John Stuart Mill did not do so since he argues as if an Occurrence could have a Cause. Peirce continues: “It is impossible to thread our way through the Logical intricacies of Being unless we keep these two things, the Occurrence, and the Real Fact, separte in our Thoughts. The Syllabus deduction is the object of a detailed analysis in Bellucci (in prep.). Should we paraphrase the result of the argument, we could say that if the Dicisign, for a first glance, says: “Here are some Objects O, and they are characterized by the relational property P”, what it really says on the Syllabus analysis is “Here are some Objects O, and they are really connected to this sign which is why this sign is able to describe them as having the relational property P”. In the Predicate’s picture of the Dicisign itself, then, what we normally woould call the Predicate is involved as a part. This part of the sign is the Predicate whose first function, then, surprisingly, is to depict the sign itself in its relation to the object. The turning point of the argument is that in order to claim an indexical connection to the object, this connection must, in itself, be depicted in part of the sign. This is analyzed as a claim that the sign is in actual, indexical connection to its object, and this, in turn, is analyzed as necessitating the Dicisign’s two-part structure. The long argument in the Syllabus (EPII 275-277) has the shape of a deduction taking its premiss in the Dicisign’s truth claim. Not all Dicisigns, however, are symbols, cf. The purpose of every sign is to express “fact,” and by being joined with other signs, to approach as nearly as possible to determining an interpretant which would be the perfect Truth (.)” (p. Degenerate cases are thus limit phenomena only.From this observation Peirce moves to the special type of symbols which is propositions, the central issue of “Kaina Stoicheia”, able to express facts: “ What we call a “fact” is something having the structure of a proposition, but supposed to be an element of the very universe itself. The notion of “degeneracy” comes from the geometry of conic sections where certain sections (the point, the crossing lines, the circle, the parabola) only obtain with particular, non-generic values of the variables, simplifying the equations, as opposed to the generic sections giving ellipses and hyperbolas. Peirce’s initial argument here is that symbols are genuine signs in contradistinction to the degenerate sign types of icons and indices.
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