Jon A. and Clark,
JA
Already by 1870 Peirce ... shifts individuality from a category
of being to a category of description, relative to a particular
discourse situation...
That's an important observation.
CG
I think really what we’re getting at is Peirce’s notion of the
Universe of Discourse. The question then becomes what distinguishes
or differentiates one universe of discourse from an other?
In logic (Peirce's as well as everybody else's), the universe of
discourse is the set over which the quantifiers range. Two UoDs
are distinct iff the sets are distinct.
Peirce also said that one might have more than one UoD in
a single sentence. An example would be a language L with some
UoD U1, and a metalanguage L2 that talks about L and about
the relationship of L to some particular subject.
CG
We can of course distinguish two universes such as the universe
in which Superman exists and the universe (such as our own)
in which he does not.
Yes, consider the following sentence:
"I think that Tom believes Superman is real, but
Mary knows he's just a character in a story."
This sentence would have four UoDs: (1) the world that includes
Tom, Mary, and me; (2) the UoD of my thought; (3)the UoD of Tom's
belief, and (4) the UoD of Mary's knowledge.
John
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