Jeff,
What Peirce wrote in 1893 is that he had broadened the application of the terms, i.e. the breadth of the propositions involving them. That does not mean that their depth, or "signification" as Peirce often called it, changed in any way; rather it signals an increase of information conveyed by those propositions. So I think it's misleading to say that Peirce's "meaning" of those terms changed from 1867 to 1893 (or later), or that his concepts of breadth and depth changed in any way. Indeed, whenever he brings up the subject in his 1903-4 writings (such as "New Elements"), he is careful to say that the concepts are very old indeed, and he does not say that he is repurposing these well-established logical terms to say something different from what logicians have said for centuries. Indeed his own ethics of terminology would discourage that sort of repurposing. His originality was in defining "information" as a third "quantity" which could be formalized as the logical product of the other two. In short, these are very basic concepts in logic/semiotic, and what Peirce did by broadening their application within logic was to demonstrate just how basic they are. I could supply a dozen or so quotes from Peirce to back this up, and will do that if you wish, but there's probably no need for that. Gary f. From: Jeffrey Brian Downard [mailto:jeffrey.down...@nau.edu] Sent: 28-Jun-17 18:15 To: Peirce-L <peirce-l@list.iupui.edu> Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce's own definition of 'information' Hello Gary R, John S, Gary F, Jon A, List, I take the following passage to indicate that Peirce changed his use of "depth" and "breadth" in some respects some time between 1867 and 1896. The change was a broadening of the use of both terms. I restricted myself to terms, because at the time this chapter was first written (1867), I had not remarked that the whole doctrine of breadth and depth was equally applicable to propositions and to arguments. The breadth of a proposition is the aggregate of possible states of things in which it is true; the breadth of an argument is the aggregate of possible cases to which it applies. The depth of a proposition is the total of fact which it asserts of the state of things to which it is applied; the depth of an argument is the importance of the conclusions which it draws. In fact, every proposition and every argument can be regarded as a term.--1893. (CP 2.407 Fn P1 p 249) I wonder if other changes are involved that were required by this broadening in the meaning of both of these terms? Given the fact that the classification of signs as terms, propositions and arguments is based in 1903 on the relation between the sign and the interpretant--and that he later grounded the distinction on the relation between the sign and the final interpretant in particular--I tend to think that Peirce is reforming the early explanations in a number of ways--but it isn't obvious to me what might count as natural development or refinement of the earlier position and what might count as a more dramatic shift in position. The distinction between different classes of final interpretants as emotional, energetic or logical should give us some reason to reconsider how the conceptions of "breadth" and "depth" work in the context of the mature semiotic theory. --Jeff
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