Continuing from Lowell 2.2:
.The board itself is a graph, since it represents the universe as consisting of single imaginary things. The board and what is written on it together make up another graph. It is quite important, however, to distinguish between a graph and a graph replica. Suppose an editor writes to me and asks for an article of 4000 words. You know what he means by words in that case. In what I write the single word "the" may occur twenty times on every page. Every time it will count as a separate word. Yet in another sense, it is the same word. In this latter sense, the word the consists in the sum total of general conditions to which ink-marks or voice-sounds must conform in order to be understood in a certain way. In this sense the word the is, strictly speaking, never written; but what is written conforms to it, or, as we say, embodies it. In the other sense a written word is written once and only once, since every act of writing makes a new word. Now when I speak of a graph, I mean the general type of whatever means the same thing and expresses that meaning in the same way so far as the conventions of this system take cognizance of the ways; while that which is scribed once and only once and embodies the graph, I call a graph-replica. For brevity, however, I speak of "scribing a graph" just as we speak of writing the word the. The phrase may be defended as employing the word "scribe" in a special sense. I will now put an additional replica upon the board, or the sheet of assertion Let us agree to understand that each of those replicas has the same meaning as if it stood alone; and that it shall be the same with any other two replicas on the sheet, so that I now assert not only that there is a ripe pear, but also that it rains. By calling this system a system of existential graphs, my meaning is that two graphs at different points of the board, whether far or near, are both asserted, each just as much as if the other were not there. Manuscript and transcription: https://fromthepage.com/jeffdown1/c-s-peirce-manuscripts/ms-455-456-1903-low ell-lecture-ii/display/13600 <http://gnusystems.ca/Lowells.htm> http://gnusystems.ca/Lowell2.htm }{ Peirce's Lowell Lectures of 1903 https://fromthepage.com/jeffdown1/c-s-peirce-manuscripts/ms-455-456-1903-low ell-lecture-ii
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