ONT Re: Rightful Reigning Regent
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RRR. Dialogical Note 2
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MB = Michel Balat
MB: J'ai bien peur d'avoir a afficher ma profonde inculture,
mais je ne vois toujours pas comment un signe pourrait
etre un signe sans avoir quelque hic et nunc indiciaire.
Pas de symbole sans indice, si j'ai bien lu Peirce. Sans
quoi il ne saurait y avoir quelque symbole que ce soit.
Comme aime a le dire mon cher Gerard Deledalle, sans
occurrences une loi est vide.
Michel,
I utterly agree! I have often stressed this myself,
pointing out once that the exclamation "Voila!" has
iconic, indexical, symbolic features in full measure.
But consider the context of my inquiry. I am hic et nunc
examining Quine's allusions to Russell's illusions that his
theory of "singular descriptions" really achieves what they
say and apparently think it does. This question in its turn
takes its place within a more encompassing horizon and a more
ancient tradition that includes the "combinator calculus" that
was cooked up by Schoenfinkel and Curry and going back at least
to Bentham's "theory of fictions". Moreover, though Quine seems
to ignore it here, the leading idea of "contextual definition",
also known as "paraphrasis", is present in Peirce's early work
on group representations in linear algebra that leads straight
on to his very general "term models" in "universal algebra",
to give these things the names that they would have today,
and all of this is continuous with the evolution of the
pragmatic maxim. So we have some explaining to do!
But in the immediate context I was only pressed to challenge the idea
that the indicial aspect has been dismissed by quite so simple a means
as Russell and Quine suggest, reducing it to a matter of "logical form".
Jon Awbrey
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