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The Indexical and the Presentative Functions of Signs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Willis Moore*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri.

Extract

In his presidential address on “Symbols, Signs, and Signals,” given before the Association for Symbolic Logic, December 28, 1938, Professor C. J. Ducasse made and important distinction between what he there called the indicative and the quiddative symbol. He remarked in passing that he thought it possible to show that: 1) “The same entity may function both as indicative and as quiddative symbol: or one part of a complex symbol may be quiddative and another indicative”; and 2) “the difference between the two roles is irreducible: the indicative is not a species of the quiddative nor vice versa.” An indicative symbol is defined as “one of which the distinctive property is to orient our attention to some place in an order system …”; and a quiddative symbol as “one of which the distinctive property is to make us conceive a certain kind of thing—a certain ‘what'—no matter where in any order system it may or may not be existing.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1942

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Footnotes

This paper and the following comment were presented at the Western Division of The American Philosophical Association Meeting, Madison, Wisconsin, April 1942.

References

1 Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 4, pp. 41-52, June 1939.

2 Ibid., p. 46.

3 Ibid., p. 46.

4 Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, 1, 275.

5 Ibid., 2, 299.

6 Ibid., 2, 298.

7 Ibid., 2, 248.

8 Ibid., 2, 299.

9 Ibid., 2, 300.

10 Ibid., 2, 304.

11 Ibid., 2, 285 and 2, 286.

12 Ibid., 2, 287.

13 Ibid., 2, 285.

14 Ibid., 2, 357.

15 Ibid., 2, 336.

16 Ibid., 2, 336.

17 Ibid., 2, 288.

18 Ibid., 2, 288-2, 290.

19 Aristotle, De Soph. Elen., Ch. 4.

20 For example, see Morris, C. W., Foundations of the Theory of Signs, “International Encyclopedia of Unified Science,” Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 17.