John, my response inserted [GF:] —
-----Original Message----- From: John F Sowa [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 22-Dec-17 10:39 On 12/22/2017 7:50 AM, <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] wrote: > for instance, you can say that a dicisign has subject(s) and > predicate, but in late Peircean semeiotics, the analysis into these > “parts” is somewhat arbitrary, and in some cases, so is the choice of > whether it has one “subject” or several. But that doesn't answer the question whether a sign has parts. GF: It gives a conditional answer: IF you consider a proposition to be a sign, and you refer to a subject or a predicate as a part of a given proposition, then I know what you mean by “part”, and I say that such a “part” is a product of an analysis which is not logically necessary. JFS: A sign is a triadic relation. GF: No. If we follow Peirce’s terminology strictly, a sign is one correlate of a triadic relation. (We’ve been through this before, and predictably some list members will object to that terminology, but I consider the issue settled by Peirce’s “Nomenclature and Division of Triadic Relations” (EP2:290, CP 2.242), not to mention the rest of the Syllabus and the entirety of the Lowell Lectures, which are consistent in this respect. We can say that a sign relation is triadic, but we can’t say that a sign is a triadic relation — not if we’re sticking to Peirce’s terminology, which I think causes less confusion than the alternative. I agree with you in this respect: I would not say that the other correlates of the triadic relation (i.e. the object and interpretant) are “parts” of the relation. A correlate is not a part. So I would agree with everything you say below, but I don’t object to references to signs as having parts. Peirce himself does this occasionally, for instance in “New Elements” where he says “the common stock of knowledge of utterer and interpreter, called to mind by the words, is a part of the sign” (EP2:310). Gary f. But it's not clear whether you can or should say that a relation has parts. For example, consider the dyadic relation greater-than or its symbol '>'. If you write "7 > 2", that statement has three symbols, and it expresses a relationship between 7 and 2. But those three symbols aren't parts of the relation. That particular relationship has 7 and 2 as parts, but the relation named greater-than can "have" infinitely many relationships. And as Aristotle observed, "have as part" is only one of many ways of "having". One might say that the *extension* of greater-than is an infinite set of pairs. But that does not imply that greater-than has infinitely many parts. The *intension* of greater-than is defined by axioms (several statements with multiple symbols). But those axioms aren't considered "parts" of the relation. In summary, I would avoid using the word 'part' to describe any relation, including the sign relation. If anybody asked me "Do relations have parts?", I would say "What do you mean? Why are you asking that question? What would you do with the answer?" John
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
