MS 455-456 (1903) - Lowell Lecture II

ReadAboutContentsHelp

Pages

6
Needs Review

6

This universe consists in the first place of certain mutually well-understood centres, or subjects of force well-understood to be different from one another; secondly, of certain subjects of force well-understood to exist, but not thoroughly understood to be known to be different from any of these of the first class; and thirdly of an indefinite supplement of subjects of force presumed to exist but of which there has been no definite recognition. Summing up the matter, we may say that the universe of discourse is the aggregate of subjects of the complexus of mutually well-known experience-forces well-understood between the graphist, or he who scribes the graph, and the interpreter of it.

Last edit over 6 years ago by gnox
7
Needs Review

7

5

since existential graphs will be the only ones dealt with, I shall call it a graph, simply. For example, what I have just written scribed is a graph. The board itself is a graph, since it represents the universe as consisting of single imaginary things. The board and what is written on it together make up another graph.

We must, It is quite important, however, to distinguish between a graph and a graph replica. Suppose an editor writes to me and asks for an article of 4000 words. You know what he means by words in that case. Suppose however I say that the In what I write the single word “the” may occur twenty times on every page. Every time it will count as a separate word. Yet in another sense, it is the same word. In this latter sense, the word the consists in the sum total of general conditions to which ink-marks or voice-sounds must conform in order to be understood in a certain way.

Last edit over 6 years ago by gnox
8
Needs Review

8

6

In this sense the word the is, strictly speaking, never written; but what is written conforms to it, or, as we say, embodies it. In the other sense every a written word is written once and only once, since every act of writing makes a new word. Now when I speak of a graph, I mean the general type of whatever means the same thing and expresses that meaning in the same way so far as the rules conventions of this system are concerned take cognizance of the ways; while that which is scribed once and only once and embodies the graph, I call the a graph-replica. For brevity, however, I speak of “scribing a graph” just as we speak of writing the word the. The phrase may be defended as employing the word “scribe” in a special sense.

I will now put an additional replica upon the board, or the sheet of assertion

It rains

A pear is ripe

Let us agree to understand that each of those graphs replicas has the same meaning as if it

Last edit over 6 years ago by gnox
9
Needs Review

9

7

stood alone; and that it shall be the same with any other two replicas on the sheet, so that I now assert not only that there is a ripe pear, but also that it rains.

By calling this system a system of existential graphs, I mean my meaning is that two graphs at different points of the board, whether far or near, are both asserted, each just as much as if the other were not there.

The most immediately useful information is that which is conveyed in conditional propositions, “If you find that this is true, then you may know that that is true.” Now in ordinary language the conditional form is employed to express a variety of relations between one possibility and another. Very frequently when we say “If A is true, then B is true,” we have in mind a whole range of possibilities, and we assert that among all possible cases,every one of those

Last edit over 6 years ago by gnox
10
Needs Review

10

8

in which A is true will be turn out to be a case in which B is true also. But in order to obtain a way of expressing that sort of conditional proposition, we must begin by getting a way of expressing a simpler kind, which does not often occur in ordinary speech but which has great importance in logic. The sort of conditional proposition I mean is one in which no range of possibilities is contemplated, which speaks only of the actual state of things. “If A is true then B is true,” in this sense is called a conditional proposition de inesse. In case A is not true, it makes no assertion at all and therefore involves no falsity. And since every proposition is either true or false, if the antecedent, A, is not true, the conditional de inesse is true, no matter how it may be with B. In case the consequent, B, is true, all that the conditional

Last edit over 6 years ago by gnox
Displaying pages 6 - 10 of 68 in total