Jon, list, If you’ve read the whole of the Atkins book I’ll have to catch up with you, as I’m only on Chapter 5 (of 7). But we could begin this thread with what Atkins calls the “Modified Kantian Insight”: The phenomenological categories somehow are based on, are derived from, are generated by, or otherwise correspond to the logical forms of propositions as discovered in formal logic, which is a part of mathematics.
I’m inclined to agree with Atkins that Peirce never abandoned this “insight,” and that from 1902 on, Peirce’s phenomenology included both logical analysis and “inspective analysis.” I associate the latter with Peirce’s more experiential descriptions of the categories, such as his description of Secondness as the “double consciousness” of effort and resistance we experience when pushing against a door that refuses to open. This corresponds to a dyadic relation in the formal logic of relations. This in turn is represented in EGs by a rhema or predicate that takes two subjects, such as “_____ kills _____”, which appears on the sheet of assertion (or phemic sheet) as a “Spot” with two “Pegs.” Attach a Line of Identity to each Peg and you have an icon of a proposition (not a pure icon, of course, because the interpretation is conventional, and because the Spot has a verbal label). It is logically analyzed into a predicate represented by the Spot with its Pegs, and two subjects represented by the two Lines of Identity. If you’ve gone along with this so far, I need to ask why you seem to posit a correspondence between continuous predicates and Lines of Identity in your recent posts -- for instance in your recent reply to John S., referring to “the continuity of the single predicate being represented by continuous Lines of Identity.” Lines of Identity are of course continuous, but how can they come to represent a predicate rather than a subject? (Are you possibly reading the verbal label on a Spot as a subject?) If you’ve already explained this, I must have missed it. My own best guess at the moment is that Peirce’s continuous predicate cannot be diagrammed with EG’s at all. It is continuous because it cannot be analyzed into parts which differ from one another, and I don’t see how this kind of continuity can be represented in EGs. I have a similar hunch that modality cannot be represented visually, at least not in the iconic way that EGs represent the -adicity or “valency” of predicates, and that Peirce eventually abandoned the Gamma graphs for precisely that reason. I would love to be proved wrong on both counts, because for years I have been looking for a way to use visual diagrams to explain the phenomenological categories to people untrained in logic or mathematics. So far my efforts to use the EGs for that purpose have come to naught. They are fine for logical analysis, but their correspondence to the experiential basis of the “indecomposable elements of the phaneron” is not obvious, at least not to me. Or rather it’s not obvious how they correspond; the Atkins formulation of the modified Kantian insight says they correspond “somehow”, but I’d like to make that less vague by visual means. Hence my interest in this topic. Gary f. } For a burning would is come to dance inane. [Finnegans Wake 250] { <http://gnusystems.ca/wp/> http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ Turning Signs gateway From: Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com> Sent: 8-Feb-19 14:35 To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] EGs and phaneroscopy Gary F., List: I, for one, am very interested in the topic that you are proposing, having recently read Atkins's book myself. In fact, his insights about the correspondence of the forms of propositions to the Categories, especially in Peirce's early writings, prompted some of my own thinking that led to many of my recent posts. Of course, I always welcome your (and others') feedback on those, as well. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt <http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt> - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt <http://twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt> On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 9:18 AM <g...@gnusystems.ca <mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca> > wrote: John S., you wrote: “Everything Peirce wrote about semeiotic, from first to last, was based on his math and logic. Since math and logic are precise, they can resolve any doubts or questions about the semeiotic.” Given your emphasis on precision, you are apparently referring to formal (i.e. mathematical) logic, and not to logic as semeiotic. That is, you are talking about necessary reasoning — which is able to “resolve any doubts” because it is not concerned with the experiential basis of its premisses. In doing so, you seem to have skipped over the science which comes between mathematics and logic/semeiotic in Peirce’s classification of the sciences, namely Phenomenology (or Phaneroscopy, his preferred term after 1904). You’ve also removed the experiential basis of logic/semeiotic, which according to Peirce is a positive science (unlike mathematics). He was very clear that logic as semeiotic draws its principles from both mathematics and phenomenology, and involves inductive reasoning — hence its fallibility. I think this oversight (or overstatement?) might be rectified by taking a closer look at the relationship between Existential Graphs and Peircean phenomenology (hence my new subject line, as this post doesn’t contribute to the debate between you and JAS). I’ve been thinking about this for some time, but haven’t found much written about it — until the new Atkins book on Charles S. Peirce’s Phenomenology, which Gary Richmond mentioned a few days ago. Atkins has quite a lot to say about the overlaps among logic, semeiotic, EGs and phenomenology, which I haven’t fully digested yet, and I wondered whether you (as an authority on EGs) might have something to say on the subject, as I don’t recall reading anything of yours in that specific connection. The main reason I was looking into this connection before the Atkins book came out is this passage from Peirce’s “PAP” (R 293, a draft leading up to the 1906 “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism”): [[ The System of Existential Graphs the development of which has only been begun by a solitary student, furnishes already the best diagram of the contents of the logical Quasi-mind that has ever yet been found and promises much future perfectionment. Let us call the collective whole of all that could ever be present to the mind in any way or in any sense, the Phaneron. Then the substance of every Thought (and of much beside Thought proper) will be a Consistituent [sic] of the Phaneron. The Phaneron being itself far too elusive for direct observation, there can be no better method of studying it than through the Diagram of it which the System of Existential Graphs puts at our disposition. We have already tasted the first-fruits of this method, we shall soon gather more, and I, for my part, am in confident hope that by-and-by (not in my brief time) a rich harvest may be garnered by this means. ]]
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