I appreciate your reply and will parse it out a bit. I certainly do not defend words and language as final in any sense. My feeling words are sort of like pincers that vastly limit whatever the sign may be. Democracy, for example, is an impossible term minus all manner of elaboration yet it would hardly profit from being collapsed into D and having its aspects denoted by other symbols or abbreviations. The struggle is to take such a term and make it resonate with those meanings which together suggests its ontological merit. I am very interested in the Wittgenstein connection because I feel he and Peirce are peas on a pod, both captives as we all are of their time, but equally monumental in breaking open the horizon so that something unprecedented and evolutionary can occur. Thanks again, S
amazon.com/author/stephenrose On Sat, Apr 14, 2018 at 4:19 PM, John F Sowa <s...@bestweb.net> wrote: > On 4/14/2018 12:57 PM, Stephen C. Rose wrote: > >> If logic is actually universal its universality is not served by locking >> its meanings in mathematical symbols and abbreviations. Universality is >> achieved fallibly by the use of words to form hypotheses and then by >> scientific parsing of the truth or falsity of a hypothesis, to determine a >> fallible but consequential truth. >> > > I very strongly agree. > > The point I make is that language is *not* based on logic. Instead, > every artificial language, which includes all the artificial notations > of mathematics, logic, chemistry, computer programming... is based on > a disciplined special-purpose subset of natural language. > > For example, "2 + 2 = 4" is an abbreviation for "Two and two is four." > The symbol '+' is a simplified '&', which is a way of writing 'et'. > > the notions I have built somewhat on Wittgenstein and even >> Nietzsche are hardly Peircean because my impression is that he may >> have felt there was a correspondence between words and his graphs >> that made them interchangeable >> > > See the article by Jaime Nubiola on the relationships between Peirce > and Wittgenstein: http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/m > enu/library/aboutcsp/nubiola/SCHOLAR.HTM > > Frank Ramsey had read Peirce and was instrumental in shifting > Wittgenstein's position from a Frege-Russell basis to something > that was much closer to Peirce. Following is a paper I wrote > after presenting an earlier version at a conference where Jaime > was also an invited speaker: http://jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.pdf > > If he elevated graphs of his or any other sort to the exalted position >> of qualifying as a viable conclusion to any practical iteration of >> the pragmatic maxim, I think he is possibly wrong. >> > > He considered graphs as more diagrammatic than any linear notation, > but graphs consist of discrete sets of nodes and arcs. That means > they can never be a perfect way of representing continuity. His > search for many variations of graphs indicates that he was never > completely satisfied with any one of them. > > That's a reason why I have been developing a method of including > arbitrary icons -- including continuous images -- inside any area > of an EG. Although Peirce never did so, he explicitly said that > an icon plus an index (for example, a portrait with a pointing > finger or a name) could state a proposition. If so, such a > combination could be included in an EG -- and the EG rules of > inference could be applied to it: http://jfsowa.com/talks/ppe.pdf > > 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 > peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L > but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the > BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm > . > > > > > >
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