[Arisbe] Re: Logic As Semiotic

[Jon Awbrey]

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| Some reasons having now been given for adopting the
| unpsychological conception of the science, let us now
| seek to make this conception sufficiently distinct to
| serve for a definition of logic.  For this purpose we
| must bring our 'logos' from the abstract to the concrete,
| from the absolute to the dependent.  There is no science
| of absolutes.  The metaphysical logos is no more to us
| than the metaphysical soul or the metaphysical matter.
| To the absolute Idea or Logos, the dependent or relative
| 'word' corresponds.  The word 'horse', is thought of as
| being a word though it be unwritten, unsaid, and unthought.
| It is true, it must be considered as having been thought;
| but it need not have been thought by the same mind which
| regards it as being a word.  I can think of a word in
| Feejee, though I can attach no definite articulation to
| it, and do not guess what it would be like.  Such a word,
| abstract but not absolute, is no more than the genus of
| all symbols having the same meaning.  We can also think
| of the higher genus which contains words of all meanings.
| A first approximation to a definition, then, will be that
| logic is the science of representations in general, whether
| mental or material.  This definition coincides with Locke's.
| It is however too wide for logic does not treat of all kinds
| of representations.  The resemblance of a portrait to its
| object, for example, is not logical truth.  It is necessary,
| therefore, to divide the genus representation according to
| the different ways in which it may accord with its object.
|
| The first and simplest kind of truth is the resemblance of a copy.
| It may be roughly stated to consist in a sameness of predicates.
| Leibniz would say that carried to its highest point, it would
| destroy itself by becoming identity.  Whether that is true or
| not, all known resemblance has a limit.  Hence, resemblance
| is always partial truth.  On the other hand, no two things
| are so different as to resemble each other in no particular.
| Such a case is supposed in the proverb that Dreams go by
| contraries, -- an absurd notion, since concretes have no
| contraries.  A false copy is one which claims to resemble
| an object which it does not resemble.  But this never fully
| occurs, for two reasons;  in the first place, the falsehood
| does not lie in the copy itself but in the 'claim' which is
| made for it, in the 'superscription' for instance;  in the
| second place, as there must be 'some' resemblance between
| the copy and its object, this falsehood cannot be entire.
| Hence, there is no absolute truth or falsehood of copies.
| Now logical representations have absolute truth and
| falsehood as we know 'à posteriori' from the law
| of excluded middle.  Hence, logic does not treat
| of copies.
|
| The second kind of truth, is the denotation of a sign,
| according to a previous convention.  A child's name, for
| example, by a convention made at baptism, denotes that person.
| Signs may be plural but they cannot have genuine generality because
| each of the objects to which they refer must have been fixed upon
| by convention.  It is true that we may agree that a certain sign
| shall denote a certain individual conception, an individual act
| of an individual mind, and that conception may stand for all
| conceptions resembling it;  but in this case, the generality
| belongs to the 'conception' and not to the sign.  Signs,
| therefore, in this narrow sense are not treated of in
| logic, because logic deals only with general terms.
|
| The third kind of truth or accordance of a representation
| with its object, is that which inheres in the very nature
| of the representation whether that nature be original or
| acquired.  Such a representation I name a 'symbol'.
|
| CSP, CE 1, pages 169-170.
| 
| Charles Sanders Peirce, "Harvard Lectures 'On the Logic of Science'", (1865),
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 1, 1857-1866',
| Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.

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