Clark, thanks for all the digging that I didn’t have time for. I considered pasting in here parts of the entry on “relation” from the Century Dictionary online, but there’s just too much of it (and neither “elementary relations” nor “relations proper” is among the dozens of varieties listed there by Peirce).
Probably the most common distinction made by Peirce in this connection is that between real relations and relations of reason, for instance on W5:300: “Relations which are mere comparisons, the members being related only in virtue of characters which each cou1d equally well have were the other annihilated, were called relations of reason by the old logicians, in contrast to real relations. They are the seconds of the internal type.” But that doesn’t help much in sorting out triadic relations. Gary f. From: CLARK GOBLE [mailto:cl...@lextek.com] Sent: 29-Nov-15 23:03 To: PEIRCE-L <peirce-l@list.iupui.edu> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] signs, correlates, and triadic relations On Nov 28, 2015, at 10:34 AM, g...@gnusystems.ca <mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca> wrote: Jon, if you can point out where Peirce's text or mine in this thread is conducive to the kind of confusion you are warning us about, I'll see what I can do to clarify things. But I don't really have the time for a wild goose chase through your old blog posts, which I expect it might well turn out to be, since it has happened in such chases too often that when I finally caught up with the wild goose, it turned out to be a familiar domestic fowl disguised behind an unfamiliar notation; so all I learned from it was a new notation which frankly was no improvement on the old one. I did a search for "relations proper” going back to 2003 and there were a few posts using it by Jon, but not that many unfortunately. This was my private archive and I admittedly have pruned it a bit. So not every post is in it - but I think most of the substantial ones are. I confess I’m not quite sure what we mean by “relations proper” as distinguished from elementary relations which I understand Jon to mean tuples. I assume this refers to the types of relations one finds in say Duns Scotus. For those interested the SEP has an entry on medieval theories of relations that is helpful. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relations-medieval/ For those of us who just aren’t quite certain how people are using their terms it might be useful to refer to something outside the Peirce corpus to clarify the meaning. As is so often the case, most of a debate is getting the terminology agreed upon so we understand one an other. I’m hoping there’s more to this debate than a mere semantic one though. The following post of Jon might be of help. It’s from March 21, 2005. JR = Joe Ransdell Re: GAR-DIS 1. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/002447.html In: GAR-DIS. http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-March/thread.html#2447 JR: I don't know whether or not we can find a single view of the conception of form in Peirce, but the following passage, which dates from late in his career, seems especially interesting: CSP: | That which is communicated from the Object through the Sign to the Interpretant | is a Form; that is to say, it is nothing like an existent, but is a power, is | the fact that something would happen under certain conditions. This Form is | 'really' embodied in the object, meaning that the conditional relation which | constitutes the Form is 'true' of the Form as it is in the Object. In the | Sign it is embodied only in a 'representative' sense, meaning that whether | by virtue of some real modification of the Sign or otherwise, the Sign | becomes endowed with the 'power' of communicating it to an interpretant. | It may be in the interpretant 'directly' as it is in the Object, or it | may be in the interpretant dynamically as behavior of the interpretant | (this happens when a military officer uses the sign "Halt!" or "Forward | march!" and his men simply obey him, perhaps automatically); or it may | be in the interpretant only representatively. (MS 793.2, 1906) Joe, I am currently focusing on a particular connection in which Peirce invokes a consideration of forms, ideas, qualities, and so on, and I'm about to re-iterate a familiar passage where he uses the word "logos" in the same role, so I think that the passage you cited is in the same line. This seems to be a topic that is broader than sign relations proper, having to do with the theory of relations in general, even though it's clear that Peirce had to develop the theory of relations in order to deal with the relations involved in signs and inquiry. If we look to the classical texts where the prepositions 'kata' and 'pros', used in a certain way, are translated "in respect to" and "in relation to", it is evident that reference to a ground or correlate, indeed, reference to a category in general, functioned as a type of equivocation resolver, without which the application of logical laws to words would be forever bedevilled by a host of quibbling objections. Taking this function as a pragmatic definition, we have a commmon role that is served by the invocation of all sorts of aspects, capacities, categories, correlates, grounds, qualifiers, qualities, respects, and so on. We can now generalize to the class of things that serve the same purpose. My guess is that we'll eventually arrive at notions of constraint, information, and their relation.
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