List, I finally found (just as I was on the point of giving up) a text in which Peirce explains the relationship between his Existential Graphs and his phenomenological “categories” (or experiential Universes, as he calls them there). It’s one of the incomplete drafts included in R 300, which Peirce entitled “The Bed-rock Beneath Pragmaticism.” I’ve been busy transcribing this from the manuscript images at the Peirce Archive https://rs.cms.hu-berlin.de/peircearchive/pages/home.php, and although my transcript is incomplete, I decided to put it up on my website, because parts of it relate to several of the current threads on this list.
R 300 is a very interesting document, partly because it appears to be his very last attempt to complete the Monist series on pragmatism which had occupied him for over three years. The first two articles in the series (Selections 24 and 25 in EP2) appeared in 1905, followed by the “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism” in 1906. In the “Bedrock” MS, Peirce says that there would be two more articles in the Monist series to complete his “proof” of Pragmaticism — and this was apparently written after Selection 28 in EP2 (R 318, 1907), where “Peirce comes closer than in any other to fully expressing his brand of pragmatism and to giving a clearly articulated proof,” according to the editors (EP2:398). Don Roberts dates R 300 “about March of 1908,” which is consistent with the time spans mentioned by Peirce in the MS itself. The main part of “Bedrock” consists of 65 manuscript pages numbered by Peirce. Much of it is about Existential Graphs, identity and teridentity, etc., and may be of interest to John S. and Jon A.S. (Jon has posted some quotes from it already). Jerry C. should be interested in the part where Peirce says that the “most interesting term of comparison for Existential Graphs is the system of ‘rational formulae,’ or graphs, that are used in Organic Chemistry.” Helmut R. should be interested in Peirce’s argument that the concept of Sequence (which does indeed involve time) is logically simpler than the concept of negation. As for the partial draft relating EGs to phenomenology, I think it might give some clues as to why Peirce abandoned the project of using EGs for his proof of pragmaticism. Any of this and a lot more can be found by searching for the right keywords in the page on my website, http://gnusystems.ca/Bedrock.htm. Comments or questions on this text can be posted here with the subject line above. Gary f.
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