Re: Daniel Everett • Polyunsaturated Predicates
Re: Relations & Their Relatives • Discussion 24
Dear Daniel,
I’ve been meaning to get back to this as it keeps coming up and it’s kind of important but it took me a while to find the thread again. Just by way of jumping in and hitting the ground running I found a record of a previous discussion from the heydays and fraydays of the old Peirce List — I’ll plunder that for what it’s worth and see if I can render the main ideas any clearer this time around.
Cf: The Difference That Makes A Difference That Peirce Makes • 9
Re: Peirce List | Rheme and Reason • Jon Awbrey • Gary Fuhrman • John Sowa
The just‑so‑story that relative terms got their meanings by blanking out pieces of clauses and phrases, plus the analogies to poly‑unsaturated chemical bonds, supply a stock of engaging ways to introduce the logic of relative terms and the mathematics of relations but they both run into cul‑de‑sacs when taken too literally, and for the same reason. They tempt one to confuse the syntactic accidents used to suggest formal objects with the essential forms of the objects themselves. That is the sort of confusion that leads to syntacticism and on to its kindred nominalism.
Here’s a short note I wrote the last time questions about rhemes or rhemata came up.
I wanted to check out some impressions I formed many years ago — this would have been the late 1960s and mainly from CP 3 and 4 — about Peirce’s use of the words rhema, rheme, rhemata, etc.
Rhema, Rheme
- CP 2.95, 250-265, 272, 317, 322, 379, 409n
- CP 3.420-422, 465, 636
- CP 4.327, 354, 395n, 403, 404, 411, 438, 439, 441, 446, 453, 461, 465, 470, 474, 504, 538n, 560, 621
Reviewing the variations and vacillations in Peirce’s usage over the years, I’ve decided to avoid the whole complex of rhematic terms for now. As I’ve come to realize more and more in recent years, analyzing and classifying signs as a substitute for analyzing and classifying objects is the first slip of a slide into nominalism, in effect, thinking the essence or reality of objects is contained in the signs we use to describe them.
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