Re: Cathy Legg At: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/15739
Hi Cathy, brave soul, I'm getting a "resource not found msg" on that link right at the moment ... But this one seems to work: http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/handle/10289/2811 Cheers, Jon On 2/24/2015 5:12 PM, Catherine Legg wrote:
Sincere apologies to everyone for the delay in posting. My life has been a bit chaotic lately. First of all I want to say how very much I have been enjoying reading Frederik's book. It combines mastery of the intricacies of Peirce's semeiotic, early and late (and we all know what a challenge that is), with a bold march out into contemporary mainstream philosophy of biology and cognitive science, flying the flag of Peircean ideas. The book's powerful organising idea of the dicisign's self-referential 'double structure' also has the capacity to blast so much cavilling, insufficient contemporary nominalistic philosophy of language out of the water! (Sorry for the somewhat drenching metaphor). Chapter 9 is a curious excursion on a very specific topic: Peirce's rationale for "the puzzling sheets containing 99 small drawings...which accompany MS 725." It seemed that Peirce was playing with these as a kind of experiment in breaking down the concept of a "natural class" to its minimal analytical components. In the background of this discussion is the topic of MS 725: Peirce's discussion of "Logical Extension and Comprehension" (presented as a talk in 1867). The tradition of logic contains a lot of discussion of this distinction (e.g. in Port-Royal Logic, in Mill, in William Hamilton), where 'extension' referred to 'things picked out', or the reference of a term, and 'intension' to the ideas evoked, or meaning of a term. So the subjects of propositions seem more suited to express extension and the predicates of propositions seem more suited to express intension. Although strictly speaking, in the proposition "The cat is on the mat", the phrase 'the cat' does have some intension insofar as certain ideas about cats pop into my mind when I hear it, and the phrase 'is on the mat' des have some extension insofar as we might think there is some (large) set of things that are on mats in this world of ours. The tradition was to define an inverse proportionality between extension and intension, such that by reducing a term's extension we increase its intension, and vice versa. So if I change "the cat" to "the brown cat" in the proposition above, I have a term that picks out fewer things but has a more specific meaning. But we will see Peirce challenging this simple formula. Coincidentally I published a paper on this talk of Peirce's in the Transaction a long time back, connecting it up with discussions of extensionality and intenionality in C20th philosophy. It's called "Extension, Intension and Dormitive Virtue". It was just when I was starting out as a scholar and is not a terribly elegant paper. But if anyone is interested: http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10289/2811 I have been wisely advised by our esteemed Peirce-L moderators not to try to post too much on this chapter in a single go, so I will leave it there for now, and return anon! Cheers, Cathy
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