PEIRCE’S LOGIC OF CONTINUITY

A CONCEPTUAL AND MATHEMATICAL APPROACH TO

THE CONTINUUM AND THE EXISTENTIAL GRAPHS

FERNANDO ZALAMEA

2012
CONTENTS

PREFACE...................................................................................................... 4

PART I
THE CONTINUUM

CHAPTER I. GENERICITY, REFLEXIVITY, MODALITY................................... 10

I.1. Cantor’s analytical object............................................................. 10

I.2. Peirce’s synthetical concept.......................................................... 14
I.3. Genericity and supermultitudeness............................................... 17
I.4. Reflexivity and inextensibility........................................................ 20
I.5. Modality and plasticity.................................................................. 22
I.6. The local methods.......................................................................... 25

CHAPTER II. SOME 20TH CENTURY MATHEMATICAL PERSPECTIVES........... 37

II.1. The primordial continuum............................................................ 37

II.2. The large set-theoretic continuum ............................................... 42
II.3. The category-theoretic continuum................................................ 45
II.4. The sheaf continuum..................................................................... 47

CHAPTER III. ARCHITECTONICS OF PRAGMATICISM...................................... 54

III.1. Five arches of Peirce’s architectonics......................................... 55

III.2. The continuum and Peirce’s architectonics ................................ 67

PART II
THE EXISTENTIAL GRAPHS

CHAPTER IV. EXISTENTIAL GRAPHS AND PROOFS OF PRAGMATICISM........... 77

IV.1. Existential graphs reflections inside Peirce’s architectonics........ 77

IV.2. A local proof of pragmaticism........................................................ 85
IV.3. “Vague proofs” of pragmaticism.................................................... 89

2
CHAPTER V. EXISTENTIAL GRAPHS AND A LOGIC OF CONTINUITY............... 102

V.1. Pragmaticist continuity................................................................. 103

V.2. Horotics and plasticity.................................................................. 105

CHAPTER VI. SKELETONS AND CATEGORIES. ALPHA: CLASSICAL

PROPOSITIONAL CALCULUS AND INTUITIONISTIC VARIATIONS......... 116

VI.1. Emergence................................................................................... 116

VI.2. Horotic skeletons......................................................................... 119
VI.3. Intuitionistic existential graphs................................................... 123

CHAPTER VII. IDENTITIES AND LOGOI. BETA: RELATIONAL

LOGIC AND FUNCTIONAL VARIATIONS............................................... 129

VII.1. Identities.................................................................................... 130

VII.2. Functionality............................................................................. 133
VII.3. Logoi......................................................................................... 135

CHAPTER VIII. MODULATIONS AND TREES. GAMMA (I):

MODAL PROPOSITIONAL CALCULI..................................................... 141

VIII.1. The verso. Horotic modalities................................................. 142

VIII.2. Trees and books....................................................................... 144

CHAPTER IX. TYPES AND TOPOI. GAMMA (II): EXTENDED LOGICS............. 151

IX.1. Types......................................................................................... 151

IX.2. Topoi......................................................................................... 153
IX.3. Open perspectives..................................................................... 155

BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................. 160

NAME INDEX................................................................................................ 166

3
PREFACE

The continuum is one of the most complex concepts that humanity has had to
decipher, not only in its technical, internal behavior, inside culture, but also in its
constant, external entangling with the cosmos. Like Proteus, the sea god which
changed his appearance at will, the continuum moves between the physical world and
abstract ideals, between a subtle phaneron and wide hierarchical ramifications in
mathematical models, between the most concrete biological evolution and arbitrary
completions of discrete breaks. On its hand, a logic of continuity has to propose
adequate signs, structures and rules to handle an important part of those passages.
The triple action of semeiotics (syntactics, semantics, pragmatics) has to be put at
work, in order to understand the global and local forces which shape the ongoing
logical passages over the continuum.
In this monograph, we investigate Peirce’s logic of continuity from a double
perspective: (i) Peirce’s original understanding of the continuum, alternative to
Cantor’s analytical Real line, (ii) Peirce’s original construction of a topological logic
–the existential graphs– alternative to the algebraic presentation of propositional and
first-order calculi. Peirce’s general architectonics, oriented to back-and-forth
hierarchical crossings between the global and the local, is reflected with great care
both in the continuum and the existential graphs. In Part I, we examine how several
deep concepts related to Peirce’s continuum establish a tense balance between the
global (genericity, reflexivity, modality) and the local (relational genericity,

4
vagueness logic, neighborhood logic, possibilia surgery). In Part II, we show how
those dialectic tensions become embodied in the calculi of the graphs, through an
extremely precise pragmatics of continuity where a host of horotic processes (from
horos, Classical Greek for boundary, border, frontier) determine the underlying
logics.
Our monograph is aimed at two specific goals: (i) insisting on Peirce's
outstanding coherence, by means of a thorough underscoring of the perfect
conceptual correspondence between a huge architectonical spectrum, a mediating
concept (continuum) and some of its particular instances (graphs); (ii) exposing the
rich mathematical bottom of the existential graphs, with a resort to modern
mathematical tools: topology, intuitionism, category theory, complex variables. The
first goal may be taken as a synthetic rearrangement of Peircean arguments, which,
dispersed through his writings, have been somewhat eluded by commentators. The
second goal, while rooted in Peirce’s intuitions, goes nevertheless well beyond
Peirce, and should be gauged as a contemporary continuation of the architectonics.
Thus, our approach may be dubbed both (i) conceptual and (ii) mathematical, as the
subtitle of the monograph suggests. Through those combined lines, our
understanding of Peirce’s continuum and existential graphs constitutes a substantially
different contribution, as compared with, as far as we know, those already available
in print.

Acknowledgements.
This book is an annotated, extended and revised translation of my two previous
Spanish publications on Peirce’s logic of continuity: El continuo peirceano
(Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2001) and Los gráficos existenciales peirceanos
(Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2010). The support of my Department
(Departamento de Matemáticas) and School (Facultad de Ciencias) was fundamental.
The Spanish contributions were thought as conceptual essays, with few references, in
order to enhance continuity and plasticity. Now that, as regards English, I cannot
hope to attain any such craft of the language, I have tried to profit from a switch to a

5
scholar level, a drier one, but which, notwithstanding, has allowed to add endnotes
under the scope of a wider dialog with the extant literature. The English version has
thus introduced all the references, decoupled the bibliography and completed some
arguments. Notes are introduced as endnotes for each chapter (secondness), at least
trying not to disrupt, with the excessiveness of footnotes, an initial, fresh reading
(firstness). The development of the monograph is intended as an accrual of the
necessary entangling of the going-by information (thirdness).
I am happy to acknowledge here the emergence and reception of the Spanish
texts. El continuo peirceano arose thanks to Jaime Nubiola and his Grupo de
Estudios Peirceanos at the Universidad de Navarra, who invited me several times to
explain my ideas on Peirce’s continuum. When the manuscript was ready, Andrés
Villaveces, Alejandro Martín and Douglas Niño acted as meticulous and critical
readers of the text. Once published, a year long correspondence with Alexander Cruz
made me think again on the continuum. Meanwhile, I attempted a partial translation
to English, which generated four articles that I submitted to the Transactions of the
Charles S. Peirce Society (2002). After due reception, the articles vanished in some
Editor’s disorder and I never heard them again. I only hope that this anecdote
amounts just to a one hundredth of the importance of Évariste Galois’ twice lost
papers for the Académie des Sciences (1830). Time went on, and the hidden, obscure
Colombian writing (recall that you don’t exist if you do not write in English...)
somehow managed to open its way thanks to the careful and generous readings of
Jérôme Havenel, Marco Annoni, Giovanni Maddalena and Arnold Oostra. That these
outstandingly gifted young scholars studied seriously El continuo peirceano made
me think that perhaps something in it was worth publishing at large. My heartfelt
thanks to all of them.
With Arnold Oostra, we began in 1997 the Colombian adventure of exploring
the Terra Incognita of the mathematics of existential graphs. First as a student, then
as a colleague, and now as my master, Oostra has been pushing forward the study of
the graphs with his unusual brightness. His Seminario Permanente Peirce, at the
Universidad del Tolima, has produced half a dozen innovative Theses on the graphs

6
and on Peirce’s mathematics, an exploit never/nowhere attained in the history of
Peirce’s mathematical understanding. My gratitude towards Oostra has no words, but
I have tried at least to render justice to him in Part II of this book. In fact, Los
gráficos existenciales peirceanos was written just as a partial substitute for Oostra’s
major works on the subject, that should be flowing in the coming years. Roberto
Perry, my good friend and colleague in the development of Colombia’s Peircean
studies, provided me with the gift of horotics, the conceptual keystone of Los
gráficos. During the decade between El continuo and Los gráficos, conversations and
correspondence reinforced me to insist on the importance of Peirce’s logic of
continuity from a contemporary mathematical viewpoint. Many thanks go here to
André De Tienne, Jérôme Havenel, Nathan Houser, Jaime Nubiola, Matthew Moore,
Marco Panza, Jean Petitot and Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen. On other paths, Giovanni
Maddalena, Rossella Fabbrichesi and Rosa Calcaterra provided wonderful invitations
to Italy which impelled new advances. I recall with particular fondness a meeting in
Milano, with Maria Luisi and her student colleagues, excited and bewildered in view
of the deep connections between Peirce’s graphs and Caicedo’s logic of sheaves.
This time, Los gráficos were carefully read by Jaime Nubiola and Arnold Oostra,
eliminating many obscurities. Finally, the English version has been corrected, with
his outstanding generosity, by Roberto Perry. Needless to say, all remaining
imperfections must be blamed on the stubborn blindness of the author.

References to Peirce’s Sources.

[CP]: C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, 8 vols. (eds. Hartshorne, Weiss & Burks),
Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1998 (new reprint of Harvard University Press original
edition, 1931-1958); electronic edition (cd-rom): Intelex Corporation, 1992.
[W]: C.S. Peirce, Writings (A Chronological Edition), 7 vols. (eds. Houser et.al., in
progress), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982-2000.
[EP]: C.S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, 2 vols. (eds. Kloesel, Houser, De Tienne),
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992- 1998.
[NEM]: C.S. Peirce, The New Elements of Mathematics, 4 vols. (ed. Eisele), The
Hague: Mouton, 1976.
[HP]: C.S. Peirce, Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science, 2 vols. (ed.
Eisele), The Hague: Mouton, 1985.

7
[RLT]: C.S. Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things (ed. Ketner), Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1992.
[PPM]: C.S. Peirce, Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking (ed.
Turrisi), Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

In order to provide some attachments in Peirce’s evolving thought, each reference to

Peirce provides, between square brackets [ ], a year (if known) when the text was
written and a place where the text can be found, between Peirce’s published writings.
For example, [1903; EP 2.147] refers to a text from 1903, to be found in the second
volume of the Essential Peirce, page 147, or [c.1896; CP 1.417] refers to a text close
to 1896, to be found in the first volume of the Collected Papers, paragraph 417.

[MS] refers to The Charles S. Peirce Papers, microfilm edition, Cambridge: Harvard
University Library, Photographic Service, 1966. An entry [MS xyz] refers to
manuscript number xyz in Richard Robin, Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of
Charles S. Peirce, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967.

8
PART I

THE CONTINUUM

9
CHAPTER I
GENERICITY, REFLEXIVITY, MODALITY

In Part I, we investigate Peirce’s continuum concept from several perspectives. We

stress what can be considered the main strength of Peirce’s original approach to the
“labyrinth of the continuum”: its central interconnection of genericity, reflexivity and
modality –and subsidiary supermultitudeness, inextensibility and plasticity–, an
approach that requires a careful logical treatment which has seldom been well
understood (chapter I). We then show that Peirce’s pioneering ideas about a non-
Cantorian continuum can receive adequate partial modeling from further independent
developments in 20th century mathematics (chapter II). With Peirce’s continuum
concept in hand, we insist on the well-known interpretation which locates the
continuum at the core of Peirce’s system, and we proceed to show some explicit uses
of continuity hypotheses which pervade the skeleton of the architectonics of
pragmaticism (chapter III). Connecting with Part I, we then approach the elusive
“proof of pragmaticism” from new perspectives, and we show that a web of crossing
threads between Peirce’s continuum, his existential graphs and his classification of the
sciences becomes fundamental, helping us to better understand an evolving array of
marks which can endorse the validity of Peirce’s system (chapter IV).

I.1. Cantor’s analytical object

Modern mathematics, overwhelmingly immersed into classical set theory, works with
set theoretic objects which have allowed only partial modeling of the underlying
mathematical concepts. A systematic identification of concept with object –arising, in
part, from biased uses of Frege’s abstraction principle– has limited the way to handle

10
many mathematical concepts. In particular, the general concept of the continuum,
when objectually transformed into Cantor’s real line in modern mathematical set
theory, has lost many sides of its extraordinary richness.
The Cantorian real line (R) was constructed to solve precise and technical
mathematical problems: convergence questions (Fourier series representations) in the
theory of functions of real variable, and questions of local hierarchization (ordinal
measure of fragments of the line) in the emerging set-theoretic topology. R serves to
model one of the fundamental aspects of a generic continuum: its completeness, or
“analytical saturation”:
N Z Q R
natural numbers integers rationals reals

DIFFERENCE PROPORTION CONVERGENCE

saturation
processes

equivalence classes: pairs of pairs of Cauchy

natural numbers integers rational
sequences

Figure 1.
Analytical accumulation of equivalence classes
to “saturate” the continuum in Cantor’s approach

Formally reconstructed inside Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF), the number

sets arise in a process of accumulating points inside an actual infinite, which begins
with the natural numbers. The integers –as equivalence classes of the difference
relation between pairs of natural numbers–, the rationals –as equivalence classes of the
divisibility relation between pairs of integers–, and the reals –as equivalence classes of
the convergence relation between Cauchy rational sequences– form sets of points, in
which elements are added. The summa of those elements represents a model of the
continuum.
Nevertheless, from a more elementary common sense perspective, without
even entering yet into the composition or intrinsic properties of the continuum, it
should be obvious that a given model alone (actual, determinate) cannot, in principle,
capture all the richness of a general concept (possible, indeterminate). In fact, the
pragmatic maxim hinders immediately such a pretense:

11
representations
model 1
CONCEPT model 2

model 3 (etc.) ...

Figure 2.
Elementary use of the pragmatic maxim:
no general concept can be modeled by an object alone

The existence of multiple ways of representing and modeling should avoid any
identifications of a mathematical concept with a mathematical object (something
which, however, is normally and even normatively done). One of those doubtful
identifications consists in the classical set theoretic formulation: continuum ! R,
where the idea of continuity (a general concept) is identified with the Cantorian real
line (a given model). Even the existence of “monstrous” models in contemporary
model theory (homogeneous, saturated and universal, at will) arises with respect to
given collections of axioms, that can only capture partially the concepts behind the
axioms. It becomes fundamental, then, to distinguish the continuum from R. A very
different thing is that the reals help to represent –as they have effectively done so–
fundamental aspects of the concept of continuity.
It turns out that continuity is a protean concept, which –like Proteus, the
mythical sea-god fabled to assume various shapes– can be modeled in several diverse
ways, witnessing its extraordinary richness. More generally, as points out Saunders
MacLane, one of the founders of the mathematical theory of categories,

Mathematics is that branch of science in which the concepts are protean: each concept
applies not to one aspect of reality, but to many1.

MacLane’s conception coincides fully with Peirce’s view: mathematics moves in the
unbounded realm of pure possibilities, constantly transposed into reality. Following
the pragmatic maxim, the continuum (general) can only be approached by its different
signs (particular models) in representational contexts. A map of many disguises of the
continuum is shown in figure 3.

12
!1

real numbers cardinal Gödel’s constructibles

c
R
!2
maximality Martin
Woodin
cof(c) ! "
König !n

Cohen models

nonstandard analysis
… …
syntax (language, axiomatics, ZF) semantics (models)

continuity
concept classical first order logic - infinitistic and abstract logics

SETS

real number objects

sheaf topoi
Grothendieck topoi
CATEGORIES

intuitionistic logic - sheaf logics

peircean continuum: genericity, reflexivity, modality

modal logics “PRAGMATA”

Figure 3.
Proteus: the continuum “along” the pragmatic maxim

13
The many shapes of the continuum shown in figure 3 will be studied carefully in the
second chapter. For the moment, the diagram helps to show the very particular place of
Cantor’s analytical object in a general outlook, and points to the location of Peirce’s
continuum, which will be studied in what follows. It is clear that Cantor’s real line R,
which inside ZF plays a fundamental protean role (since its cardinal can take, there, all
the possible forms not in contradiction with König’s cofinality restriction), outside ZF
falls short with respect to the generic and modal richness lying in a general concept of
continuity. In this sense, the Cantorian real line is but a “first embryo” of continuity, as
Peirce claimed, alone, in the desert.

I.2. Peirce’s synthetical concept

Peirce’s continuum is an “absolutely general” concept which, in principle, does not

have to be completely objectified in just a formal context (for example, Peirce’s
continuum seems to transcend, as many great cardinal hypotheses do, the power of
representation of ZF). It is a really generic concept, which intrinsically lies, in Peirce’s
view, inside any other general concept: “every general concept is, in reference to its
individuals, strictly a continuum”2. Thus, Peirce’s continuum, as a lean, “free” concept
in the realms of the general and the possible, cannot be bounded by a determinate
collection: “no collection of individuals could ever be adequate to the extension of a
concept in general”3. Leaving free the determination contexts of the continuum –his
partial “extensions”– and insisting in the intensionality of the continuum as a general,
Peirce obtains immediately one of the profound peculiarities in his vision of the
continuum. An original and extremely important asymmetrization of Frege’s
abstraction principle occurs: as we will further study in our second chapter, intension
and extension, in multiple cases, as the one in hand, do not have to be logically
equivalent.
Besides recovering the primacy of concepts over objects, Peirce insists in a
synthetical understanding of the continuum, as a general whole which cannot be
analytically reconstructed by an internal sum of points4:

Across a line a collection of blades may come down simultaneously, and so long as
the collection of blades is not so great that they merge into one another, owing to their
supermultitude, they will cut the line up into as great a collection of pieces each of
which will be a line, –just as completely a line as was the whole. This I say is the
intuitional idea of a line with which the synthetic geometer really works, –his virtual
hypothesis, whether he recognizes it or not; and I appeal to the scholars of this
institution where geometry flourishes as all the world knows, to cast aside all

14
analytical theories about lines, and looking at the matter from a synthetical point of
view to make the mental experiment and say whether it is not true that the line refuses
to be cut up into points by any discrete multitude of knives, however great.5

As we shall later see, this synthetical view of the continuum will be fully
recovered by the mathematical theory of categories, in the last decades of the 20th
century. For now, we can already record that Peirce’s continuum, as a synthetical
concept opposed to Cantor’s analytical object6, necessarily possesses a greater
richness (indeterminate, general, vague) than the real numbers object, since –
simultaneously– the conceptual attains an ampler plurality than the objectual and the
synthetical involves a wider distributed universality than the analytical.
Next diagram encompasses, in our reading, the most salient traits of Peirce’s
continuum, understood unitarily as a synthetical concept where we see entangled three
crucial global properties (genericity, reflexivity, modality), three sub-determinations
of those properties (supermultitudeness, inextensibility, plasticity) and four local
methodologies (generic relationality, vagueness logic, neighborhood logic, possibilia
surgery), which can weave, in local contexts, the global architecture:

GLOBAL PROPERTIES LOCAL METHODS

GENERIC RELATIONALITY

GENERICITY

SUPERMULTITUDENESS

VAGUENESS LOGIC

REFLEXIVITY

INEXTENSIBILITY

NEIGHBORHOOD LOGIC

MODALITY

PLASTICITY

POSSIBILIA SURGERY

Figure 4.
The “double sigma”: global and local concepts which articulate Peirce’s continuum

15
The double sigma underlines some fundamental threads between global and
local aspects of Peirce’s continuum to which we will devote the rest of this chapter.
The terminology is an attempt at recalling Watson and Crick’s “double helix”, a
double staircase of interlaced spirals where genetic information sums up. As the
double helix codifies a fundamental part of the secrets of the living, the double sigma
wishes to synthetize part of the fundamental secrets of the continuum.7 A vertical
reading –a pragmatic reading– of the double sigma, gives rise to two important
programs of research, that we will call pragmata of the continuum, and whose full
elucidation would need “long duration” inquiries within our “community of
researchers”: the construction of a categorical topics, which would systematically
study the global synthetic correlations between “sites” of knowledge, and the
construction of a modal geometry, which would study the methods for establishing
local connections between those sites and detect their modal “invariants”.

Global Pragma Local Pragma

CATEGORICAL TOPICS MODAL GEOMETRY

(versus (versus
set-theoretic classical
foundations) arithmetization)

Figure 5.
“Pragmata” of the continuum

As we shall see in our second chapter, 20th century mathematics,

independently of Peirce, did advance in the construction of a far-reaching “categorical
topics”, obtaining many outstanding but somewhat isolated technical results. On the
other hand, the construction of a “modal geometry” is just beginning in the last
decade. One of the many legacies of Peirce’s continuum consists in coherently
interweaving the two preceding pragmata, systematically finding reflections of the

16
global into the local, and vice versa. We proceed to show how Peirce’s writings
support the double sigma interpretation.

I.3. Genericity and supermultitudeness

Perhaps the most salient trait of Peirce’s continuum is its general character, with all
the connotations and derivations that the term includes. To adapt us a little to the more
precise language of modern mathematics, we will also use the term “generic” as a
substitute equivalent of “general”. In Peirce, the general includes very diverse
nuances, but all united under an idea of “freeness” –whatever is free of particularizing
attachments, determinative, existential or actual. The general is what can live in the
realm of possibilia, not determinate nor actual, and which opposes the particular mode
of the existential. In Peirce’s words,

The idea of a general involves the idea of possible variations which no multitude of
existent things could exhaust but would leave between any two not merely many
possibilities, but possibilities absolutely beyond all multitude.8

Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence
or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing.9

Generality –as a law or regularity beyond the merely individual, as a deep layer
of reality beyond the merely named, as a basic weapon in the dispute between realism
and nominalism– falls into peircean thirdness and glues naturally together with the
continuum. Peirce recalls several times that the continuum can be seen as a certain
form of generality:

The continuum is a General. It is a General of a relation. Every General is a continuum

vaguely defined.10

Continuity, as generality, is inherent in potentiality, which is essentially general. (...)

