John, List: JFS: But Jon's claim that a subject could be a Seme contradicts the foundations of Peirce's semeiotic.
Peirce himself explicitly disagreed. "The first member of the triplet, the 'Seme,' embraces the logical Term, the *Subject *or Object of a sentence ..." (R 295:11[28]; 1906, bold added) "By a *Seme*, 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" (CP 4.538; 1906, bold added). JFS: But Jon claimed that the triad Subject, Proposition, Argument would be an appropriate widening. For a time, yes; but as I posted *three weeks ago*, "neither 'Subject' nor 'Predicate' (nor 'Quasi-predicate') will work as the 'much widened' replacement for 'Term' or 'Rheme,' since it has to encompass *both *of them. That is presumably why Peirce reintroduced 'Seme' in 1906 ..." In other words, I already publicly admitted--then and subsequently--that I was wrong. JFS: A Seme is a First. It represents a pure possibility, such as a Mark/Tone, Potisign, or Qualisign. But a grammatical subject in language refers to something that exists. It is a Second, such as a Token, Actisign, or Sinsign. To claim that a grammatical subject could be a Seme would break the system of categories. Again, this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of Peirce's entire Speculative Grammar. A Seme is not limited to being a Mark/Tone, Potisign, or Qualisign--that would rule out all words serving as predicates from being Semes, since every Symbol is a Type, Famisign, or Legisign; and every Replica or Instance of a Symbol is a Token, Actisign, or Sinsign. Moreover, a Seme is certainly not precluded from *referring to* something that exists--an Icon, which is *always* a Seme, can have an Existent as its Dynamic Object. JFS: But a grammatical subject refers to something that exists (or is assumed to exist) in the Universe of Discourse. That kind of subject would be a Second. It would be a Pheme, not a Seme. As you acknowledged two days ago, "A grammatical subject by itself is not a syntactically correct English sentence." Therefore, a grammatical subject by itself is not a Pheme (Proposition), and it is certainly not a Delome (Argument), which entails that it *must *be a Seme. Its Dynamic Object is an Existent, but that does not entail that the Sign *itself *must be an Existent according to its relation to its Final Interpretant. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 1:10 AM John F Sowa <[email protected]> wrote: > Jon and I had an offline exchange. He sent me a list of offline > comments by readers who were also misled by the ambiguity in the > word 'subject'. See the *anonymous* comments below. > > A mistaken interpretation of just one word is not a big deal. > But Jon's claim that a subject could be a Seme contradicts the > foundations of Peirce's semeiotic. > > I have no desire to continue this debate. But I persisted because > it would be unethical to allow an email list devoted to Peirce's > philosophy to undermine the foundations he so carefully constructed. > > Summary of the main thread: > > 1. In CP 4.538, Peirce said that the triad Term, Proposition, Argument > had to be widened, and he proposed a new triad Seme, Pheme, Delome. > In 4.539, he discussed issues about percepts, which showed why the > category Seme needed to go beyond purely symbolic terms. > > 2. But Jon claimed that the triad Subject, Proposition, Argument would > be an appropriate widening. He was misled by an ambiguity in the > word 'subject'. > > 3. But that triad would contradict the foundation of Peirce's system. > A Seme is a First. It represents a pure possibility, such as a > Mark/Tone, Potisign, or Qualisign. But a grammatical subject in > language refers to something that exists. It is a Second, such > as a Token, Actisign, or Sinsign. To claim that a grammatical > subject could be a Seme would break the system of categories. > > The reason why Jon was misled is that the word 'subject' without > any qualifiers is ambiguous. A Term in Aristotle's syllogisms may > be used in either subject position or predicate position. As a > Term without an indexical word in front (a, some, any, every...), > it would be a predicate, which is a Seme. > > But a grammatical subject refers to something that exists (or is > assumed to exist) in the Universe of Discourse. That kind of > subject would be a Second. It would be a Pheme, not a Seme. > > That's all there is to the debate. But it has ramifications that > get into many abstract issues about Peirce's logic and semeiotic. > I admit that those details often obscured the basic points. > > If anybody has any doubts or questions about any of these issues, > I'd be happy to explain them. > > John >
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