Clark, List: In Peirce's terminology, a diagram is a certain *type *of icon--one that "resembles" its object by embodying the significant *relations *among its parts. The notion of *significant *relations (rather than *all *relations) is where your point about "more and less" comes into play. As you suggested, I wonder if the diagram specified by the universal "red" is simply the continuous spectrum of colors that correspond to electromagnetic wavelengths between 620 and 750 nm, or if John S. has something else in mind. Either way, I suspect that the diagram specified by the universal "lion" is much more difficult to characterize.
Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 9:29 AM, CLARK GOBLE <cl...@lextek.com> wrote: > On Mar 28, 2017, at 6:52 AM, Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > But the point of Peirce's extreme scholastic realism is that the universal > "red" is *not *defined by the collection of all red things, and the > universal "lion" is *not* defined by the collection of all lions. > Rather, each universal/general is a *continuum *that encompasses all > *possible *reds or all *possible* lions. Between any two *actual *reds or > *actual *lions, there is an inexhaustible supply of *potential *reds or > *potential *lions that would be intermediate between them. What kind of > diagram does each of these universals/generals specify accordingly? What > significant relations does it embody? How are we relating a stop sign to a > diagram when we call it red, or an animal at the zoo to a diagram when we > call it a lion? > > I’m curious as to John’s response. My own would be that different diagrams > can get at different aspects of the universal but not necessarily represent > it fully. As Icons there would typically be lost data. So you might have a > graph of red things to represent the general of redness without necessarily > arguing that the general arises out of red things (as with say Armstrong > Universals). You might have a graph that specifies the range of colors > represented by the general red (as some linguists do to compare color signs > between cultures) and so forth. > > The nature of an icon is to resemble the object but that usually means > that there’s a matter of ‘more and less.’ That is there are additions that > aren’t part of the original object and aspects that are missing. >
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