> On Mar 28, 2017, at 6:52 AM, Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > But the point of Peirce's extreme scholastic realism is that the universal > "red" is not defined by the collection of all red things, and the universal > "lion" is not defined by the collection of all lions. Rather, each > universal/general is a continuum that encompasses all possible reds or all > possible lions. Between any two actual reds or actual lions, there is an > inexhaustible supply of potential reds or potential lions that would be > intermediate between them. What kind of diagram does each of these > universals/generals specify accordingly? What significant relations does it > embody? How are we relating a stop sign to a diagram when we call it red, or > an animal at the zoo to a diagram when we call it a lion?
I’m curious as to John’s response. My own would be that different diagrams can get at different aspects of the universal but not necessarily represent it fully. As Icons there would typically be lost data. So you might have a graph of red things to represent the general of redness without necessarily arguing that the general arises out of red things (as with say Armstrong Universals). You might have a graph that specifies the range of colors represented by the general red (as some linguists do to compare color signs between cultures) and so forth. The nature of an icon is to resemble the object but that usually means that there’s a matter of ‘more and less.’ That is there are additions that aren’t part of the original object and aspects that are missing.
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