Mary: It was also startling to read the fourth paragraph. It compelled me to re-read the earlier paragraphs several times. CSP’s strange insistence on the logical perplexity of repeating words in sentences (or on sheets of assertion) has long puzzled me.
I am not aware of any similar conundrum related to this rare notion of a conundrum in either the symbolic logic of mathematics or grammar. Is the metaphor of “trustee” in the previous sentence is a potent clue? (the paragraphs are reproduced below.) > On Nov 21, 2017, at 10:48 AM, Mary Libertin <[email protected]> wrote: > > This paragraph I’ve written above raises so many possible problems and > questions. Is the blot that he discusses earlier in his Harvard lecture a way > to begin an enactment of the play of musement or process of semiosis at an > elemental level — In perception? > Or, how is Peirce’s above paragraph related to nominalism? Can you expand on your first question is some detail? It is extraordinarily compact and can be interpreted in numerous ways. As for the second question, I would conjecture that this sentence is remote from any notion nominalism (or Husserlian phenomenology) because it rests on a strong form of extension of scientific meaning that is not related to the usual blather (that is, lack of meaning of identity in scientific reasoning) of set theory. Knowing that you speak from the voice of another discipline, What does this response to your second question mean to you? Cheers jerry Happy Thanksgiving to All! "If you bear in mind these characteristics of proper names, you will perceive that when lawyers and others use the letters A, B, C as a sort of improved relative pronouns, saying for example that if A owes B money and C owes A money, then B may “trustee” C for the debt (as you say in Massachusetts), these letters differ from new proper names only in the accidental circumstance that they are first introduced in the antecedent of a conditional proposition while proper names are first introduced in positive assertions. I call such improvised proper names selectives. There is nothing to prevent our using the capital letters as such individual names, provided we distinguish the first replicaby scribing it heavily or otherwise. I cannot say that this is a bad way; it serves the purpose of putting out of view confusing [trifles?]. But I do say that it requires rather complicated rules, and from every other point of view except that of putting unimportant circumstances out of view and convenience in printing, is usually inferior to another way of fulfilling the same purpose, which I proceed to describe."
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