An Improvement on the Gamma Graphs

 
573. In working with Existential Graphs, we use, or at any rate imagine that we use, a sheet of paper of different tints on its two sides. Let us say that the side we call the recto is cream white while the verso is usually of somewhat bluish grey, but may be of yellow or of a rose tint or of green. The recto is appropriated to the representation of existential, or actual, facts, or what we choose to make believe are such. The verso is appropriated to the representation of possibilities of different kinds according to its tint, but usually to that of subjective possibilities, or subjectively possible truths. The special kind of possibility here called subjective is that which consists in ignorance. If we do not know that there are not inhabitants of Mars, it is subjectively possible that there are such beings. . . .  
   
574. The verso is usually appropriated to imparting information about subjective possibilities or what may be true for aught we know. To scribe a graph is to impart an item of information; and this item of information does one of two things. It either adds to what we know to exist or it cuts off something from our list of subjective possibilities. Hence, it must be that a graph scribed on the verso is thereby denied.
   
575. Now the denial of a subjective possibility usually, if not always, involves the assertion of a truth of existence; and consequently what is put upon the verso must usually have a definite connection with a place on the recto.  
   
576. In my former exposition of Existential Graphs, I said that there must be a department of the System which I called the Gamma part into which I was as yet able to gain mere glimpses, sufficient only to show me its reality, and to rouse my intense curiosity, without giving me any real insight into it. The conception of the System which I have just set forth is a very recent discovery. I have not had time as yet to trace out all its consequences. But it is already plain that, in at least three places, it lifts the veil from the Gamma part of the system.
   
577. The new discovery which sheds such a light is simply that, as the main part of the sheet represents existence or actuality, so the area within a cut, that is, the verso of the sheet, represents a kind of possibility.
   
578. From thence I immediately infer several things that I did not understand before, as follows:

First, the cut may be imagined to extend down to one or another depth into the paper, so that the overturning of the piece cut out may expose one stratum or another, these being distinguished by their tints; the different tints representing different kinds of possibility.

This improvement gives substantially, as far as I can see, nearly the whole of that Gamma part which I have been endeavoring to discern.

   
579. Second, In a certain partly printed but unpublished "Syllabus of Logic," which contains the only formal or full description of Existential Graphs that I have ever undertaken to give, I laid it down, as a rule, that no graph could be partly in one area and partly in another;(*1) and this I said simply because I could attach no interpretation to a graph which should cross a cut. As soon, however, as I discovered that the verso of the sheet represents a universe of possibility, I saw clearly that such a graph was not only interpretable, but that it fills the great lacuna in all my previous developments of the logic of relatives. For although I have always recognized that a possibility may be real, that it is sheer insanity to deny the reality of the possibility of my raising my arm, even if, when the time comes, I do not raise it; and although, in all my attempts to classify relations, I have invariably recognized, as one great class of relations, the class of references, as I have called them, where one correlate is an existent, and another is a mere possibility; yet whenever I have undertaken to develop the logic of relations, I have always left these references out of account, notwithstanding their manifest importance, simply because the algebras or other forms of diagrammatization which I employed did not seem to afford me any means of representing them.(*2) I need hardly say that the moment I discovered in the verso of the sheet of Existential Graphs a representation of a universe of possibility, I perceived that a reference would be represented by a graph which should cross a cut, thus subduing a vast field of thought to the governance and control of exact logic.
   
580. Third, My previous account of Existential Graphs was marred by a certain rule which, from the point of view from which I thought the system ought to be regarded, seemed quite out of place and inacceptable, and yet which I found myself unable to dispute.(*1) I will just illustrate this matter by an example. Suppose we wish to assert that there is a man every dollar of whose indebtedness will be paid by some man or other, perhaps one dollar being paid by one man and another by another man, or perhaps all paid by the same man. We do not wish to say how that will be. Here will be our graph, Fig. 219.
 
Figure 219(*2)
  But if we wish to assert that one man will pay the whole, without saying in what relation the payer stands to the debtor, here will be our graph, Fig. 220. Now suppose we wish to add that this man who will pay all those debts is the very same man who owes them. Then we insert two graphs of teridentity and a line of identity as in Fig. 221.
 
Figure 220 Figure 221
  The difference between the graph with and without this added line is obvious, and is perfectly represented in all my systems. But here it will be observed that the graph "owes" and the graph "pays" are not only united on the left by a line outside the smallest area that contains them both, but likewise on the right, by a line inside that smallest common area. Now let us consider a case in which this inner connection is lacking. Let us assert that there is a man A and a man B, who may or may not be the same man, and if A becomes bankrupt then B will suicide. Then, if we add that A and B are the same man, by drawing a line outside the smallest common area of the
 
