Bibliography

On the System of Existential Graphs Considered as an Instrument for the Investigation of Logic

…assertion does not add a new element of thought. For an assertion is not a thought but a deed. If one goes before a notary and takes one’s affidavit to a statement, that is nothing but highly emphatic assertion.

A calculus […] is a system of symbols by transforming which according to a certain routine one is enabled to pass from a premiss to a conclusion in a particularly speedy and direct way.

…I must explain in what sense I speak of a “science”, – which is an abridged expression for a heuretic science, or science aiming at the discovery of new truth. Namely, I do not mean by science, as the ancients did, that doctrine which is beyond all doubt. Nor do I use the word in the sense in which Coleridge at the beginning of the XIX^th century defined science as systematized or ordered truth. But I use science in the sense of a business, that is, of a total of real acts exerting reciprocal effects one upon another, and concerned with closely analogous purposes. When I speak of any given heuretic science, I mean the body of doings in Past and Future time, not too remote from the present, of the members of a certain social group. These persons constitute a social group in their acquaintance with, understanding of, and sympathy for one another’s doings. And the peculiarity which make it a scientific group are, first, that the members are devoted to ascertaining truths of a given kind on account of their speculative interest in the matters, that they have each of them some special facilities or capacities for such research, that they employ approved methods, and that each seeks aid from the results of the others. From this point of view, the question whether a given class of investigations ought to be regarded as belonging to this science or to that is not to be settled by mere logical analysis, but is a question of fact; namely, it is the question whether the men who in our day will undertake in a scientific way investigations of the class in question will naturally mingle with one group or with another group.

…a sign is not only on the one hand determined by a more or less real object but on the other hand it determines something, – which I call its interpretant, – to be through it determined as it is by the object of the sign. The interpretants of the signs with which logic chiefly has to do are themselves signs. For every cognition is a sign as Leibniz and other nominalists have sufficiently shown and all deliberate meditation is of the nature of a dialogue as Plato represented it to be. But it is important to recognize that there are signs whose interpretants are not ipso facto signs. Such is the command of a captain of infantry “Ground arms!” [—]

The object is the sign’s determinant; the interpretant is the determinand of the sign and through the sign of the object likewise.

…it will be necessary for the present and for a long time to come to regard logic, not as a distinct science, but as only a department of the science of the general constitution of signs, – the physiology of signs, cenoscopic semeiotics. For it we roughly define a sign as a medium of communication, a piece of concerted music is a sign, and so is a word or signal of command. Now logic has no positive concern with either of these kinds of signs, but it must concern itself with them negatively in defining the kind of signs it does deal with; and it is not likely that in our time there will be anybody to study the general physiology of the nonlogical signs except the logician, who is obliged to do so, in some measure.

…a sign is a something which is on the one hand caused or otherwise determined by something else which is not utterly and altogether unreal, – this something else being the object of the sign. When I say that the object is not altogether unreal, I mean this. If a thing has whatever characters it has utterly regardless of what any men existing either now or at any assignable future date may opine that its characters are, that thing is, by definition, perfectly real. But in so far as it is whatever the thinker may think it to be, it is unreal. Now I say that the object of a sign must resist in some measure any tendency it may have to be as the thinker thinks it. [—]

The object is the sign’s determinant…

…I must explain in what sense I speak of a “science”, – which is an abridged expression for a heuretic science, or science aiming at the discovery of new truth. Namely, I do not mean by science, as the ancients did, that doctrine which is beyond all doubt. Nor do I use the word in the sense in which Coleridge at the beginning of the XIX^th century defined science as systematized or ordered truth. But I use science in the sense of a business, that is, of a total of real acts exerting reciprocal effects one upon another, and concerned with closely analogous purposes. When I speak of any given heuretic science, I mean the body of doings in Past and Future time, not too remote from the present, of the members of a certain social group. These persons constitute a social group in their acquaintance with, understanding of, and sympathy for one another’s doings. And the peculiarity which make it a scientific group are, first, that the members are devoted to ascertaining truths of a given kind on account of their speculative interest in the matters, that they have each of them some special facilities or capacities for such research, that they employ approved methods, and that each seeks aid from the results of the others. From this point of view, the question whether a given class of investigations ought to be regarded as belonging to this science or to that is not to be settled by mere logical analysis, but is a question of fact; namely, it is the question whether the men who in our day will undertake in a scientific way investigations of the class in question will naturally mingle with one group or with another group.

…the science of the general constitution of signs, – the physiology of signs, cenoscopic semeiotics.

…a sign is a something which is on the one hand caused or otherwise determined by something else which is not utterly and altogether unreal, – this something else being the object of the sign. [—] But a sign is not only on the one hand determined by a more or less real object but on the other hand it determines something, – which I call its interpretant, – to be through it determined as it is by the object of the sign. The interpretants of the signs with which logic chiefly has to do are themselves signs. For every cognition is a sign as Leibniz and other nominalists have sufficiently shown and all deliberate meditation is of the nature of a dialogue as Plato represented it to be. But it is important to recognize that there are signs whose interpretants are not ipso facto signs. Such is the command of a captain of infantry “Ground arms!” [—]

The object is the sign’s determinant; the interpretant is the determinand of the sign and through the sign of the object likewise.