Ben,
I’ve been trying to disentangle some of the same knots you’re working on here, but you’ve been one step ahead of me (if not two or three) all along; some local busyness here has kept me from digging further into the “Prolegomena” and the Roberts book as I’d like to. I keep coming back to the Prolegomena, and it seems a bit less opaque each time, but i still have a hard time reading EGs. Just a couple of remarks on your investigation: The passage in Roberts that you cite starts on p. 103, not 109. As for Peirce’s “corrected” graph (Roberts Fig. 14, but it looks a bit different there): my tentative reading of it is: “There is someone who is not both (a) the wife of a husband who does not fail and (b) a suicide.” That’s reading a graph of teridentity which has its three-way junction on the verso (I’m assuming that the shading here indicates the verso). This seems different from your reading, and maybe that of Roberts too, but I’m not at all sure it’s right. The whole issue (including its relation to the “strange rule”) is still unclear to me, and I think I’ll have to come back to it later as I have so many times to the Prolegomena already. EGs seem to do that to me. :-\ (That last comment is iconic, but not optimally … ) gary f. From: Benjamin Udell [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 13-Feb-15 4:19 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce in 1913 on existential graphs List, I've found by Googling sufficiently, that Don D. Roberts discussed the 1913 Peirce-to-Woods passage on existential graphs, starting on page 109 in _The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce Page 109: https://books.google.com/books?id=Q4K30wCAf-gC <https://books.google.com/books?id=Q4K30wCAf-gC&pg=PA103&lpg=PA103&dq=%22as+I+did,+I+should+have+scribed%22> &pg=PA103&lpg=PA103&dq=%22as+I+did,+I+should+have+scribed%22 First few words on page 110: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22eight+sentences%2C+and+only+one+of+them+seems+to+me+to+contain+an+error.+That%22 Roberts quotes sentences in the letter to Woods that the CP didn't. Peirce says he made a "blunder," and goes on to say "Curiously enough it was not until two years after the publication that I happened to notice my fallacy." For my part, I kind of doubt that Peirce was thinking it fallacious as early as 1908. Anyway, then Peirce shows the original graph and his correction of it, upon which he comments "It would pay any very accurate thinker, such as you and Royce are, to examine the fallacy," and adds, as in CP 8, ". . . [This fallacy] cost me the trouble of my nonsensical 'tinctures' and heraldry." Don D. Roberts says of this: Three questions arise: (1) What is the fallacy or 4.569? (2) How would the substitution of Fig. 14 for Fig. 3 repair the fallacy? (3) How did the fallacy lead Peirce to his 'nonsensical' tinctures? (1) I can find no fallacy in the disputed passage. The passage contains eight sentences, and only one of them seems to me to contain an error. That one is the fifth sentence, which claims that Fig. 3 [End quote] "Fig. 3" is the label added by Roberts to Peirce's rendition of his supposedly fallacious Prolegomena graph. The second Google search linked above got me the words "one is the fifth sentence, which claims that Fig. 3". Roberts finds no fallacy in the disputed Prolegomena passage, and one error in the passage, by which Roberts presumably does not mean the passage in the letter to Woods, of which Roberts quotes six, not eight, sentences. The passage in Prolegomena beginning in the middle of 4.569 "For the sake of illustrating this...," and continuing to the paragraph's end contains eight sentences (excluding the Fourth Permission itself to which it points). The fifth sentence is "That, at least, is all it will seem to mean if we fail to take account of the fact, that being all in one Province, it is said that her suicide is connected with his failure." I myself have felt some confusion over the paragraph around that point, so I guess Roberts nailed down that particular problem. Does anybody know what Roberts went on to say? I suppose I could buy his book. Instead of appending the previous posts in this thread, I'll just include the part quoted from CP 8: [CP 8 Bibliography: I. General: 1905 (pages 298-299) With brackets in the original, and Zeman-style renditions by me of the graphs appearing there, Quote :] In a letter to F. A. Woods, [Bibliography]M-22, Peirce says that the material in [CP] 4.569, from "For the sake of illustrating this . . ." up to the statement of the Fourth Permission, is wrong. He says: "Instead of scribing as I did, I should have scribed ". . . [This fallacy] cost me the trouble of my nonsensical 'tinctures' and heraldry. "I am also sceptical as to the universal validity of my '4th permission.'" [End quote ] Best, Ben
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