Before I forget how I got myself into this particular briar patch — I mean the immediate occasion, not the long ago straying from the beaten path — it was largely in discussions with Henry Story where he speaks of links between Peirce’s logical graphs and current thinking about string diagrams and bicategories of relations.  Now that certainly sounds like something I ought to get into, if not already witting or otherwise engaged in it, but there are a few notes of reservation I know I will eventually have to explain, so I’ve been working my way up to those.

First I need to set the stage for any properly Peircean discussion of logic and mathematics, and that is the context of triadic sign relations.  I know what you’re thinking, “How can we talk about triadic sign relations before we have a theory of relations in general?”  The only way I know to answer that is by putting my programmer hard-hat on and taking recourse in that practice which starts from the simplest thinkable species of a sort and builds its way back up to the genus, step by step.

Resource

• Survey of Relation Theory

cc: Category Theory • Cybernetics • Ontolog • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
cc: FB | Relation Theory • Laws of Form • Peirce List