Ben, Franklin et al.,
If this is what Peirce had in mind when he wrote (10 years earlier) that “every proposition and every argument can be regarded as a term”, then he was saying that a proposition can be regarded as a term if you erase from it the very components that make it a proposition. And the same for reducing an argument to a proposition. Possible, I guess, but it seems oddly uninformative to me. } We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to be odd's without ends. [Finnegans Wake 455] { <http://gnusystems.ca/wp/> http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ Turning Signs gateway From: Benjamin Udell [mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com] Sent: 8-Nov-15 14:14 To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Vol. 2 of Collected Papers, on Induction Gary F., Franklin, Gary, you wrote, I’m not sure what Peirce meant by saying in 1893 that every proposition and every argument can be regarded as a term, or what advantage a logician would gain by regarding them that way. [End quote] In "Kaina Stoicheia" III. 4. (EP 2:308), 1904, http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/stoicheia/stoicheia.htm Peirce says: [....] If we erase from an argument every monstration of its special purpose, it becomes a proposition; usually a copulate proposition, composed of several members whose mode of conjunction is of the kind expressed by "and," which the grammarians call a "copulative conjunction." If from a propositional symbol we erase one or more of the parts which separately denote its objects, the remainder is what is called a rhema; but I shall take the liberty of calling it a term. Thus, from the proposition "Every man is mortal," we erase "Every man," which is shown to be denotative of an object by the circumstance that if it be replaced by an indexical symbol, such as "That" or "Socrates," the symbol is reconverted into a proposition, we get the rhema or term "_____ is mortal." [....] [End quote] Somewhere Peirce also notes that a proposition is a medadic term. Best, Ben On 11/8/2015 1:48 PM, g...@gnusystems.ca <mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca> wrote: Franklin, I’m not sure what Peirce meant by saying in 1893 that every proposition and every argument can be regarded as a term, or what advantage a logician would gain by regarding them that way. But to me it sounds like a precursor of his (much later) observation that one can analyze a proposition by “throwing everything” into the predicate or by throwing everything into the subject. Maybe his comment in the Regenerated Logic also works in both directions. In the Kaina Stoicheia passage, when Peirce says that the “totality of the predicates of a sign” is “called its logical depth,” and that the “totality of the subjects … of a sign is called the logical breadth,” the sign he is referring to has to be a proposition, because only propositions include subjects and predicates. Each subject and each predicate can be called a “term,” but it’s the breadth and depth of the whole sign, the proposition, that Peirce is defining here, not the breadth or depth of the terms (which is what he defined in ULCE). And, as you say, propositions and arguments also have information (which for Peirce is the logical product of breadth and depth). Gary f.
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