Jon, I trust you are eventually going to say something relevant to the content of my “Rhematics” post, but in the meantime, here’s the follow-up I promised, which specifically relates developments in Peirce’s logic to his categories and his Existential Graphs.
Peirce was critical of logicians who, like Aristotle, tried to derive logical principles from what were really characteristics of language. He was also critical of “psychologism” or the attempt to draw logical principles from the study of how human minds work. But that doesn't mean he had nothing to say about psychology or linguistics; it's just that his remarks about them usually occur in a logical (sometimes phenomenological) context. Linguistics, in its analysis of the “parts of speech,” makes a basic distinction between nouns and verbs, which is often taken as equivalent to the distinction between subject and predicate in logic. Peirce on the other hand distinguished between proper nouns (names of individuals) and common nouns (general nouns), and he grouped common nouns with verbs and other “words which signify.” For instance, CP 4.157 (c. 1897): [[ The mind, by its instinctive adaptation to the Outer World, represents things as being in space, which is its intuitive representation of the clustering of reactions. What we call a Thing is a cluster or habit of reactions, or, to use a more familiar phrase, is a centre of forces. In consequence, of this double mode of association of ideas, when man comes to form a language, he makes words of two classes, words which denominate things, which things he identifies by the clustering of their reactions, and such words are proper names, and words which signify, or mean, qualities, which are composite photographs of ideas of feelings, and such words are verbs or portions of verbs, such as are adjectives, common nouns, etc.]] In one of his drafts for the Cambridge lectures of 1898, Peirce applied this distinction to his early terminology for Existential Graphs. NEM4:338 (R439): [[Any part of a graph which only needs to have lines of identity attached to it to become a complete graph, signifying an assertion, I call a verb. The places at which lines of identity can be attached to the verb I call its blank subjects. I distinguish verbs according to the numbers of their subject blanks, as medads, monads, dyads, triads, etc.]] At this point, the lines of identity are themselves verbs, but their ends are proper nouns or demonstrative pronouns. Together with the juxtapositions and the “ovals” which later became “cuts,” this gives us three kinds of sign corresponding to Peirce's three categories. NEM4:339 (R439): [[In the system of graphs may be remarked three kinds of signs of very different natures. First, there are the verbs, of endless variety. Among these is the line signifying identity. But, second the ends of the line of identity (and every verb ought to [be] conceived as having such loose ends) are signs of a totally different kind. They are demonstrative pronouns, indicating existing objects, not necessarily material things, for they may be events, or even qualities, but still objects, merely designated as this or that. In the third place the writing of verbs side by side, and the ovals enclosing graphs not asserted but subjects of assertion, which last is continually used in mathematics and makes one of the great difficulties of mathematics, constitute a third, entirely different kind of sign. Signs of the first kind represent objects in their firstness, and give the significations of the terms. Signs of the second kind represent objects as existing,—and therefore as reacting,—and also in their reactions. They contribute the assertive character to the graph. Signs of the third kind represent objects as representative, that is in their thirdness, and upon them turn all the inferential processes. In point of fact, it was considerations about the categories which taught me how to construct the system of graphs.]] This, i would submit, represents an early stage in the evolution of the trichotomy rheme/dicisign/argument. If so, it shows the continuity between Aristotle's rhema, or verb, and Peirce's rheme (or predicate) as represented in Existential Graphs. Another observation Peirce made later about linguistics reiterates the idea that common or general nouns are more like verbs than they are like proper nouns or pronouns. This is an important point for Peirce because it shows that logicians err in separating the copula from the predicate in their analysis of propositions – and the error seems to arise from a psycholinguistic prejudice which prevents them seeing the primacy of verbs over common nouns. EP2:285: [[It happens to be true that in the overwhelming majority of languages there are no general class names and adjectives that are not conceived as parts of some verb (even when there really is no such verb) and consequently nothing like a copula is required in forming sentences in such languages. The author (though with no pretension to being a linguist), has fumbled the grammars of many languages in the search for a language constructed at all in the way in which the logicians go out of their way to teach that all men think (for even if they do so, that has really nothing to do with logic). The only such tongue that he has succeeded in finding is the Basque, which seems to have but two or three verbs, all the other principal words being conceived as nouns. Every language must have proper names; and there is no verb wrapped up in a proper name. Therefore, there would seem to be a direct suggestion there of a true common noun or adjective. But, notwithstanding that suggestion, almost every family of man thinks of general words as parts of verbs. This seems to refute the logicians' psychology.]] This explains why Peirce analyzes the proposition into subject and predicate, rather than following the traditional three-term analysis into subject, predicate and copula. Peirce’s logic has here come a long way from Aristotle's distinction between onoma and rhema (see http://gnusystems.ca/wp/2017/05/rhematics/), but in my view the developmental path has been continuous in all its twists and turns. Gary f. -----Original Message----- From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 29-May-17 17:00 Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Re: Jay Zeman's existentialgraphs.com Gary, List ... Re: <http://gnusystems.ca/wp/2017/05/rhematics/> http://gnusystems.ca/wp/2017/05/rhematics/ I hope to comment more fully, eventually, but the uses to which Susan Awbrey and I turned Aristotle's passage from De Interp can be found in our paper from 1992/1995: * Awbrey, J.L., and Awbrey, S.M. (Autumn 1995), “Interpretation as Action : The Risk of Inquiry”, ''Inquiry : Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines'' 15(1), pp. 40–52. …
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