Franklin,
I’m not sure what Peirce meant by saying in 1893 that every proposition and
every argument can be regarded as a term, or what advantage a logician would
gain by regarding them that way. But to me it sounds like a precursor of his
(much later) observation that one can analyze a proposition by “throwing
everything” into the predicate or by throwing everything into the subject.
Maybe his comment in the Regenerated Logic also works in both directions.
In the Kaina Stoicheia passage, when Peirce says that the “totality of the
predicates of a sign” is “called its logical depth,” and that the “totality of
the subjects … of a sign is called the logical breadth,” the sign he is
referring to has to be a proposition, because only propositions include
subjects and predicates. Each subject and each predicate can be called a
“term,” but it’s the breadth and depth of the whole sign, the proposition, that
Peirce is defining here, not the breadth or depth of the terms (which is what
he defined in ULCE). And, as you say, propositions and arguments also have
information (which for Peirce is the logical product of breadth and depth).
Gary f.
} The birth and death of the leaves are the rapid whirls of the eddy whose
wider circles move slowly among the stars. [Tagore] {
<http://gnusystems.ca/wp/> http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ Turning Signs gateway
From: Franklin Ransom [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 8-Nov-15 12:32
To: [email protected] 1 <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Vol. 2 of Collected Papers, on Induction
Gary F, list,
Gary, thank you, thank you so much for finding that quote about the information
of propositions and arguments! I spent so many hours, and not just yesterday,
trying to find that quote again. I'll have to keep it somewhere I'll be sure to
find it. Btw, it's 407, not 406, at least in the Intelex version on Past
Masters.
Now, you said:
One place where Peirce uses the terms breadth and depth in reference to the
proposition (rather than the term) is “Kaina Stoicheia” (1904), EP2:305:e
I'm confused. I had just read that passage again yesterday, and then again when
you quoted it. But I don't see reference to the breadth and depth in reference
to the proposition. Rather, it is still to terms, understood with respect to
the roles they play in propositions and how such roles determine the
information a given term signifies. This is just what we find in ULCE; there is
nothing new in Kaina Stoicheia. Perhaps I have misunderstood something?
Returning to the quote from the note to CP2:407, I wonder what he meant that
"[i]n fact, every proposition and every argument can be regarded as a term." I
recall Stjernfelt said in NP, p.79, that "both Rhemes and Dicisigns may be seen
as potential or truncated Arguments rather than autonomous figures:", and he
goes on to quote Peirce:
I have maintained since 1867 that there is but one primary and fundamental
logical relation, that of illation, expressed by ergo. A proposition, for me,
is but an argumentation divested of the assertoriness of its premiss and
conclusion. This makes every proposition a conditional proposition at bottom.
In like manner a "term," or class-name, is for me nothing but a proposition
with its indices or subjects left blank, or indefinite. ("The Regenerated
Logic, 1896, 3.440)
However, this goes in the direction of arguments, not in the direction of
terms. How can every proposition and every argument be regarded as a term? If
he had said this before explaining how the concept of information applies to
propositions and arguments, I would have thought that he simply meant they can
be regarded as terms insofar as they too have information. But since he
concludes with that statement, my guess is that he meant something more by it.
But what? Or maybe I'm reading too much into it, and he just meant to say
exactly that, that like terms, propositions and arguments also have information.
Franklin
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