On 2/8/2017 12:31 PM, Jerry LR Chandler wrote:
The three triads of CSP, qualisign, sinsign, legisign; icon, index, symbol; rhema, dicisign, argument, can be, in my opinion, a “recipe” for realism; that is, the logical association of antecedent observations (Qualisigns with logical consequences (legisigns)) What I find exceedingly curious about the (strange) words of this table is that only the last word, “argument” is used in logic. The other eight words are merely dictionary words. Clearly, some similarity with 21 st Century AI exists in these three 19th Century triads.
I have discussed, written about, and lectured on Peirce's semiotic to various audiences -- mostly in AI and cognitive science. His terminology is indeed a deterrent for many people.
One wonders why CSP’s three triads have not been adopted.
The words qualisign, sinsign, legisign, rhema, and dicisign have no chance of being accepted. Even Peirce scholars use them only when discussing Peirce's writings. The triad of icon, index, and symbol is the most widely recognized, cited, and used -- partly because the words are more common. Peirce's terms 'type' and 'token' are widely used even by people who have no idea where they came from. And the words 'predicate' and 'proposition' are common in logic. For teaching Peirce's semiotic, I therefore recommend that those five words should be replaced with terms that CSP himself used: mark, token, type; icon, index, symbol; predicate, proposition, argument. See Figure 2, page 5 of "Signs and reality": http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signs.pdf
For example, consider an index of species. Is it real? Or, ideal?
For both a nominalist and a realist, an index is something observable: a pointing finger, a pronoun in speech or writing, or a physical occurrence of some kind. But a species is a type, which is determined by some law of nature. A realist would say that the law is real. But a nominalist would say that a law is merely a pattern of words that summarize some observational data. In short, both nominalists and realists could use the nine terms above in practical applications. They would often reach the same conclusions, but they would disagree about the existence of referents for the words in the third column. John
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