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:[email protected]]
Sent: 8-Nov-15 14:14
To: [email protected]
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, [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> 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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