 
Figure 222 Figure 223
  graphs joined, which are here bankrupt and suicide, the strange rule to which I refer is that such outer line, because there is no connecting line within the smallest common area, is null and void, that is, it does not affect the interpretation in the least. . . . The proposition that there is a man who if he goes bankrupt will commit suicide is false only in case, taking any man you please, he will go bankrupt, and will not suicide. That is, it is falsified only if every man goes bankrupt without suiciding. But this is the same as the state of things under which the other proposition is false; namely, that every man goes broke while no man suicides. This reasoning is irrefragable as long as a mere possibility is treated as an absolute nullity. Some years ago,(*3) however, when in consequence of an invitation to deliver a course of lectures in Harvard University upon Pragmatism, I was led to revise that doctrine, in which I had already found difficulties, I soon discovered, upon a critical analysis, that it was absolutely necessary to insist upon and bring to the front, the truth that a mere possibility may be quite real. That admitted, it can no longer be granted that every conditional proposition whose antecedent does not happen to be realized is true, and the whole reasoning just given breaks down.
   
581. I often think that we logicians are the most obtuse of men, and the most devoid of common sense. As soon as I saw that this strange rule, so foreign to the general idea of the System of Existential Graphs, could by no means be deduced from the other rules nor from the general idea of the system, but has to be accepted, if at all, as an arbitrary first principle -- I ought to have asked myself, and should have asked myself if I had not been afflicted with the logician's bêtise, What compels the adoption of this rule? The answer to that must have been that the interpretation requires it; and the inference of common sense from that answer would have been that the interpretation was too narrow. Yet I did not think of that until my operose method like that of a hydrographic surveyor sounding out a harbour, suddenly brought me up to the important truth that the verso of the sheet of Existential Graphs represents a universe of possibilities. This, taken in connection with other premisses, led me back to the same conclusion to which my studies of Pragmatism had already brought me, the reality of some possibilities. This is a striking proof of the superiority of the System of Existential Graphs to either of my algebras of logic.(*1) For in both of them the incongruity of this strange rule is completely hidden behind the superfluous machinery which is introduced in order to give an appearance of symmetry to logical law, and in order to facilitate the working of these algebras considered as reasoning machines. I cannot let this remark pass without protesting, however, that in the construction of no algebra was the idea of making a calculus which would turn out conclusions by a regular routine other than a very secondary purpose. . . .(*2)
   
582. The sheet of the graphs in all its states collectively, together with the laws of its transformations, corresponds to and represents the Mind in its relation to its thoughts, considered as signs. That thoughts are signs has been more especially urged by nominalistic logicians; but the realists are, for the most part, content to let the proposition stand unchallenged, even when they have not decidedly affirmed its truth. The scribed graphs are determinations of the sheet, just as thoughts are determinations of the mind; and the mind itself is a comprehensive thought just as the sheet considered in all its actual transformation-states and transformations, taken collectively, is a graph-instance and taken in all its permissible transformations is a graph. Thus the system of existential graphs is a rough and generalized diagram of the Mind, and it gives a better idea of what the mind is, from the point of view of logic, than could be conveyed by any abstract account of it.  
   
583. The System of Existential Graphs recognizes but one mode of combination of ideas, that by which two indefinite propositions define, or rather partially define, each other on the recto and by which two general propositions mutually limit each other upon the verso; or, in a unitary formula, by which two indeterminate propositions mutually determine each other in a measure. I say in a measure, for it is impossible that any sign whether mental or external should be perfectly determinate. If it were possible such sign must remain absolutely unconnected with any other. It would quite obviously be such a sign of its entire universe, as Leibniz and others have described the omniscience of God to be, an intuitive representation amounting to an indecomposable feeling of the whole in all its details, from which those details would not be separable. For no reasoning, and consequently no abstraction, could connect itself with such a sign. This consideration, which is obviously correct, is a strong argument to show that what the system of existential graphs represents to be true of propositions and which must be true of them, since every proposition can be analytically expressed in existential graphs, equally holds good of concepts that are not propositional; and this argument is supported by the evident truth that no sign of a thing or kind of thing -- the ideas of signs to which concepts belong -- can arise except in a proposition; and no logical operation upon a proposition can result in anything but a proposition; so that non-propositional signs can only exist as constituents of propositions. But it is not true, as ordinarily represented, that a proposition can be built up of non-propositional signs. The truth is that concepts are nothing but indefinite problematic judgments. The concept of man necessarily involves the thought of the possible being of a man; and thus it is precisely the judgment, "There may be a man." Since no perfectly determinate proposition is possible, there is one more reform that needs to be made in the system of existential graphs. Namely, the line of identity must be totally abolished, or rather must be understood quite differently. We must hereafter understand it to be potentially the graph of teridentity by which means there always will virtually be at least one loose end in every graph. In fact, it will not be truly a graph of teridentity but a graph of indefinitely multiple identity.
   
584. We here reach a point at which novel considerations about the constitution of knowledge and therefore of the constitution of nature burst in upon the mind with cataclysmal multitude and resistlessness. It is that synthesis of tychism and of pragmatism for which I long ago proposed the name, Synechism,(*1) to which one thus returns; but this time with stronger reasons than ever before. But I cannot, consistently with my own convictions, ask the Academy to listen to a discourse upon Metaphysics.