Jon AS and Jerry LRC,
JAS
I see the difference between a Rheme and a Seme (now a Term)...
Peirce mentioned the word 'term' only in the first sentence
of CP 4.538. I suspect that he used that word because most
of his readers were familiar with syllogisms.
But today, predicate calculus is the most widely taught version
of logic, and the familiar triad is predicate/proposition/argument.
Peirce himself used that triad much more often than he used the
triad seme/pheme/delome.
I will probably stick with "Term" unless we come up with a better
idea. Frankly, I might end up reverting to "Seme," since it is
the most basic of all Signs...
Who is your intended audience? I have attended a few Peirce
sessions at APA conferences, and I find it depressing that the
only mention of Peirce is at special sessions devoted to Peirce.
If that's your audience, you can use any weird words you like.
But Don Roberts taught logic, including EGs, to many years of
students. In his book on EGs, he does not mention the words
'seme' or 'delome', and he only mentions 'pheme' in order to
explain 'phemic sheet'.
For a copy of Don R's book, see
http://www.felsemiotica.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Roberts-Don-D.-The-Existential-Graphs-of-Charles-S.-Peirce.pdf
JLRC
Basic principle: I hope that we can make Peirce's ideas more widely
known and used in the 21st c. Unusual words that Peirce rarely used
himself are not likely to attract new readers. I believe that it's
not useful to revive those words for any purpose other than making
a scholarly comment about a particular MS in which they occur.
Basic principle???
Or policy objective underlying your writings?
There are two kinds of principles of any science:
1. Knowledge that has been thoroughly tested and widely applied.
2. Methodeutic for discovering and testing new ideas.
As Peirce recognized, science is an international collaborative
effort that evolves over centuries. That's social methodeutic.
Peirce had some success in spreading his ideas internationally
during the 19th c. And he was very disappointed about losing
his positions at USCGS and Johns Hopkins after 1892.
I believe that he would have been even more disappointed if he
thought that people who studied his writings did not reach out
to spread his teachings to as wide an audience as possible.
Today, the triad predicate/proposition/argument is familiar
to all logicians and their students. If we want to teach them
what Peirce had to say, those are the words to use.
the triad seme/pheme/delome is a non starter. Peirce himself
used those words in only one article on EGs in 1906. He never
used them in any other writings. They belong in footnotes, not
in the core curriculum.
John
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