Re: Peirce List
It may be a day or two before I can get back to the zeroth law of semiotics and how grasping it cures a strain of ills that language and some fashions of logic are heir to, but on the subject of nominalism I found a summary of a previous discussion that may say some things better than I have this time around.
Re: Peirce List • Sungchul Ji
General terms are terms like man, woman, child, etc., each of which applies to many individuals, in other words, has a general denotation or a plural extension. Generally speaking, a general term is treated as bearing an accessory reference, indirect denotation, or other form of association to a general property like man-ness, woman-ness, child-ness, etc. and to a set of individuals like men, women, children, etc. But a strict nominalist would hold that we have no need of these properties or sets, that all we need are the individual terms that denote individuals individually together with the general terms that denote individuals in a general way.
Re: Peirce List • Tom Wyrick
Nominalism takes its name from the idea that “generals are only names” and it goes by the maxims “Do not take a general name for the name of a general” and “Do not multiply entities beyond necessity”. That is, we should not mistake a general term, one applying to many individuals, for a term denoting a general entity, property, or universal, as those are dispensable in favor of individual entities.
It would be a mistake to think pragmatism is diametrically opposed to all such principles. As far as the advice against confounding signs with objects, the caution against confusing different types and uses of signs with one another, and the care to economize our budgets of entities to a reasonable degree, if not to extremes of absolute austerity, pragmatism goes a long way with that. The fork in the road comes with the degree to which general entities can be eliminated, wholly or not so wholly.
cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog Forum • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
cc: FB | Semeiotics • Laws of Form (1) (2) • Peirce List (1) (2) (3)
A statement 
The statement 
When I endeavored some years ago to examine the so-called “liar paradox” from what I take to be a pragmatic, semiotic, sign relational standpoint, I arrived at a way of understanding it that dispelled, for me, every air of paradox about it. I wrote out an outline of that analysis under the same title I’m using here and shared it in several discussion groups. The couplet above is a bare bones rendering of that analysis.
The more rambling version can be found at the following locations.
A statement
The statement
Re: Peirce List • Edwina Taborsky
My old avatar 0* (Zero-Aster) does incline to laconic verses but I hope to address a class of concrete applications which will serve to unpack their sense.
The main thing I wish to communicate is the possibility that many so-called insolubilia and paradoxes are merely cases of conceptual difficulty which can be resolved when viewed within the right sort of conceptual framework, namely, Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics or a natural extension of it.
cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog Forum • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
cc: FB | Semeiotics • Laws of Form (1) (2) • Peirce List (1) (2) (3)
New discussions of the so-called “Liar Paradox” have broken out at several places on the web in recent weeks, just to mention a couple of cases:
Bedevilments of that ilk always bring to mind — to my mind at least — the critical ways the Peircean paradigm of logic as semiotics differs from the fallback paradigm bedeviling the thinking of those who have yet to see by Peirce’s lights.
And that in turn brings to mind the following oldie but still goodie saying what I spy as the issue lying at the root of the “Liar” and many other pseudo-problems.
Meaning is a privilege not a right.
Not all pictures depict.
Not all signs denote.
Never confuse a property of a sign,
just for instance, existence,
with a sign of a property,
for instance, existence.
Taking a property of a sign
for a sign of a property
is the zeroth sign of
nominal thinking
and the first
mistake.
Also Sprach 0*
2002 Oct 09
cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog Forum • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
cc: FB | Semeiotics • Laws of Form (1) (2) • Peirce List (1) (2) (3)
Meaning is a privilege not a right.
Not all pictures depict.
Not all signs denote.
Never confuse a property of a sign,
just for instance, existence,
with a sign of a property,
for instance, existence.
Taking a property of a sign
for a sign of a property
is the zeroth sign of
nominal thinking
and the first
mistake.
Also Sprach 0*
9 October 2002
cc: Cybernetics • Ontolog Forum • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
cc: FB | Semeiotics • Laws of Form (1) (2) • Peirce List (1) (2) (3)
Re: Cathy O’Neil • Profit as Proxy for Value
Re: Michael Harris • Xenomoney
There is a deep and pervasive analogy between systems of commerce and systems of communication, turning on their near‑universal use of symbola (images, media, proxies, signs, symbols, tokens, etc.) to stand for pragmata (objects, objective values, the things we really care about, or would really care about if we examined our values in practice thoroughly enough).
Both types of sign‑using systems are prey to the same sort of dysfunction or functional disease — it sets in when users confound signs and objects so severely as to take signs for ends instead of means.
There is a vast literature on this topic, once you think to go looking for it. And it’s a perennial theme in fable and fiction.
cc: FB | Semeiotics • Mathstodon
Re: Peirce List • Helmut Raulien
Definitions and examples for relation composition and the two most commonly arising types of relation reduction can be found in the following articles.
A previous post on this thread gives a thumbnail sketch of the main themes:
Peirce’s idea of reducibility and irreducibility is the more fundamental concept, having to do with the question of whether relations can be derived from others by relational composition, and this type of operation is invoked in every variety of formal construction. Consequently, projective reducibility does nothing to defeat Peirce’s thesis about the primal nature of triadic relations.
But people sometimes confuse the two ideas of reducibility, compositional and projective, so it’s good to clarify the differences between them. Projective reducibility, when you can get it, is more of a “consolation prize” for dyadic reductionists, who tend to ignore the fact that you can’t do anything constructive without triadic relations being involved the mix. Still, it’s a useful property and good to recognize it when it occurs.
Inquiry Into Inquiry 