The original potentiality is essentially continuous, or general.11

The possible is general, and continuity and generality are two names for the same
absence of distinction of individuals.12

A perfect continuum belongs to the genus, of a whole all whose parts without any
exception whatsoever conform to one general law to which same law conform likewise
all the parts of each single part. Continuity is thus a special kind of generality, or
conformity to one Idea. More specifically, it is a homogeneity, or generality among all
of a certain kind of parts of one whole. Still more specifically, the characters which are
the same in all the parts are a certain kind of relationship of each part to all the
coördinate parts; that is, it is a regularity.13

17
The continuum is thus a general, where all the potentialities can fall –
overcoming all determinations– and where certain modes of connection between the
parts and the whole (local and global) become homogenized and regularized –
overcoming and melting together all individual distinctions. The generic character of
Peirce’s continuum (thirdness) is thus closely weaved with the overcoming of
determinacy and actuality (secondness). In this process the threads of indetermination
and chance (firstness) become essential, freeing the existent from its particular
qualities in order to reach the generality of possibilia. For Peirce, the logic of relatives
is the natural filter which allows to free and lean out action-reaction agents, in order to
melt them in a higher general continuity, because relative logic allows to observe the
individual as a “degenerate” form of relationality and the given as a degenerate form
of possibility:

Continuity is simply what generality becomes in the logic of relatives.14

True continuity is perfect generality elevated to the mode of conception of the Logic of
Relations.15

Continuity is shown by the logic of relations to be nothing but a higher type of that
which we know as generality. It is relational generality.16

The continuum is all that is possible, in whatever dimension it be continuous. But the
general or universal of ordinary logic also comprises whatever of a certain description
is possible. And thus the continuum is that which the logic of relatives shows the true
universal to be.17

Peirce’s dictum • continuity = genericity via relative logic • is one of his

most astonishing intuitions. In a first approach, it appears as a pretty cryptic, “occult”
motto, but, as we will forcefully show in the next chapter, it really can be considered
as a genial abduction, underlying the introduction of topological methods in logic and
summarizing the proof (obtained in the 1990’s) that many of the fundamental
theorems of the logic of relatives are no more than corresponding continuity theorems
in the uniform topological space of first-order logic elementary classes.
We think that this outstanding peircean abduction –clearly explicited from
1898 on and perhaps one of the firmer expressions of Peirce’s logical refinement–

18
could have been based in two previous, crucial, logical “experiments”: on one side, his
construction of systems of existential graphs (from 1896 on), where the rules of logic
happen to be back-and-forth processes on the continuity of the sheet of assertion
(discrete back-and-forth for the propositional calculus, and continuous back-and-forth
for the logic of relatives –see the continual elongations of the identity line); on the
other side, his neglected invention of infinitesimal relatives (in the never dried-out
memory of 1870 on the logic of relatives)18, which Peirce uses to reveal extremely
interesting structural similarities between formal processes of differentiation (over the
usual mathematical continuum) and operational processes of relativization (over a
much more general logical continuum).
An immediate consequence of the genericity of the continuum is that the
continuum must be supermultitudinous, in the sense that its size must be fully generic,
and cannot be bounded by any other actually determined size19:

A supermultitudinous collection (...) is greater than any of the single collections. (...) A
supermultitudinous collection is so great that its individuals are no longer distinct from
one another. (...) A supermultitudinous collection, then, is no longer discrete; but it is
continuous.20

A supermultitudinous collection sticks together by logical necessity. Its constituent

individuals are no longer distinct and independent subjects. They have no existence, –no
hypothetical existence–, except in their relations to one another. They are no subjects, but
phrases expressive of the properties of the continuum.21

The supermultitudinous character of Peirce’s continuum shows, according to

Peirce, that the Cantorian real line is just “the first embryo of continuity”, “an incipient
cohesiveness, a germinal of continuity”22. Nevertheless, the cardinal indetermination
of Cantor’s continuum inside ZF –a profound discovery of 20th century mathematical
logic that Peirce could not imagine– shows that the Cantorian model can also be
considered as a valid generic candidate to capture the supermultitudeness23 of the
continuum (even if other generic traits of Peirce’s continuum, in the extensible or
modal realm, as we shall soon see, do not seem capable to be modeled by the
Cantorian real line).
In any case, from the very beginning of their investigations, Cantor and
Peirce’s paths are clearly opposed: while Cantor and, systematically, most of his

19
followers, try to bound (and bind) the continuum, Peirce tries to unbound it: to
approach a supermultitudinous continuum, not restricted in size, truly generic in the
transfinite, never totally determined. It comes then, as a most remarkable fact, that
many indications of the indeterminacy of the continuum found at the core of
contemporary Cantorian set theory (free analysis of the set theoretic universe through
disparate filters, using forcing techniques, with many phenomena possibly coexistent)
seem to assure in retrospect the appropriateness of Peirce’s vision. The generality of
Peirce’s continuum implies, as we shall now see, that it cannot be reconstructed from
the “particular” or the “existent”, and that it must be thought in the true general realm
of possibilia.

I.4. Reflexivity and inextensibility

One of the fundamental properties of Peirce’s continuum consists in its reflexivity, a

finely grained approach to Kant’s conception that the continuum is such that any of its
parts possesses in turn another part similar to the whole (see figure 6):

A continuum is defined as something any part of which however small itself has parts of
the same kind.24

We will use the term “reflexivity” for the preceding property of the continuum
since, following a reflection principle, the whole can be reflected in any of its parts:

continuum : whole

( ) given any part of the continuum,

there exists another part similar to the whole

“magnifying glass”

Figure 6.
The reflexivity of Peirce’s continuum

As Peirce immediately infers (see next citation), reflexivity implies that the continuum
cannot be composed by points, since points –not possessing other parts than
themselves– cannot possess parts similar to the whole. Thus, reflexivity distinguishes

20
at once the peircean continuum from the Cantorian, since Cantor’s real line is
composed by points and is not reflexive. In Peirce’s continuum the points disappear as
actual entities (we shall see that they remain as possibilities) and are replaced –in
actual, active-reactive secondness– by neighborhoods, where the continuum flows:

The result is, that we have altogether eliminated points. (...) There are no points in such a
line; there is no exact boundary between any parts. (...) There is no flow in an instant.
Hence, the present is not an instant. (...) When the scale of numbers, rational and
irrational, is applied to a line, the numbers are insufficient for exactitude; and it is
intrinsically doubtful precisely where each number is placed. But the environs of each
number is called a point. Thus, a point is the hazily outlined part of the line whereon is
placed a single number. When we say is placed, we mean would be placed, could the
placing of the numbers be made as precise as the nature of numbers permits.25

We will call inextensibility the property which asserts that a continuum cannot
be composed of points. As we mentioned, a continuum’s reflexivity implies its
inextensibility (Peirce’s continuum is reflexive, thus inextensible), or, equivalently, its
extensibility implies its irreflexivity (Cantor’s continuum is extensible, thus
irreflexive). The fact that Peirce’s continuum cannot be extensible, its not being able to
be captured extensionally by a sum of points, retrieves one of the basic precepts of the
Parmenidean One, “immovable in the bonds of mighty chains”, a continuous whole
which cannot be broken, “nor is it divisible, since it is all alike, and there is no more of
it in one place than in another, to hinder it from holding together, nor less of it, but
everything is full of what is”26.
The inextensibility of Peirce’s continuum is closely tied to another brilliant
intuition of Peirce, which states that number cannot completely codify the continuum:

Number cannot possibly express continuity.27

Lengths are not measurable by numbers, nor by limits of series of them.28

The impossibility to fully express the continuum through number grilles29 is a

natural limitation which shows that, in order to obtain a finer understanding of the
continuum, the program of classical arithmetization of the real line (Weierstrass,
Cantor) should be complemented with the new “pragma” that Peirce’s writings
suggest: the construction of a modal geometrization of the continuum.

21
I.5. Modality and plasticity

Peirce’s crucial modalization of his pragmaticism can be driven, as Max Fisch has
shown30, to his late readings of the Greek Masters, at the middle of the 1880’s. The
Aristotelian influence –following Aristotles’ use of a wide spectrum of possibilities to
cover all reams of reality– weighs in Peirce’s approach to the continuum, when he
begins to present the continuum as a complex modal logos:

A continuum is a collection of so vast a multitude that in the whole universe of

possibility there is not room for them to retain their distinct identities; but they become
welded into one another. Thus the continuum is all that is possible, in whatever
dimension it be continuous.31

You have then so crowded the field of possibility that the units of that aggregate lose
their individual identity. It ceases to be a collection because it is now a continuum. (...) A
truly continuous line is a line upon which there is room for any multitude of points
whatsoever. Then the multitude or what corresponds to multitude of possible points, –
exceeds all multitude. These points are pure possibilities. There is no such gath. On a
continuous line there are not really any points at all.32

It seems necessary to say that a continuum, where it is continuous and unbroken, contains
no definite parts; that its parts are created in the act of defining them and the precise
definition of them breaks the continuity. (...) Breaking grains of sand more and more will
only make the sand more broken. It will not weld the grains into unbroken continuity.33

The great richness of real and general possibilities far exceeds the “existent”
34
realm and forms a “true” continuum, on which the existent must be seen as a certain
type of discontinuity. “Existence as rupture” is another amazing peircean intuition,
which anticipates by a century Weinberg’s ruptures of the symmetry principle,
continuity breakdowns that help to explain in contemporary physics the cosmos’
evolution:

The zero collection is bare, abstract, germinal possibility. The continuum is concrete,
developed possibility. The whole universe of true and real possibilities forms a
continuum, upon which this Universe of Actual Existence is, by virtue of the essential
Secondness of Existence, a discontinuous mark.35

Peirce’s recursive contrast between secondness and thirdness –a growing

dialectics which develops its potentiality through a permanent back-and-forth of
reflections and iterations– is also the clash between existence and being, between

22
discontinuous mark and continuous flow, between point and neighborhood. In
Peirce’s vision, while points can “exist” as discontinuous marks defined to anchor
action-reaction number scales on the continuum, the “true” and steady components of
the continuum are generic and indefinite neighborhoods, interweaved in the realm of
possibilia without actually marking its frontiers. The metaphysical process36 which
presupposes a general being prior to the emergence of existence seems to be akin to
the genetic structure of Peirce’s continuum: just like Brouwer, Peirce postulates the
possibility of conceiving previously a global continuum (“higher generality”), on
which marks and number systems are introduced subsequently to mimic locally the
general continuum (this becomes particularly clear, and clean, in Peirce’s existential
graphs; see our fourth chapter). As Peirce clearly suggests, the infinite breaking of
grains of sand never achieves their fully merging into one another: a synthetic vision
of the continuum (Peirce, Brouwer) has to be given previously to its analytical
composition (Cantor).
Peirce’s continuum –understood as a synthetical range where whatever is
possible should be able to glue– has to be a general place (logos), extremely flexible,
plastic, homogeneous, without irregularities:

The perfect third is plastic, relative and continuous. Every process, and whatever is
continuous, involves thirdness.37

This continuum must clearly have more dimensions than a surface or even than a solid;
and we will suppose it to be plastic, so that it can be deformed in all sorts of ways
without the continuity and connection of parts being ever ruptured. Of this continuum the
blank sheet of assertion may be imagined to be a photograph. When we find out that a
proposition is true, we can place it wherever we please on the sheet, because we can
imagine the original continuum, which is plastic, to be so deformed as to bring any
number of propositions to any places on the sheet we may choose.38

The idea of continuity is the idea of a homogeneity, or sameness, which is a regularity.

On the other hand, just as a continuous line is one which affords room for any multitude
of points, no matter how great, so all regularity affords scope for any multitude of variant
particulars; so that the idea [of] continuity is an extension of the idea of regularity.
Regularity implies generality.39

A perfect continuum belongs to the genus, of a whole all whose parts without any
exception whatsoever conform to one general law to which same law conform likewise
all the parts of each single part. Continuity is thus a special kind of generality, or
conformity to one Idea. More specifically, it is a homogeneity, or generality among all of
a certain kind of parts of one whole. Still more specifically, the characters which are the
same in all the parts are a certain kind of relationship of each part to all the coordinate

23
parts; that is, it is a regularity. The step of specification which seems called for next, as
appropriate to our purpose of defining, or logically analyzing the Idea of continuity, is
that of asking ourselves what kind [of] relationship between parts it is that constitutes the
regularity a continuity; and the first, and therefore doubtless the best answer for our
purpose, not as the ultimate answer, but as the proximate one, is that it is the relation or
relations of contiguity; for continuity is unbrokenness (whatever that may be) and this
seems to imply a passage from one part to a contiguous part.40

Peirce’s continuum is general, plastic, homogeneous, regular, in order to allow,

in a natural way, the “transit” of modalities, the “fusion” of individualities, the
“overlapping” of neighborhoods. The generic idea of a continuous flow is present
behind those transits, fusions and overlappings, ubiquitous osmotic processes that
Peirce notices in the plasticity of protoplasm and human mind, and that, in a bold
abduction, he lifts to a universal hypothesis:

If the laws of nature are results of evolution, this evolution must proceed according to
some principle; and this principle will itself be of the nature of a law. But it must be such
a law that it can evolve or develope itself. (...) Evidently it must be a tendency toward
generalization, -- a generalizing tendency. But any fundamental universal tendency ought
to manifest itself in nature. Where shall we look for it? We could not expect to find it in
such phenomena as gravitation where the evolution has so nearly approached its ultimate
limit, that nothing even simulating irregularity can be found in it. But we must search for
this generalizing tendency rather in such departments of nature where we find plasticity
and evolution still at work. The most plastic of all things is the human mind, and next
after that comes the organic world, the world of protoplasm. Now the generalizing
tendency is the great law of mind, the law of association, the law of habit taking. We also
find in all active protoplasm a tendency to take habits. Hence I was led to the hypothesis
that the laws of the universe have been formed under a universal tendency of all things
toward generalization and habit-taking.41

Peirce’s continuum –generic and supermultitudinous, reflexive and

inextensible, modal and plastic– is the global conceptual milieu where, in a natural
way, we can construct hierarchies to bound possible evolutions and local concretions
of arbitrary flow notions. In the remainder of this chapter we will show how to deal
with those constructions, completing thus an introductory overview to the “double
sigma” interpretation of Peirce’s continuum (figure 4). We will study some of the local
methods that Peirce devised to begin to control the specific “passages” of genericity,
reflexivity and modality.

24
I.6. The local methods

True discoverer of all the potentiality lying in the logic of relatives42, Peirce applies
the strength of that logical lens to the problem of locally approaching the continuum.
Turning to the genericity of the continuum, Peirce notices that the “mode of
connection” of the parts must be understood in full generality, involving a genuine
triadic relation, and he opens thus the way to a study of generic triadic relations,
closely tied with “general modes” of smoothness and contiguity:

My notion of the essential character of a perfect continuum is the absolute generality

with which two rules hold good, first, that every part has parts; and second, that every
sufficiently small part has the same mode of immediate connection with others as every
other has.43

No perfect continuum can be defined by a dyadic relation. But if we take instead a triadic
relation, and say A is r to B for C, say, to fix our ideas, that proceeding from A in a
particular way, say to the right, you reach B before C, it is quite evident that a continuum
will result like a self-returning line with no discontinuity whatever...44

The attraction of one particle for another acts through continuous Time and Space, both
of which are of triadic constitution. (...) The dyadic action is not the whole action; and
the whole action is, in a way, triadic.45

These assertions show that Peirce is trying to find fitting reflections of the
global into the local: the continuum –which in its “perfect generality” is one of the
most achieved global forms of thirdness– must also embody a genuinely triadic
mode46 of connection in the constitution of its local fragments.
Peirce’s continuum, as a general, is indeterminate. Along what we could call
indetermination “fibers”, the general reacts antithetically with the “vague”:

Logicians have too much neglected the study of vagueness, not suspecting the important
part it plays in mathematical thought. It is the antithetical analogue of generality. A sign
is objectively general, in so far as, leaving its effective interpretation indeterminate, it
surrenders to the interpreter the right of completing the determination for himself. "Man
is mortal." "What man?" "Any man you like." A sign is objectively vague, in so far as,
leaving its interpretation more or less indeterminate, it reserves for some other possible
sign or experience the function of completing the determination. "This month," says the
almanac-oracle, "a great event is to happen." "What event?" "Oh, we shall see. The
almanac doesn't tell that."47

25
We refer to next figure for a visual image of the situation. To an important
degree, the study of generality can be seen as the study of the universal quantifier
(“any man”), while the study of vagueness is the study of the existential quantifier (“a
great event”). As we will see in our second chapter, an explicit adjunction, or evolving
antithesis, between genericity (!) and vagueness (") was to be found, and precisely
studied, by another great american mathematician in the 1960’s.

generality

“antithesis”
(adjunction ! : ")

vagueness

progressive
indetermination determination

continuum

Figure 7.
Generality-vagueness “adjunction”
in the indeterminate “fibers” of the continuum

Peirce’s logic of vagueness48 hopes to control the transit of the indefinite to the
definite, of the indeterminate to the determinate, and to study some intermediate
borders49 in processes of relative determination. Prior to this horizontal control,
nevertheless, Peirce discovered the basic vertical antithesis • genericity vs. vagueness •
whose partial resolutions were to pave the way to the construction of intermediate
logical systems. The “antithesis”, when applied locally to the continuum, weaves
closely a scheme of general connexion modes, naturally intermediate:

26
A point of a surface may be in a region of that surface, or out of it, or on its boundary.
This gives us an indirect and vague conception of an intermediary between affirmation
and denial in general, and consequently of an intermediate, or nascent state, between
determination and indetermination. There must be a similar intermediacy between
generality and vagueness.50

Mathematical logic in the 20th century would show that the natural logic
associated to the connecting modes of the continuum is really an intermediate logic –
the intuitionistic logic– in which the principle of excluded middle does not hold. It is
thus amazing that Peirce –following general paths in his architectonics, very distant
from the technical demands that underlie intuitionistic constructive threads– could
have been able to predict that an adequate logic for the continuum would have to
abandon, in fact, the law of excluded middle:

If we are to accept the common sense idea of continuity (after correcting its vagueness
and fixing it to mean something) we must either say that a continuous line contains no
points or we must say that the principle of excluded middle does not hold of these points.
The principle of excluded middle only applies to an individual (for it is not true that
"Any man is wise" nor that "Any man is not wise”). But places, being mere possibles
without actual existence, are not individuals. Hence a point or indivisible place really
does not exist unless there actually be something there to mark it, which, if there is,
interrupts the continuity.51

I must show that the will be's, the actually is's, and the have beens are not the sum of the
reals. They only cover actuality. There are besides would be's and can be's that are real.
The distinction is that the actual is subject both to the principles of contradiction and of
excluded middle; and in one way so are the would be's and can be's. In that way a would
be is but the negation of a can be and conversely. But in another way a would be is not
subject to the principle of excluded middle; both would be X and would be not X may be
false. And in this latter way a can be may be defined as that which is not subject to the
principle of contradiction. On the contrary, if of anything it is only true that it can be X it
can be not X as well.52

In these two quotes, Peirce points out that the logic of actuality can be
approached by usual classical logic, but that the “true” logic of continuity (to be
applied to the dynamical flow of potential sites and not to the static condition of
points) is a logic where the principle of excluded middle fails. In his rather difficult
language of “vague” modalities (“can be”: #; “would be”: ¬#) , Peirce also relates
generality and necessity (forms of thirdness), as well as vagueness and possibility
(forms of firstness), and tries to characterize logically the former as failures of

27
distribution of the excluded middle, as well as the latter as failures of distribution of
the contradiction principle53:

The general might be defined as that to which the principle of excluded middle does not
apply. A triangle in general is not isosceles nor equilateral; nor is a triangle in general
scalene. The vague might be defined as that to which the principle of contradiction does
not apply. For it is false neither that an animal (in a vague sense) is male, nor that an
animal is female.54

Failure of Excluded Middle: Failure of Contradiction Principle:

p $ ¬p fails ¬ (p % ¬p) fails

for the general (!) for the vague (")
and for the necessary ( ) and for the possible (#)

&=/ !xP $ !x¬P &=/ ¬ ("xP % "x¬P)

&=/ p $ ¬p &=/ ¬ (#p % # ¬p)

Figure 8.
Generality and Vagueness do not distribute

In our next quotes we will see how Peirce, after analyzing a situation in all its
possible generality, once again extrapolates his logical acumen to a cosmological
hypothesis. These risky and fascinating abductions are based, in our view, in a double
continuity hypothesis: the hypothesis that the logical continuum –composed by relative
logic and its intermediate layers– is a true reflection of the cosmos’ continuum, and the
hypothesis that free, generic assertions behave similarly between local and global
structural forms of the continuum:

The evolution of forms begins or, at any rate, has for an early stage of it, a vague
potentiality; and that either is or is followed by a continuum of forms having a multitude
of dimensions too great for the individual dimensions to be distinct. It must be by a
contraction of the vagueness of that potentiality of everything in general, but of nothing
in particular, that the world of forms comes about.55

All that I have been saying about the beginnings of creation seems wildly confused
enough. Now let me give you such slight indication, as brevity permits, of the clue to
which I trust to guide us through the maze. Let the clean blackboard be a sort of diagram
of the original vague potentiality, or at any rate of some early stage of its determination.

28
This is something more than a figure of speech; for after all continuity is generality. This
blackboard is a continuum of two dimensions, while that which it stands for is a
continuum of some indefinite multitude of dimensions. This blackboard is a continuum
of possible points; while that is a continuum of possible dimensions of quality, or is a
continuum of possible dimensions of a continuum of possible dimensions of quality, or
something of that sort. There are no points on this blackboard. There are no dimensions
in that continuum. I draw a chalk line on the board. This discontinuity is one of those
brute acts by which alone the original vagueness could have made a step towards
definiteness. There is a certain element of continuity in this line. Where did this
continuity come from? It is nothing but the original continuity of the blackboard which
makes everything upon it continuous.56

A generic continuum is always present in the universe, reflected in multiple

layers (single continuum of qualitative possibilities – line in the blackboard) and
“meta-layers” (double continuum of qualitative possibilities – blackboard). Through
acts of “brute force”, breaks are then produced on the continuum which allow to
“mark” differences: secondness, existence, discreteness, emerge all as ruptures of the
real, the third, the continuous. Vagueness, indetermination, amalgamation, present in a
“primitive” continuum (the Parmenidean “One”), evolve towards a logic of identity,
more and more determined, capable of recording differences by means of successive
breaks, ruptures, discontinuities. Since the evolution is not absolute, but contextual,
nor fully achievable, but partial, the counterpoint between a continuous ground and
discontinuity peaks becomes saturated only in certain given contexts. Changing flows
of the living, or approaching visions of the world, in other contexts, acquire a
completely new dynamics. A peircean model for the development of the universe can
be seen as an evolving spiral, which extends in a three-dimensional continuum and
which crosses diverse conceptual cylinders that symbolize both the natural and the
cultural world: in each crossing, in each “mark”, a new height and a new location
allow to construct a new perspective, from which the unlimited peircean semeiosis can
transform itself.
Peirce’s continuum is formed by superposed “real” environments and
neighborhoods –modes of fusion and connection of the possibilia–. On that continuum
“ideal” points are marked –cuts and discontinuities of the actual– only to construct
contrasting scales and to facilitate the “calculus”. An apparent oddity, which ties the
real with the possible and the ideal with the actual, is one of the radical stakes of

29
peircean philosophy57. Indeed, the actual, the given, the present, the instant, are no
more than ideal limits: limits of possibility neighborhoods which contain those
actuality marks, those points impossible to be drawn, those fleeting presents, those
impalpable instants.
Accordingly, Peirce stresses that the continuum must be studied –in a coherent
approach with its inextensibility– by means of a neighborhood logic: an intermediate
logic which would study the connecting modes of environments of the real, a non-
classical logic which would go beyond punctual “positive assertion and negation”:

I have long felt that it is a serious defect in existing logic that it takes no heed of the limit
between two realms. I do not say that the Principle of Excluded Middle is downright
false; but I do say that in every field of thought whatsoever there is an intermediate
ground between positive assertion and positive negation which is just as Real as they.58

A continuum (such as time and space actually are) is defined as something any part of
which however small itself has parts of the same kind. Every part of a surface is a
surface, and every part of a line is a line. The point of time or space is nothing but the
ideal limit towards which we approach indefinitely close without ever reaching it in
dividing time or space. To assert that something is true of a point is only to say that it is
true of times and spaces however small or else that it is more and more nearly true the
smaller the time or space and as little as we please from being true of a sufficiently small
interval. (...) And so nothing is true of a point which is not at least on the limit of what is
true for spaces and times.59

A drop of ink has fallen upon the paper and I have walled it round. Now every point of
the area within the walls is either black or white; and no point is both black and white.
That is plain. The black is, however, all in one spot or blot; it is within bounds. There is a
line of demarcation between the black and the white. Now I ask about the points of this
line, are they black or white? Why one more than the other? Are they (A) both black and
white or (B) neither black nor white? Why A more than B, or B more than A? It is
certainly true, First, that every point of the area is either black or white, Second, that no
point is both black and white, Third, that the points of the boundary are no more white
than black, and no more black than white. The logical conclusion from these three
propositions is that the points of the boundary do not exist. That is, they do not exist in
such a sense as to have entirely determinate characters attributed to them for such reasons
as have operated to produce the above premises. This leaves us to reflect that it is only as
they are connected together into a continuous surface that the points are colored; taken
singly, they have no color, and are neither black nor white, none of them. Let us then try
putting "neighboring part" for point. Every part of the surface is either black or white. No
part is both black and white. The parts on the boundary are no more white than black,
and no more black than white. The conclusion is that the parts near the boundary are half
black and half white. This, however (owing to the curvature of the boundary), is not
exactly true unless we mean the parts in the immediate neighborhood of the boundary.
These are the parts we have described. They are the parts which must be considered if we
attempt to state the properties at precise points of a surface, these points being
considered, as they must be, in their connection of continuity. One begins to see that the
phrase "immediate neighborhood," which at first blush strikes one as almost a
contradiction in terms, is, after all, a very happy one.60

30
Peirce’s arguments show that talking of “points” in the boundary of the ink
drop is just an “ideal” postulate. There exist really only colored environments in the
paper, of three specific kinds: black, white, or black-and-white neighborhoods.
Boundary “points” are characterized as ideal entities which can only be approached by
neighborhoods of the third kind. Thus, neighborhood logic –or “continuous coloring”
logic– embodies elementary forms of thirdness and triadicity61, and immediately
discards the law of excluded middle. It should not come as a surprise, then, that Peirce,
in attempts to construct triadic connectives62, would become the first modern logician
to construct truth-tables with intermediate truth-values.
In Peirce’s continuum the neighborhoods are possibilia environments63, where
a supermultitude of potential “points” accumulate. In many approaches to Peirce’s
continuum, those possibilia have been described as infinitesimal monads: around an
actual mark on the continuous line stands a supermultitudinous myriad of
infinitesimals64. It will be of prime concern to construct a “local surgery” in the
geometry of those possibility realms65, which should involve techniques similar to
Whitney’s surgery techniques in differential topology, and with which germs of
possibility could be glued66 and deployed simultaneously. That possibilia surgery –still
fully to be developed, but implicit in Peirce’s approach (for example, pretty clear in
the erasure and deiteration processes in the existential graphs)– should be able to
naturally interweave with Thom’s cobordism techniques (a “generic cobordism”
should be part of a generic third67) and with Thom’s call on an “archetypical”
continuum –a “topos” qualitatively homogeneous– similar in many ways to Peirce’s
continuum.
We think that Peirce’s continuum hooks up perfectly with Leibniz’s “maximal
principle”, according to which the world articulates along the simplest hypothesis and
the richest phenomena. Peirce’s continuum covers, as a matter of fact, a huge
phenomenical range, while it articulates only three simple concepts –genericity,
reflexivity, modality– from which a wide spectrum of global and local characteristics
follows.

