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, CG List,

It's a little too late for Halloween, but probably about time to revisit our old friend,
Peirce's "skeleton diagram", that often pops up in connection with his use of "formal".

CSP: Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe I have shown, only another name for
      semiotic (Greek semeiotike), the quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs.
      By describing the doctrine as "quasi-necessary", or formal, I mean that we observe
      the characters of such signs as we know, and from such an observation, by a process
      which I will not object to naming Abstraction, we are led to statements, eminently
      fallible, and therefore in one sense by no means necessary, as to what must be the
      characters of all signs used by a "scientific" intelligence, that is to say, by an
      intelligence capable of learning by experience. As to that process of abstraction,
      it is itself a sort of observation.

CSP: The faculty which I call abstractive observation is one which ordinary people perfectly
      recognize, but for which the theories of philosophers sometimes hardly leave room. It is
      a familiar experience to every human being to wish for something quite beyond his present
      means, and to follow that wish by the question, "Should I wish for that thing just the same,
      if I had ample means to gratify it?" To answer that question, he searches his heart, and in
      doing so makes what I term an abstractive observation. He makes in his imagination a sort of
      skeleton diagram, or outline sketch, of himself, considers what modifications the hypothetical
      state of things would require to be made in that picture, and then examines it, that is, observes
      what he has imagined, to see whether the same ardent desire is there to be discerned. By such a
      process, which is at bottom very much like mathematical reasoning, we can reach conclusions as
      to what would be true of signs in all cases, so long as the intelligence using them was scientific.

C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, CP 2.227. (Eds. Note. "From an unidentified fragment, c. 1897")

Cf. http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory_talk:Jon_Awbrey/Projects/Notes_And_Queries#Excerpt_1.__Peirce_.28CP_2.227.29

Regards,

Jon

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