John, this looks to me like an evasive maneuver on your part. Peirce's definition of "Seme" is part of his speculative grammar and has nothing to do with Existential Graphs.
Gary f. -----Original Message----- From: John F Sowa <s...@bestweb.net> Sent: 12-Mar-19 17:03 To: Francesco Bellucci <bellucci.france...@googlemail.com> Cc: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] The Bedrock Beneath Pragmaticism Francesco and Jerry LRC, Thanks for both of your comments. They are critical for resolving these issues. FB > In R 295, a draft of the "Prolegomena", Peirce says: > > CSP: The first member of the triplet, the “Seme,” embraces the logical > Term, the Subject or Object of a sentence, everything of any kind, be > it a man or a scribed character, such as h or Pb, which will serve or > is supposed to serve, for some purpose, as a substitute for its > Object. (R 295, p. 26ff) To resolve these issues, we need to determine exactly how Peirce would translate "logical Term" to existential graphs. Does it mean the bare predicate or the predicate plus a line of identity? JLRC > If my memory serves me correctly, the word “term" derives from the > middle ages, perhaps Peter of Spain? It is a shortened form of the > word “terminus” which simply represents the beginning and ending of a > sentence. Yes. Petrus Hispanus was the author of "Summulae Logicales" (1239). For the next six centuries, every textbook on logic was copied from or influenced by it. That includes Whateley's book, which Peirce read cover to cover in one week when he was 13 years old. In his letter to Kehler (1911), Peirce showed exactly how the subject and predicate terms of a syllogism are translated to an EG. See NEM 3:168, 169 (pp. 8, 9 of http://jfsowa.com/peirce/eg1911.pdf ). On p. 3:168, he wrote "Fig. 11 shows the two premisses "Any S is M" and "Any M is P." In the traditional terminology, S is the subject term, M is the middle term, and P is the predicate term. If you look at the Fig. 11 to 17, all three terms are monads. Since M is represented in exactly the same way in subject position or predicate position, that indicates that a "logical term" is just the monad by itself, independent of the line or ligature. FB > I refomulate Claims #1 and #2 as follows: > > Claim #1: every rheme is a seme, but not every seme is a rheme; the > subject of a sentence is a seme (R 295) but not a rheme (at least, not > a rheme in the sense in which rhemes were defined, e.g., in 1903). > > Claim #2: 'Seme' includes predicates and quasi-predicates, but not > subjects of sentences. The subject of a sentence is not a seme. The problem with this formulation is the ambiguity of the words 'subject' and 'predicate' in Aristotelian logic, 20th c logics. and English grammar. Since Peirce was writing during the transition, his English sometimes obscures the meaning. But his translation to EGs is always precise. My hypothesis: I don't believe that Peirce intended a seme to include a line of identity that identifies a particular individual. For my Claim #2, I'll delete the word 'subject' because it's highly ambiguous. Instead, I would say: Claim #2: 'Seme' includes predicates and quasi-predicates, but not a ligature or line of identity. In any case, there is more to say. John
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