Re: Facebook Discussion • Richard Saunders

I’m about to be diverted for a couple of weeks but this is an ever-ongoing question so I know I’ll be coming back to it again.  The short shrift goes a bit like this —

The gist of the idea that Peirce dubbed the pragmatic maxim is really a mathematical principle that has always been hard to render in ordinary language, largely because of the Procrustean subject-predicate embedding that most of the languages we know and love impose on its core structure.  The primal form is more like one of those bistable gestalts — duck-rabbit, Necker cube, old-young woman, etc.  One way to get a mental handle on the matter is to mull over the many variations on its underlying theme, such as the ones I quoted and discussed in my blog post —

• Pragmatic Maxim