By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
A transcendental convertible with "real" is "one." But if possibilities form a continuum—in Peirce's phrase, "a multitude beyond all multitudes"-how can a possibility be "one" as well as "real," "true," "good," and "beautiful"?
Even granting my principle that convertible transcendentals, including "one," must apply to concretes in a different way or sense from that in which they apply to abstracts, and to the one divine reality in a different way or sense from that in which they apply to any nondivine reality—even granting this, there still seems to be a problem. For, so far as I can see, the only way or sense in which a possibility could be one is in whatever way or sense a determinable, as distinct from a determinate, can be one. But what way or sense is that? I can't improve upon the answer implied by what Hartshorne says about possibilities being determinables, and so on.
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[P]ossibilities are determinables not determinates. . . . Given a determinate how[,] we can relate it to the [sc. determinable] somehow, but given only the somehow we cannot relate it to a determinate how. Determinables are not classes of determinates, but aspects of creativity relevant to such classes, so far as the latter are given (CSPM: 65.).
[B]y 'possibility of particular P' we mean, if we understand ourselves, only that the previous phase of process defined itself as destined to be superseded somehow, within certain limits of variation, by a next phase of process. The 'somehow' is not, however, a wholly undifferentiated question mark, but involves some modes of contrast, of 'alternative possibilities,' none of which can coincide in character with the particular which later turns up, but some one of which, or some one region of the continuum of possible quality, will later be recognizable as the nearest alternative or region, the one which with the least further definition is equivalent to the particular" (RSP: 97 ff.).
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According to this, a determinable can be one because the "somehow" it is is always "within certain limits of variation," or "is not ... a wholly undifferentiated question mark, but involves some modes of contrast, of 'alternative possibilities,' . . . some one of which, or some region of the continuum of possible quality, will later be recognizable as the nearest alternative or region, the one [sic!] which with the least further definition [or determination?] is equivalent to the particular." In other words, although the oneness of a determinable can be defined only relatively to that of some determinate, it is not at all relative to any determiner, because "with the least further definition [or, better, determination]" is as nonrelative or objective as anything you please.
1 September 2005
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