, the next most popular philosophical architectonic structures are triads, triplicities, or trinities.
Some philosophers describe their triads as three "worlds," just as dualism is often described in terms of an Ideal World and a Material World. The deep philosophical (and scientific) question is - do these divisions "carve Nature at the joints," as Plato put it in the Phaedrus
We analyze examples, and find that the three worlds are most often simply the canonical Ideal/Material dualism with an interpolated third world corresponding to a human world (or more broadly, the biological world), with its obvious connection to the world of "subjective?" ideas above and the "objective" material world below.
's Three Realms
- An External Realm of Public Physical Things and Events
- An Internal Subjective Realm of Private Thoughts
- An "Objective" Platonic Realm of Ideal "Senses" (to which sentences refer, providing their meaning)
's Three Worlds (clearly influenced by Frege)
Charles Sanders Peirce
- World I - "the realm of physical things and processes"
- World II - "the realm of subjective human experience"
- World III - "the realm of culture and objective knowledge" - of human artifacts (our Sum)
's Three Universes of Experience.
Peirce's first and third worlds are both immaterial (our Sum
), with the material world in the middle. So a better triad would have had Signs in the middle as human inventions mediating between the ideal and the material. Peirce's triad of Objects - Percepts - Concepts is in the correct order. Another related Peircean triad is Tychasm/Chance, Ananchasm/Necessity, and Synechism/Continuity, or Evolutionary Love.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
- Firstness - Ideas
- Secondness - Things
- Thirdness - Signs.
's Three Phases of Development.
Teilhard tried to divide evolution into different temporal phases, which maps well onto our three levels of information emergence .
- Geosphere - Inanimate Matter
- Biosphere - Living Things
- Noösphere - Human Cognition.
The Information Philosopher
's Three levels of Information Emergence (seen in our tri-color I-Phi logo)
- The Physical/Material (green) - Ilya Prigogine's "order out of chaos," when the matter in the universe forms information structures
- The Biological/Material (red) - Erwin Schrödinger's "order out of order," when the material information structures form teleonomic self-replicating biological information structures that communicate and process information
- The Mental/Immaterial (blue) - Bob Doyle's abstract "information out of order," when organisms with minds create and externalize information, communicating it to other minds and storing it in the environment for future humans
's Three Sources that "Ground" Authoritative Knowledge
- The Traditional - Knowledge is inherited, handed down, from the great thinkers of the past (compare Frege's "Objective" Platonic Realm of Ideal "Senses" to which sentences "refer," providing their meaning)
- The Modern - Knowledge is created by Reason, by providing a rational account (logos) of how things are, augmented by modern empirical science since the Enlightenment
- The Post-Modern - all cultural knowledge is "relative" to the culture that invented it. For conservative post-moderns, science can establish knowledge about an objective external world. For radical post-moderns, "anything goes" (Feyerabend), even science "invents/creates reality." There are no grounds/foundations for knowledge, for "justified true beliefs."
's three kinds of dynamics.
- Homeodynamic- "Any dynamic process that spontaneously reduces a system's
constraints to their minimum and thus more evenly distributes system properties
across space and time. The second law of thermodynamics describes the paradigm case" (thus states of thermodynamic equilibrium, with maximal disorder and with minimal information? If so, "thermodynamic" might be a better term?)
- Morphodynamic - "Dynamical organization exhibiting the tendency to become
spontaneously more organized and orderly over time due to constant perturbation,
but without the extrinsic imposition of influences that specifically
impose that regularity" (thus both Prigogine's "order out of chaos" and Schrödinger's "order out of order" are morphodynamic; note that both of these are "negentropic")
- Teleodynamic - "A form of dynamical organization exhibiting end-directedness
and consequence-organized features that is constituted by the co-creation,
complementary constraint, and reciprocal synergy of two or more strongly
coupled morphodynamic processes" (end-directedness is usually called "teleonomic")
's levels of Culture Emergence.
