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 <[email protected]>
Sent: 8-Feb-19 14:35
To: [email protected]
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 <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
> 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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