Hi, all,
I am writing a piece for some philosophers - remember I have No training in philosophy - on how to express Peirce's sign relation, which, is roughly, "S. is a sign to I., of O." Somehow, in the last several years, I have been infected by you guys with the word, "arguments". I have found it very convenient to use it to refer to terms you fill into an empty expression to fill it up, so it computes. So below is a short passage. If you can manage to read the passage, I will have two questions: 1. Have I used the term correctly; and 2. Is there a substitute for it. After all, if I could avoid demanding that philosophical readers change their definitions of "argument", I would probably make things easier for myself. The passage follows: Nick wants to know, What is the form of proper expressions of the sign relation? He understands that minimally a sign statement is a five term expression of the form. [Argument1][relation1][Argument2][Relation2]Argument3]; or, for short A1R1A2R2A3 Here the term "argument" is used in a sense familiar to computer scientists: to refer to a term that must be supplied to complete a well-formed expression of a particular kind. Three-termed expressions are familiar in every-day life. "Danny does hit the ball" is an example of another three-termed expression, one we call a transitive sentence. To complete a well-formed transitive sentence we must supply a subject, an action verb, and an object and the subject must act on the object in accordance with the verb. The General form of such an expression is thus: [A1=Subject][R1=does][A2=Verb] [R2:to] [A3:Object] There are rules about what sorts of values can be supplied for each of the arguments which any English speaker will know and will violate only for rhetorical purposes. "Ball does hit Danny to" is not a well formed English sentence, whatever a transformational Grammarian might contrive to make of it. . So to Nick's question: we have to understand what three arguments and two relations are required to write a well-formed expression of the sign relation. This means we have to supply rules (analogous to the rules that we just supplied for a transitive sentence) for what sort of conceptions can properly fill the role of each of the arguments and what sorts of relations the sign relation itself entails. Thanks, everybody (or anybody). There is a special place in heaven reserved for those who help colleagues write. Remember, the issue is not whether what I say about the sing relation is true, but rather, have I used the term argument correctly and is it necessary for me to use it - i.e., do you have one that is just as good for the purpose. Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
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