PLEASE DON'T OPEN ANYTHING ATTACHED TO THIS E-MAIL. I'LL STAY OFF THE LISTSERVE UNTIL I CAN TRACK DOWN A POSSIBLE VIRUS IN THE SYSTEMS I WORK WITH.
NEAL -----Original Message----- From: Benjamin Udell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Mon 5/8/2006 4:54 PM To: Peirce Discussion Forum Cc: Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? Jerry, Your thumbnail sketch of chemical logic seems clear to me, and my memories from long-ago high-school chemistry fit with it. The striking thing to a gawker like me who knows very little about chemistry is those symbols, and it's encouraging to one's intuition to be reassured that chemists themselves find the symbols striking, a theme worth addressing. The idea seems to be that one thinks the chemistry through those symbols; the symbols so empower chemical thought that chemists make a theme of it. What I wonder are two things: 1. I've seen that it's called "a logic." I'd like to ask, just to be sure, are its characteristics distinctly logical, order-theoretic, or anything like that, as opposed to, say, abstract-algebraic, or enumerative-combinatorial, or even graph-theoretic? 2. Is there anything that you think comparable with chemical thought's use of chemical symbolism, using signs -- diagrams, symbols, semblances, or indexes -- in any other major research fields physical, material, biological, or social/human? Physicists use Feynmann diagrams, but those don't seem to have anything like the prominence in physics which chemical symbolism has in chemistry. On the other hand, I'm hardly one to know. But when I think of physical thought, I think of mathematical expressions a lot more generally, rather than just of visual diagrams. As for some analogous sort of key vehicle of biologists' thinking, -- I can't even think of a "typical" biologist, there seem such diverse kinds, at least "on paper," or in Internet searches and encyclopedia articles, which are pretty much what's available to me. Best, Ben Udell ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jerry LR Chandler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Peirce Discussion Forum" <peirce-l@lyris.ttu.edu> Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2006 7:39 PM Subject: [peirce-l] Re: NEW ELEMENTS: So what is it all about? Ben: My comment is from a chemical perspective. It may or may not be of help to you. On May 6, 2006, at 1:06 AM, Peirce Discussion Forum digest wrote: > But first, on a general note, let me say that among the issues driving my > current display of confusion & error, is the question: if comprehension is > for quality & predicate, while denotation is for objects > (resistances/reactions), then what dimension is for representational and > logical relations themselves? Words like "not," "probably," "if," etc. do not > designate either qualities or objects, nor do they represent objects as > having this or that quality. Names of chemical substances are always a subject of a chemical sentence. A chemical sentence can express existence. Water exists. This is in the imperative mood. A chemical name connotes the properties; the properties are context dependent. (Thermodynamics, for example, describes the context dependency of the variables of temperature, pressure and volume.) > What, then, do they connote? What do they denote? The particular properties denote a specific substance; the particular properties create the identity of the species in chemical logic. (Of course, one must keep in mind that the chemical name always refers to the pure substance. The problems of mixtures (like a biological cell) are vastly more complicated with respect to connotation and denotation. The concept of purity is difficult enough in its own right!)) Of course, if one is philosophically opposed to the notion of material existence, the expressions of chemistry are a linguistic challenge! Cheers Jerry --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
