Re: Deja Vu All Over Again • A Question About Peirce's Categories

Jon Awbrey <[email protected]> Wed, 18 Dec 2013 11:00:10 -0500

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.inquiry
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Re: Gary Richmond
http://web.archive.org/web/20131215190824/http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/11302

Gary,

Thanks for the encouragement, though others may blame you for it. Speaking of time, it's probably
about to get scarce and scattered for many of us, myself included, so what I say for a while will be
off the cuff and off the top of my head, liberally sprinkled with fireside reveries and auld lang
reminiscences.

I can think of several times in my life when the issue of signs and time -- relational structure and
transformational process -- became critical. The first that comes to mind right now was after I had
taken a detour from my studies in math and physics to learn a little logic, which led to psychology,
which led to philosophy. Peirce seemed to speak to me, if a bit Sphinx-like, all through this time,
and I heard him speaking from many different directions. Then came a time when I realized that I
was going to have to learn a little more mathematics if I wanted to understand what he was saying.
It had to do with matrices -- there were places where he used them to represent the structures of
dyadic relations, and places where he used dyadic relations to represent the meaning of logical
values and logical operators, pragmatically speaking, in terms of their effects. Long story short,
I returned to mathematics and eventually grad school. I didn't wanna do it -- he made me do it.

Now matrix representations of linear transformations, even while yet remaining on the flatland of
dyadic mathematics, is one of the places where we can see the relationship between form and time,
between relational structure and transformational process.