Re: “On the Paradigm of Experience Appro priate for Semiotic”

* Comments on the Peirce List slow reading of Joseph Ransdell,
   "On the Paradigm of Experience Appropriate for Semiotic",
   http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/ransdell/paradigm.htm

Peirce List,

I copied some of my earlier comments on the current slow reading to
the Conceptual Graphs list, and John Sowa made a number of pertinent
remarks that he asked me to forward, so I will include the CG List on
my copy list for the time being.

Here is John's first reply:

On 11/7/2011 2:30 PM, Jon Awbrey wrote:
> One of the continuing problems that we have in reading Peirce is the fact that
> logical atomists, logical positivists, and later writers tend to attach rather
> different meanings to words like "formal", "logical atom", and "positive" than
> Peirce did himself.
>
> The meaning of "formal" is especially critical for the present discussion,
> since it figures most prominently in Peirce's most detailed definition of
> a sign relation, namely, the one given in 2 variants in NEM 4, 20-21 & 54.
>
> Logic will here be defined as formal semiotic. A definition of a sign will be
> given which no more refers to human thought than does the definition of a line
> as the place which a particle occupies, part by part, during a lapse of time.

I agree that Peirce often used words in ways that are different from
common current usage.  But in this example, he used the word 'formal'
in the same sense as modern logicians and computer scientists.

Following is another quotation by CSP, in which he uses the word
'formal' in the modern sense.  And he wrote it in 1869.  Compare
that to what Tarski wrote in 1936:

> Peirce (1869):  “All that the formal logician has to say is, that
> if facts capable of expression in such and such forms of words are
> true, another fact whose expression is related in a certain way
> to the expression of these others is also true.... The proposition
> ‘If A, then B’ may conveniently be regarded as equivalent to
> ‘Every case of the truth of A is a case of the truth of B.’”
>
> Tarski (1936):  “In terms of these concepts [of model],
> we can define the concept of logical consequence as follows:
> The sentence X follows logically from the sentences of the class K
> if and only if every model of the class K is also a model of the class X.”

John

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