Peirce’s 1870 “Logic of Relatives” • Comment 11.16
https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2014/05/21/peirces-1870-logic-of-relatives-c…
Peirce’s 1870 “Logic of Relatives” • Comment 11.16
https://oeis.org/wiki/Peirce%27s_1870_Logic_Of_Relatives_%E2%80%A2_Part_2#C…
All,
We now have enough material on morphisms to go back and cast a
more studied eye on what Peirce is doing with that “number of”
function, whose application to a logical term t is indicated by
writing the term in square brackets, as [t]. It is convenient
to have a prefix notation for the function mapping a term t to
a number [t] but Peirce previously reserved the letter “n” for
logical “not”, so let’s use v(t) as a variant for [t].
My plan will be nothing less plodding than to work through the
statements Peirce made in defining and explaining the “number of”
function up to our present place in the paper, namely, the budget
of points collected in Comment 11.2.
https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2014/04/30/peirces-1870-logic-of-relatives-c…
NOF 1
=====
<QUOTE CSP:>
I propose to assign to all logical terms, numbers; to an absolute term,
the number of individuals it denotes; to a relative term, the average
number of things so related to one individual. Thus in a universe of
perfect men (“men”), the number of “tooth of” would be 32. The number
of a relative with two correlates would be the average number of things
so related to a pair of individuals; and so on for relatives of higher
numbers of correlates. I propose to denote the number of a logical term
by enclosing the term in square brackets, thus [t].
(Peirce, CP 3.65)
</QUOTE>
The role of the “number of” function may be formalized by assigning it
a name and a type, in the present discussion v : S → R, where S is a
suitable set of signs, a “syntactic domain”, containing all the logical
terms whose numbers we need to evaluate in a given context, and where R
is the set of real numbers.
Transcribing Peirce’s example:
Let m = man
and t = tooth of___.
Then v(t) = [t] = [tm]/[m]
To spell it out in words, the number of the relative term “tooth of___”
in a universe of perfect human dentition is equal to the number of teeth
of humans divided by the number of humans, that is, 32.
The dyadic relative term t determines a dyadic relation T ⊆ X × Y,
where X and Y contain all the teeth and all the people, respectively,
under discussion.
A rough indication of the bigraph for T might be drawn as follows,
showing just the first few items in the toothy part of X and the
peoply part of Y.
Figure 51. Dyadic Relation T
https://inquiryintoinquiry.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/lor-1870-figure-511.…
Notice that the “number of” function v : S → R needs the
data represented by the entire bigraph for T in order to
compute the value [t].
Finally, one observes this component of T is a function in
the direction T : X → Y, since we are counting only teeth
which occupy exactly one mouth of a tooth-bearing creature.
Regards,
Jon