31
In the next chapter, after a contrast (induction) of several alternative models for
the continuum proposed in 20th century mathematics, we proceed to draw off some of
the “simple” mathematical hypotheses (abduction) which underlie those models, and
whose eventual formal unification (deduction) could help us construct new approaches
to Peirce’s continuum.

1
Saunders MacLane, “Is Mathias an ontologist?”, in: Haim Judah, Winfried Just, Hugh Woodin
(comps.), Set Theory and the Continuum, New York: Springer, 1992, p. 120.
2
“Some amazing mazes” [1908; CP 4.642].
3
“Consequences of critical common-sensism” [1905; 5.526].
4
An important distinction between “topicists” and “analysts” is drawn by Peirce in [MS 137] (1904):
while analysts build up the continuum on points, inversely, topicists drop down points from the
continuum. See B. Noble, “Peirce’s Definitions of Continuity and the Concept of Possibility”,
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society XXV (1989), 149-174, p.151.
5
“Multitude and continuity” [c.1895-1900; NEM 3.96].
6
V. Potter and P. Shields, “Peirce’s Definitions of Continuity”, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society XIII (1977), 20-34, set four “main periods” for the eventual development of Peirce’s
continuum: pre-Cantorian (before 1884), Cantorian (1884-1894), Kantistic (1895-1908), post-
Cantorian (1908-1911). It is not our task in this chapter to redress a historical understanding of the
lines of development of Peirce’s thought, but the triple emphasis of Potter and Shields around Cantor
seems excessive. As we will show, Peirce’s continuum is by and large a non-Cantorian construction
articulated around generals, reflections and possibilia inexistent in Cantor’s real line. A more faithful
historical approach seems to be J. Dauben, “Charles S. Peirce, Evolutionary Pragmatism and The
History of Science”, Centaurus 38 (1996), 22-82, where Dauben shows that Peirce’s interest in
infinity was prompted by logical questions (syllogisms and modalities, independently of Cantor) and
not by mathematical considerations. As Dauben shows, a good divergence standpoint in Peirce’s and
Cantor’s approaches can be seen in their disparate understanding of the theorem (found independently
by both) that the power of a multitude is greater than that multitude. While Cantor constructs then the
hierarchy of alephs to try to track down the power cardinals, Peirce unleashes up the
supermultitudeness of the continuum: it cannot possess any determinate multitude since then it could
be surpassed by the power of that multitude.
7
Here we follow the suggestion of R. Dipert, “Peirce’s Underestimated Place in the History of Logic:
A Response to Quine”, in: K. Ketner (ed.), Peirce and Contemporary Thought: Philosophical
Inquiries, New York: Fordham University Press, 1995, 32-58, who claims that a study of Peirce’s
writings on sets “would return us to where earnest thought on the subject dropped off” (p. 50). In fact,
we hope to prove that reading Peirce independently of Cantor –as we continue to do in the remainder
of this chapter– will return us to a wider landscape than the one provided by Cantor’s “first embryo”
of continuity.
8
“Lectures on Pragmatism” [1903; CP 5.103].
9
“What Pragmatism Is” [1905; CP 5.431].
10
“Letter to E.H. Moore” [1902; NEM 3.925].
11
“Detached Ideas on Vitally Important Topics” [1908; CP 6.204-205].
12
“Multitude and Number” [1897; CP 4.172].
13
“Some Amazing Mazes” - “Supplement” [1908; CP 7.535 note 6].
14
“What Pragmatism Is” [1905; CP 5.436]. Another similar expression has been noticed in G. Locke,
“Peirce’s Metaphysics: Evolution, Synechism, and the Mathematical Conception of the Continuum”,
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society XXXVI (2000), 133-147. In [MS 4.5] Locke reckons
Peirce’s statement: “corresponding to generality in nonrelative logic is continuity in relative logic”.

32
The correspondence [generality : higher-order logic :: continuity : first-order logic] is yet to be fully
explored, but we provide some clues in our second chapter.
15
“Consequences of Critical Common-Sensism” [1905; CP 5.528].
16
“Detached Ideas on Vitally Important Topics” [1908; CP 6.190].
17
“Detached Ideas Continued and the Dispute Between Nominalists and Realists” [1898; NEM
4.343].
18
“Description of a Notation for the Logic of Relatives” [1870; W 2.359-429]. The “infinitesimal
relatives” appear at pages 395-408. Considered by D. Merrill as “elaborate and obscure mathematical
analogies” [W 2.xlviii], the infinitesimal relatives were introduced by Peirce to show that certain
identities in first-order logic could be seen as differential “marks” of continuous processes. It is our
poor understanding of Peirce’s ideas what should rather be called “obscure”; it is hoped that time will
show that Peirce’s analogies were difficult but magnificent anticipations: his infinitesimal relatives
seem just close enough to some of the “quantale” manipulations now advanced in differential
geometry. T. Herron, “C.S. Peirce’s Theories of Infinitesimals”, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society XXXIII (1997), 590-645, draws also attention, in his second appendix, towards what could be
obtained from a good understanding of Peirce’s infinitesimal relatives.
19
H. Putnam, “Peirce’s Continuum”, in Ketner, op.cit., 1-22, tries to describe the supermultitudeness
of Peirce’s continuum through the “cardinal ' of all sets” (p.11). In our view, this great cardinal
hypothesis would still be short of the truly supermultitudeness of the continuum, which should not be
reached by any given cardinal (however big). What is again in hand is that Peirce’s continuum should
not to be reachable in the cumulative Cantorian set-theoretic hierarchy (restricted to V or extended
through great cardinals). Closer to Peirce’s spirit would seem König’s efforts to prove that the
continuum is not an aleph: in König’s words (1905), “the second-number class cannot be considered
to be a complete set” (cited in R. Dipert, “Peirce’s Philosophical Conception of Sets”, in: N. Houser,
D. Roberts. J. van Evra (eds.), Studies in the Logic of Charles Sanders Peirce, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1997, 53-76). On the other hand, the essential indeterminacy of the continuum (or
incompleteness in König’s sense) has been thoroughly emphasized by Putnam, who finds the “key” to
Peirce’s continuum in the “possibility of repeated division which can never be exhausted in any
possible world in which one can complete abnumerably infinite processes” (Putnam, op.cit., p. 17).
20
“Multitude and Continuity” [c.1897; NEM 3.86-87].
21
Ibid. [c.1897; NEM 3.95].
22
Ibid. [c.1897; NEM 3.88].
23
However, this assertion must be treated with caution, since in fact most of the efforts of set theory
researchers are directed to find additional natural axioms to ZF, in order to fix and determine the size
of the continuum in a given rank of aleph’s hierarchy (natural minimality: (1: Gödel; natural
maximality: (2: Martin, Woodin). The indetermination of 2 0 is not well appreciated by the
(

specialists, who consider that the incompleteness of ZF must be repaired. In any of the “normative”
responses given to the cardinal size of the continuum, it ceases immediately to be supermultitudinous
since the additional axioms force it to adjust within a determinate level of a hierarchy.
24
“The Conception of Time Essential in Logic” [1873; W 3.103]. Peirce, like Kant, would confuse,
for some time, the reflexivity of the continuum with its infinite divisibility; see, for example: “I have
termed the property of infinite intermediety, or divisibility, the Kanticity of a series”, in: “Grand
Logic” [1893; CP 4.121], or “The Kanticity is having a point between any two points”, in: “Century
Dictionary” [1898; CP 6.166]. Nevertheless, from 1900 on, Peirce would revise in his understanding
of the “kanticity”, or reflexivity, of the continuum, fully apprehending the complexity of 1873’s
assertion. See, for example, his mea culpa: “Further study of the subject has proved that this definition
is wrong. It involves a misunderstanding of Kant's definition which he himself likewise fell into.
Namely he defines a continuum as that all of whose parts have parts of the same kind. He himself, and
I after him, understood that to mean infinite divisibility, which plainly is not what constitutes
continuity since the series of rational fractional values is infinitely divisible but is not by anybody
regarded as continuous. Kant's real definition implies that a continuous line contains no points”, in:
“Marginal Note” [1903; CP 6.168], or also: “The above conception of a line leads to a definition of
continuity very similar to that of Kant. Although Kant confuses continuity with infinite divisibility,

33
yet it is noticeable that he always defines a continuum as that of which every part (not every echter
Theil) has itself parts. This is a very different thing from infinite divisibility, since it implies that the
continuum is not composed of points”, in: “Letter to the Editor of Science” [1900; CP 3.569].
25
“On Continuous Series and the Infinitesimal” [NEM 3.126-127].
26
“The Way of Truth”, in Parmenide’s Poem (John Burnet ed., R.P. 118).
27
“Multitude and Continuity” [c.1897; NEM 3.93].
28
“On Continuous Series and the Infinitesimal” [NEM 3.127].
29
The impossibility to express the continuum through number grilles is also one of the basic
characteristics of Brouwer’s intuition of the continuum, as we shall see in our second chapter.
30
M. Fisch, “Peirce’s Arisbe: The Greek Influence in His Later Philosophy”, in: M. Fisch, Peirce,
Semeiotic and Pragmatism (eds. Ketner, Kloesel), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
“From Epicurus’s chance, for example, Peirce moved to the chance and spontaneity of Aristotle, and
in general to Aristotle’s logical and physical modalities in relation to his own categories”, ibid., p.
232.
31
“Eight Class Lectures on Reasoning and the Logic of Things” (Cambridge Lectures) [1898; RLT
160].
32
“Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed” (Lowell Lectures) [1903; NEM 3.388].
33
“Marginal Note” [1903; CP 6.168]. On the very important paragraph 6.168, see Fisch (op.cit), p.
246, note 18.
34
In Putnam’s words, underlining the modal key to Peirce’s continuum, “possibility intrinsically
outruns actuality, not just because of the finiteness of human powers” (Putnam, op.cit., p. 19).
35
“Detached Ideas Continued and the Dispute Between Nominalists and Realists” [1898; NEM
4.345].
36
We should not fear to speak of “metaphysics” in a mainly scientific approach! A fundamental part
of Peirce’s program was to construct a “mathematical metaphysics” [CP 6.213] –fulfilling thus
Leibniz’ dream–, where concepts could be cleaned up of the hotchpotch which obscured them
(systematic uses of the pragmatic maxim), but where one could turn again, with renewed vigor and
naturalness, to the great open questions of Greek and scholastic philosophy.
37
“One, Two, Three: An Evolutionist Speculation” [1886; W 5.301].
38
“Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed” (Lowell Lectures) [1903; CP 4.512].
The “assertion sheet” refers to Peirce’s existential graphs: they constitute a local and technical model,
utterly precise, where many of the more daring and “speculative” Peirce assertions on the continuum
incarnate. As some Peirce scholars have shown, and as we hope to prove in our fourth chapter, the
existential graphs are the masterpiece of Peirce’s logic (“My chef d’oeuvre”, in: “Letter to Jourdain”
[1908], cited in D. Roberts, The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce, The Hague: Mouton, 1973,
p. 110). To continue ignoring the existential graphs is a true contradiction with Peirce’s architectonical
and logical thought, thoroughly reflected in the outstanding architectonics of the graphs.
39
“On Topical Geometry, in General” [CP 7.535].
40
“Supplement” [1908; CP 7.535, note 6].
41
“Eight Class Lectures on Reasoning and the Logic of Things” (Cambridge Lectures) [1898; CP
7.515].
42
Peirce recognized De Morgan as one of his spiritual fathers (“my master, Augustus De Morgan”, in:
“A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic” [1903; CP 3.574, note 2]), but the true vision and the
development of the logic of relatives are due to the extraordinary Peirce memoirs of the years 1870-
1885.
43
“Some Amazing Mazes” - “Addition” [1908; CP 4.642].
44
“The Logic of Events” [1898; CP 6.188].
45
“Some Amazing Mazes” - “Fourth Curiosity” [c.1909; CP 6.330].
46
C. Eisele, “The Problem of Mathematical Continuity” (in C. Eisele, Studies in the Scientific and
Mathematical Philosophy of C.S. Peirce, The Hague: Mouton, 1979, 208-215) stressed the
fundamental idea that a study of Peirce’s logic of continuity should involve, as a first approximation, a
3-valued logic.
47
“Consequences of Critical Common-Sensism” [c.1905; CP 5.505].

34
48
For an extensive study of Peirce’s vagueness, see J.E. Brock, C.S. Peirce’s Logic of Vagueness,
Ph.D. Thesis, Urbana: University of Illinois, 1969.
49
For a nice description of Peirce’s relations between continuity and vagueness, see R. Fabbrichesi
Leo, Continuità e vaghezza, Milano: CUEM, 2001, pp.140-149.
50
“Issues of Pragmaticism” [1905; CP 5.450].
51
“Marginal Note” [1903; CP 6.168].
52
“Letter to Paul Carus” [c.1910; CP 8.216].
53
Another description of this situation can be found in B. Noble, op.cit., p.170, where possibilities, or
“may-be’s”, fail the principle of contradiction, and continuities, or “would-be’s”, fail the principle of
excluded middle.
54
“Consequences of Critical Common-Sensism” [c.1905; CP 5.505].
55
“The Logic of Events” [1898; CP 6.196].
56
Ibid. [1898; CP 6.203].
57
Peirce’s weavings between possibility and realism, and actuality and idealism –incarnated
technically in the continuum– constitute, if not a complete renewal of philosophy, at least a fresh
coming back to the Greek masters and the scholastics, which revives the “transcendental” outlook of
German idealism.
58
“Letter to William James” [1909; manuscript cited in Max Fisch, op.cit., p. 180].
59
“The Conception of Time Essential in Logic” [1873; W 3.106]. In another draft of the same text,
Peirce affirms that “a point of time differs in no respect from an interval, except that it is the ideal
limit. And if nothing is present for any length of time, nothing is present in an instant”. [1873; W
3.103].
60
“Grand Logic” [1893; CP 4.127].
61
R. Lane, “Peirce’s Triadic Logic Revisited”, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society XXXV
(1999), 284-311, has forcefully shown that Peirce’s triadic logic has to be understood as a logic
concerning the “ink blot”: a natural continuity logic, far away from arbitrary polyvalent formal
manipulations.
62
See M. Fisch, “Peirce’s Triadic Logic”, op.cit., pp. 171-183. Peirce’s manuscripts are from 1909.
The manuscripts were not published before Fisch, and therefore they did not have any influence in the
development of many-valued logics.
63
Our neighborhoods, or possibilia environments, correspond to Putnam’s “point parts” (Putnam,
op.cit. pp.7-8), and can be seen also as infinitesimal monads.
64
For a thorough account of Peirce’s infinitesimals, see T. Herron, op.cit. On another hand, C.
Hausman, “Infinitesimals as Origins of Evolution: Comments Prompted by Timothy Herron and
Hilary Putnam on Peirce’s Synechism and Infinitesimals”, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society XXXIV (1998), 627-640, forcefully shows that possibilia constitute privileged loci of
branching which support Peirce’s spontaneity and creativity sparks. In chapter IV we try to show that
the triadic branching of the classification of sciences, understood in the continuous environment of
Gamma existential graphs, can be seen just as such a spark of creativity.
65
The eventual interest of a “geometry of possibilia” for the understanding of Peirce’s continuum is
also supported by the historical evidence lying behind many of the geometrical motivations
interweaved in Peirce’s approach to the continuum. M. Murphey, The Development of Peirce’s
Philosophy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961, chapters VIII-XI, and C. Eisele,
“Mathematical Exactitude in C.S. Peirce’s Doctrine of Exact Philosophy” (in: K. Ketner (ed.),
Proceedings of the C.S. Peirce Bicentennial International Congress, Lubbock: Texas Tech University
Press, 1981, 155-168) have duly emphasized the geometrical background (Hamilton, Cayley, Clifford,
Klein, Listing, Riemann, Bolzano, Grassmann) of many fundamental peircean ideas. Nevertheless, we
are still in need of a detailed study which may connect Peirce’s early geometrical representations of
the logic of relatives with his later topological insights (peircean continuum, continuity logic,
existential graphs).
66
A. Johanson’s “protocompactness” in a modern pointless continuum can be seen in fact as a
property which would ensure the adequate glueing of coherent possibilia. See A. Johanson, “Modern

35
Topology and Peirce’s Theory of the Continuum”, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society
XXXVII (2001), 1-12.
67
Maybe a “generic cobordism” could be that “unnoticed condition in the general hypothesis of a
collection which requires this mergency of individuals”, unknown condition that Peirce considered the
key of the “paradox” of the continuum. See “Multitude and Continuity” [c.1897; NEM 3.100].

36
CHAPTER II
SOME 20TH CENTURY MATHEMATICAL PERSPECTIVES

Continuing our survey of Peirce’s continuum, we show how, following several

independent paths, 20th century mathematical logic has rediscovered (and amplified,
to a better understanding) many features related to the genericity, reflexivity and
modality of Peirce’s continuum. From Peirce’s wide legacy of ideas around the
continuum, two trends have caught particular attention: his vindication of
infinitesimals and his thesis concerning the reduction of relations. Since thorough
works on these subjects have appeared68, we will not discuss them further here, and
we will concentrate in other areas related to Peirce’s continuum which have been less
paid heed. In particular, we claim that an understanding of modern methods in
topological model theory and in Category Theory are extremely useful to disentangle
the riddle of Peirce’s continuum.

II.1. The primordial continuum

In the same years in which Peirce and Cantor wrote on the continuum, Giuseppe
Veronese presented an alternative vision of the continuum, close to Peirce’s in many
respects. Veronese considers a “whole intuitive continuum” on which webs of points
are just reference systems, and cannot fully capture the underlying continuous

37
“fundamental form” –a feature shared by the reflexivity (and thus the inextensibility)
of Peirce’s continuum–:

The rectilinear intuitive continuum does not depend on the system of points which we
may think on it. Never a system of points can give, in an absolute sense, the whole
intuitive continuum, since a point has no parts. [...] We shall see in our geometrical
considerations that a system of points can represent the continuum sufficiently, and can
do nothing more. The rectilinear continuum is not composed of points, but of sections
(tratti), each of which joins two distinct points and is itself continuous. [...]
Introduction: A fundamental form is a one-dimensional system which is homogeneous,
i.e. identical in the position of its parts. [...] Hypothesis VII (homogeneity of the
fundamental form). Every segment, where the ends vary in opposite directions and
which become unlimitedly small, contains an element outside the domains of variability
of its ends.69

The coincidence with Peirce, both in concepts and language, is deep. Veronese,
a first rate italian mathematician, would then provide an extensive technical
development of his “fundamental form”, a task that Peirce’s more limited skills in
modern mathematical analysis could not afford him to undertake. The homogeneity
of the fundamental form –extending the domain of variation of the continuum and
guaranteeing enough infinitesimals (“elements outside” boundaries of sections
“unlimitedly small”)– corresponds, in Veronese, to the homogeneity of the possibilia
realm in Peirce’s continuum, ensuring supermultitudinous “monads” around each
point, or actual break, on the continuum. Veronese’s continuum –intuitive,
prelogical, pretopological– starts from a non set-theoretic notion of emptiness, a
weaving and amalgamating synthetic notion which can be viewed as a smooth fluid,
both finite and unlimited, in which parts melt naturally with the whole70. Veronese’s
continuum, as well as Peirce’s, is non archimedean, since the archimedean property
of the Cantorian continuum71 is just a way to force the continuum to be captured by
standard natural number scales. Veronese’s and Peirce’s continua lie over a generic
synthetic ground –“smooth” or “plastic”– beyond Cantor’s model, i.e., beyond
analytic number representability.
In the first stage of Brouwer’s thought (1907-10), the continuum appears as a
primordial synthetic intuition. Brouwer draws images akin to Peirce’s and
Veronese’s:

38
The continuum as a whole is intuitively given; a construction of the continuum, an act
which would create by means of the mathematical intuition “all its points” is
inconceivable and impossible.72

Brouwer starts from a wholly generic continuum, on which acts and reacts the
“primordial intuition” of mathematics, the “auto-conscious” possibility of human
mind, able both to mark the continuum and to observe the mark, producing thus the
brouwerian “two-oneness” which allows to develop intuitionistic number theory
(integers, constructible reals):

...the intuition of two-oneness, the primordial intuition of mathematics which

immediately creates not only the numbers one and two but all finite ordinal numbers...73

In the Primordial Intuition of two-oneness the intuitions of continuous and discrete

meet: “first” and “second” are held together, and in this holding-together consists the
intuition of the continuous (continere = hold together).74

In the temporal two-ity emerging from time-awareness one of the elements can again
and in the same way fall apart, leading to temporal “three-ity”, or three-element time
sequence is born. Proceeding this process, a self-unfolding of the primordial happening
of the intellect, creates the temporal sequence of arbitrary multiplicity.75

In Brouwer’s second period (1917-30), the Dutch mathematician articulates

again from scratch his vision of the continuum, generating it constructively with his
choice sequences; then, the intuitionistic continuum develops dynamically and
becomes a variable set. A reflexive constructive process seems to happen here,
similar to the ones we signaled in Peirce and Veronese: from a global intuition of the
continuum one goes over to local constructions, which try to reflect the original view
–“one”, “primordial”, “fundamental”76–.
In the intuitionistic continuum several existential proof arguments (valid in
Cantor’s model) do not hold, and the law of excluded middle fails (as in Peirce’s
continuum). Also, Brouwer’s and Peirce’s continua are both “supermultitudinous”, in
the sense that both possess the highest consistent cardinality for a mathematical
concept within their respective theoretical contexts. Indeed, according to Peirce, the
size of the continuum is the limit of denumerable iterations of the exponential
(maximum size in Peirce’s system, since he didn’t allow the use of arbitrarily high

39
ordinals), and, according to Brouwer, the size of the continuum is the biggest
between only four recognizable constructive sizes (finite, denumerable, non-
denumerable, primordial continuity). Of course, these versions of the continuum
cannot be implemented in classical set-theory, where arbitrary ordinals do exist and
where Cantor’s theorem holds (&&)(X)&&> &&X&&).
The generic intuition of the continuum will not be lost throughout the 20th
century and will be retrieved with force by René Thom, the Fields medalist:

Here I would like to face a myth deeply anchored in contemporary mathematics, namely
that the continuum is engendered (or defined) as arithmetic unfolds through the
sequence of natural numbers. [...] I ponder, on the contrary, that the archetypical
continuum is a space which possesses a perfect qualitative homogeneity; I would like to
say that two “points” are always equivalent by means of a continuous sliding
(eventually local) of the space on itself; unfortunately the very notion of a “point”
already presupposes a break of spatial homogeneity. [...] The notion of place (Aristotle’s
*+,ó-) could perhaps help to access a rigorous definition, since places can serve as an
open basis for a topology. A decreasing sequence of nested intervals could converge to
that minimal element: a point. Our archetypical continuum possesses no structure by
itself (whether it be metrical or simply differential): the only demanded property is its
qualitative homogeneity.77

Many deep similarities draw Thom’s postulates very close to Peirce’s

indications on the continuum: Thom’s “perfect qualitative homogeneity” corresponds
to Peirce’s perfect generality, Thom’s critic on the “myth” of the arithmetization of
the continuum recalls Peirce’s assertion that number cannot possibly capture
continuity, Thom’s understanding of points as homogeneity breaks matches Peirce’s
vision of points as continuity breaks, Thom’s attempt to restore the notion of “place”
as a basis for a rigorous definition of the continuum corresponds to Peirce’s intent to
construct a neighborhood logic connatural with the generic sliding of the fluid in a
drop of ink, Thom’s fundamental insistence that the “archetypical continuum” must
really be an archetype without additional structure corresponds to Peirce’s basic
insight that the continuum must be a purely relational General (“free” in the sense of
mathematical Category Theory, as we shall soon see).
Thom explains the passage from the continuum to the discrete by means of
“cuts” (breaks, discontinuities), local marks which could serve as actuality spots for
the brouwerian two-oneness:

40
We can say nothing of that perfect continuum except that it is an unutterable mystique:
it carries no mark, no point, does not admit any orientation, nothing can there be
identified. How, then, does in such medium happen the first intrusion of the discrete?
[...] The intrusion of the discrete in the continuum manifests itself by the cut. [...] On the
line, the point appears as a cut: it helps to hinder the left half-line (Dg) from the right
half-line (Dd). [...] Here intervenes a vision proper to Aristotle. As a point O is marked
on the line (D), the line divides in two potential (./01µ23) half-lines; but to get
separation in act (20*2425231), one needs that the point O unfold in two points, Og left
adherent to Dg, Od right adherent to Dd, and only then the two half-lines closed in O
reach the existence in act as two separate entities. The points Og, Od, although different
(boundaries of different entities) are nevertheless together (1µ1), and we have passed,
in O, from a continuity situation to a contiguity situation; thus the celebrated formula:
entelechy severs.78

The intrusions of cuts within the continuum, as well as the unfolding of

boundaries in it, allow thus a natural flow from continuity to contiguity, a process
that Peirce had already signaled as basic in the progressive determination of the
general. A general theory of boundaries should be of great profit, then, in order to
obtain a better understanding of Peirce’s continuum. Thom’s general theory of
cobordism is in fact such a theory, but its range of application is still restricted to
differential geometry. A natural path to follow –hard but important– would consist of
axiomatically “freeing” cobordism theory from its differential structure and to
abstract it towards the general. Even if such a path seems still remote, we believe one
of the natural apparatus to clear the route is now in place: the very powerful abstract
categories of relations (“allegories”) of Peter Freyd.
Freyd’s allegories79 provide precisely a general methodology which allow to
pass from a structured class to its “free” skeleton. Following an ubiquitous procedure
in categorical logic, Freyd shows that, departing from pure type theories with certain
structural properties (regularity, coherence, first order, higher order), one can
construct in a uniform way –through an architectonic hierarchy completely
controlled– free categories which reflect the given structural properties (regular
categories, pre-logoi, logoi, topoi).80 Lean, free categories are then able to be
reflected in any other category with similar properties: Freyd achieves thus the
amazing discovery of initial archetypes in mathematical theorization.
It is not therefore too risky to conjecture success for what we would like to
call the allegorical program for the continuum: to construct a hierarchy of partial,

41
converging, models for Peirce’s and Thom’s archetypical continuum, starting from
appropriate differential structures and “freeing” them towards genericity, through
Freyd’s allegorical representation machinery. It should also be noticed that the
natural context of allegories can provide several other benefits in an assessment of
Peirce’s continuum. For example, on one side, Peirce’s generic triadic relation,
which he signals as an eventual key to the continuum, fits perfectly in the axiomatic
framework of allegories, where the connecting modes of abstract relations are
studied in full generality. On another side, Peirce’s antithesis between generality and
vagueness, found by Lawvere to be a full categorical adjunction between the
universal and existential quantifiers (! -- "), gets an immense algebraic richness
through the allegorical machinery. On yet another perspective, a wide range of
partial modalities hidden in Freyd’s calculi could be used to model Peirce’s flow of
modalities over the continuum.

