Jon Awbrey

@inquiryintoinquiry.bsky.social

169 Followers 518 Following

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Photo of a snow-covered, frozen pond in a wintry forest setting, viewed over a wooden rail fence and through a set of three evenly-spaced, slender trees in the foreground, with a line of trees in the background.
Now those who are not accustomed to the homologies of the conceptions of men and words, will think it very fanciful if I say that this concurrence of four terms to determine the sphere of a disjunctive term resembles the arbitrary convention by which men agree that a certain sign shall stand for a certain thing. And yet how is such a convention made? The men all look upon or think of the thing and each gets a certain conception and then they agree that whatever calls up or becomes an object of that conception in either of them shall be denoted by the sign. In the one case, then, we have several different words and the disjunctive term denotes whatever is the object of either of them. In the other case, we have several different conceptions — the conceptions of different men — and the conventional sign stands for whatever is an object of either of them. It is plain the two cases are essentially the same, and that a disjunctive term is to be regarded as a conventional sign or index. And we find both agree in having a determinate extension but an inadequate comprehension. (Peirce 1866, pp. 468–469)
small creek in winter gently flowing over a very slight, horseshoe-shaped cascade … the sound brings the mind a moment of peace …