Re: SUO: Re: Parse Of Things Remembered
Pat,
We went round and round on this issue before, so I don't want
to repeat the experience. But I just wanted to add a couple
of new remarks:
>Peirce was misled by an analogy between logic and chemistry, which
>wasnt a bad idea in 1885, but seems kind of daft in hindsight. He
>seems to have thought that the associations between relations and
>their instances, which he was encoding as arcs in his graphs, were
>like valency in chemistry....
First of all, Peirce was a buddy of Sylvester's at Johns Hopkins
University, and Cayley was a visitor there. Graph theory in all
its glory was a big topic there. So he wasn't exactly naive
about what can and cannot be done with graphs.
Second, Whitehead also remarked that dyadic relations weren't
sufficient for knowledge rep. Last week, I scanned a few pages
from Chapter 9 of his book "Concept of Nature," but I don't
want to bother scanning the whole thing. However, if you have
it (or can find it), I recommend Ch. 8, in which he remarks
"Other schools of philosophy admit relations but obstinately
refuse to contemplate relations that have more than two
relata..." (p. 150)
W. then goes on to discuss "percipient events", which require
more than 2 relata -- just the kind of examples that P. was
dealing with.
John