II.2. The large set-theoretic continuum

Always independently of Peirce’s original ideas on the continuum, mostly unknown

to the scientific community, other generic aspects of Peirce’s continuum have been
modeled through other mathematical constructions of 20th century mathematics. In
particular, the generic size of Peirce’s continuum, its “supermultitudeness”, its
multitude (cardinal) larger than all other multitudes, has revived in the super-infinity
of some collections in alternative set theories: the super-infinity of the class of
Conway’s “surreal” numbers in NBG (Cantorian) set theory, and the super-infinity of
the set of natural numbers in Vopenka’s (non-Cantorian) AST.
The class No of Conway’s surreals81 can be axiomatized (Ehrlich), in NBG
set theory82, by means of axioms for non archimedean ordered fields together with an
axiom of absolutely homogeneous universality:

A model A for a theory T in a language L will be said absolutely homogeneous universal

[B. Jónsson, 1960] if and only if it is absolutely universal with respect to T (i.e., every
model of T in L can be embedded in A) and it is absolutely homogeneous with respect to
T (i.e., given any two substructures of A that are models of T in L, whose universe are

42
sets, and an isomorphism between them, the isomorphism can be extended to an
automorphism of A.83

Besides the very interesting fact that No can be axiomatized through generic
properties of homogeneity and universality –following closely the (independent)
general guidelines of Peirce’s continuum– fundamental for us is another theorem
which guarantees the supermultitudeness of No, since No contains the class On of all
ordinals84 in NBG. Thus, Conway’s No finely models several aspects of the
genericity of Peirce’s continuum, even if it lies far away from reflecting its other
reflexive and modal properties. In fact –as well as with all other contemporary
mathematical constructions we are aware of– just some partial properties of Peirce’s
continuum seem able to be reflected in a given mathematical model (confirming thus,
inductively, what the pragmatic maxim would anyway foresee).
In sharp contrast to NBG, Vopenka’s AST85 can be truly considered an
alternative set theory. Vopenka distinguishes, as in NBG, classes and sets, but he
introduces above all a really strong asymmetrization, which breaks the usual set
theoretic equivalence between intensionality and extensionality. In AST, Zermelo’s
separation axiom can fail: not every subclass of a (AST-)set has to be a (AST-)set.
The asymmetrization signals, on one hand, that not every intensional property has to
yield an extensional set, and, on the other hand, that very little of the indefinite and
infinite range of intensional possibilia can be effectively actualized –a conception
Vopenka founds in Bolzano86 and, as we saw before, Peirce independently took up
again–. As a consequence of the radically new axiomatic contextualization of
Vopenka, )(X) no longer can be actualized when X is infinite (even if, for finite sets,
ZF and AST do agree). The theory possesses, then, just two infinite cardinalities: the
one of the class of usual natural numbers (N), and the one of the class An of “finite”
natural numbers (defined as those for which every subclass is in fact a set). In this
theory, far away from what happens in ZF, N plays part of the role of the continuum,
being a super-infinite class.
From another set-theoretic perspective, even if inside ZF no global
supermultitudinous or reflexive models can be found, in the two better known ZF

43
extension scales –the great cardinals scale and the forcing axioms scale– diverse
local properties can be found, which reflect one scale into the other and which may
correspond to fragments of genericity and reflexivity in Peirce’s sense. Going farther
than bounded genericity in forcing87 –which builds up over particular classes of
orderings (ccc, proper, etc.) in order to ensure nice extension properties of the
associated models (cardinal preservations, iterations, etc.)– and abstracting away
from those local orderings, it would be extremely important to axiomatize a generic
notion of genericity. In such an endeavour a welcome union of set-theoretic and
category-theoretic tools would have to take place, and Peirce’s continuum could turn
to be approached as a maximal generic extension of Cantor’s “first embryo” of
continuity.
The reflexivity of Peirce’s continuum, and, therefore, its inextensibility, are
constitutive characteristics that do not seem possible to be modeled naturally inside
ZF (where points do build up sets). Linked with this obstruction lies the
intensionality of Peirce’s continuum (similar to the “primitive” intensional versions
of Veronese’s, Brouwer’s or Thom’s continua), to which are afterwards superposed
extensional local fragments (“number scales”) in order to attain relative control.
Thus, it may be relevant –just as Vopenka advocates going back to Bolzano’s
intensional domains– to try to develop versions of the continuum in axiomatic
settings where Frege’s abstraction principle becomes asymmetrically weakened88.
From the perspective of required axioms to capture an intensional, inextensible and
generic continuum such as Peirce’s, Zermelo’s local separation axiom may be still
too stringent. A further local asymmetrization of the principle (favoring the rise of
intensional concepts, as in existential graphs) could be in order. In Peirce’s
cosmological continuum, the realm of possibilia and the intensionality of real
potentials reign over the actual extensionality of existence; similarly, in his logical
continuum (continuously with the cosmological continuum!), a clear primacy of the
intensional should be reflected in local axiomatic settings.
Pre-eminence of intensionality would convey an important support to the
inextensibility of Peirce’s continuum. Indeed, an asymmetrization of Zermelo’s

44
separation axiom immediately gets rid of the a priori existence of points: since only
some formulas produce associated classes, the singletons {a} not always need to
exist (they are associated to formulas x=a, which could turn to be not available in the
theory if the parameter a is not constructible). Also, perhaps with some sort of local
paraconsistent logic, some manipulations of contradictory intensional domains could
be developed –in the potential realm– without yet facing the associated contradictory
extensional classes –in the actual realm– which would trivialize the system, thus
confering a greater flexibility to a generic approach (“free” of actual bonds) to the
continuum. It should also be noticed that brilliant mathematicians, such as Jean
Bénabou89 and Edward Nelson90 (as well as Thom) consider that the intension-
extension symmetry, creed of contemporary mathematics, must be broken.

II.3. The category-theoretic continuum

Constructed as a generic environment for the transversal study of information

transfers between mathematical structures –a weaved environment where diverse
synthetic “universal properties” are contrasted, an intensional environment where
extensional objects are not a priori needed–, the mathematical theory of categories is
the environment of contemporary mathematics which better can be fused with
Peirce’s thought, and where perhaps the greater number of tools and models can be
found to faithfully approach both Peirce’s general architectonics and Peirce’s
particular ideas.91 The continuum –vessel and bridge between the general and the
particular– is therefore specially well suited to be understood categorically. The
paradigm of the mathematical theory of categories92 –“arrows, not elements”;
synthesis, not analysis; relational, contextual, external knowledge, not monolithic,
isolated, internal knowledge– reflects nicely Peirce’s pragmatic maxim.93 In
Category Theory the pragmatic dimension becomes evident through diverse
functorial readings (“interpretations”) between “concrete categories”. As invariants
of a generic functorial back-and-forth emerge –solidly: theorematically– “real”
universal notions, definable in any “abstract category”, beyond its eventual existence

45
(or non-existence) in given particular categories. Category Theory thus provides the
more sophisticated technical arsenal, available in the present state of our culture,
which can be used to prove that there do exist real universals, vindicating forcefully
the validity of Peirce’s scholastic realism.
One of the fundamental visions that Category Theory supplies is compactly
codified in Yoneda’s lemma, a mathematical result of utmost simplicity but which
explains in a deep way the generic presence of the continuum in any consideration of
reality. Yoneda’s lemma shows that any “small” category can be faithfully embedded
in a category of “presheaves” (functors to sets), where “ideal” (or “non standard”)
objects crop up to complete the universe, turning it continuous:

category
• • of presheaves
category C A hA “ideal” over C
objects
“copy” of C

discrete context continuous context

Figure 9.
Yoneda’s lemma: generic presence of the continuum

Diverse forms of continuity are hidden behind Yoneda’s lemma.

“Representable” functors hA symbolize (in Peirce’s sense) all interrelations of A with
its context and preserve limits: they are “continuous”. The presheaf category where
the initial category is embedded is a “complete” category, in the sense that it
possesses all categorical limits: it is therefore a natural continuous environment.
Even deeper, Yoneda’s lemma is the natural tool to describe the “classifier objects”
(semantic codifiers) in presheaf categories: the truth notions turn out then to be –in a
natural way– pragmatic notions, weaved with the continuum where they lie. The
emergence of “ideal” objects as attempts are made to try to capture the “real” –
explicit and unavoidable in Yoneda’s lemma, penetrating and permanent in any form

46
of mathematical creativity– agrees with the peculiar mixture of realism and idealism
present in Peirce’s philosophy. The continuous bottom emerging in Yoneda’s lemma
is yet another indication that Peirce’s global synechism can count on amazing local
reflections to support its likeliness.
Some presheaf categories serve in turn as appropriate places for the
construction of internal models of the continuum, where some aspects of the
genericity and inextensibility of Peirce’s continuum become actualized. One of those
environments where a “synthetic geometry of the continuum” can be produced is the
presheaf category C = Set L op where L is the category of formal C varieties (Lawvere,
6

Reyes, Moerdijk)94. A “copy” in C (through Yoneda) of the Cantorian real line,

called the “smooth line”, acquires very nice properties –by virtue of its new
relationships with the enhanced presheaf environment– which accommodate some
requirements of Peirce’s continuum: the smooth line is non archimedean, possesses
infinitesimals, can not be determined by points, contains a generic (non standard)
copy of the naturals. In another truly surprising technical way, but perfectly in tune
with peircean semiotics, this shows how a “copy” (more precisely: an interpretant) of
an incomplete concept, in a given context, can complete itself naturally in another,
richer, context.

II.4. The sheaf continuum

On another hand, other internal models in sheaf categories95 can detach (prescind,
make a “prescision” in Peirce’s terms) certain properties fused together in the
Cantorian real line (R), showing again that R contains too much spare structure and
that it is not generic enough (recall Thom’s advocation that the archetypical
continuum should possess “no structure” beyond its “qualitative homogeneity”).
Indeed, in any sheaf category Sh(O(T)) over a topological space (T,O(T)), one can
construct (Troelstra, van Dalen) diverse copies of the Cantorian real line96. In the
specific case of the category Sh(O(R)), the copies are different according to whether
the construction is done through Dedekind cuts (Rd) or through Cauchy sequences

47
(Rc), yielding closure properties neatly detached from an intuitionistic perspective (Rc
is real-closed, Rd is not). Even if, again, current intuitionistic sheaf models do not
seem more than “first embryos” of continuity, the logic of sheaves underlying those
models –which technically provides a finer handling of genericity and neighborhood
logic– should be of great help in an appropriate global axiomatization of Peirce’s
continuum.
Sheaf logic, proposed in a very ductile and fruitful form by Xavier Caicedo97,
includes a wide range of intermediate logics between intuitionistic logic and classical
logic. Given a topological space, Caicedo defines a natural local forcing on open
sets, and he uses it (with all the rigour of modern mathematical logic and, once again,
independently of Peirce) to carefully emphasize Peirce’s fundamental idea that truth
is generically local and not just punctual98: something is valid in a point if and only if
it is valid in a neighborhood around the point. Sheaf logic coheres accurately a lot of
Peirce’s detached ideas (“detached ideas on vitally important topics”). Caicedo’s
results handle well the problematics around genericity and neighborhood logic (recall
the “double sigma” which codes Peirce’s continuum – first chapter) and open
fascinating new perspectives. The construction of a theory of generic models allows
to obtain –in a uniform way, as simple corollarial structures in appropriate sheaves–
the fundamental theorems of classical model theory (completeness, compactness,
types omission, Los’ theorem for ultraproducts, set theoretic forcings), while the
study of interconnections between usual punctual semantics (à la Tarski) and local
sheaf semantics allows to reconstruct classical truth, in the sheaf fibers, as natural
limit of intuitionistic truth, characteristic of its global sections.99
Caicedo’s contributions show that –as newtonian mechanics can be seen as a
limit in Einstein’s relativity, or euclidean space can be seen as a limit in Riemann’s
geometry– classical logic deserves to be understood as a limit in sheaf logic. The
awareness of this bordering situation can be interpreted in two complementary ways
“vitally important”. On one hand, it explains (in a precise conceptual and technical
way, not just dogmatically) the pre-eminence of classical logic in the development of
20th century mathematics100, since classical logic turns out to be the natural logic

48
which better fits the “Cantorian program” –construction of mathematics as punctual
sum of ideal actualizations, in a static, somewhat trivialized, Platonic context–. On
the other hand, it opens huge perspectives on the continuum of intermediate layers
between intuitionistic and classical logic, and locates sheaf logic as the natural logic
which better seems to suit what we would like to call a peircean program for
mathematics –construction of mathematics as relative web of real possibilities, in an
evolving, non trivial Platonic, or Aristotelian context–.
Other findings of Caicedo101 –on global continuous operations which codify
structural properties of extensions of first order classical logic– yield an illuminating
perspective on Peirce’s fundamental weaving between generality, continuity and
relative logic. Applying topological methods in model theory, Caicedo shows that
general axioms in abstract logics coincide precisely with continuity requirements on
algebraic operations between model spaces, and he establishes an extensive list of
correspondences between topological and logical properties, many of them based in
the discovery that uniform continuity of natural operations between structures hides
strong logical contents. Caicedo’s theorems can be interpreted in various ways to
elucidate Peirce’s “cryptic” motto: • continuity = genericity via relative logic • On
one side, following a straight global reading of Caicedo’s results, we can see that the
“general” (axioms of abstract model theory), filtered through the web of relative
logic (first order classical logic), yields a natural continuum (uniform topological
space by way of “local” elementary equivalence102; uniform continuity of logical
operations in that web: projections, expansions, restrictions, products, quotients,
exponentials103). On another side, for example, following a more detailed reading, the
fact that closure under relativizations in an abstract logic is equivalent to comparing
adequate uniform topologies in model spaces104, thus demarcating and detaching
many logical transfers, shows that the “relative” and the “continuous” can coincide in
a level of utmost abstraction, “free” and “general”.
As we have seen, multiple advances in 20th century mathematics –alternative
set theories, Category Theory, sheaf logic, topological logic– help to determine more
accurately Peirce’s ideas on the continuum, with regard to global genericity and

49
reflexivity and their local counterparts (generic relations, vagueness, neighborhood
logic). In spite of those achievements, lesser can be found to model in a correct way
Peirce’s continuum as a “replenished” modal realm, where all universe of possibilia
could fit. A path to be explored is Jan Krajicek’s modal set theory (MST)105, where
one can work with an irrestrictive abstraction principle, but where certain
constructions have to be modalized in order to avoid the inconsistency of the
theory106. In the MST context, a natural problem would be to define (with perhaps
additional axioms) a supermultitudinous continuum and to show its relative
consistency; such a definition seems plausible since the abstraction principle can be
dealt in all its global potentiality, beyond actual multitudes. Krajicek’s theory is
constructed upon a classical basis: first order classical logic plus modal calculus T.
Nevertheless, as we have signaled, intuitionistic logic –more akin to variable sets and
topologies, closer to a full treatment of the continuum– could be the basis of a similar
system, constructed in a more specific way to apprehend Peirce’s continuum. In this
sense, another natural problem could be to propose an intuitionistic modal set theory
(beginning with a variation MSTI) and to explore definitions and connections, in the
new theory, of the intermediate concepts which approach softly the continuum
(particularly, sheaves and logico-topological methods).
Besides Krajicek’s MST, another path would have to be followed if we are
looking for modern tools to understand (and develop) Peirce’s modal continuum:
Gonzalo Reyes’ very interesting work on bi-Heyting algebras (Heyting algebras107
with a “difference” co-dual to Heyting’s implication). In these algebras, several of
Lawvere’s pioneering insights on abstract boundary operators can be nicely
formalized, and it can be shown that many modal operators turn out to be limits of
natural iterations of the difference and the negation operators available in the bi-
algebra108. The classifier object in any presheaf topos possesses a bi-Heyting algebra
structure and, thus, any presheaf topos counts with an infinite hierarchy of
intermediate modalities. In this way, the presence of continuous modalities turns out
to be much more ubiquitous than expected, pointing again to the immense richness
lying in a multifarious category-theoretic approach to Peirce’s continuum.

50
Beyond the diverse partial tools yielded by contemporary mathematics to
approach Peirce’s continuum, remains the deep problem of unifying those partial
models in a coherent global context, in case such an unification is possible. It is not
clear, indeed, if there exist intrinsic limits to a global understanding of the
continuum, and –even if we renounce to find a “monster” model which encompasses
at the same time genericity, reflexivity and modality– if it is possible to find a “free”
pragmatic theory which could gradually weave the continuum. As an objective for
coming work –abduction to be contrasted inductively by future deductions– we
conjecture that such a “skeleton” theory should in fact be possible to be constructed,
in terms of mathematical Category Theory –following the “allegorical program for
the continuum”– and that the indeterminate universality of the continuum should be
able to incarnate progressively in concrete categories, laying local differential marks
that should nevertheless be able to be reintegrated functorially –completing the
“peircean program for the continuum”–.

68
On Peirce’s infinitesimals (and, particularly, on nilpotent infinitesimals, closer to Peirce’s ideas) see
T. Herron, “C.S. Peirce’s Theories of Infinitesimals”, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society
XXXIII (1997), 590-645. On Peirce’s reduction thesis see R. Burch, A Peircean Reduction Thesis.
The Foundations of Topological Logic, Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1991. Burch’s deep
work is, strangely, still considered open to controversy, but in fact Burch proves in a definitive way
that ternary relations cannot be reduced to binary and unary relations over a language of continuous
operators (junctions) on relations, capturing thus Peirce’s topological logic. The fact that ternary
relations can be reduced to binary and unary relations over a language of discrete operations on
relations (the usual reduction of relations to sets of couples) does not hinder in any way Burch’s
results.
69
Giuseppe Veronese, Fondamenti di Geometria (1891) (§55, footnote), cited by Detlef Laugwitz,
“Leibniz’ Principle and Omega Calculus”, in: J.M. Salanskis, H. Sinaceur (eds.), Le Labyrinthe du
Continu, Paris: Springer-Verlag, 1992, p.154.
70
For this description we have used R. Peiffer-Reuter’s, “Le Fond Lisse et la Figure Fractale: l’Idée
du Continu chez Natorp et Veronese”, in: Salanskis-Sinaceur (op.cit.), p.98. According to Peiffer-
Reuter, Veronese’s intuitive continuum is then mathematicized by an “avalanche” of scales, both in
the infinitely small and the infinitely large, constructing thus a local and partial reflection of the
underlying global and generic “fond lisse”. See also, Paola Cantù, Giuseppe Veronese e i Fondamenti
della Geometria, Milano: Unicopli, 1999, particularly chapter 2, “Il Continuo non Archimedeo”,
pp.87-164.
71
Archimedean axiom: given any pair of positive reals, any of them can be exceeded by an integer
multiple of the other.
72
L.E.J. Brouwer, “On the foundations of mathematics” (1907; doctoral thesis), cited in: W. P. van
Stigt, Brouwer’s Intuitionism, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1990, p.323.
73
L.E.J. Brouwer, “Intuition and Formalism” (1912), ibid, p.149.
74
L.E.J. Brouwer, “Die mögliche Mächtigkeiten” (1908), ibid, p.155.

