MS 298-299 Phaneroscopy

φαν11 ter continued [Next following is 11 ter recontinued]

the use is limited to cases in which the man has actually formed a resolution; while I propose to extend the meaning so as to cover any state of a man having an accidental cause in which he would behave upon occasion in a way more special than men in general or even the person in question would usually be at all certain to behave in the absence of the special cause. By calling this cause accidental, I mean that it does not arise according to any general law of man’s biological ontology being or even according to any such law that is special to that man, independently of circumstances that might not have occurred. For example, I should not say that the fact that a person has erotic dreams argues any determination of his soul; but if he or she falls in love, I should say that the society of the person whom he or she loves has caused a “determination of the soul,” in its general faculty of love, to excite a passion for that particular person. The words “of the soul” in this phrase, as used by me, are not intended to imply the existence of the substance called the soul (although personally I do believe in it), but merely to show that the word “determination” does not here bear any of its other senses, of which there are just a dozen, not [over]

φαν12

the characters that they signify, that is, that they are intended, or virtually profess to be intended, to excite in the interpreter of them,— and therefore do excite in the correct interpreter; nor are they symptoms or subjects or vehicles, of symptoms, as that goodman and housewife who alternately come forth from and retire into their hygroscopic cottage, are subjects of behaviour which is symptomatic of moisture or dryness, being brute effects of the events they signalize. No, thought-signs belong to that class of signs which the prince of logicians has termed symbols; namely, these signs which are made to be signs, and to be precisely the signs that they are, neither by possessing any decisive qualities nor by embodying effects of any special causation, but merely by the certainty

φαν13

that they will be interpreted as signs, and as just such and such signs. Now I use the term Thought in such a sense that I speak of any two symbols which are intended, or profess to be intended, to be representative of the same real object, be it thing, event, or law, and which further signify, or are intended to call forth the same response, or interpretation, be it an emotion, an obedient act, or another sign, I speak of these, I say, as being, or embodying, the same Thought, in different guises. The highest kind of symbol is one which signifies a growth, or self-development, of thought, and it is of that alone that a moving representation is possible; and accordingly, the central problem of logic is to say whether one given thought is truly, i.e. is adapted to be, a development of a given other or not. In other words, it is the critic of arguments. Accordingly, in

φαν14

my early papers I limited logic to the study of this problem. But since then, I have formed the opinion that the proper sphere of any science in a given stage of development of science is the study of such questions as one social group of men can properly devote their lives to answering; and it seems to me that in the present state of our knowledge of signs, the whole doctrine of the classification of signs and of what is essential to a given kind of sign, must be studied by one group of investigators. Therefore, I extend logic to embrace all the necessary principles of semeiotic, and I recognize a logic of icons, and a logic of indices as well as a logic of symbols; and in this last I recognize three divisions: Stecheotic (or stoicheiology), which I formerly called Speculative Grammar; Critic, which I formerly called Logic; and Methodeutic, which I formerly called Speculative Rhetoric. A fallacy

φαν15

is, for me, a supposititious thinking, a thinking that parades as a self-development of thought but is in fact begotten by some other sire than reason; and this has substantially been the usual view of modern logicians. For reasoning ceases to be Reason when it is no longer reasonable: thinking ceases to be Thought when true thought disowns it. A self-development of Thought takes the course that thinking will take that is sufficiently deliberate, and is not truly a self-development if it slips from being the thought of one object-thought to being the thought of another object-thought. It is, in the geological sense, a “fault”;— an inconformability in the strata of thinking. The discussion of it does not appertain to pure logic, but to the application of logic to psychology. I only notice it here, as throwing a light upon what I do not mean by