Frances to Cheerskep and others... Peirce posits that philosophy needs a distinct peculiar vocabulary that is technically and logically specialized, so that thinkers will understand the precise meaning of its terms in order that they will think with expertise and exactitude and certainty. This suggestion seems appropriate and reasonable, considering the field it is directed toward, and if the unique jargon must be sprinkled with neologisms then so be it. The evolutionary building up of any language with signs as words is actually a metaphoric process of iconic analogy, so that even neologisms will be somewhat similar to their objects of reference or subjects of definition. Peircean neologisms taken together however attempt to define a whole system of philosophy, and not merely single concepts in isolation, which motive may justify their use.
The symbolic logic and logical syntax that is now being used in philosophy is clearly a kind of language akin to that of pure mathematics, which aspires to satisfy this posited need. When it is taken to its positivist extreme however it then becomes misleading, in that any kind of lingual system for logic will yield a degraded or degenerate version of logic. The limit of perceptual knowledge after all is sentience and experience, while the limit of conceptual knowledge is inference and intelligence. Knowledge is tethered because thought and mind must use signs made of existent phenomenal stuff, which boundary entails that thinkers can only guess at what seems to be the meaning of signs by interpreting them. What are being interpreted nonetheless are objective signs, and not subjective notions incited by those signs, because the thinker is brought into a relation with the sign and its meaning, and not with their own inner sense or knowledge of them, since it is after all the sign that is held to bear meaning and not the thinker or the mind. This approach denies virtually any place for psychologism in the practice of logic. Under the realist pragmatism of Peirce it is held that when a mind senses a sign yielding some meant content there will be two given sets of properties sensed simultaneously in the one sign, which are the ideal general classes of meaning the sign may be a member of and the real special tokens that the sign in fact seems to be. The form of the token sign will conform to the referred meaning carried by the sign, and the typical class as an interpretant effect will control this conformity, thereby assuring thinkers of some normality. The conformity is controlled by both sign and meaningful content actually being tethered within a limited margin or related ground of interest. The meaning hence must remain in the sphere or domain or realm of the sign at issue. All of this extensional and intensional restriction of objects is attended to by the logic of relativity. Cheerskep partly wrote... Frances reports that Peirce wrote: "Philosophy has a peculiar need of a language distinct and detached from common speech, with a vocabulary so outlandish that loose thinkers shall not be tempted to borrow its words." This sounds good in principle, but it fails in practice. Peirce himself is reported late in life to have lamented his style of writing because it made so much of his work "unreadable". In argument it simply makes the eyes water. The Peirce quote at the top continues: "This is particularly true in logic, which wholly consists, one might almost say, in exactitude of thought." So philosophers, "mathematical logicians", spent half a century or so devising several systems of symbolic logic. As Peirce anticipated, such systems had a virtue: Learning these strange new symbols was like learning a foreign language, a foreign alphabet. The student memorized the one and only notion the logicians wanted them to entertain when they saw a given symbol. This eliminated the problem of readers conjuring all sorts of varying notions with varying associations accumulated over lifetimes of varying experiences. But -- big, big fault: If the one-and-only notion was itself muddled, then ensuring that that notion was the one that arose each-and-every time the symbol was used was no virtue at all. And mathematical logic is riddled with ultimately indefensible notion.