51
75
L.E.J. Brouwer, “Willen, Weten, Spreken” (1933), ibid.
76
G. Locke, “Peirce’s Metaphysics: Evolution, Synechism, and the Mathematical Conception of the
Continuum”, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society XXXVI (2000), 133-147, also calls
“aboriginal” the “primordial” continuum.
77
R. Thom, “L’Anteriorité Ontologique du Continu sur le Discret” (1992), in Salanskis-Sinaceur,
op.cit., p.141 (our translation).
78
Ibid, p.142. Thom’s remarks could help to understand better the enormous philosophical
significance buried in Peirce’s existential graphs cuts. In fact, Peirce’s Alpha and Gamma ovals
produce actual, discrete, formulas over the underlying continuum of the sheet of assertion. In a
forceful way, “entelechy severs” meanwhile the graphs are illatively transformed.
79
P. Freyd (with A. Scedrov), Categories, Allegories, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1990. The work
lasted almost twenty years (1972-90) in the making. Without doubt, it should be considered as one of
the highest points of 20th century mathematics, its height nevertheless still not valued enough by the
mathematical community.
80
Procedure T (theory) 7 AT (allegory) 7 MapSplitCor(AT) (category), which produces a “free”
result when one starts from a “pure” type theory, and which shows in every step (relationality, identity
merging, partial inverses, functionality) how a general mathematical conglomerate is being “filtered”
towards the general. Ibid, p.277.
81
J.H. Conway, On Numbers and Games, London: Academic Press, 1976.
82
“NBG” for von Neumann - Bernays - Gödel. The theory distinguishes (arbitrary) classes and sets
(classes which are member of other classes), allowing simpler infinity handlings than ZF.
Nevertheless, NBG’s and ZF’s construction schemes are very similar and their proof power is
identical (equiconsistent theories).
83
P. Ehrlich, “Universally Extending Arithmetic Continua”, in: Salanskis-Sinaceur (op.cit), p.169.
84
It should also be noted that E. Nelson’s model of Robinson’s non-standard analysis is another
candidate for supermultitudeness, since it provides “plenty of natural-looking subsets (...) which have
more points than any cardinal number in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory” (see T. Herron, op.cit., p. 620).
A further supermultitudinous model for the continuum, adjoining arbitrary ordinal lengths, can be
found in W.C. Myrvold, “Peirce on Cantor’s Paradox and the Continuum”, Transactions of the
Charles S. Peirce Society XXXI (1995), 508-541.
85
P. Vopenka, Mathematics in the Alternative Set Theory (AST), Leipzig, 1979. Also: A. Sochor, “The
alternative set theory”, in: Set Theory and Hierarchy Theory, New York: Springer, 1976, pp. 259-273.
86
See J. Sebestik, Logique et Mathématique chez Bolzano, Paris: Vrin, 1992, pp. 471-472. For
Vopenka, the domain of actual sets is no more than a “minute island of actuality in the ocean of
potentialities” (ibid).
87
Woodin’s brilliant work, which finds natural axioms at level H(82) to decide the continuum
hypothesis (in the sense that 2 0 = (2), can be seen as a protended effort to define a universal
(

homogeneous order for H(82) and to guarantee enough generics for that order. The bounded
homogeneity and genericity thereby studied should be transcended beyond 82. For references, see the
(compact and straightforward) mimeo: H. Woodin, The Continuum Hypothesis, University of
California (in particular, p. 41), or also his (gigantic and cumbersome) monograph (934 pp.): H.
Woodin, The Axiom of Determinacy, Forcing Axioms, and the Nonstationary Ideal, Berlin: De
Gruyter, 1999.
88
Frege’s abstraction principle (FAP) puts intension and extension on the same level: for all
“intension” (formula 9(x)) there exists a corresponding “extension” (class {x: 9(x)}), and vice versa.
The global equivalence demanded by (FAP) leads immediately to Russell’s contradiction (considering
the formula 9(x) : x;x). Zermelo’s separation (or comprehension) axiom (basis of the system ZF,
removing all known contradictions) breaks the global symmetry intension-extension, but retains a
local equivalence between them: for all 9(x) and for all A there exists a class {x<A: 9(x)}. Peirce’s
continuum would seem to need a further break of symmetry at local levels.
89
J. Bénabou, “Rapports entre le Fini et le Continu”, in: Salanskis-Sinaceur (op.cit.), p.178: “A certain
number of signs [e.g., non-standard analysis, topos theory, according to Bénabou] show that the
essential assumption of «set-theoretic creed» –namely, that only concepts in which coincide extension

52
and comprehension [e.g., intension] can be apprehended by mathematics– begins to falter. [...] The
indispensable distinction, underlined by Thom, between extension and comprehension of a concept,
impossible in set theory, begins to be reckoned in various ways, even if still by a large minority”.
90
Like Thom, Nelson criticizes certain mathematical “myths” and “beliefs” (such as ZF’s consistency)
which would rather seem religious. See E. Nelson, “Mathematical Mythologies”, ibid, p.156.
91
An excellent use of the mathematical theory of categories to pinpoint and extend Peirce’s semiotics
can be found in R. Marty, L’algèbre des signes. Essai de sémiotique scientifique d’après Charles
Sanders Peirce, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990. Nevertheless, beyond Marty’s deep work, we don’t
know any other sustained effort to apply the mathematical theory of categories to Peirce’s thought.
Several indications of such a program have been here only recorded, but we hope to develop them at
length in the future.
92
One should not confuse the mathematical theory of categories and Peirce’s cenopythagorean
categories (One-Two-Three): even if they overlap perfectly in complementary levels and readings, the
two theories cover completely different methods and objectives.
93
For a diagrammatic presentation of the maxim, much in the vein of the mathematical theory of
categories, see our next chapter.
94
I. Moerdijk, G. Reyes, Models for Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis, New York: Springer, 1991.
95
Informally, a “sheaf” is a “presheaf” which can glue, through generic elements, the diverse
compatible information collections codified in the presheaf.
96
A.S. Troelstra, D. van Dalen, Constructivism in Mathematics, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988.
97
X. Caicedo, “Lógica de los haces de estructuras”, Revista de la Academia Colombiana de Ciencias,
XIX (1995): 569-586.
98
Peirce’s “ink spot” and his logical analysis of the boundary are repeated (independently) by Caicedo
in an almost identical form as Peirce does. Ibid, p.570, figure 1.
99
In his sheaf logic –constructed systematically in an intermediate layer between Kripke models and
Grothendieck topoi, profiting both from concrete particular examples and abstract general concepts–
Caicedo works in a crossroad of algebraical, geometrical, topological and logical techniques. The
back-and-forth between the generic and the concrete, as well as his transversal crossing techniques,
show that in his very method of research (beyond similar objectives) Caicedo stands very close to
Peirce.
100
Lindström theorems also explain carefully the natural pre-eminence of classical logic with respect
to very specific properties (Löwenheim-Skolem) of Cantor’s set theory, but they show in turn that
classical logic is very rigid with respect to its basic structural properties (booleanness, relativization,
compactness).
101
X. Caicedo, “Continuous operations on spaces of structures”, in: M. Krynicki, M. Mostowski, L.W.
Szczerba (eds.), Quantifiers: Logics, Models and Computation, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995, vol. I, 263-
296. Xavier Caicedo: “Compactness and normality in abstract logics”, Annals of Pure and Applied
Logic 59 (1993), 33-43.
102
X. Caicedo, “Continuous operations on spaces of structures”, op.cit., p.266.
103
Ibid, p.273.
104
Ibid, p.276.
105
J. Krajicek, “Modal Set Theory”, preprint, University of Prague, 1985.
106
Global MST could turn out to be inconsistent. Krajicek only proves relative consistency of some of
its fragments.
107
Heyting algebras provide a canonical semantics for intuitionism, in the same way Boolean algebras
codify classical semantics. Heyting algebras are closely related to topologies provided with simple set-
theoretic operations: the continuum continuously continues to be hidden in unsuspected places!
108
G. Reyes, H. Zolfaghari, “Bi-Heyting Algebras, Toposes and Modalities”, preprint, Université de
Montréal, 1991.

53
CHAPTER III
ARCHITECTONICS OF PRAGMATICISM

Peirce’s pragmatic architectonics can be seen as a sophisticated system, with

multiple information channels and nested control layers, constructed to understand
the world simultaneously in its more abstract generality and its more concrete
specificity. The architecture of the system, with its pervasive reflections and
overlapping frames, recalls the gothic cathedral evoked by À la Recherche du Temps
Perdu, but transcends even the work of man, trying to capture a general architectural
design in the natural world, a reality independent of communities of inquirers.
Peirce’s architectonics provides a wide arsenal of crossing instruments to understand
in part a complex reality, where –in a frontier crossed over by constantly iterated and
deiterated information– merge the richness of external cosmos and the multiplicity of
semiotic systems interior to cultural communities. It is not therefore surprising that
Peirce’s architectonics supposes a continuum, which weaves cosmos and humanity,
which systematically studies the crossing and bordering processes characteristic of
any semeiosis, and which supports the possibility of contrasting the back-and-forth
breedings of the edifice.
In the first part of this chapter we stress five basic structural spans (pragmatic
maxim, general categories, universal semeiotics, determination-indetermination
duality, triadic classification of sciences) which support Peirce’s architectonics. We
have emphasized a diagrammatic presentation of some of those arches, paying

54
particular attention to a fully modalized diagram of the pragmatic maxim, which will
be central to our latter concerns around a “local proof of pragmaticism”. Then, in the
second part of the chapter, we show how explicit continuity assumptions are strongly
related to the steadiness of those spans.

III.1. Five Arches of Peirce’s Architectonics

The pragmatic (then pragmaticist) maxim appears formulated several times

throughout Peirce’s intellectual development. The better known statement is from
1878, but more precise expressions appear (among others) in 1903 and 1905:

Consider what effects which might conceivably have practical bearings we conceive
the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the
whole of our conception of the object.109

Pragmatism is the principle that every theoretical judgement expressible in a sentence

in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has
any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a
conditional sentence having its apodosis in the imperative mood.110

The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes
of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances,
would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol.111

The pragmaticist maxim signals that knowledge, seen as a semiotic-logical

process, is pre-eminently contextual (versus absolute), relational (versus substantial),
modal (versus determined), synthetic (versus analytic). The maxim serves as a
sophisticated sheaf of filters to decant reality. According to Peirce’s thought, we can
only know through signs, and, according to the maxim, we can only know those
signs through diverse correlations of its conceivable effects in interpretation contexts.
The pragmatic maxim “filters” the world by means of three complex webs which can
“differentiate” the one into the many, and, conversely, can “integrate” the many into
the one: a representational web, a relational web, a modal web. Even if the 20th
century has clearly retrieved the importance of representations and has emphasized
(since cubism, for example) a privileged role for interpretations, both the relational

55
and the modal web seem to have been much less understood (or made good use of)
through the century.
For Peirce, the understanding of an arbitrary actual sign is obtained
contrasting all necessary reactions between the interpretations (sub-determinations)
of the sign, going over all possible interpretative contexts. The pragmatic dimension
emphasizes the correlation of all possible contexts: even if the maxim detects the
fundamental importance of local interpretations, it also urges the reconstruction of
global approaches, by means of appropriate relational and modal glueings of
localities. A diagrammatic scheme of the pragmaticist maxim –which follows closely
the 1903 and 1905 enunciations above stated– can be the following:

sign sub-determinations

representation si
context i

sign (s)
context j

sj reaction
(NECESSARY) pragmatic
dimension
__
(ACTUAL)
... (POSSIBLE) # context k

sk

Figure 10.
Peirce’s pragmaticist maxim

In our next chapter, we will further formalize this diagrammatic scheme, and
provide half-way of an equivalence which codifies a local proof of pragmaticism in
the language of Gamma existential graphs. For the moment, it is interesting to notice
that such a diagrammatic scheme is in complete accordance with a category-theoretic
perspective (in the sense of the mathematical theory of categories): the sign is

56
relatively “free” (left of the diagram) until it incarnates in “concrete” environments
(center of the diagram: interpretants si,...,sk,...) and is later “functorially” reintegrated
through pragmatic glueings (right of the diagram). The “one” (s) can truly enter into
a dialectical semiosis with the “many” (sn). Peirce’s pragmaticist maxim can be seen
as a firm “bedrock” underlying an outstanding logico-semiotic abstract differential
and integral world-view.
Phaneroscopy –or the study of the “phaneron”, that is the complete collective
present to the mind– includes the doctrine of Peirce’s cenopythagorean categories,
which study the universal modes (or “tints”) occurring in phenomena. Peirce’s three
categories are vague, general and indeterminate, and can be found simultaneously in
every phenomenon; they are further prescised and detached, following a recursive
separation of interpretative levels, in progressively more and more determined
contexts. Since they are general categories, their indetermination is mandatory
(allowing them to incarnate “freely” in very diverse contexts), and their description is
necessarily vague:

The first is that whose being is simply in itself, not referring to anything nor lying behind
anything. The second is that which is what it is by force of something to which it is
second. The third is that which is what it is owing to things between which it mediates
and which it brings into relation to each other.112

Peirce’s Firstness detects the immediate, the spontaneous, whatever is

independent of any conception or reference to something else:

The first must be present and immediate, so as not to be second to a representation. It

must be fresh and new, for if old it is second to its former state. It must be initiative,
original, spontaneous, and free; otherwise it is second to a determining cause. It is also
something vivid and conscious; so only it avoids being the object of some sensation. It
precedes all synthesis and all differentiation; it has no unity and no parts. It cannot be
articulately thought: assert it, and it has already lost its characteristic innocence; for
assertion always implies a denial of something else.113

Secondness is the category of facts, mutual oppositions, existence, actuality,

material fight, action and reaction in a given world. Secondness, with its emphasis on
direct contrasts, balances the intangibility of firstness, closer to ungraspable

57
intuitions (Joyce’s epiphanies, Proust’s Hudimesnil trees, Leibniz’s monads). The
conflict which characterizes experience is evident in the second category:

The second category, the next simplest feature common to all that comes before the
mind, is the element of struggle. This is present even in such a rudimentary fragment of
experience as a simple feeling. For such a feeling always has a degree of vividness, high
or low; and this vividness is a sense of commotion, an action and reaction, between our
soul and the stimulus. (...) By struggle I must explain that I mean mutual action between
two things regardless of any sort of third or medium, and in particular regardless of any
action.114

Peirce’s Thirdness proposes a mediation beyond clashes, a third place where

the “one” and the “other” enter in dialogue. It is the category of sense, representation,
synthesis, knowledge:

By the Third, I understand the medium which has its being or peculiarity in connecting
the more absolute first and second. The end is second, the means third. A fork in the road
is third, it supposes three ways. (...) The first and second are hard, absolute, and discrete,
like yes and no; the perfect third is plastic, relative, and continuous. Every process, and
whatever is continuous, involves thirdness. (...) Action is second, but conduct third. Law
as an active force is second, but order and legislation third. Sympathy, flesh and blood,
that by which I feel my neighbor’s feelings, contains thirdness. Every kind of sign,
representative, or deputy, everything which for any purpose stands instead of something
else, whatever is helpful, or mediates between a man and his wish, is a Third.115

Summing up, Peirce’s vague categories can be tinctured with key-words as

following:

(1) Firstness: immediacy, first impression, freshness, sensation, unary

predicate, monad, chance, possibility.
(2) Secondness: action-reaction, effect, resistance, alterity, binary relation,
dyad, fact, actuality.
(3) Thirdness: mediation, order, law, continuity, knowledge, ternary
relation, triad, generality, necessity.

The three peircean categories interweave recursively and produce a nested

hierarchy of interpretative modulations (modes, tones or tints). The richness of
Peirce’s method lies in the permanent iterative possibility of his categorical analysis,
a possibility which allows, in each new interpretative level, further and further
refinements of previous distinctions obtained in prior levels. Knowledge –understood
as a progressive prescision (yielding thus progressive precision)– can grow defining

58
more and more contexts of interpretation, and emphasizing in them some
cenopythagorean tinctures.
The conceptual and practical back-and-forth between diverse layers is
governed by the pragmatic maxim, which intertwines naturally with Peirce’s
categories. The maxim affirms that we can only attain knowledge after conceiving a
wide range of representability possibilities for signs (firstness), after perusing active-
reactive contrasts between sub-determinations of those signs (secondness), and after
weaving recursive information between the observed semeioses (thirdness). The
maxim acts as a sheaf with a double support function116 for the categories: a
contrasting function (secondness) to obtain local distinctive hierarchies, a mediating
function (thirdness) to globally unify the different perspectives. As we will
emphasize later, an appropriate support for the appropriate working of such a sheaf
mechanism lies in a continuity hypothesis, according to which the permanent back-
and-forth of signs and of their conceivable effects enables to permeate all boundaries
and cross all cultural and natural environments.
Peirce’s sign is a vague117, general and undetermined triad, which gets bounded
and sub-determined in progressive contexts. The most general form of a sign can be
seen as a variant of a generic substitution principle: a sign is “something which
substitutes something for something”118. Diagrammatically:

----------------- substitutes --------------- for -------------

1
2
3

Figure 11.
Peirce’s general sign

In a similar form, a “free” decomposition of “being” as a general sign can be

represented in the following diagram, where Peirce’s categories and the first levels of
semiosis and modalization119 become interweaved:

59
-------------- is reacting with ------------- by means of -------------

Firstness
Potentiality

Secondness
Actuality

Thirdness
Necessity

Figure 12.
“General sign” of Peirce’s three categories

In Peirce’s analysis, signs are always triadic. If, in some cases, a sign can be
seen as dyadic, it is because triadicity has degenerated120 in a combination of
seconds. A first level of triadicity is found in the very definition of sign as a ternary
generic relation S(-, -, -): –1– substitutes –2– for –3–. Term “2” is the “object” of the
sign; term “1”, which substitutes the object, is its “representamen”; term “3” is the
medium, the interpretation context, the “quasi-mind” where the substitution is
carried; inside that quasi-mind, the representamen acquires a new form: the
“interpretant”. A second level of triadicity –sub-qualifying the three ways in which
object and representamen can correlate– produces Peirce’s well-known initial
classification of signs: icon (1), index (2) and symbol (3). An icon substitutes a given
object: it signals a syntactic mark. An index is an icon which, furthermore, detects
some changes of the object: it signals a semantic variation. A symbol is an index
which, furthermore, weaves variations along an interpretation context: it signals a
pragmatic integration. All sorts of other sub-determinations are possible and the
taxonomy can be refined recursively; Peirce came to distinguish at least 66 specific
classes of signs.

60
interpretant (3)

sign

(1) representamen object (2)

Figure 13.
Peirce’s triadic sign

# #
#
% %

(1): icon (syntaxis) (2): index (semantics) (3): symbol (pragmatics)

Figure 14. A Peirce triad.

Icon (sign in firstness), index (sign in secondness), symbol (sign in thirdness).

Logic, a one-word term for universal semiotics, studies arbitrary

transformations of signs and becomes a general theory of representations. Logic can
then be seen as a sort of geographical science, which studies characters common to
classes of “cognitive places”, emphasizing semantic, topographic aspects (map
designs including relative heights of each fixed cognitive place), as well as
pragmatic, projective aspects (projection designs allowing comparisons of variable
cognitive places). The construction of cognitive places profits from a multitude of
representation processes, thanks to which mixed sensorial and formal data are
recorded. With a complex machinery of logical filters and lens, the choice of
contexts and data is controlled and its due relevance is assured.
Adopting the pragmatic maxim, logic –understood as a projective and
topographical science of cognitive places– includes an arsenal of tools to symbolize,
contrast, follow and transfer information (some of these tools were reckoned in our
previous chapter). Between different representations one can distinguish implicit

61
relations (still not detected, potential) or explicit relations (already detected, actual).
An important objective in logic is to turn explicit the implicit, or, otherwise said, to
coherently actualize the field of possible relations between representations. The
interpretation practice is open-sided and extends to infinity, while new connections
between representations are been captured. Connaturally with that unfolding and
continuous semeiosis, logic has to deal with general and global tools, which cannot
be reduced to purely existential or local considerations.
One of the strengths and major appeals of Peirce’s semeiotics is to let free the
notion of “quasi-mind”, or interpretation context, where the semeiosis occurs (the
“objects” are also very arbitrary: they can be physical objects, concepts, or any kind
of signs where the semeiosis can again begin). Freeing interpretation environments
from the psychological shades related to particular human “minds”, Peirce’s
semeiotics turns unstoppably to a very wide range of universality. Since a quasi-mind
can be either a protoplasm medium where semeiosis grows in back-and-forth
processes of liquefaction and cohesion121, or a nervous system where semeiosis
integrates cells excitation, fibers transmission and habit taking, or a cultural
environment spanned by linguistic grids, or even the very cosmos where the laws of
physics are being progressively determined, it is clear that Peirce’s “general signs”
can cover huge domains of reality122. In that gigantic range, it is reasonable to abduct
–as Peirce did– a possible evolution of signs towards determination:

1
natural physiological cultural
signs 2 signs signs

protoplasm - cosmos humanity

Figure 15.
“Progressive determination” of signs

62
Peirce’s architectonics postulates a “dialectics” between indetermination and
determination, opposing processes of progressive determination –a general evolutive
tendency of signs in the universe– to the constant appearance of elements of
indetermination and chance (“tychism”) that periodically free the signs from their
sedimentary semantic load. This back-and-forth between freeness and particularity,
between generality and experience, between possibility and actuality, can be viewed in
fact as a beginning of a natural adjunction between indetermination and determination:

F: determination
indeterminate determinate
X G: indetermination A

Given an indeterminate sign X, its “concrete determination” FX is compared

with another determinate sign A in the same structural way as its “free
indetermination” GA can be compared with X:

[ FX , A ] = [ X, GA ] .

Figure 16.
Adjunction between determination and indetermination

The “adjunction” bounds unitarily the dialectic back-and-forth: partially

determining the undetermined – partially undetermining the determined. It is a
double process of saturation and freeness which seems to govern not only many
fundamental constructions in mathematics (from where the term “adjunction” is here
borrowed), but also many basic information transfers in the cosmos. The iterated
back-and-forth FG, FGF, FGFG,... produce in fact the great richness of Peirce’s
semeiotics: the accumulating spiral of undetermined and determined layers supports
the “unlimited semeiosis” that refines without end our conception of the world. In
any interpretability environment (that is, when interpretants and contexts of
interpretation are conceived), many elements of “pure chance” undetermine what is
apparently achieved, and other “saturation” tendencies determine what is apparently
vague. In Peirce’s words,

63
In the beginning was nullity, or absolute indetermination, which, considered as the
possibility of all determination, is being. A monad is a determination per se. Every
determination gives a possibility of further determination. When we come to the dyad,
we have the unit, which is, in itself, entirely without determination, and whose existence
lies in the possibility of an identical opposite, or of being indeterminately over against
itself alone, with a determinate opposition, or over-againstness, besides.123

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.124

We are brought, then, to this: conformity to law exists only within a limited range of
events and even there is not perfect, for an element of pure spontaneity or lawless
originality mingles, or at least must be supposed to mingle, with law everywhere.
Moreover, conformity with law is a fact requiring to be explained; and since law in
general cannot be explained by any law in particular, the explanation must consist in
showing how law is developed out of pure chance, irregularity, and indeterminacy.125

Peirce’s basic horizontal adjunction between generality and vagueness (studied

in our first chapter), together with the transversal adjunction between determination
and indetermination, shape together a planar grid where many peircean insights
obtain an orientation. In most of Peirce’s approaches to knowledge or nature, are
combined –over a continuous bottom supporting osmotic passages– contrasting
elements of indetermination, freeness and isolation with processes of determination,
saturation and mediation. The many overlapping grids and layers which thus evolve
in Peirce’s architectonics guarantee the malleability of the edifice.
Peirce’s categories permanently overlap in the phaneron. Phenomena are never
isolated, never wholly situated in some detached categorical realm. Nevertheless,
some readings can emphasize determined categorical layers, and can help to obtain
important relative distinctions (the method shows, right away, that no absolute
characterization is to be expected). Throughout his life, Peirce proposed more than
one hundred of such layered readings in reference to the classification of sciences. In
1903, using his categories, Peirce came up with a lasting classification that Beverley
Kent has designated as “perennial” classification126.
The first recursive branching of the classification shows the places of
mathematics and the continuum. Mathematics (1), ever-growing support of an ever-
growing cathedral, emphasizes possibilia: it studies the abstract relational realm
without any actual or real constraints. In place 1.1 of the classification, the

64
mathematical study of the immediately accessible is drawn: the study of finite
collections. In place 1.2, the study of mathematical action-reactions on the finite is
undertaken: colliding with the finite, the infinite collections appear. In place 1.3 a
mediation is realized: the general study of continuity emerges. The awesome richness
of mathematics arises from its peculiar position in the panorama of knowledge:
constructing its relational web with pure possibilities, it reaches nevertheless
actuality (and even reality) by means of unsuspected applications, guaranteeing in
each context its necessity. The fluid wanderings of mathematics –from the possible
to the actual and necessary– are specific of the discipline.
Philosophy (2) is removed from pure possibilia and closer to what is “given”: it
studies phenomena common to the general realms of experience (action-reaction
over “existence” and potential “being”). Phaneroscopy (2.1) deals with universal
phenomena in their firstness, in their immediacy, utilizing mathematical tools
obtained in (1). Normative sciences (2.2) study common experiential phenomena, but
from a secondness viewpoint: action of phenomena on communities, and action of
communities on phenomena. Esthetics (2.2.1) studies impressions and sensations
(firstness) produced by phenomena, consistently with an adequate “general ideal”
(summum bonum); the “general ideal”, that we will describe shortly, depends
strongly on the continuum. Ethics (2.2.2) studies action-reaction (secondness)
between the summum bonum and communities, giving rise to normative actions by
communities in order to mate properly the “ideal”. Logic (2.2.3) studies the
mediating structures of reason (thirdness), coherently with the “general ideal”. As
Richard Robin has pointed out127, the pragmatic maxim lies in a very interesting
equilibrium point (2.2.3.3) in the classification, supporting the classificatory sciences
which stand upon the maxim and profiting from the particular observations of special
sciences which lie under it. A more detailed study of this situation is undertaken in
our next chapter, where we contend that a continuous interpretation of the
“perennial” classification (in the language of Gamma existential graphs) provides
new clues to the central situation (2.2.3.3) of the pragmatic maxim.

65
1.1. Finitude
1. Mathematics 1.2. Infinitude
1.3. CONTINUUM

2.1. Phaneroscopy --- Three Categories

2. Philosophy
2.2.1. Esthetics
2.2. Normative Sciences 2.2.2. Ethics

2.2.3.1. Grammar
2.2.3. Logic 2.2.3.2. Critics
2.2.3.3. Methodeutics

2.3.1. Relative Ontology

2.3. Metaphysics 2.3.2. Physical Metaphysics --- Cosmology
2.3.3. Religious Metaphysics --- Theology

3.1. Physics

Psychology – Sociology - Economics

3. Special Sciences 3.2. Psychics Linguistics - Ethnology
History - Critics (...)

3.3. “Systemics” (...)

