Hi, Kevin, Thanks for joining and posting.
Have you read Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/ransdell/eds.htm by Joseph Ransdell? It's a good introduction to his speculative grammar. Here are some more links in case you missed one. a.. Marty, Robert (1997), "76 Definitions of the Sign by C. S. Peirce" collected and analyzed by Robert Marty, Department of Mathematics, University of Perpignan, Perpignan, France, and "12 Further Definitions or Equivalent proposed by Alfred Lang", Dept. of Psychology, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland. Eprint. a.. Atkin, Albert (2006), "Peirce's Theory of Semiotics", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. As regards his logic or semiotic in general, and its division into three departments, the section "Philosophy: logic, or semiotic" in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce is not bad, and has footnotes with references and links to the relevant material, usually texts by Peirce. A lot of it was written by Jon Awbrey, and I've edited it since then and added a bunch of things. In that section, the subsections on pragmatism and theory of inquiry are on methodeutic. In Peirce's view, conceptions ARE signs. Now, one may mean various things by "concept" or "conception," but one can say that intellectual conceptions are symbols. Peirce's speculative grammar a.k.a. stechiotic is not confined to the analysis and classification of symbols or intellectual conceptions. It also deals with icons and indices, as well as other ways to divide signs. So its subject matter is broader than that of conceptual analysis, but it might be considered to include a good deal of conceptual analysis. In Peirce's view conceptions and symbols can have icons 'attached' them, - that is, the word and idea 'blue' can evoke an apprehension of the quality of blue in one's mind. Peirce investigates such relationships. Peirce also considers the functions of conceptions and other symbols in semiosis. Symbols grow, in his view, and a principle role of a symbol is to combine an index with an icon. The icon is attached to the symbol, and the symbol's actual individual instance (itself not a symbol but an index), for example an individual utterance of the word "horse," is an index to one's experience of the symbol's object, some horse. The index directs one to the object and the icon offers characteristics attributed to the object. (Another index-icon combo is a photograph, which on the whole is an index to the extent that its meaning depends on its being factually connected to its object.) Now, there is a good deal in Peirce's philosophical logic that he seems to have treated as 'prior' to the specific departments of stechiotic, critic, and methodeutic. This 'prior' material includes the consideration of the presuppostions of reason, the nature of belief, doubt, to learn, etc. However, later he seemed to include all that in his first department of logic. A brief outline of this issue is in "Classification of the sciences (Peirce): Logic's divisions later" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_the_sciences_(Peirce)#Logic.27s_divisions_later, again with footnotes with references and links. The conception or idea of a horse, or something like the meaning of the word "horse," is a symbol which, to the extent that it is can be expressed or evoked by a word, has as its _replicas_, as Peirce called them, such words as English "horse" and Spanish "caballo." Those replicas are also symbols, ones which prescribe qualities of sound and appearance for their individual instances. Peirce thought of words less as the clothing of ideas than as clothed ideas. The individual instances of words are also replicas, of the given word and of the idea, but are not symbols, in Peirce's classification, where all symbols are generals or generalities (a generality as a sign he called a 'legisign' or 'type'.) Instead, the individual instance of a symbol (and of any other legisign) is an _index_, more specifically an indexical sinsign, to one's experience of the legisign's object. (He called a sign that consists in an individual actuality or fact a 'sinsign' or 'token'). I don't have all the references handy, but they're in "Semiotic elements and classes of signs" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotic_elements_and_classes_of_signs, much of which I wrote a year or two ago, in the sections on classes of signs. The references are in footnotes and usually include links. Well, that's a whole bunch of stuff. You or anybody, please send along any comments or criticisms. Best, Ben ----- Original Message ----- From: Kevin H To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2011 11:50 AM Subject: [peirce-l] Lay question about speculative grammar Hi all: I'm not a Peirce scholar like many of you, and a few months ago my subscription to this list was approved (it took forever). But I have a keen interest in Peirce's logic and philosophy, but without many of the necessary resources or your expertise. So I've been hesitant to post, and more interested in reading the messages put here. But there is one notion that I can't get out of my head, and I just wanted to put it to the test. Is what Peirce calls speculative grammar equivalent to what philosophers call "conceptual analysis"? I guess I ask this because I'm interested in Peirce's "trivium": speculative grammar, critic, and methodeutic. It seems to me that this corresponds roughly to conceptual analysis, what we usually call logic itself, or the logic of argument, and some sort of generalized logic of methodology. I think in my own readings, I've thought that conceptual analysis does seem to be a very different kind of logic compared to what is usually considered logic: abduction, deduction, and induction. Before we can put arguments into propositional form, we first need a good grasp of the concepts we are dealing, and that seems to me to be the purpose of this speculative grammar. But I've taken a good look at this page: http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/terms/grammarspec.html . I'm undecided on whether what I've just said is true or not, probably mainly because he refers to his semiotics which I'm not entirely understanding. For instance, I don't fully understand how and in what sense should concepts correspond with signs. In a way, his discussion of his trivium is a sort of conceptual analysis, or speculative grammar, in that he divides up these concepts and undertakes to explicate their relations with each other. I'm also very much interested in his methodeutic, but I'm unable to find much more about this topic, at least online. There seems to be more books written about Peirce's logic than there used to be, but I've read just about everything I could find online. Anyway, thanks for any insights you guys will offer me, Kevin --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
