Re: Peirce List • JA • JFS

JFS:

For those of us who are trying to convince modern students to study Peirce, we need to become bilingual.  We need to show how his terminology and notations map to and from current systems — more importantly, how they point the way to new discoveries and innovations that are obscured by modern methods.

I am also concerned with maintaining avenues of communication and cross-fertilization among various communities of inquiry.  We have to observe the specialized ways that terms are used in particular communities but we cannot capitulate to uses so specialized that they obscure the more general meaning.  In the present case, I am concerned to rescue the beauty of form, as appreciated in classical texts, mathematics, and Peirce’s philosophy, from the anorexia to which it was subjected by a few schools of nominal thought.

A reasonable tactic, then, is simply to say “syntactic form” or “syntactic structure” when that is all one means.