James Chastek over at Just Thomism has an interesting short post on Peirce’s argument against Nominalism ‘in favor of forms that are both common and existing in things apart from the consideration of mind’.
Chastek illustrates the argument this way:
I can pick up and drop ten rocks and watch them fall each time, and I can flip ten fair coins and watch them land on heads ten times, but I have totally different expectations of what will happen in each case on the eleventh try. I know there is something about rocks that is at work to ensure results and so know what is going to happen, but I know there is nothing at work in the coins. In the first I see a pattern, in the second only a fluke.
The ‘reality’ of form, in a Peircian sense, was important to my doctoral project ‘constructing a cosmology hospitable to spirit’.