Frances -- Many thanks for using an example in your latest on this thread.
Without them, your long and learned disquisitions, expressed entirely in
general
abstractions, are effectively inscrutable to non-Peirceans.
> (3B) The product of a single football exists as a token artifact,
> but the game of football exists as an ideal typical class of
> existent token football games, so to sense a specific football
> game is also to sense the general game of football, therefore the
> token and the type exist, and the token furthermore is an iconic
> sign that indicates its own tone and type.
>
I can't agree. My view, I'm afraid, says this thinking is based on a common
but almost never identified basic mistake. It's rarely identified because when
you hear it my guess is you'll feel the mistake is mine because my suggestion
is so bizarre. As Kate might observe, when we examine a specific football, we
experience a number of specific sense data, all of which we believe are
occasioned by an object "out there", ouside our minds. (There is even your "
collective group of percipients" who would corroborate our "perception".) We
could
point at the single object, palp it, smell it.
But there is nothing specific you can point at that is "the game". Everything
you can point at it is "accounted for" by sense data -- of this player
running this way, that player running after him with the ball, collisions --
none of
which is "the game". While we'd all agree there's a football "out there"
because we can point at the object etc, there is nothing we can point at, palp,
smell etc that is the game.
Does Peirce have a term for such "cluster" words -- of which there are many,
many: footall game, game, race, poem, novel, play and on and on. Or would he
say ALL words are cluster words, even for objects. E.g. Theseus's boat. For
those not familiar with that, a very old question in philosophy asked: If over
the course of many years of repairing his boat, Theseus replaced every single
piece of wood on the craft, is it still the SAME boat? Back in the 1890s, when
Frege began his musings that are sometimes credited with being the beginning of
the philosophy of language, he announcd his topic as the problem of "same".
**************
Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial
challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and
calculators.
(http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001)
