Frances to John and other interested listers--- 

In posting a revised tree diagram on a classification of the sciences you seem 
to be positing in your guess some frustration over its original realist 
framework, along with some irritation on where to locate a wider science of 
semiotics as a theory of signs that holds more than only symbols. 

In his later classification of the sciences Peirce seemingly located formal 
logics under the mathematical sciences, but he also located critical logics and 
normal logics as separate normative sciences under the philosophical sciences. 
The curiosity here might be whether semiotics as a science should be somewhat 
separated from logics altogether, but as a proto kind of quasi logics and thus 
where should semiotics then fall within a classification of the sciences. 

As an exacted foundational theory, semiotics would likely be well classified 
with formal logics under mathematics, but when fielded in other ways as an 
alternate study then semiotics is also a defined referential science and an 
applied instrumental science, so that semiotics aside from being a formal and 
normal sort of logics might be best located somewhere under phenomenology 
within the philosophical sciences. Semiotics after all is a vast study of 
senses and signs and systems, which breadth seems far beyond the depth of 
symbolic and algebraic logics, even given logics own necessary importance in 
mathematics and philosophics. 

Any pragmatist classification of the sciences should of course be 
architectonically consistent with the trichotomic structure of the phenomenal 
categories. This seems to be an initial task that has yet to be fully done, 
even before the location of an independent or isolated mathics and logics and 
semics within that completed structure. My muse is that a newly revised 
classification of the sciences but along Peircean lines is indeed possible. 


John wrote in my compacted paragraph: 
In his 1903 classification of the sciences (CP 1.180-202) Peirce classified 
formal logic under mathematics, but he also classified logic as a normative 
science. Question: Where is semeiotic? As a formal theory, it would be 
classified with formal logic under mathematics. But semeiotic is also an 
applied science when it is used in perception, action, communication. When I 
drew a diagram to illustrate Peirce's classification, I did not include 
semeiotic because he had not mentioned it. But since it is a science, it 
belongs somewhere in that diagram. Where? 

I believe that it belongs directly under phenomenology, since every perception 
involves signs. See the attached CSPsemiotic.jpg. Does anyone have any 
comments? 



 

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