Gary, List,
That is a very familiar passage and the discussion
that always follows is a very old discussion among
all the usual cherry-pickers.
The short shrift is something like this. It is obvious
from the context that Peirce is using the word “calculus”
in some specialized 19th century sense most likely common
among professional computers. That is all well and good.
We should remember that it once had that special sense.
On the other hand, I am using the word “calculus” in the sense
that is commonly used today, for instance, as it occurs in the
studies of the “differential and integral calculus” or the
“propositional calculus”, and none of these studies have
anything to do with skipping over steps of analysis,
indeed, quite the opposite.
Of course, people are free to keep using words in peculiar senses,
just so long as they understand that they will be misunderstood.
When people insist on doing that, the usual remedy is finding
other words for the intended senses. In this case, one may
substitute words like “formal language” or “formal system”
for “calculus”. It just costs a few more syllables and
most people will gradually weary of that, eventually
reverting to the common idioms.
Regards,
Jon
On 4/6/2016 8:30 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Jon wrote,
[[ Peirce's existential graphs are a general calculus for expressing the same
subject matter as his earlier logic of
relative terms and thus they serve to represent the structures of many-place
relations. ]]
Peirce wrote,
[[[ this system is not intended as a calculus, or apparatus by which
conclusions can be reached and problems solved
with greater facility than by more familiar systems of expression. Although
some writers have studied the logical
algebras invented by me with that end apparently in view, in my own opinion
their structure, as well as that of the
present system, is quite antagonistic to much utility of that sort. The
principal desideratum in a calculus is that
it should be able to pass with security at one bound over a series of difficult
inferential steps. What these
abbreviated inferences may best be, will depend upon the special nature of the
subject under discussion. But in my
algebras and graphs, far from anything of that sort being attempted, the whole
effort has been to dissect the
operations of inference into as many distinct steps as possible. —CP 4.424
(c.1903) ]]]
[[[ The sheet of the graphs in all its states collectively, together with the
laws of its transformations,
corresponds to and represents the Mind in its relation to its thoughts,
considered as signs. … The scribed graphs are
determinations of the sheet, just as thoughts are determinations of the mind;
and the mind itself is a comprehensive
thought just as the sheet considered in all its actual transformation-states
and transformations, taken collectively,
is a graph-instance and taken in all its permissible transformations is a
graph. Thus the system of existential
graphs is a rough and generalized diagram of the Mind, and it gives a better
idea of what the mind is, from the point
of view of logic, than could be conveyed by any abstract account of it. —CP
5.482, 1906 ]]]
Gary f.
-----Original Message----- From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:[email protected]] Sent:
5-Apr-16 18:00 To: [email protected];
'Peirce List' <[email protected]> Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Systems Of
Interpretation
On 4/5/2016 9:11 AM, <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] wrote:
By the way, since Jon’s diagram is nothing like an Existential Graph, > I
don't know why Jon refers to the central
unit in it as a “spot.”
Peirce uses that term only in the context of Existential Graphs, > which are
also not diagrams of the
sign-object-interpretant > relation.
Gary, List,
Peirce's existential graphs are a general calculus for expressing the same
subject matter as his earlier logic of
relative terms and thus they serve to represent the structures of many-place
relations.
Cast at that level of generality, there is nothing to prevent them from being
used to express the special cases of
relative terms that we need in a theory of triadic sign relations, for example,
terms like “s stands to i for o” or
“__ stands to __ for __” depending on the form one prefers. People sometimes
get wigged out about the fact that we
have to use sign relations in order to mention sign relations, but the fact is
that we do that all the time whether
we are using Peirce's semiotics or not. Peirce just makes the process a whole
lot clearer than most others do.
Regards,
Jon
--
academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey
my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/
inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
isw: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/JLA
oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey
facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache
-----------------------------
PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L
to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To
UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the
line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at
http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
