List, Jon:

> On Mar 28, 2021, at 9:16 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> 
> What is the truth of the matter?
> What was Peirce's view of the matter?
> When we are trying to leverage Peirce's insights in an effort to answer #1, 
> we must first answer #2 accurately, and his own voluminous writings are where 
> the "rubber meets the road" in that inquiry. One more time, someone who 
> declines to be scrupulously faithful to Peirce's own concepts and terminology 
> will be off the mark when attempting to apply them in other domains.

In my opinion, the challenges of representing CSP texts demands the interpreter 
attempts to embrace the historical settings in several disciplines at the time 
he lived, now well over a century ago.  To be faithful to the hypothetical 
meanings that this polymath may have conjured requires some considerations of 
the state of logics, mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology  as they were 
emerging in the second half of the 19 th Century.  After a short description of 
one approach to understanding CSPs’ view, I will pose a question. 

The perplexity of the second question is deep enough in the social disciplines, 
but such an understanding provide very insight into the truths of the social 
disciplines as we enter into the third decade of the 21 st Century.  

The search the meaning of Peircian texts in the “hard” sciences is even more 
difficult.  The conceptual framework of relational logics that bind the hard 
sciences into 21 st Century unity has morphed into novel terminologies, 
innumerable terms that are irrelevant to CSP texts. This morphogenesis of 
languages motivated Bateson to address in considerable detail schismatogenesis. 
  

In the field of chemistry, my specialty, it has required nearly two decades of 
off and on efforts to decipher the meanings of the trichotomy (qualisigns, 
sinsigns, legisigns, the antecedent and associated representational terms 
(icon, index, and symbol) and the consequence terms that generate the terms 
(rheme, dicisign, argument) for propositional logic used by Peirce in his 
chemical and other texts). The binding of these nine terms to the usage of 
phenomenological  terms by 19 th Century chemists is remote from current usage. 
In particular, the speciation terms (including “and” and “or”) are used 
differently in quantitative inferences in modern logics. (These changes in 
meanings can be associated with the rise of “set theory” and the non-Peircian 
notions of categorical graph theory.)

 CSP usage is vaguely related to what could be referred to as a relevance 
logic, a non-Gentzenian natural deductive logic in today’s terminology. (For a 
clear introduction to relevant logics, see the recent writings of Stephen Read.)

Now, I come to the basic purpose of this post, a question that may tweak a open 
mind.
Has the meaning of the term “ethic” or “grammar” changed significantly in the 
past century?

Cheers
Jerry 

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