November 8th to 11th, 2004

Ana Maria Guimarães Jorge
ana.gui@terra.com.br
FAAP - Brazil

OBJECTIVE TIME AND SPACE IN PEIRCE'S WORK: FROM THE GENERAL TO THE INDEFINITE FUTURE

ABSTRACT
Every logic proceeds from vagueness to the definition. Time is the condition that allows definition. The peircean ontological realism is based on the objectivity of the general and of time, and it is in the conjunction of such entities that something can be made existent, predicting a prophetic type of Real (CP 6.191 1898); "time is the form under which logic presents itself to objective intuition; and the signification of the discontinuity at the actual instant is that here new premisses, not logically derived by Firsts, are introduced." (CP 6.87 1898).
Temporal relations involve three states: past, present and future in an irreversible and not predominantly spatial way, for the fact that spatial movement involves the positional determination of the events. A simple duality, the passage from a first state to a second, substitutes that determination of a relation among three states that characterizes physical dynamics: "The event passes out of the problematical state of futury into the state of a fait accompli." (CP 7.490 1898). The continuity of the events is guaranteed by the generalizing tendency, or generalization, manifest in nature, and whose development happens where there is enough active plasticity.
What does approximate or does distance the ideas of time and space one from each other, in the peircean work, in order to guarantee the continuity of what is general in conservative and no-conservative actions? Conservative forces govern nothing, except the space relations of the particles, because they are laws of the mutual reactions of particles in the space: "particles react upon one another more strongly the nearer they are to one another." (CP 7.523 1898). In Peirce's work the discontinuity principle is relative, because it does not imply dimensional interruptions, but it continues to be of a reduced dimensionality. A partial reading of the logic of those relations will be made in this article.

KEYWORDS: Time, Space and Semiotics.

Center for Pragmatism Studies
Philosophy Graduate Program
Departament of Philosophy
Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo - Brazil