John, a few responses: JS: “Every operation that Peirce specified converted one EG to another EG that expressed exactly the same proposition with a different choice of relations.”
GF: As Gary R has pointed out (quoting Peirce), “All that existential graphs can represent is propositions, on a single sheet, and arguments on a succession of sheets, presented in temporal succession”; and Peirce says the same thing at CP 4.538: “An Argument is represented by a series of Graphs.” A succession of Graphs expressing exactly the same proposition cannot be an argument. The conclusion of an argument, which is the definitive part of it, must follow from the premises; it cannot merely restate them and claim to be an analysis of the thought process, i.e. of logical consequence, which is what Peirce intended his EGs for. JS: “The word 'thought' is misleading for modern ears, since it sounds too psychological. Peirce said that thoughts exist outside the mind. But most readers don't think in those terms. It's better to use the neutral word 'proposition'.” GF: Most readers are not logicians or students of logic, and have little or no idea what the word “proposition” means in this context. When Peirce addressed himself to a broader audience than logicians, “thought” (capitalized or not) was the word he chose — for instance, look at the opening sentence of the 1906 “Prolegomena.” Perhaps most of your readers are logicians, but I’m sure that most of mine are not. In my book, I did have to point out Peirce’s non-psychological use of the word thought, but I also had to give some explanation of what a proposition was, because I couldn’t take it for granted that my reader would know that. GF (earlier): “I share with Gary R a deep interest in phenomenology/phaneroscopy — and especially the observational part (as opposed to the analytical part) of it.” JS: “That's my motivation for the ppe.pdf slides.” GF: I can’t find any trace of phaneroscopic observation in that presentation, at the conclusion or anywhere else. What I see throughout is observation of diagrams as a key element of formal or deductive logic, which of course it is, as Peirce made clear. Your slideshow is 100% logic, with the addition of some theoretical formulations drawn from psychology to show how logical diagrams might be applied to the study of cognition. As such, I think your presentation serves its purpose very well, but it has nothing to do with phaneroscopy as defined by Peirce, and certainly not with the kind of observation involved in that science, which in Peirce’s view is a prerequisite for logic. Or at least that was his view from 1902 on. But I’ll have more to say about that in another thread. Gary f. -----Original Message----- From: John F Sowa <[email protected]> Sent: 20-Feb-19 10:40 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Analyzing Propositions (was EGs and Phaneroscopy) On 2/20/2019 9:20 AM, <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] wrote: > What you’ve said about Jon’s MEGs, though, is true only if we read the > lines in those diagrams as Lines of Identity; and the main > modification Jon made was to read the lines NOT as Lines of Identity > but as Lines of Relation. I agree. But it violates the principles of EGs, since it doesn't put an explicit marker at the intersection. With the label Rel at the intersection, the MEGs become EGs. Since Peirce never said that the result was a new kind of EG, that would be what he had intended. > It’s not clear to me how sequences of MEGs could be used to analyze > the thought process into the smallest possible steps Please drop the word MEG. Every operation that Peirce specified converted one EG to another EG that expressed exactly the same proposition with a different choice of relations. That puts the Aristotelian transformation into perspective: it's replaces one relation with a copula. Peirce learned that method at age 13, and he developed the idea over the years. The word 'thought' is misleading for modern ears, since it sounds too psychological. Peirce said that thoughts exist outside the mind. But most readers don't think in those terms. It's better to use the neutral word 'proposition'. > The analysis of propositions is only one aspect of EGs as “moving > pictures of thought,” and the rules for permissible transformations of > graphs are the keys for analyzing the process of thought. I strongly agree. In fact, that's the motivation for a talk i presented at a Peirce session of the Vancouver APA in April 2015: "Peirce, Polya, and Euclid: Integrating logic, heuristics, and geometry" <http://jfsowa.com/talks/ppe.pdf> http://jfsowa.com/talks/ppe.pdf > I share with Gary R a deep interest in phenomenology/phaneroscopy — > and especially the observational part (as opposed to the analytical > part) of it. That's my motivation for the ppe.pdf slides. See the concluding slide of ppe.pdf, which is attached as ppe.png. There's much more to say, but I believe that EGs that contain arbitrary icons (in any number of dimensions) can simulate the phaneron. John
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