural Modeling • Systems Science