Sorry about the typo I missed (“meniotics”, fixed below). I should also add that normative logic (not formal logic) must be deployed by all sciences (including semeiotic) in the stage of their inquiry where they are obliged to test the truth of the inferences they make against their observations — also, I think, in the abductive stage where they have to decide whether a hypothesis is worth testing or not. So in that sense normative logic is a prerequisite for all inquiries other than mathematics and phaneroscopy. When we focus too much on Peirce’s top-down classification of sciences, we sometimes forget the circularity of the inquiry process.
Gary f. From: [email protected] <[email protected]> Sent: 9-Mar-19 10:31 Jon, Gary R, John, list, JAS: … Semeiotic as a generalization of normative logic to encompass all kinds of Signs, not just Symbols; i.e., Speculative Grammar. Again, it is normative because it studies "what must be the characters of all signs used by a 'scientific' intelligence, that is to say, by an intelligence capable of learning by experience" (CP 2.227; c. 1897, emphasis in original). Peirce emphasized “must be,” but he does not refer to “normative” science at all in the passage you quote. You put the “normative” label on what Peirce says here, and when you do that — especially in the phrase “Normative Logic as Semeiotic” — you water down the signification of the word to the point where it almost evaporates. A normative science for Peirce (and as far as I know, for anyone who uses the word regularly) is one whose essence is to make dualistic judgments distinguishing good from bad, true from false, right from wrong, etc. What Peirce is referring to here is not normative science but, more broadly, positive science (as opposed to mathematics, which deals with hypothetical objects and thus does not learn from experience of the actual world). Here’s the context: [[ Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe I have shown, only another name for semiotic (σημειωτικη), the quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs. By describing the doctrine as “quasi-necessary,” or formal, I mean that we observe the characters of such signs as we know, and from such an observation, by a process which I will not object to naming Abstraction, we are led to statements, eminently fallible, and therefore in one sense by no means necessary, as to what must be the characters of all signs used by a “scientific” intelligence, that is to say, by an intelligence capable of learning by experience. ] CP 2.227] Logic as Semeiotic is Logic in this broad sense. Logic as normative , i.e. logical Critic, is one of three branches of that, as Peirce explains: [[ The speculative rhetoric that we are speaking of is a branch of the analytical study of the essential conditions to which all signs are subject,— a science named semeiotics, though identified by many thinkers with logic. In the Roman schools, grammar, logic, and rhetoric were felt to be akin and to make up a rounded whole called the trivium. This feeling was just; for the three disciplines named correspond to the three essential branches of semeiotics, of which the first, called speculative grammar by Duns Scotus, studies the ways in which an object can be a sign; the second, the leading part of logic, best termed speculative critic, studies the ways in which a sign can be related to the object independent of it that it represents; while the third is the speculative rhetoric just mentioned. ] EP2:326 ] Belluci quotes a similar passage in which logic (in the narrow sense) is named as a “department” of semeiotic: [[ it will be necessary for the present and for a long time to come to regard logic, not as a distinct science, but as only a department of the science of the general constitution of signs,— the physiology of signs,— cenoscopic semeiotics. For if we roughly define a sign as a medium of communication, a piece of concerted music is a sign, and so is a word or signal of command. Now logic has no positive concern with either of these kinds of signs, but it must concern itself with them negatively in defining the kind of signs it does deal with; and it is not likely that in our time there will be anybody to study the general physiology of the non-logical signs except the logician, who is obliged to do so, in some measure. ] R 499 ISP 17-19, 1906 ] Peirce says here that it is up to logicians to study cenoscopic semeiotics — not that semeiotics replaces logic, but that it supervenes on logic. Thus it is quite misleading to claim that in Peirce’s classification, Semeiotic replaces Logic as a normative science. It is more accurate to say that Logic in the broad or “general” sense is coterminous with Semeiotic, and Logic in the narrow sense (Critic) is the normative part of that. None of the passages that you have quoted in defense of that claim even mention “semeiotic”, or any variant spelling of it, or any equivalent term such as “theory of signs,” in connection with Logic as a normative science. “Normative Logic as Semeiotic” is a chimera of your own invention, Jon. Gary f.
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