Stephen and Jon, SCR
I have longed for some sense that there could be conversation that recognizes the efforts of persons like me who have labored considerably to create a more general and universal understanding that will resonate with ordinary readers.
I agree that those issues are far more important than trying to resuscitate a dead word. Right now, the world is going through some very dangerous times. The billionaires who did more to create the danger than anyone else are building bunkers in New Zealand in hope of surviving the impending doom. Peirce is one of the few mathematicians and scientists who had a high respect for the normative sciences. With his logic and semeiotic, he laid the foundation for all the branches of philosophy and the special sciences. But the so-called "mainstream" of analytic philosophy (Frege, Russell, Carnap, Quine, and their buddies) denounced metaphysics and ignored the normative sciences as mindless feelings. Carnap's most damning rejection of anything other than science was "That's poetry!" What I've been trying to say is that a century of Frege, Russell, Carnap, and Quine has trivialized philosophy and made it irrelevant to the daily lives of nearly everybody. And haggling over dead words like 'seme' is trivializing Peirce. JAS
The question remains whether, after introducing "Seme" in 1906, he ever used any other word for a Sign classified as a Possible-- rather than an Existent (Pheme/Proposition) or a Necessitant (Delome/Argument)--according to its relation with its Final Interpretant.
Anything in any of Peirce's three universes (possibles, actuals, and the necessitated) can be given a name. In fact, you can take the definition quoted in Commens (CP 4.548) and replace the word 'seme' with 'name'. That produces the following definition:
By a name, I shall mean anything which serves for any purpose as a substitute for an object of which it is, in some sense, a representative or Sign. The logical Term, which is a class-name, is a name. Thus, the term “The mortality of man” is a name.
This shows how vague that definition really is. The word 'name', which every child knows, fits the definition in CP 4.548 just as well or better than the word 'seme'. That is why Peirce never found any use for it. Any thought he might express with the word 'seme' could be expressed more clearly without it.
JFS: That is more ethical than implying that you have a deeper understanding of what Peirce intended than he had. When have I ever made or implied such an outrageous claim?
Peirce only used that word in CP 4.538 ff and the MSS of the drafts of that article. Two years later, he mentioned it (without further comment) in a list of triads that he sent to Lady Welby. He never used it for any other purpose. But you wrote "Like turtles, it's semes all the way down." And with all these notes about that word, you're implying that it's very important for semeiotic. If Peirce had thought that, he would have (a) used it more often, and (b) written much more about it. John
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