Kirsti, I changed the subject line to "Contexts in language and logic"
That was the title of the slides I cited, and I'm sorry that I forgot to include the name of the directory, "talks". Following is the correct URL: http://jfsowa.com/talks/contexts.pdf
So a little note on the wording in:
[JFS] In summary, the range of contexts for writing or using EGs is as open ended as the contexts for using any other kinds of signs. It's best to distinguish the act of drawing an EG from any use or speech act, such as assertion.
Shouldn't the last word be "asserting", thus using the verb, not the noun? This may sound trifle, but I do think it is important to make clear whether and when one is talking about an act, or an entity.
The distinction between a verb form such as 'asserting' and a noun such as 'assertion' is what Peirce called *hypostatic abstraction*. To illustrate the point, Peirce used a term that Molière invented as a joke in "Le Malade Imaginaire":
Quare Opium facit dormire: … Quia est in eo Virtus dormitiva. Why does opium make one sleep: Because in it is dormitive virtue.
Molière considered the term 'dormitive virtue' as a joke because it doesn't explain anything. Nominalists call it a meaningless name. But Peirce said that the act of replacing the verb by the noun leads to a hypothesis (hypostatic abstraction) that there exists something that causes sleep. That hypothesis led chemists to discover morphine as the substance with dormitive virtue. Further research led to a family of related chemicals named opioids. Among those chemicals are natural hormones named endorphins (from the phrase 'endogenous morphine'), which bind to opiate receptors in the brain. The act of turning a verb into a noun led chemists to search for something named by that noun. That research explains why opium has dormitive virtue and why people become addicted to taking opioids. And by the way, the English noun 'entity' is derived from the Latin noun 'entitas', which is derived from the verb form 'ens' (being). In Chinese, the same word form may be used as a noun, a verb, or an adjective. But in IndoEuropean languages, differences in the word form affect the way people think and act about the referent. John
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