- Mimetic: the "copycat" or "monkey see, monkey do" ability of primates facilitated transfer of learning, ritual
- Mythic: language in humans, mental/brain development is influenced by social network of speakers generating symbols for ideas
- Informatic: External storage of knowledge - writing, printing, computers, Internet
Types of Triads
- Levels: Material - Biological/Human - Ideal (physis - bios/nomos - logos)
- Inner Levels: Body - Mind/Brain - Spirit
- Plato: Truth - Goodness - Beauty
- Aristotle/Kant: Epistemology - Ethics - Aesthetics
- Number: One - Two/Many - All (unity - duality/plurality - totality)
- Person: I - You - We (self - other - society/community)
- Truth: Correspondence - Coherence - Consistency (empirical - conventional/pragmatic - logical)
- Time: Past - Present - Future
- Family: Father - Mother - Son
- Dialectic: Thesis - Antithesis - Synthesis (new higher thesis)
- Hume's Relations: Similarity - Contiguity - Causality (form - space - time)
- Medieval Trivium: Grammar - Rhetoric - Logic
- Rhetoric: Simile - Metonym - Metaphor
- Peirce: Objects - Percepts - Concepts
- Peirce's Semiotics: Icon - Index - Symbol
- Peirce's Symbol: Ground - Object - Interpretant
- Peirce's Science: Abduction (hypothesis) - Induction - Deduction
- Grounds: Tradition - Modern - Postmodern
- Beliefs: Naturalism - Humanism - Spiritualism (supernatural/superhuman)
- Matter: Solid - Liquid - Gas (earth - water - air)
- Time: Begin - Middle - End (archos - physis/nomos - telos)
- Journey: Eden - Fall - Atonement (home - travels - homecoming)
- Life: Birth - Life - Death
A Few Tetrads
- Classical Materials: Earth - Water - Air - Fire (anticipating today's states of matter: solid - liquid - gas - plasma)
- Plato's Divided Line: Stories - Techniques - Hypotheses - Theories (eikasia - pistis - dianoia - noesis)
- Aristotle's Causes: Material cause - Efficient cause - Formal cause - Final cause (He considered chance to be a possible fifth cause.)
- Graeco-Roman Four Temperaments (or humors): Choleric (yellow bile), Melancholic (black bile), Sanguine (blood), and Phlegmatic (phlegm)
anticipating the four major neurotransmitters from the brain stem that regulate mood: Serotonin, Dopamine, GABA and Norepinephrine.
- Medieval cosmology: Earth (below us) - Water (with us) - Air (above us) - Stars (beyond us)
- The medieval scholastic Quadrivium: Math - Geometry - Music - Astronomy (number - space - time - motion)
- Schopenhauer's Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason: Being -Becoming - Knowing - Willing
- Heidegger's Geviert (2x2): Earth - Mortals - Heavens - Gods
- Derrida's Jeu des Cartes
C.S. Pierce's "response to the anticipated suspicion that he
attaches a superstitious or fanciful importance to the number
three, and forces divisions to a Procrustean bed of trichotomy."
"I fully admit that there is a not uncommon craze for trichotomies... I am not so
afflicted; but I find myself obliged, for truth's sake, to make
such a large number of trichotomies that I could not [but] wonder if my readers, especially those of them who are in the way of knowing how common the malady is, should suspect, or even
opine, that I am a victim of it. But I am now and here going
to convince those who are open to conviction, that it is not so,
but that there is a good reason why a thorough student of the
subject of this book should be led to make trichotomies, that
the nature of the science is such that not only is it to be expected that it should involve real trichotomies, but furthermore, that there is a cause that tends to give this form."
(Collected Papers, C.S.Peirce, Principles of Philosophy, 1.568)
David Hume's discovery of the only three possible bases for the association of ideas.
"The fact that different ideas are connected is too obvious to be overlooked; yet I have not found any philosopher trying to list or classify all the sources of association. This seems to be worth doing. To me there appear to be only three factors connecting ideas with one another,
namely, Resemblance, Contiguity in time or place, and Cause or Effect.
I don’t think there will be much doubt that our ideas are connected by these factors. A
picture naturally leads our thoughts to the thing that is depicted in it; the mention of one room
naturally introduces remarks or questions about other rooms in the same building; and if we
think of a wound, we can hardly help thinking about the pain that follows it. But it will be hard to prove to anyone’s satisfaction - the reader’s or my own - that this these three are the only sources of association among our ideas. All we can do is to consider a large number of instances where ideas are connected, find in each case what connects them, and eventually develop a really general account of this phenomenon. The more cases we look at, and the more care we employ on them, the more assured we can be that our final list of principles of association is complete." (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section III, Of the Association of Ideas, David Hume)
"We have three relationships
- one to this bodily shell which envelops us
- one to the Divine cause which is the Source of everything in all things
- and one to our fellow mortals around us."
(Marcus Aurelius, Book VIII, 27)
"“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me"
(Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:161.33-6)