Re: Detached Ideas On Vitally Important Topics (DIOVIT)

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Continuing With:

| Charles Sanders Peirce,
| 'Reasoning and the Logic of Things',
| 'The Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898',
| Edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner,
| With an Introduction by Kenneth Laine Ketner & Hilary Putnam,
| Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992.
|
| AKA "Detached Ideas On Vitally Important Topics" (DIOVIT),
| 'Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce', CP 1.616-677.

Previously On This Thread:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-logic/2001Jan/0058.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-logic/2001Jan/0077.html

Arisbeans, (Conceptual Graphists), RDF Loggers, SemioComrades,

After that bit of historical introduction we reach one of those places
in Peirce's work that I was telling you about the other day, where he
hints at the fact, as he sees it, anyway, that the logical operation
of denial or negation is really just the anchor -- what's the right
word:  archetype, forerunner, generator, harbinger, precursor, just
where in the logical relay does it belong? -- for a whole generation
of "intentional, modal, propositional attitudes" (IMPA), maybe even the
whole generation of IMPA that "finite information creatures" (FIC's) like
us can find or make among our cognitive, intellectual, and logical resources.

But I am beginning to get in the way of the reading again,
so I will just move on and lay out this patch of the text,
leave you a bit of spacetime and a spell of breath or two
to contemplate the richness of over-&-underlying textures,
and then perhaps come back later to truck up this Persean
magic carpet with my clod-plodding e-labyrinth of comment.

Recall:

| It is now time to explain to you this Logic of Relatives. 

And Now:

| I shall here treat the subject by means of Existential Graphs,
| which is the easiest method for the unmathematical.  Still, I shall
| not attempt to set this forth at all.  I shall not even trouble you
| with the statement of its nine fundamental rules;  far less with the
| score of others with which it is necessary to familiarize oneself in
| order to practice the method.  But I shall describe in a confused,
| illogical fashion every essential feature of the system.
|
| Let us pretend to assert anything we write down
| on the black board.  As long as the board remains
| blank, whatever we may opine, we assert nothing.
| If we write down
|
||    You are a good girl
|
| we assert that.  If we write
|
||    You are a good girl
||    You obey mamma
|
| we assert both.  This is therefore a copulative proposition.
| When we wish to assert something about a proposition without
| asserting the proposition itself, we will enclose it in a
| lightly drawn oval, which is supposed to fence it off
| from the field of assertions.  Thus
|
||    ( You are a good girl )---is much to be wished
|
| and again
|
||    ( You are a good girl ) is false
|
| This last assertion that a proposition is false is a 'logical'
| statement about it;  and therefore in a logical system deserves
| special treatment.  It is also by far the commonest thing we
| have occasion to say of propositions without asserting them.
| For those reasons, let it be understood that if a proposition
| is merely fenced off from the field of assertion without any
| assertion being explicitly made concerning it, this shall be
| an elliptical way of saying that it is false.

!!!!!!!!!!

Jon Awbrey

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Received on Wednesday, 24 January 2001 09:48:10 UTC