Charles Peirce on Skepticism: "I applaud scepticism with all my heart provided it have four qualities: first, that it be sincere and real doubt; second, that it be aggressive; third, that it push inquiry; and fourth, that it stand ready to acknowledge what it now doubts as soon as the doubted element comes clearly to light" (CP 1.344)

Action and Perception

There is a category which the rough and tumble of life renders most familiarly prominent. We are continually bumping up against hard fact. We expected on thing, or passively took it for granted, and had the image of it in our minds, but experience forces that idea into the background, and compels us to think quite differently. You get this kind of consciousness in some approach to purity when you put your shoulder against a door and try to force it open. You have a sense of resistance and at the same time a sense of effort. There can be no resistance without effort; there can be no effort without resistance. They are only two ways of describing the same experience. It is a double consciousness. We become aware of ourself in becoming aware of the not-self. The waking state is a consciousness of reaction; and as the consciousness itself is two-sided, so it has also two varieties; namely, action, where our modification of other things is more prominent than their reaction on us, and perception, where their effect on us is overwhelmingly greater than our effect on them. And this notion, of being such as other things make us, is such a prominent part of our life that we conceive other things also to exist by virtue of their reactions against each other. The idea of other, of not, becomes a very pivot of thought. To this element I give the name secondness. (CP 1.324)

I begin with the [element] which the rough and tumble of life renders most familiarly prominent. We are continually bumping up against hard fact. We expected one thing, or passively took it for granted, and had the image of it in our minds, but experience forces that idea into the background, and compels us to think quite differently. You get this kind of consciousness in some approach to purity when you put your shoulder against a door and try to force it open. You have a sense of resistance and at the same time a sense of effort. There can be no resistance without effort; there can be no effort without resistance. They are only two ways of describing the same experience ....

... The waking state is a consciousness of reaction; and as the consciousness itself is two-sided, so it has also two varieties; namely, action, where our modification of other things is more prominent than their reaction on us, and perception, where their effect on us is overwhelmingly greater than our effect on them (CP 1.32)

This is interesting because it gives a sort-of enactive and embodied approach.

"By an Object, I mean anything we can think; anything we can talk about. By real object, I mean anything of which whatever is true is so whether we think it to be so or not. To this definition, it might be objected that it applies to any object; since if any object is unreal, it is so whether we think it to be so or not: and we frequently think unreal objects to be real, but that objection falls to the ground, since we cannot think an unreal object to be real: we only think of some idea in mind as applying a [difficult to read] predicate to something out of our mind. Or, to state the objection otherwise, the only object of of which nothing else is true except unreality, is meerly the abstract idea of unreal and if we think that to be real..."

From Peirce's manuscripts: Reflections on Real and Unreal Objects (MS [R] 996)

Lazy Sunday.

Sunset walks in Edmonton.

Hot off the needles, my first pair of socks! The yarn is from @lichenandlace in wildflower, which I picked up from @yarnsuntangled in #yyz during the summer. I really like how the colour way looks like flowers on a mountainside—it really reminds me of spring! 🌱🌸

I often focus on the scenes in travel photography, cutting out people wherever possible; however, after binge-reviewing my old albums, I've noticed that the best photos are always ones where people are interacting with the environment--even when they're tourists!

Today I bit the data management bullet and started reviewing old photos. Geeze, I've forgotten how tedious it can be reviewing photos en masse: selecting them, editing them, exporting them, properly arranging them into albums..,

The most difficult part of any knitting project: unraveling because you dramatically underestimated how much yarn you have 🤦🏼‍♀️ I suppose I should be more mindful of my gauge.