ONT Logic As Semiotic
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| 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. 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. (CP 2.227).
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, 'Collected Papers', CP 2.227,
| Editor's Note: "From an unidentified fragment, c. 1897."
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