(...)

Figure 17.
Triadic “perennial” classification of sciences

Peirce showed that the “general ideal”, according to pragmaticist

requirements, could not be fixed, but evolving; that it could not be determined, but
open; that it could not be particular, but general. Peirce’s “general ideal” can then be
described as the “continuous growing of potentiality”. Accordingly, logic –which
studies partial determinations of the “general ideal” in phenomenal thirdness– creates
an evolving arsenal of relational and representational tools, specifically searching for
an accurate control on mediation and continuity processes. Thus, it is not surprising

66
that Peirce’s advances in logic further evolved towards the construction of general
“logics of continuity”, such as the BETA and GAMMA existential graphs systems.
One of the most significative features of Peirce’s triad is its modal
decomposition: possibility as firstness, actuality as secondness, necessity as thirdness
(see note 10). The systematic introduction of possibilia in any consideration can be
seen as one of the great methodological strengths of Peirce’s architectonics, and, in
particular, of its pragmaticist maxim (after Peirce's mea culpa in his analysis of a
“hard diamond”). A full modalization of the maxim is, at bottom, what distinguishes
the richness of Peirce’s pragmaticism from other brands of pragmatism. Peirce’s
continuum –understood as a synthetical bondage place– is the pure field of
possibility: as we have seen, the usual analytical decomposition (“points”, “atoms”)
is supermultitudinously compacted, the units loose their actual singularity and
particularities “blend” in a general realm. Modalization considerably enlarges
Peirce’s system and guarantees the appropriate multifunctionality of its
architectonics.

III.2. The Continuum and Peirce’s Architectonics

In many places of his work128, Peirce insisted that the understanding of the continuum
and the study of continuity formed one of the key problems in philosophy. For
Peirce, continuity is an “indispensable element of reality”129, that allows the
development of evolutionary processes and that can be found in all realms of
experience, from the liquid continuum which allows protoplasmic mutation, to the
cosmic continuum which allows the expansive explosion of the universe, going
through the continuum which underlies human thought and sensibility. Peirce
baptized synechism a major thread in his philosophy that postulated a real
operativeness of continuity in the natural world:

The word synechism is the English form of the Greek >/0253>µ+-, from >/025?-,
continuous. (...) I have proposed to make synechism mean the tendency to regard
everything as continuous. The Greek word means continuity of parts brought about by
surgery. (...) I carry the doctrine so far as to maintain that continuity governs the
whole domain of experience in every element of it130.

67
Synechism is closely weaved with the five structural arches (maxim,
categories, logic, adjunction, classification) that support Peirce’s architectonics131. A
continuity principle is used in at least two crucial ways to ensure the good running of
Peirce’s pragmatic maxim. First, one of the central ideas of pragmatism –namely,
that every semiotic distinction can be measured in some way, through conceivable
contrastable effects– finds its continuum expression in the statement that synechism
guarantees the measurability of difference:

Synechism denies that there are any immeasurable differences between phenomena.132

In fact, the pragmatic maxim postulates that two general signs (objects or
concepts) are identical if and only if all their action-reactions in all conceivable
interpretation contexts coincide, or, equivalently, that they are different if and only if
some distinction can conceivably be measured between their diverse effects in the
phaneron. Since in Peirce’s continuum all differences can possibly be measured
(using the possibilia monad around each “point”), the assumption of a general
continuum, really operative in nature and close to Peirce’s continuum, provides a
strong backing to the maxim.
Second, only a continuous bottom can guarantee the semiotic overlappings,
the gradual differential changes of tinctures and modalities, and the subsequent
crucial integration processes that the pragmatic maxim requires for its exact
functioning. Only a continuum can anchor differences and analytic breakings, and –
simultaneously– allow for the construction of integrals and synthetic visions. The
peculiar strength of the pragmatic maxim –its simultaneous differential and integral
character– lies thus on the continuum. Even deeper, only a continuum like Peirce’s
generic133 and modal continuum –“all whatever is possible”134– can distinguish and
reintegrate again all possibilia realms on which is based the full modalization of the
maxim.
The three cenopythagorean categories, in one of Peirce’s finest statements,
may be understood as conceptual “tints”, as gradual “tones” in the phenomenal
continuum:

68
Perhaps it is not right to call these categories conceptions; they are so intangible that
they are rather tones or tints upon conceptions135.

The tones or tints (“tinctures” in a existential graphs partial modeling) are

modes, degrees, partial veils, that unfold over the continuum (musical, visual,
schematic). Even if each fixation or analysis of those modes, each slip of the veils,
means a discontinuity forced on space in order to partially represent it, the totality of
those modes is fused in an unbreakable connection underlying the phaneron. The
prescision used by Peirce to partially detach the categories136 is no more than a
methodological tool to partially decompose the continuum, a decomposition only
offered to construct again new synthesis:

Without continuity parts of the feeling could not be synthetized; and therefore there
would be no recognizable parts137.

Explicitly, in at least one sentence, Peirce states that the philosophy of

continuity leads to triadic thought:

The philosophy of continuity leads to an objective logic, similar to that of Hegel, and to
triadic categories. But the movement seems not to accord with Hegel's dialectic, and
consequently the form of the scheme of categories is essentially different138.

In fact, Peirce’s “movement” is not just linear: it can be viewed as a much

more intertwined motion, closer to the recursiveness of Peirce’s architectonics. A
relative back-and-forth spiral process between continuity and triadicity takes place,
and diverse evolutive contrasts detach in a correlative way (never a foundational or
absolute one) the meaning of terms and the co-relations of concepts. Peirce’s One,
Two and Three serve as ubiquitous categories for tincturing all thought and nature, as
formal bridges that overlap all continuous universe and humanity. Indeed, the human
being is seen by Peirce as an iterated reflection of the categories, either in the
physiological basis of his nerve cells (1: “disengaging energy”; 2: “nerve-currents”;
3: “acquiring habits”)139, or in the categories of his consciousness (1: “feeling”; 2:
“resistance”; 3: “synthetic consciousness”)140, or in the faculties of his psyche (1:

69
“pleasure”; 2: “desire”; 3: “cognition”)141. The continuum of Peirce’s categories,
extended all over the phaneron, inscribes142 itself in the line of medieval
correspondences between micro and macrocosmos –in turn, evolved images of
Pythagorean thought143– and can be seen as a modern form of the “Great Chain of
Being”, a universal scale of all existence, governed by a completeness principle (all
possibility can be actually realized), a gradation principle (all actuality can be
necessarily relativized), and a continuity principle (all necessity can be possibly
glued).144
Logic (or universal semeiotics) is Peirce’s par excellence tool to
systematically study the multiple tones of the continuum. Peirce’s logic, closer in its
beginnings to boolean algebra, grows rapidly beyond its initial dualistic approach,
and sets the way to a full logic of continuity, narrowly tightened with relative logic:

The dual divisions of logic result from a false way of looking at things absolutely.
Thus, besides affirmative and negative, there are really probable enunciations, which
are intermediate. So besides universal and particular there are all sorts of propositions
of numerical quantity. (...) We pass from dual quantity, or a system of quantity such
as that of Boolian algebra, where there are only two values, to plural quantity.145

While reasoning and the science of reasoning strenuously proclaim the subordination
of reasoning to sentiment, the very supreme commandment of sentiment is that man
should generalize, or what the logic of relatives shows to be the same thing, should
become welded into the universal continuum, which is what true reasoning consists
in.146

Continuity is simply what generality becomes in the logic of relatives.147

The continuum is that which the logic of relatives shows the true universal to be.148

Peirce often signaled that generality and continuity stood very close, as full
forms of thirdness. The last two citations are short hand announcements that, on one
side, generality could be interweaved to continuity, and, on the other side, that the
webbing filter between them could be seen as the logic of relatives. As we showed in
our previous chapter, these most intriguing and profound insights become in fact
fully illuminated and corroborated by new findings in contemporary mathematical
logic, proving again that the presence of a continuum underlying Peirce’s
architectonics is a key vault of the edifice. Also, far from being a “curiosity”,

70
Peirce’s existential graphs – badly understood by peircean scholarship and grossly
ignored by historiographers of logic, but, nevertheless, one of the most extraordinary
blends of logic and continuity ever constructed– become then a vital arch of the
architectonics. As Peirce was well aware when he called his graphs “my chef
d’oeuvre” (and as we will show in detail in the rest of the monograph) most of the
characteristic features of Peirce’s architectonics –and, in particular, the essential
place of the continuum– can be fully reflected in the behavior of Peirce’s systems of
existential graphs.
In any case, it is also patent that, in order to obtain an adequate understanding
of the continuum, several reflections of continuity should be handled, in recursive
and evolving layers of growing complexity (corresponding, in part, to the more
technical reflexivity properties of Peirce’s continuum). In Peirce’s words:

Looking upon the course of logic as a whole we see that it proceeds from the question
to the answer -- from the vague to the definite. And so likewise all the evolution we
know of proceeds from the vague to the definite. The indeterminate future becomes the
irrevocable past. In Spencer's phrase the undifferentiated differentiates itself. The
homogeneous puts on heterogeneity. However it may be in special cases, then, we must
suppose that as a rule the continuum has been derived from a more general continuum,
a continuum of higher generality.149

Peirce’s indetermination-determination adjunction is yet another example

showing how some continuity considerations must be set in a hierarchy of levels and
meta-levels. Over the meta-level of a meta-generic continuum (“continuum of higher
generality”) can schematically be drawn a lower (i.e. locally multi-layered) back-
and-forth between tychism and synechism which pervades Peirce’s architectonics:

Permit me further to say that I object to having my metaphysical system as a whole

called Tychism. For although tychism does enter into it, it only enters as subsidiary to
that which is really, as I regard it, the characteristic of my doctrine, namely, that I chiefly
insist upon continuity, or Thirdness, and, in order to secure to thirdness its really
commanding function, I find it indispensable fully [to] recognize that it is a third, and
that Firstness, or chance, and Secondness, or Brute reaction, are other elements, without
the independence of which Thirdness would not have anything upon which to operate.
Accordingly, I like to call my theory Synechism, because it rests on the study of
continuity. I would not object to Tritism.150

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“Tritism”

meta-generic continuum
synechism1 tychism synechism2

Figure 18.
Tychism-synechism adjunction drawn over a generic continuum

The introduction of elements of “pure chance” –the characteristic

indetermination of tychism– is seen thus as a contextual ingredient inside a much
more general process, where the primacy of the continuum is not contested. Indeed,
the continuum happens to be the only truly generic concept on which the “design” of
Peirce’s architectonics can be sketched, since it is the only one which allows multiple
intra-level internal reflections in the edifice. This explains Peirce’s (otherwise
cryptic) motto:

Tychism is only a part and corollary of the general principle of Synechism.151

Peirce’s triadic classification of the sciences extends also over a general

continuum, which allows appropriate trifurcations of the neighborhoods of the
classification152, encouraging translations, iterations and deiterations from one
environment of knowledge to the other. The continuum not only supports the
(possibility, actuality and necessity) of the transfers: deeper, it induces them, as it
systematically folds and unfolds the unity and multiplicity of knowledge, considering
polyvalent culture and philosophy as natural gradation problems over the
continuum:

The whole method of classification must be considered later; but, at present, I only
desire to point out that it is by taking advantage of the idea of continuity, or the
passage from one form to another by insensible degrees, that the naturalist builds his
conceptions. Now, the naturalists are the great builders of conceptions; there is no

72
other branch of science where so much of this work is done as in theirs; and we must,
in great measure, take them for our teachers in this important part of logic. And it will
be found everywhere that the idea of continuity is a powerful aid to the formation of
true and fruitful conceptions. By means of it, the greatest differences are broken down
and resolved into differences of degree, and the incessant application of it is of the
greatest value in broadening our conceptions.153

In his classifications of the sciences, Peirce studies the “generation of ideas

by ideas”154, and insists that all classifications evolve and “must certainly differ from
time to time”155. On the evolving continuum of culture we find the cast for very
diverse classifications, but always with a central objective: rendering gradations
more precise and defining discipline frontiers, to further allow their crossing and
merging. Thus, for Peirce, transdisciplinariness is clearly more enlightening than
interdisciplinariness. Drawing together objectives and methods of research, it
becomes natural that the study of frontiers (and of free “general similarities”156
standing beyond specifics) has to be achieved over the very modal genericity of the
continuum, where particulars dissolve and differences “melt” in a superior
contiguity. Inextricably tied with the arches of Peirce’s architectonics, the continuum
fuses with the structural tensors that support the edifice.

109
“How to Make Our Ideas Clear” [1878; CP 5.402].
110
“Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism” [1903; CP 5.18].
111
“Issues of Pragmaticism” [1905; CP 5.438].
112
“A Guess at the Riddle” [1887-88; CP 1.356].
113
Ibid. [1887-88; CP 1.357].
114
“Lectures on Pragmatism” [1903; CP 1.322].
115
“One, Two, Three: an evolutionist speculation” [1886; W 5,300-301].
116
We intend here a “sheaf” in its mathematical sense (as we used it in the previous chapter). A sheaf
is based in a double function, both analytical and synthetical, which may well explain its conceptual
richness: the sheaf “differentiates” its basis space (points look like fibers) but, in turn, it “integrates”
the fibers’ unfolded space. The mathematical conditions of “diversifying” (presheaf) and “glueing”
(sheaf) are precisely the conditions which allow a conjugation of analysis and synthesis.
117
For a particularly bright analysis of the interrelations between semeiotic, vagueness and continuity
see Rossella Fabbrichesi Leo, Sulle tracce del segno, Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1986, and Continuità e
vaghezza, Milano: CUEM, 2001.
118
The medieval formula for a sign (aliquid stat pro aliquo: “something which substitutes
something”) is a “degenerate second” variant of Peirce’s fuller triadic formulation. Peirce’s turn
introduces permanently a “third” for (“something which substitutes something for something”),
paving the way to pragmatic semiotics.
119
Within secondness –category of action-reaction and facts– falls at once the range of actuality.
Within firstness –category of immediacy– falls the range of possibility, understood as that which has

73
not yet been contrasted (secondness) or mediated (thirdness). Within thirdness –category of mediation
and order– falls the range of necessity, understood as modal ordering or normative mediation.
120
Peirce distinguished “genuine” thirds (ternary relations irreducible to combinations of monadic and
binary predicates) and “degenerate” thirds (ternary relations constructible from monads and dyads).
For example, 1 is between 0 and 2 is a degenerate third (can be reduced to the conjunction: “1 is
bigger than 0” and “2 is bigger than 1”), but 1+2=3 is a genuine third (addition is a ternary irreducible
relation).
121
“A Guess at the Riddle” - “Trichotomic” [1887-88; EP 1,284].
122
According to Peirce’s system, signs can even cover all reality if we allow an understanding of pure
chance occurrences as “degenerate” signs in the second degree.
123
“The Logic of Mathematics” [1896; CP 1.447].
124
“An Improvement on the Gamma Graphs” [1906; CP 4. 583].
125
“A Guess at the Riddle” [c.1890; CP 1.407].
126
Beverley Kent, Charles S. Peirce. Logic and the Classification of Sciences, Montreal: McGill -
Queen’s University Press, 1987. The entry 3.3 (“systemics”) does not appear in Peirce. Nevertheless
systemics –in Niklas Luhmann’s sense: a lattice of recursive feedbacks between environments
(potential places for hierarchical information) and systems (actual information hierarchies)– seems to
complete the classification in a natural way.
127
Richard S. Robin, “Classical Pragmatism and Pragmatism’s Proof”, pp.145-146, in: Jacqueline
Brunning, Paul Forster (eds.), The Rule of Reason. The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
128
Some examples: “It will be found everywhere that the idea of continuity is a powerful aid to the
formation of true and fruitful conceptions” [1878; W 3,278]. “Continuity, it is not too much to say, is
the leading conception of science” [c.1896; CP 1.62]. “The principle of continuity, the supreme guide
in framing philosophical hypotheses” [c.1901; CP 6.101].
129
“What pragmatism is” [1905; EP 2,345].
130
“Immortality in the light of synechism” [1893; EP 2,1].
131
For the best presentation yet available of Peirce’s architectonics from the viewpoint of general
continuity principles, see Kelly Parker, The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought, Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press, 1998. Parker shows masterfully how Peirce´s system can be understood as a
structural glueing of the skeletons (1) of his classifications of the sciences, the lattices (2) of his
systems of logic and semeiotics, and the “mediating binding forces” (3) of his generic continuity
principles. The “continuous quasi-flow” or “relational stream” of Peirce’s thought emerges with
enormous coherence. Nevertheless, in the presentation of Peirce’s continuum, Parker still relies too
much on an introduction of Peirce’s ideas as compared to Cantor’s, somehow losing the force of
Peirce’s independent, truly original, approach to the labyrinth of the continuum.
132
Ibid. [1893; EP 2,3].
133
Demetra Sfendoni-Mentzou, “Peirce on Continuity and the Laws of Nature”, Transactions of the
Charles S. Peirce Society XXXIII (1997), 646-678, recalls that in the scholastic idea of generality
(“Generale est quod natum aptum est dici de multis”) generality is intrinsically welded with
multiplicity. Thus, continuity, understood by Peirce as inexhaustible possibility and multiplicity,
becomes the quintessence of generality.
134
“Detached ideas continued and the dispute between nominalists and realists” [1898; NEM 4,343].
135
“One, Two, Three” [c.1880; CP 1.353].
136
Ibid.
137
“Minute Logic” [c.1902; CP 2.85].
138
“A Philosophical Encyclopaedia” [c.1893; CP 8 G-c.1893, p.285].
139
“One, Two, Three: Fundamental Categories of Thought and Nature” [1885; W 5,247].
140
Ibid. [1885; W 5,246].
141
Ibid.
142
Peirce, thorough reader, was well aware of his place: “They [First, Second, Third] are not my
discovery; in special and unphilosophical forms, they are familiar enough. They are well-known in
philosophy; and have formed the basis of more than one famous system, already. But I have my way

74
of apprehending them, which it is essential to bring to the reader’s mind” (in: “First, Second, Third”
[1886; W 5,302-303]). Peirce’s original way consisted in detaching and utmost simplifying the terms,
thanks to his outstanding logical acuity, to further use them in all conceivable realms, thanks to his
outstanding philosophical weaving.
143
Peirce’s categories are cenopythagorean: not pythagorean, nor neopythagorean, but “full of
freshness, 5130+-pythagorean”. Ms 899 (c. 1904). In: C.S. Peirce, Categorie (ed. Rossella Fabbrichesi
Leo), Bari: Laterza, 1992, p.129.
144
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. History of an Idea, Cambdrige: Harvard University
Press, 1936. The completeness, gradation and continuity principles appear in Lovejoy’s introduction,
but the statements here presented are based on a peircean (modal-symmetric-triadic) reading.
145
“A Guess at the Riddle” [c.1890; CP 1.354].
146
“On Detached Ideas in General and on Vitally Important Topics” [1898; CP 1.673].
147
“What pragmatism is” [1905; CP 5.436].
148
“Detached ideas continued and the dispute between nominalists and realists” [1898; NEM 4,343].
149
“The Logic of Events” [1898; CP 6.191].
150
Ibid. [1898; CP 6.202].
151
“Letter to William James” [1897; CP 8.252]. The quotation provides an opportunity, to unlikely
psychologist readers, to contrast Peirce's and James' views of tychism and synechism.
152
Such a “neighborhood” reading of the classification is explained in our next chapter, and depends
essentially on a continuous “deiteration” of the classification in the sense of Peirce’s Gamma graphs.
153
“The Doctrine of Chances” [1878; CP 2.646].
154
“A Detailed Classification of the Sciences” - “Minute Logic” [1902; CP 1.216].
155
Ibid. [1902; CP 1.203].
156
Ibid. [1902; CP 1.215].

75
PART II

THE EXISTENTIAL GRAPHS

76
CHAPTER IV
EXISTENTIAL GRAPHS AND PROOFS OF PRAGMATICISM

In this chapter, we will show how Peirce’s system folds on itself and finds local
reflections –provable, or, at least, well grounded– which correspond to the major
global hypotheses of the system. In particular, we will study how the pragmaticist
maxim (i.e., the pragmatic maxim fully modalized, support of Peirce’s
architectonics) can be technically represented in Peirce’s existential graphs, a truly
original logical apparatus, unique in the history of logic, well suited to reveal an
underlying continuity in logical operations and to provide suggestive philosophical
analogies. Further, using the existential graphs, we will formalize –and prove one
direction of– a “local proof of pragmaticism”, trying thus to explain the prominent
place that existential graphs can play in the architectonics of pragmaticism, as Peirce
persistently advocated. Finally, we will present a web of “continuous iterations” of
some key peircean concepts (maxim, classification, abduction) which supports a
“lattice of partial proofs” of pragmaticism.

IV.1. Reflections of the existential graphs inside Peirce’s architectonics

Back-and-forth osmotic processes are fruitful companions in Peirce’s architectonics.

In fact, constructing local reflections of global trends can be seen as a consequence
of the permanent crossing of structural arches in Peirce’s system (pragmaticist
maxim, categories, universal semeiotics, indetermination-determination adjunction,

77
triadic classification of sciences), a weaving that produces natural communicating
hierarchies and levels in the edifice157. In the next diagram we synthetize a fold of
Peirce’s global architectonics on some of its local fragments:

general indetermination- peircean pragmaticist

continuum determination categories maxim (PM)

“great chain of being”

completeness – gradation - continuity

forms of logic “maximum” universality

generic relationality
modalities

global " local codification

sheet of assertion
cuts partial formalization
identity line of (PM) in a Gamma
modal and second-order
system

problem:
“metaphysical irradiation” existential graphs
local " global

Peirce’s architectonics

Figure 19.
Various level reflections of pragmaticist architectonics.
The global continuum inside the local continuum of existential graphs.
The modal form of the pragmatic maxim inside a system of Gamma existential graphs

Peirce’s systems of existential graphs –his “chef d’oeuvre” (Letter to

Jourdain, 1908)– iconically reflect his entire philosophical edifice. The Alpha sheet
of assertion, continuous sheet on which the graphs are marked, stands as an iconic
reflection of real non-degenerate continuity (thirdness), while the Beta line of
identity, continuous line which opens the possibility of quantifying portions of
reality, iconically reflects existence as degenerate continuity (secondness):

78
Since facts blend into one another, it can only be in a continuum that we can conceive
this to be done. This continuum must clearly have more dimensions than a surface or
even than a solid; and we will suppose it to be plastic, so that it can be deformed in all
sorts of ways without the continuity and connection of parts being ever ruptured. Of this
continuum the blank sheet of assertion may be imagined to be a photograph. When we
find out that a proposition is true, we can place it wherever we please on the sheet,
because we can imagine the original continuum, which is plastic, to be so deformed as to
bring any number of propositions to any places on the sheet we may choose.158

The line of identity which may be substituted for the selectives very explicitly represents
Identity to belong to the genus Continuity and to the species Linear Continuity. But of
what variety of Linear Continuity is the heavy line more especially the Icon in the
System of Existential Graphs? In order to ascertain this, let us contrast the Iconicity of
the line with that of the surface of the Phemic Sheet. The continuity of this surface being
two-dimensional, and so polyadic, should represent an external continuity, and
especially, a continuity of experiential appearance. Moreover, the Phemic Sheet iconizes
the Universe of Discourse, since it more immediately represents a field of Thought, or
Mental Experience, which is itself directed to the Universe of Discourse, and considered
as a sign, denotes that Universe. Moreover, it [is because it must be understood] as being
directed to that Universe, that it is iconized by the Phemic Sheet. So, on the principle that
logicians call "the Nota notae" that the sign of anything, X, is itself a sign of the very
same X, the Phemic Sheet, in representing the field of attention, represents the general
object of that attention, the Universe of Discourse. This being the case, the continuity of
the Phemic Sheet in those places, where, nothing being scribed, no particular attention is
paid, is the most appropriate Icon possible of the continuity of the Universe of Discourse
-- where it only receives general attention as that Universe -- that is to say of the
continuity in experiential appearance of the Universe, relatively to any objects
represented as belonging to it.159

Among Existential Graphs there are two that are remarkable for being truly continuous
both in their Matter and in their corresponding Signification. There would be nothing
remarkable in their being continuous in either, or in both respects; but that the continuity
of the Matter should correspond to that of Significance is sufficiently remarkable to limit
these Graphs to two; the Graph of Identity represented by the Line of Identity, and the
Graph of Coexistence, represented by the Blank.160

These quotes show the importance Peirce assigned to self-reference processes

inside his system. Adequate symbolic concretions of the self-reference principle
“nota notae” are observed both in the empty sheet of assertion and in the line of
identity, graphs which continuously match their forms and meanings. Looking
closely to the line of identity, Peirce analyzes further its full richness as a general
sign, where iconical, indexical and symbolical tints blend together:

The value of an icon consists in its exhibiting the features of a state of things regarded as
if it were purely imaginary. The value of an index is that it assures us of positive fact.
The value of a symbol is that it serves to make thought and conduct rational and enables
us to predict the future. It is frequently desirable that a representamen should exercise

79
one of those three functions to the exclusion of the other two, or two of them to the
exclusion of the third; but the most perfect of signs are those in which the iconic,
indicative, and symbolic characters are blended as equally as possible. Of this sort of
signs the line of identity is an interesting example. As a conventional sign, it is a symbol;
and the symbolic character, when present in a sign, is of its nature predominant over the
others. The line of identity is not, however, arbitrarily conventional nor purely
conventional. Consider any portion of it taken arbitrarily (with certain possible
exceptions shortly to be considered) and it is an ordinary graph for which the figure “--is
identical with--” might perfectly well be substituted. But when we consider the
connexion of this portion with a next adjacent portion, although the two together make
up the same graph, yet the identification of the something, to which the hook of the one
refers, with the something, to which the hook of the other refers, is beyond the power of
any graph to effect, since a graph, as a symbol, is of the nature of a law, and is therefore
general, while here there must be an identification of individuals. This identification is
effected not by the pure symbol, but by its replica which is a thing. The termination of
one portion and the beginning of the next portion denote the same individual by virtue of
a factual connexion, and that the closest possible; for both are points, and they are one
and the same point. In this respect, therefore, the line of identity is of the nature of an
index. To be sure, this does not affect the ordinary parts of a line of identity, but so soon
as it is even conceived, [it is conceived] as composed of two portions, and it is only the
factual junction of the replicas of these portions that makes them refer to the same
individual. The line of identity is, moreover, in the highest degree iconic. For it appears
as nothing but a continuum of dots, and the fact of the identity of a thing, seen under two
aspects, consists merely in the continuity of being in passing from one apparition to
another. Thus uniting, as the line of identity does, the natures of symbol, index, and icon,
it is fitted for playing an extraordinary part in this system of representation.161

In fact, Peirce’s line of identity can be considered fairly as the more powerful
and “plastic” (in Peirce’s continuum sense) of the symbolic conceptual tools that he
introduced in the “topological” logic of existential graphs. Coherently with that
plasticity, an adequate handling of a thicker identity line (existential quantifier in a
second-order logic), will provide the basis of our approach162 to a “local proof of
pragmaticism”. Next, we remind briefly163 the basic properties of ALPHA, BETA and
GAMMA existential graphs needed to proceed.
Through a pragmatic collection of systems, the existential graphs cover
classical propositional calculus (system of ALPHA graphs and generic illative
transformations), first-order classical logic over a purely relational language (system
of Beta graphs and transformations related to the identity line), modal intermediate
calculi (systems of Gamma graphs and transformations related to the broken cut),
and fragments of second-order logic, classes and metalanguage handlings (specific
“inventions” of new Gamma graphs). Over Peirce’s continuum (generic space of

80
pure possibilities), information is constructed and transferred through general action-
reaction dual processes: insertion – extraction, iteration – deiteration, dialectics yes-
no. The realm of Peirce’s continuum is represented by a blank sheet of assertion
where, following precise control rules, some cuts are marked, through which
information is introduced, transmitted and eliminated. The diverse marks
progressively registered in the sheet of assertion allow logical information to evolve
from indetermination to determination, thanks to a precise triadic machinery: (1)
formal graphical languages, (2) illative transformations, (3) natural interpretations,
all well intertwined in a pragmatic perspective.

