Re: Peirce on Definition and Determination
Jon Awbrey <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.inquiry |
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| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Note 8 (Revised) Peircers, I wasn't too happy with my paragraph on the meaning of “normative” -- I have a feeling that I did a better job of capturing the essence in some things I wrote in the psst, so I may go looking for those -- at any rate, I amended the paragraph with a more verbose attempt. Re: Jim Willgoose At: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/8233 The most general meaning of “formal” is “concerned with form”, but the Latin “forma” may mean “beauty” in addition to “form”, so perhaps a normative “goodness of form” enters at this root. The Latin word “norma” literally means a “carpenter's square”. The Greek “gnomon” is a sundial pointer taking a similar form. The most general meaning of “normative” is “having to do with what a person ought to do”, but a pragmatic interpretation of ethical imperatives tends to treat that as “having to do with what a person ought to do in order to achieve a given object”, so another formula might be “relating to the good that befits a being of our kind, what must be done in order to bring that good into being, and how to tell the signs that show the way”. Defining logic as formal or normative semiotic differentiates logic from other species of semiotic under the general theory of signs, leaving a niche open for descriptive semiotic, just to mention the obvious branch. This brings us to the question: How does a concern with form, or goodness of form, along with the question of what is required to achieve an object, modify our perspective on sign relations in a way that duly marks it as a logical point of view? Regards, Jon -- academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/ inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ mwb: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache _______________________________________________ Inquiry mailing list [email protected] http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/inquiry