1. Signs.

Sheet of assertion: blank generic sheet. Icon:

Cuts: generic ovals detaching regions

in the sheet of assertion. Icons:

(Alpha) (Gamma)
Line of identity: generic line weaving relations
in the sheet of assertion. Icon:
(Beta)

Logical terms: propositional and relational signs

marking the sheet of assertion. Icons: p, q, ... R, S, ....

2. Illative Transformations of Signs.

Detaching Properties (“information zones”).

Cuts can be nested but cannot intersect.
Identity lines can intersect other identity lines and all kinds of cuts.

Double cuts Alpha can be introduced or eliminated around any graph, whenever in
the “donut” region (gray) no graphs different from identity lines appear.

Transferring Properties (“information transmission”).

Inside regions nested in an even number of cuts (Alpha or Gamma), graphs may be erased.
Inside regions nested in an odd number of cuts, graphs may be inserted.
Towards regions nested in a bigger number of cuts, graphs may be iterated.
Towards regions nested in a lower number of cuts, graphs may be deiterated.

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3. Interpretation of Signs and Illative Transformations.

Blank sheet: truth

Alpha cut: negation
Juxtaposition: conjunction
Line of identity: existential quantifier
Gamma cut: contingency (possibility of negation)

Double cut: classical rule of negation (¬¬p@p)

Erasure and insertion: minimal rule of conjunction (p%q7p and ¬p7¬(p%q))
Iteration and deiteration: intuitionistic rule of negation as generic connective (p%¬q @ p%¬(p%q))

Figure 20.
Rudiments of Existential Graphs

The existential graphs variety of formal languages and illative

transformations can be turned into logical calculi if one assumes surprisingly
elementary axioms:

wider
• axioms: (ALPHA) (BETA) choices (GAMMA)

• calculi: ALPHA : Classical propositional calculus

BETA : Purely relational first-order logic
GAMMAI : Intermediate modal logics164
GAMMAII A Second-order logic.

Peirce hoped that the existential graphs could help to provide a full “Apology for
Pragmaticism”165. In fact, in all due justice, the very existential graphs looked at
themselves –under the perspective that Roberts’ and Zeman’s completeness proofs
have supplied– provide an outstanding apology for the deep pragmatic approach that
Peirce undertook in logic:

82
classical propositional
calculus
system ALPHA

first-order
logic

classical clarification uniform rules

thought of ideas of pragmatic handling system BETA

Figure 21.
Existential graphs as an “Apology for Pragmaticism”

Indeed, the simultaneous axiomatization of classical propositional calculus

and purely relational first-order logic, with the same five generic rules (double Alpha
cuts, insertion, erasure, iteration and deiteration), renders explicit technical common
roots for both calculi which have been ignored in all other available presentations of
classical logic. The same rules detect, in the context of Alpha language, the handling
of classical negation and conjunction, and, in the context of Beta language, the
handling of the existential quantifier: something just unimaginable for any logic
student raised into Hilbert-type logic systems. Thus –in agreement with Peirce’s
pragmatic maxim and Peirce’s “idealist” realism– the ALPHA and BETA calculi show
that there exists a kernel, a “real general” for classical thought, a kernel which, in
some representational contexts, gives rise to the classical modes of connection, and
which, in other contexts, gives rise to the classical modes of quantification. The
common roots for classical connectives and quantifiers are revealed in common
pragmatic action-reaction processes, global and general, which in diverse
representational contexts generate derived rules, local and particular, proper to each
context. We face thus a truly remarkable “revelation” in the history of logic, not yet
fully understood nor valued in all its depth. It is, in a very precise way, the only

83
known presentation of classical logical calculi which uses the same global and
generic axiomatic rules to control the “traffic” of connectives and quantifiers.
In turn, the “Apology for Pragmaticism” obtained with the existential graphs
shows the coherence of the synechist abduction, at least if it is restricted to the
continuum underlying classical logic. In fact, the existential graphs show that the
rules of classical connectives and quantifiers correspond continuously to each other
over a generic bottom; their apparent differences are just contextual and can be seen
as breaks on the underlying logical continuity. But even beyond the classical realm,
as we hinted in our second chapter, we count on several mathematical supports to
conjecture that the synechist hypothesis can span a wider range of validity, including
–fair abduction– diverse progressive forms of the logical continuum (intuitionistic,
categorical, peircean) up to –bold abduction– the cosmological continuum.
A pair of examples, where (going from local to global) we re-interpret some
specific “marks” of the graphs, can be useful to show the possible interest of a
“metaphysical irradiation” of the graphs. In first place, the immediate comparison of
axioms for the ALPHA, BETA and GAMMAII (second order) calculi,

(ALPHA) (BETA) (GAMMAII)

shows symbolically that existence (first and second-order lines of identity) can be
seen, simultaneously, as a continuity break in the “real general” (blank sheet of
assertion), and as a continuity link in the “particular” realm (ends of the identity
line). The identity lines, continuous sub-reflections of the sheet of assertion, are self-
reflexively marked on the general continuum and allow to construct the transition
“from essence to existence”166. The elementary axioms of the basic systems of
existential graphs support thus the idea –central in philosophy (pre-socratics,
Heidegger)– that a first self-reflection of “nothingness on nothing”167 can be the
initial spark that puts in motion the evolution of the cosmos.
In second place, the continuous iterations of lines of identity (Beta or GamaII)
through cuts (Alpha or Gamma) (see figure 22) show that existence is no more than a

84
form to link continuously fragments of actuality inside the general realm of all
possibilities. It would be fallacious, then, as Peirce severely advocated in his
“disputes against nominalists”, to think the existent, the actual, the given, without
previously assuming a coherent continuous bottom of real possibilia, a bottom
needed in order to guarantee the relational emergence of existence:

existence possibilia

Figure 22.
Continuous iterations (and deiterations) of lines of identity.
Existence (actuality, secondness) is continuously linked to real possibilities.

IV.2. A local proof of pragmaticism

In 1903, in his Harvard conferences, Peirce thought he had guessed a “proof of

pragmaticism”168. Of course, such a proof, in an absolute and global sense, could not
be sustained and would go in opposite direction to the pragmatic maxim.
Nevertheless, the impossibility of an absolute proof does not preclude that some
fragmentary and local codings of the proof could, in principle, be realized. Peirce
insisted that the existential graphs should help in that task, but it seems that he never
fully completed the scattered indications left in his latter writings169:

I beg leave, Reader, as an Introduction to my defence of pragmatism, to bring before you

a very simple system of diagrammatization of propositions which I term the System of
Existential Graphs. For, by means of this, I shall be able almost immediately to deduce
some important truths of logic, little understood hitherto, and closely connected with the
truth of pragmaticism.170

85
You apprehend in what way the system of Existential Graphs is to furnish a test of the
truth or falsity of Pragmaticism. Namely, a sufficient study of the Graphs should show
what nature is truly common to all significations of concepts; whereupon a comparison
will show whether that nature be or be not the very ilk that Pragmaticism (by the
definition of it) avers that it is.171

It is one of the chief advantages of Existential Graphs, as a guide to Pragmaticism, that it

holds up thought to our contemplation with the wrong side out, as it were.172

We now present a translation of the “full modal form” of the pragmaticist

maxim (figure 10, previous chapter) to the language of existential Gamma graphs,
indicating advances and limitations in our approach173. In particular, a formalization
of the maxim, half-way provable in a modal second-order GAMMA system, shows
that the maxim can acquire new supports for its validity. Indeed, beyond the clear
usefulness of the maxim as a global philosophical method (abductively stated,
inductively checked), it is also of precious value to count on a reflection of the
maxim as a valid local theorem (deductively inferred). Peirce’s pragmaticist maxim,
always considered by Peirce as an hypothesis, obtains thus a new confirmation by
means of a logical apparatus. The three dimensions of reasoning (abduction-
induction-deduction) become strongly welded. If –in the future– the structural
transfer from local to global fostered in part by pragmaticism becomes better
understood, the local Gamma proofs of pragmaticism could then acquire an
unsuspected relevance to support the general architectonics of the system.
In first instance, combining the notion of “integral” (relational glueing) and the
formalism of Gamma graphs, we can obtain an intermediate, semi-formal, statement
of the pragmaticist maxim. The value of semi-formality (or “informal rigour”)
consists in allowing further refinements, depending on the way the “integral” is
afterwards rendered symbolically in adequate GAMMA systems174. An intermediate
expression of the pragmaticist maxim is the universal closure of the following
statement, obtained directly as a diagrammatic translation of the full modal form of
the maxim to a “mixed” language with existential graphs (semi-formal “mixtures”
involving symbols : and B will soon be deleted):

86
C :
R, #
" C#(R) (PRAGEG),

that is: for all C, “C is equivalent to the integral of all necessary relations between
interpretants of C and elements of their contexts, running on all possible
interpretative contexts”. With the usual logical symbols this can also be written semi-
formally:

!C ( C " % #$x ! C (R,x) ) .

#

R,#

The pragmaticist maxim, understood semi-formally as the (universal closure

of) the intermediate statement (PRAGEG), can then be implemented locally in diverse
GAMMA fully formal systems, in which (PRAGEG) may become a theorem of the
system. As the implementation will be more faithful, and the GAMMA system will be
more universal, the pragmaticist maxim will acquire greater deductive strength. We
proceed now to an elementary implementation of the maxim in a specific GAMMA
system, closely related to Peirce’s general realism (scholastic reality of universals,
where the possibly necessary becomes actual). The implementation is still far from
being duly faithful (codifies all interpretants in just one sign), and the GAMMA
system is still away from true universality (requires the axiom #! p @ p), but we
think that an important step in a local proof of pragmaticism is here undertaken.
Consider (PRAGEG): C " % #$x ! C (R,x) . Identifying # with identity (use
#

R,#

of the self-reference principle “nota notae”: codification of all interpretants of a sign

in the sign itself), and translating the integral B as a universal quantification on all

87
relations, we see that the right-hand side of (PRAGEG) can be represented by the
following diagram175 (where the thicker line stands for a Gamma second-order
existential quantifier):

Now, using the rules of erasure, deiteration, and double Alpha cut
elimination, it is shown that this diagram (that we can call the “pragmatic reading of
C”) illatively implies the following diagrams176:

C C

C C

88
that is, the diagram representing the “pragmatic reading of C” does in fact imply C,
in the case in which the double broken cut may be erased, that is when the modality
#! can be eliminated.
This shows that one of the two implications in the equivalence that constitutes
a local form of the pragmaticist maxim (the “positive” implication according to
which the pragmatic knowledge of C guarantees the knowledge of C) can be proved
in systems in which #! p 7 p, that is in systems in which the possibly necessary
implies the actual. On the other hand, the reverse implication does not seem to be
provable177, not even in case we could count on introducing double broken cuts
(corresponding to a full equivalence #! p @ p). We can call this reverse implication
the “negative” one: the denial of one of the conceivable characters of C implies not-
C. Arguably, this “negative” implication can be considered the more interesting one
from the perspective of a fallibilist architectonics such as Peirce’s, showing that our
advance in the weaving graphs-pragmaticism is still a modest one. To obtain a fuller
equivalence between C and its pragmatic reading, a finer implementation of the
pragmaticist maxim would have to be achieved, but we hope our tentative opens the
way in such a possibilia realm.
Our reflection of the global pragmaticist maxim –half-way provable in a local
setting of Gamma graphs– can be considered as a further indication (induction) of the
eventual correction of the general maxim. Peirce had proposed the maxim as a
hypothesis (abduction) to be criticized, contrasted, and refined. An important trend
of research would then consist in obtaining other interesting implementations of the
maxim that could become theorematic (deduction) in other GAMMA systems178. The
vertical glueing of many theorematic implementations of the maxim would be very
close to a wide “proof of pragmaticism”.

IV.3. “Vague proofs” of pragmaticism

A sound use of the pragmaticist maxim –applied reflexively to itself in a self-

unfolding continuum, helping to understand better its eventual “proof”– shows that

89
arguments in favour of pragmaticism can never be set in a definitive way, in an
absolute space. Indeed, as the maxim itself advocates, any argument that hopes to
attain a certain degree of necessity has to be set locally in a determined interpretation
context. From this elementary observation, it follows that the “proof of
pragmaticism” sought by Peirce may (in fact, must) be seen as a sophisticated lattice
of partial proofs, where along diverse hierarchical levels converge local abductions,
inductions and deductions, which may (must) correlate each other, but that can never
be summarized in a unique “transcendental deduction”. Peirce’s architectonics
shows, in fact, that knowledge is always constructed along different perspectives,
floors and levels –like Borges’ Babel tower, doubly infinite, never comprised in a
unique glance– without a “transcendental” or “absolute” vantage point from where a
complete panorama could be gazed at (observe that the non-existence of such a
“point at infinity” is perfectly linked with the non-existence of privileged points in
Peirce’s continuum).

• = " #" semeiosis (•)

PM# : a local reading

•
!
continuity
PM
global concept
interpret(PM)

PM* : another local reading

Figure 23.
The pragmaticist maxim (PM) applied to itself: PM(PM).
Infinite ramification of Peirce’s architectonics.
Continuous lattice of local proofs of MP.

Inside Peirce’s architectonics it is thus natural to emphasize some

argumentative mixtures (confluences abduction – induction – deduction) which build
up the lattice of supports for pragmaticism. It may be said that all of Peirce’s work –
from his first timid logical comments to his final daring cosmological speculations–

90
consists in the meticulous and perseverant construction of that lattice, always trying
to enlarge consistently its range of validity, to extend its depth and to correlate its
diverse “marks”. Of course, we face a lattice of marks sketched over a continuous
bottom, where, once again, an extraordinary role is played by the natural
correspondence between a general philosophical trend, the world which supports it
and the methods which seek to prove it. In the following, we will study just some of
the marks supporting pragmaticism, which are closely related to the continuum: the
existential graphs as “Apology for Pragmaticism”, the central place of the pragmatic
maxim in the classification of sciences, the self-referential and “fixed-point”
arguments sustaining pragmaticism, and, finally, the “logic of abduction”.
One of the finer marks in support of Peirce’s pragmaticism is a natural
“continuity interpretation”179 of some peculiar features of the existential graphs. On
one side, the genesis180 of the graphs shows clearly that they were constructed
continuously, departing from diagrammatic experiments related to the logic of
relatives (letter to Mitchell, 1882; reply to Kempe, 1889), coming abductively to
propose basic rules and ideas (entitative graphs, 1896), and making afterwards
permanent corollarial illations, inductively contrasted and polished (entries in the
Logic Notebook, from 1898 on), up to constructing truly theorematic systems of
existential graphs (ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA, 1903). It is interesting to notice that this
process of discovery uses fully the argumentative triad abduction – induction –
deduction, and that it only uses that mixture. Since the result is the simultaneous re-
construction of both classical propositional calculus and first-order logic, which can
be considered as a neat basis for the main general qualitative and quantitative modes
of thought, the construction of the existential graphs shows that Peirce’s
argumentative triad may include the continuum of all possible types of arguments
representable in classical thought. In this way, the pragmaticist hypothesis stating
that the triad abduction – induction – deduction saturates all inferential processes
obtains an important backing: another “mark” in our lattice-type “proof of
pragmaticism”.

91
On the other side, the construction of the existential graphs should be
understood as a full “Apology” for pragmaticism and synechism, not only because of
the unveiling of the “real general” for classical thought that we have already
discussed, but also because of its ability to represent pragmatically –in its language,
rules and axioms– deep local reflections of the global continuous trends present in
the architectonics. The language of existential graphs reflects iconically the
cosmological continuum (thirdness), its continuity breaks (secondness) and its
chance elements (firstness): the Alpha sheet of assertion and the Beta line of identity
are plastic fusion operators (thirdness), the Alpha cuts are segmenting marks which
depart from the real general and give rise to actual existence (secondness), the
Gamma cuts are fissures which open the way to chance and possibility (firstness).
The rules, or illative transformations, reflect in an outstandingly pragmatic way the
more elementary osmosis occurring in semeiosis: registering and forgetting
information (rules of insertion and erasure), detaching and transgressing dual
information zones (rules of introduction and erasure of double Alpha cuts),
transferring and recovering information (rules of iteration and deiteration). Finally,
the axioms, as already mentioned, can be thought as a nutshell expression of Peirce’s
wider general synechism.
If, following Peirce, we understand the pragmatic maxim as a part of
“methodeutics” (“studying methods to be followed in the search, exposition and
application of truth”181), its place in the “perennial” classification of sciences lies
naturally in the trichotomic subdivision 2.2.3.3, a prominent central place inside the
classification which supports generality layers above it and profits from
particularization layers below, as Richard Robin has pointed out182. Going deeper,
and extending continuously Robin’s fundamental remark, we may understand
pragmaticism as a continuous irradiation of the maxim –more precisely, as its
continuous iteration and deiteration– from place 2.2.3.3 towards all other
neighborhoods of knowledge present in the classification:

92
1.1

2.1 1.2

2.2.1 1.3
continuum

2.2.2 1

2.2.3.1

2.2.3.2

2.2.3.3
PM

2.2.3
................
2.2 2.3 ...... ...... ......

2 3

Figure 24.
Continuous iterations of the pragmatic maxim (PM)
along a continuous unfolding of the triadic classification of sciences

The previous diagram suggests another useful argument to consolidate the

global web of local marks in which may consist the “proof of pragmaticism”. The
diagram suggests the building up of an adequate translation of the classification into
existential graphs, a translation which should perhaps be inverse (or done in a sheet
verso) to the one represented in figure 24 –where regions with more trichotomic
ramifications in the classification tree should be surrounded by less cuts– in such a
way that the pragmatic maxim could really be iterated towards all other
neighborhoods in the classification. An even finer implementation would have to
introduce also the types of Gamma cuts which should be nested iconically around
fragments of the classification: possibility (broken-Alpha) cuts for trichotomies of
type 1, actuality (Alpha) cuts for trichotomies of type 2, necessity (Alpha-broken-
Alpha) cuts for trichotomies of type 3. If this kind of translation could be done, we

93
could pass from discrete models for the classification (trees with ramification 3) to
continuous models (assertion neighborhoods, natural osmosis), producing thus a
coherent sub-determination of Peirce’s synechism. An effective continuous
implementation of figure 24 could also help to understand, not only the central
irradiation of the maxim in all fields of knowledge, but also the natural pre-eminence
of some crossings between disciplines in detriment of others, constructing thus the
prolegomena of a true “topographical” science which could determine regions of
interplay likeness/affinity/difference, with “heights” and “access roads” in the
continuous relief of knowledge183.
The central place of the pragmatic maxim in the classification of sciences
allows to perceive the maxim as a balance environment in a wide structure. In turn,
pragmaticism can also be understood as a generic fixed-point technique, a reflexive
and self-referential apparatus which, through each self-application, stratifies the field
of interpretation. Peirce’s fourth article (1909) in the Monist series was going to
present

a theory of Logical Analysis, or Definition [which] rests directly on Existential Graphs,

and will be acknowledged, I am confident, to be the most useful piece of work I have
ever done... Now Logical Analysis is, of course, Definition; and this same method
applied to Logical Analysis itself –the definition of definition– produces the rule of
pragmaticism.184

Another fixed-point tentative to guarantee the unavoidable centrality of

pragmaticism appears, as the editors of the Essential Peirce have well noticed, when
Peirce, trying to characterize habit as a final logical interpretant, shows that habit can
only be defined through other habits185:

The deliberately formed, self-analyzing habit, –self-analyzing because formed by the aid
of analysis of the exercises that nourished it–, is the living definition, the veritable and
final logical interpretant. Consequently, the most perfect account of a concept that words
can convey will consist in a description of the habit which that concept is calculated to
produce. But how otherwise can a habit be described than by a description of the kind of
action to which it gives rise, with the specification of the conditions and of the motive?186

In this way, habits turn out to be fixed-points of the self-referential operator

definition of the definition, since its definition resorts to the very same term which is

94
being defined. Now, the fact that habits can be seen as fixed-points connects again in
a very natural way the architectonics of pragmaticism with its underlying continuum.
Indeed, it can be shown in modern mathematics that, underneath any fixed-point
theorem, lies a natural topology which renders continuous the fixed-point operator
and which allows to construct the fixed-point as a limit of discrete approximations.
The local results of modern mathematics, abductively and continuously transferred to
the global design of the architectonics, provide thus another “mark” which pulls taut
the web of supports of pragmaticism. For future endeavours remains the task of
modeling –inside the mathematical theory of categories– an integral translation of
some of the differential “marks” we have been recording: the “free” iconicity of
existential graphs, the iterative “universality” of the pragmatic maxim, the
“reflexivity” of habits.
The pragmaticist maxim, fully modalized, depends crucially on a range of
possible interpretation contexts, where some hypothetical representations are subject
to further deductive inferences and inductive contrasts. Peirce’s logic of abduction –
understood as a system to orderly adopt hypotheses with respect to given contexts187–
lies then at the very core of pragmaticism:

If you carefully consider the question of pragmatism you will see that it is nothing else
than the question of the logic of abduction. That is, pragmatism proposes a certain maxim
which, if sound, must render needless any further rule as to the admissibility of
hypotheses to rank as hypotheses, that is to say, as explanations of phenomena held as
hopeful suggestions; and, furthermore, this is all that the maxim of pragmatism really
pretends to do, at least so far as it is confined to logic (...) A maxim which looks only to
possibly practical considerations will not need any supplement in order to exclude any
hypotheses as inadmissible. What hypotheses it admits all philosophers would agree
ought to be admitted. On the other hand, if it be true that nothing but such considerations
has any logical effect or import whatever, it is plain that the maxim of pragmatism cannot
cut off any kind of hypothesis which ought to be admitted. Thus, the maxim of
pragmatism, if true, fully covers the entire logic of abduction.188

From the natural correlation “pragmaticism :: logic of abduction” it follows

that another “vague” proof of pragmaticism –another mark in its supporting web–
should be looked for in an adequate continuous understanding of the “logic of
abduction”, that is of the abductive inference, illation and decidability processes. In
effect, as Peirce notices,

95
It must be remembered that abduction, although it is very little hampered by logical
rules, nevertheless is logical inference, asserting its conclusion only problematically or
conjecturally it is true, but nevertheless having a perfectly definite logical form.189

Abduction’s “perfectly definite logical form” arises in Peirce’s early studies

(1860’s) around “vague” variations of the Aristotelian syllogism. We suggest (see
figure 25) that already in those early researches the fundamental adjunctions
“determinacy – indeterminacy” and “definition – vagueness” may have entered in
Peirce’s thought. In those beginnings, the adjunctions may have been only intuitive,
plastic, continuous processes, but they may have allowed Peirce to bend the rigid
Aristotelian rules and to jump to the verso of Peirce’s logical creativity:

Variations on the syllogistic form a i i in the first figure

All X is Y
Some Z is X deductive form implicative inference
____________ general + vague # vague
Some Z is Y

Some Z is Y
Some Z is X inductive form vague + vague # general
____________ (no inference)
All X is Y

All X is Y
Some Z is Y abductive form retro-implicative inference
____________ general + vague # vague
Some Z is X

Figure 25.
Syllogistic abduction as “vague” deformation of syllogistic deduction.

Understood as a system to provide reasonable hypotheses which could explain

irregular states of things, Peirce’s abduction develops between 1870 and 1910,
accurately defining the system’s tools in accordance with the general dictate of logic

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to evolve towards progressive determination. The “logic of abduction” refines
Peirce’s prior ideas on the “logic of discovery”: its ability to undergo experimental
testing, its capacity to explain surprising facts, its economy, its simplicity, its
plausibility, its correlation with the evolved instinct of the species190. Led by his
breakthroughs in the logic of relatives, Peirce moves from analytically describing the
particular predicative form of syllogistic abduction towards constructing
synthetically abduction as a general relational system: contextual and contrasting
handling of hypotheses, optimization and decision “filters” to maximize the
likelihood of adequate hypotheses, search of correlations between the complexity of
hypotheses and their probability of correctness.

Deductive systems Abductive systems

C &D 1 7 E C &D 1 7 E
_________________ _________________

C , 1 &D E C , E &D #1

C , E &D Prob(1)

In general, there are important correlations between the conclusion’s

complexity in context’s eyes (C-Compl(E)) and the probability of the
explanatory correctness of the hypothesis (Prob(1)). The higher the
complexity (C-Compl(E)), the more plausible becomes the equivalence
Prob(1) : 1 along the context C, reversing thus the inference191.

Figure 26.
Abduction as a system of logical approximation
towards correctness and optimization of explanatory hypotheses.

The logic of abduction, as Peirce himself mentions very precisely, tries to

explain in a systematic way regularity breaks and homogeneity disorders, along
given contexts, that go beyond simple casual (punctual) irregularities. In fact,
explanation is only really needed and appropriately lodged when it goes beyond
particulars and then fuses into the general (the continuum):

97
The only case in which this method of investigation, namely, by the study of
how an explanation can further the purpose of science, leads to the conclusion
that an explanation is positively called for, is the case in which a phenomenon
presents itself which, without some special explanation, there would be reason to
expect would not present itself; and the logical demand for an explanation is the
greater, the stronger the reason for expecting it not to occur was. (...) But if we
anticipate a regularity, and find simple irregularity [irregularity being the
prevailing character of experience generally], but no breach of regularity, –as for
example if we were to expect that an attentive observation of a forest would
show something like a pattern, then there is nothing to explain except the
singular fact that we should have anticipated something that has not been
realized.192

Abduction reintegrates breach and context from a higher perspective, and

fuses them in a common explanatory continuum. Thus, the deep task of the logic of
abduction may be seen as locally glueing breaks in the continuum, by means of an
arsenal of methods which select effectively the “closer” explanatory hypotheses for a
given break and which try to “erase” discontinuities from a new regularizing
perspective:

finite number of useful hypotheses infinitude of useless hypotheses

hip1
break
hip2
hipn . . . .

optimization:
economy, complexity control:
plausibility, evolutive instinct

Figure 27.
Abduction as “glueing” breaks in the continuum.
“Optimal” selection of explanatory hypotheses.

Thus, the logic of abduction becomes in fact one of the basic supports of
Peirce’s pragmaticist architectonics and general synechism. Abduction serves as a
regulatory system for the Real, for that plastic weaving (third) formed by facts
(seconds) and hypotheses (firsts), where hypotheses are subject to complexity tests
until they continuously fuse with facts. The logic of relatives –which, as we saw in

98
our second chapter, technically filters continuity and generality– serves also as a
crucial “filter” in the logic of abduction: it is the natural apparatus which provides
the normal forms193 of hypotheses, in order to study their adequate complexity.
Beyond Murray Murphey’s famous judgement194 on the ineffective use of
continuity to hold Peirce’s architectonics, we hope to have been able to show that
Peirce’s “castle” –very real, but not reducible to existence– is far from just flying in
the air.

157
One of the basic abductions that supports our work on Peirce’s continuum contends that Peirce’s
system constitutes a natural apparatus to correlate in a refined way what is global with what is local,
what is total with what is partial, and what is continuous with what is discrete. We think we have
supported that hypothesis with enough inductions in our monograph. In this chapter, we are trying to
support it through local bounded deductions.
158
“Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed” (Lowell Lectures) [1903; CP 4.512].
159
"The Bedrock Beneath Pragmaticism” [1906; CP 4.561, note 1].
160
“Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism” [c.1906; NE 4.324].
161
“Logical Tracts” [c.1903; CP 4.448].
162
We follow Peirce’s indication, brought up by Don Roberts: “The Gamma Part supposes the
reasoner to invent for himself such additional kinds of signs as he may find desirable” ([MS 693],
cited in Don Roberts, The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce, The Hague: Mouton, 1973, p.75).
The thick identity line, representing second-order existential quantification, is such an “invention”.
163
For full presentations of the existential graphs, one can consult Don Roberts, op.cit. (Ph.D. thesis,
University of Illinois, 1963); Jay Zeman, The Graphical Logic of C.S. Peirce, Ph.D. Thesis,
University of Chicago, 1964; Pierre Thibaud, La logique de Charles Sanders Peirce: De l’algèbre aux
graphes, Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1975; or Robert Burch, A Peircean Reduction
Thesis. The Foundations of Topological Logic, Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1991.
164
The proofs of equivalences ALPHA or BETA are far from being obvious: see Roberts or Zeman,
op.cit. (conjectures due to Peirce, proofs to Roberts (1963) and Zeman (1964)). The best treatment of
GAMMA modal systems is to be found in Zeman, op.cit., chapter III, “The Gamma Systems”, pp. 140-
177. Zeman shows that the GAMMA calculus extending ALPHA to the broken cut without restrictions
in the iteration and deiteration rules corresponds to a Lukasiewicz modal calculus, while other
GAMMA extensions with restrictions on iteration and deiteration through broken cuts correspond to
Lewis’ systems S4 and S5.
165
“Come on, my Reader, and let us construct a diagram to illustrate the general course of thought”, in
“Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism” [1906; CP 4.530].
166
The passage “from essence to existence”, somewhat obscure in Heidegger’s philosophy, has been
thoroughly studied in modern (1900-1940) mathematical creativity by Albert Lautman in his
outstanding doctoral thesis “Essai sur les notions de structure et d’existence en mathématiques”
(1937), in: Albert Lautman, Essai sur l’unité des mathématiques et divers écrits, Paris: Union
Générale d’Éditions(10-18), 1977.
167
“Nothing” in Veronese’s full intensional sense: a fluid primigenial continuum.
168
[1903; PPM, passim]. See also: “Pragmatism” [1907; EP 2.398-433].
169
The problem of the “proof of pragmaticism” has been one of the crucial open problems in peircean
scholarship. See, for example, Richard S. Robin, “Classical pragmatism and pragmatism’s proof”,
pp.145-146, in: Jacqueline Brunning, Paul Forster (eds.), The Rule of Reason. The Philosophy of
Charles Sanders Peirce, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

99
170
“Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism” [1906; CP 4.534]. An immense majority of Peirce
scholars considers “faulty” or mistaken the connections that Peirce sought between the existential
graphs and proofs of pragmaticism (see, for example, Zeman, op.cit., p.177). Our position, instead,
seeks to retrieve and further advance the richness of those connections, following J. Esposito
(Evolutionary Metaphysics. The Development of Peirce’s Theory of Categories, Ohio: Ohio
University Press, 1980, p. 228) who considered that the existential graphs “not only appear to
establish the truth of the pragmatic maxim philosophically in the form of a deduction, but also
pragmatically and inductively by affording an efficient logical system”.
171
“Phaneroscopy” [1906; CP 4.534, note 1].
172
Ibid. [1906; CP 4.7]. The fact that existential graphs help to contemplate “with the wrong side out”
the proof of pragmaticism can be interpreted as an indication that the proof has to be strongly
modalized (as here we try). The reverse of the sheet of assertion is not just the world of non existence,
but also the world of possible existence. In fact, the situation could further be enriched, if we could be
able to implement Peirce’s full geometry of the graphs: “Existential graphs (...) must be regarded only
as projection upon (a) surface of a sign extended in three dimensions. Three dimensions are necessary
and sufficient for the expression of all assertions” ([MS 654.6-7], cited in Esposito, op.cit., p. 227).
173
In view of Dipert’s sad and truthful comment, “It is a pity that logicians and philosophers have
ceded so much of Peirce’s work on “diagrams”“ (R. Dipert, “Peirce’s Underestimated Place in the
History of Logic: A Response to Quine”, in K. Ketner (ed.), Peirce and Contemporary Thought:
Philosophical Inquiries, New York: Fordham University Press, 1995, p. 48), as a long overdue task,
we try here to redress some logician’s oversights.
174
It should be observed that Peirce’s system, and the progressive combinatorial bounds we propose,
are very close to Leibniz’s general project, clearly retrieved by 20th century mathematical logic.
175
The “second step” (construction of diagrams) in the mathematical proof of a theorem is thus
fulfilled. Peirce considered that the construction of diagrams could be “the weakest point in the whole
demonstration” [MS 1147.52]. See D. Roberts, “An Introduction to Peirce’s Proof of Pragmaticism”,
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, XIV (1978), p. 125. In our approach, after the diagram
is constructed, experimentation, observation and deduction follow, as advocated by Peirce.
176
In the horizontal order of illative inference, the specific uses of the rules are: erasure of lines of
identity (Beta, Gamma) in an even area (6 nested cuts Alpha and Gamma); deiteration of identity lines
Beta and Gamma to regions with lower number of cuts (4 around Beta line, 1 around Gamma line);
erasure of the Beta identity line in an even area (4 cuts) and apparition of the Gamma second-order
axiom (thick line unenclosed); deiteration of the all Gamma identity line; erasure of the Gamma line
in an even area (0 cuts) and twice double Alpha cut elimination.
177
The problem lies in the first step of the deduction, which cannot be reversed: the erasures of the
lines of identity in the 6 nested cuts area cannot be turned into insertions and glueings of extended
new identity lines, for which we would need to be in an odd area.
178
It should be observed that our methodology follows closely the pragmaticist maxim itself: to
capture the actual maxim, it has been locally represented in a given context and therein its necessary
logical status has been studied. Afterwards, we would have to think in all possible GAMMA systems
of representation, in order to obtain a faithful reading of the maxim.
179
For a different “continuity interpretation” of the graphs, see Jay Zeman, “Peirce’s Graphs – the
Continuity Interpretation”, Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society 4 (1968), 144-154 (text
corresponding to the introduction of Zeman’s fundamental doctoral thesis, op.cit.).
180
Roberts, op.cit., chapter 2 and appendix 1.
181
“An Outline Classification of the Sciences” [1903; EP 2.260].
182
Robin, op.cit., pp.145-146.
183
Such a continuous unfolding of Peirce’s classification of the sciences seems here to be hinted for
the first time. In part, it corresponds to Pape’s view that hypotheses should be considered as
“singularities” in the space of continuous logical relations (H. Pape, “Abduction and the Topology of
Human Cognition”, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society XXXV (1999), 248-269,
particularly p. 250). We contend, in fact, that the discrete branching classification of the sciences may
be seen as a sort of singularity, to be further embedded in the continuous space of Gamma graphs. The

100
embedding of the discrete triadic branching into continuous Gamma graphs would also substantiate
Hausman’s forceful insight that possibilia are loci of branching (C. Hausman, Charles Peirce’s
Evolutionary Philosophy, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 185-189). Other
perspectives, following Peirce’s dictum on “Moving Pictures of Thought”, have been advanced in A.-
V. Pietarinen, Signs of Logic. Peircean Themes on the Philosophy of Languages, Games, and
Communication, New York: Springer, 2006, and A.-V. Pietarinen, “Moving Pictures of Thought II:
Graphs, Games, and Pragmaticism’s Proof”, Semiotica 186 (2011), pp. 315-331.
184
“Letter to Paul Carus” - “Draft” [1909; manuscript in Max Fisch, Peirce, Semeiotic and
Pragmatism (eds. Ketner, Kloesel), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, p.372].
185
EP 2.398: “Since Peirce’s conclusion amounts to a paraphrase of his definition of pragmatism, his
proof [of pragmaticism] is complete”.
186
“Pragmatism” [1907; EP 2.418].
187
“This step of adopting a hypothesis as being suggested by the facts, is what I call abduction”, in:
“On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents especially from Testimonies” [1901; HP
2.732] (first italics are ours).
188
“Harvard Lectures” [1903; PPM 249].
189
Ibid. [1903; PPM 245]. Abduction, as fully controlled logical inference, has been finally studied
with all due rigour of contemporary mathematical logic in Atocha Aliseda-Llera, “Seeking
Explanations: Abduction in Logic, Philosophy of Science and Artificial Intelligence”, Ph.D. Thesis,
Stanford University, 1997.
190
“On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents especially from Testimonies” [1901;
HP 2.753-754].
191
It is the outstanding case of the reverse mathematics program (1970-2000) of Friedman and
Simpson, which has located minimal and natural subsystems of second-order arithmetic fully
equivalent (deduction and retroduction) to relatively complex theorems in mathematical practice
(Bolzano-Weierstrass or Hahn-Banach, for example). See Stephen Simpson, Subsystems of Second
Order Arithmetic, New York: Springer, 1999. Simpson’s monograph was one of the more awaited
texts in logic in the last two decades of the 20th century, and, once again, it harmonizes perfectly with
many peircean motifs.
192
“On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents especially from Testimonies” [1901;
HP 2,726].
193
Peirce’s “cathedral” is eminently accumulative: the intuitions of the decade 1900-1910 on
processes of abductive optimization rise over Peirce’s deep work in the algebra of logic (1870-1885).
“Normal forms” appear in the article “On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of
Notation” [1885; W 5.182-185], one of the most outstanding papers in all the history of logic. Peirce’s
thought is a continuum which fuses very diverse breaches in its evolution, since 1859 (“Diagram of
the IT” [1859; W 1.530], where a diagram draws, towards the future, the anatomy of its later modal
triadization) until 1911 (“Letter to A.D. Risteen” [1911; reference in Roberts, op.cit., p.135], where a
sketch records, towards the past, the anatomy of its architectonics).
194
“Peirce was never able to find a way to utilize the continuum concept effectively. The magnificent
synthesis which the theory of continuity seemed to promise somehow always eluded him, and the
shining vision of the great system always remained a castle in the air”, in: Murray Murphey, The
Development of Peirce’s Philosophy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961, p. 407. Consider,
nevertheless, his new preface to the reissue of his pioneering work: “On some matters I was
subsequently able to understand Peirce better, and this is particularly true of Peirce’s later work. Peirce
was more successful in achieving a coherent system than I thought in 1961” (2nd ed., Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Co., 1993, p. v).

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CHAPTER V
EXISTENTIAL GRAPHS AND A LOGIC OF CONTINUITY

Peirce’s graphs may be considered as one of the most original and profound
contributions in the history of logic. Their originality springs from their coherent
situation inside Peirce’s architectonics, where they help in answering some of the
hardest questions in Peirce’s system of philosophy: continuity, semeiosis,
pragmaticism, flux and transit theories. Their profoundness comes from an
exceptional combination of syntactic simplicity (straightforward rules of formation),
pragmatic plasticity (universal deformation rules) and semantic richness
(sophisticated models in topology, continuous logics, complex variables, Category
Theory). In the rest of the book, we will be addressing those originality and
profoundness, with an aim at the completion of three central tasks: (i) following
chapter IV, make explicit reflections and transits between global architectonics and
local concretions in the graphs, (ii) describe many links between syntactics and
pragmatics in the construction of the graphs, with several ensuing epistemological
inquiries, in particular, an emerging notion of horotics (term due to Roberto Perry,
from horos, border, limit), (iii) explore the full richness of the structural mathematics
implicit in the graphs, thanks to diverse partial models (semantics) related to
representational problems.

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V.1. Pragmaticist continuity

Two diverging tendencies in Peirce’s reception have found, on one hand, a

disordered cumulus of non systematic reflections, as diverse as imaginative, or a
complex architectonics, systematic and structured in spite of its unfinished character,
on the other hand. We will not enter here on the debate, but we will assume, as fair
hypothesis, the second tendency: Peirce’s system may be considered as an
architectonic endeavour, to be investigated as a structured whole. One of our central
objectives will thus be to consolidate the appropriate couplings for the scaffolding
apparatus on the basis of their reflections in the existential graphs, and of the
introduction of contemporary mathematics tools (non-classical logics, Category
Theory, sheaves, complex variables) to partially model those reflections. It will be an
scaffolding distant from Foundations (and thus, receded from analytic tendencies in
Set Theory), “a castle in the air” which emphasizes structural gluings, opening a truly
novel way of agglutinating knowledge. Following Murphey’s metaphor, Peirce’s
system deserves in fact to be understood, not as a construction with vertical
foundations, like the Eiffel Tower, but rather as a structure traversed by horizontal
and transversal bonds, like Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque: “a castle in the air”,
translucent and without foundations, characteristic of 21st Century.
With the existential graphs, in a local, bounded context, Peirce succeeds in his
endeavor for attaining a definition of several prominent tendencies of his thought.
The very idea of elaborating reflections of the global (architectonics) into the local
(graphs) is an immediate consequence of the transversal ligatures of the system
(pragmaticist maxim, three categories, universal semeiotics, indetermination/
determination adjunction, triadic classification of the sciences), a web of ligatures
which produces natural hierarchies between well communicated regions and levels.
Peirce’s systems of graphs, which he considered his chef d’oeuvre, reflect iconically
some of the more fruitful crossings of this philosophical system. In fact, Alpha’s
sheet of assertion, continuous sheet on which the graphs are to be marked, acts as
icon to reflect the continuity of Reality (thirdness), while Beta’s line of identity,

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continuous stroke which opens the possibility to quantify over qualities, acts as icon
to reflect the continuity of Existence (secondness). In this way, for example, a real,
third continuum can be postulated, thought and known, even before some existence,
second marks would be imagined (Peirce’s “Scholastic Realism”). Also, the
fundamental rules which ensure the radical novelty of the graphs –the iteration and
deiteration rules– are technical renderings of the plastic, osmotic machinery of
Peirce’s system, truly trans-disciplinary and often brilliantly original thanks,
precisely, to translations and deformations of concepts between diverse disciplines.
Finally, the axioms for the graphs show that existence (i.e. the line of identity) is,
simultaneously, a continuity breach in the Real general (blank sheet) and a
continuous ligature in the particular (end points of the line). The identity lines, sub-
continuous reflections of the sheet, when marked reflexively on the general
continuum, allow to construct the passage from “essence” to “existence”. The
elementary axioms of the graphs support thus the idea –basic in Philosophy
(Presocratics, Peirce, Heidegger)195– that a first reflection of “Nothingness on
Nothing” may be the initial spark which generates knowledge.
Peirce mentioned, with extraordinary intuition, that the existential graphs
provide a full “Apology of Pragmaticism” (see figure 21, with prior and subsequent
discussions). In fact, as already mentioned, knowledge may be progressively
determined over Peirce’s continuum (understood as a general space of pure
possibilities196) through universal action-reaction processes: insertion/extraction,
iteration/deiteration, yes/no dialectics. Modeling the pragmatic maxim, both
connectives and quantifiers are deformed by universal processes which render
apparently different rules in the Alpha and Beta contexts. The iteration/deiteration
dialectics cover, for example, both the discrete Alpha and the continuous Beta
realms. Linguistic distances are just breaches of an underlying pragmaticist
continuity. In turn, the Apology shows, through local graphs, the global coherence of
synechism. But even beyond the classical context, as we will often see in the
remaining chapters, we can count on strong mathematical supports, in order to assert
that the synechistic hypothesis has a much wider spectrum of validity, through

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diverse alternative forms of a Logic of Continuity: Peirce’s continuum, intuitionistic
continuum, category theoretic continuum, sheaves continuum.

V.2. Horotics and plasticity

Horotics, the understanding of borders and boundaries of knowledge, should serve as

a mediating third between analysis and synthesis. Between decomposition (analytics)
and composition (synthetics), the transitional forms between elements and relations
often govern crucial currents of thought. In particular, many moments of creative
emergence, still vague, still in transition between blurred and structured states of
information, form part of what should be a general horotic thinking. In the existential
graphs, very diverse horotic manifestations are at play. The blank sheet,
progressively marked on, witnesses the emergence of logical truths. Cuts are iconical
signs of the horos (border) itself. In fact, not just Alpha cuts serve as marks for
de/limitation and extra/limitation (structural germ for the iteration/deiteration rules),
but also Gamma cuts, with their wide modal interpretability, serve precisely as
transitional mixtures, as horotic marks between negation and contingency: in odd
regions they can be completed towards Alpha cuts, in even regions they can be half
erased from Alpha cuts. The iteration/deiteration of Beta’s identity line is the
paradigm of a continuity process, but also, when crossing Alpha cuts, it enters in a
new horotic landscape, which corresponds to the rendering of quantifier normal
forms. The very handling of the graphs, through their formation/deformation rules,
constitutes another, profound horotic expression: a mediating link between syntactics
(language) and pragmatics (rules), independent of underlying semantics. The graphic
and formal power of borders (Alpha and Gamma cuts) and limits (Beta’s identity
line) guarantees the emergence, life and evolution of signs, independently of later
interpretations.
Between analysis and synthesis, the existential graphs are to be situated in
horotic land. Explicitly introduced by Peirce as fine analytical instruments –“(...) a
method for representing propositions (1) as simple as possible (...), (2) as iconically,

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or diagrammatically and (3) as analytically as possible”197–, nevertheless the
existential graphs also involve strong synthetic features: (i) in the last Peirce, a
synthetic encompassing of logical thought, through a global understanding of
pragmatic rules, (ii) in semantics beyond Peirce, a synthetic rapprochement to
Category Theory (see infra). The existential graphs provide a web of mediations
between polarities of mathematical thought. Based on a convenient visual intuition, a
plastic theorematic capability, and a practical simplicity198, the existential graphs
combine the “best of each world”.
Peirce’s cenopythagorean categories try to propagate novelty, creativity,
originality (“ceno” from the Greek kaíno, “fresh”199). A contemporary reading of that
freshness, proposed by Roberto Perry, suggests a slight deformation of the root
“ceno” towards “caeno”, from the Latin caenum, “mud”, “mixture”. In fact, Peirce’s
architectonics may well be understood as the more sophisticated Modern
philosophical and scientific system oriented towards a fresh and creative
understanding of knowledge blends, that is, of horotics. Far from illusory purisms,
final dissections, or “clear waters”, and closer to the feasts of imagination, Peirce
studies the many contaminations of knowledge, through complementary points of
view: (A) analytical, “prescision” techniques, and (B) synthetic, gluing techniques.
These can actually be enumerated through separation (A) and iteration (B) in the
triadic classification of sciences, contextual differentiation (A) and pragmatic
reintegration (B) in the pragmaticist maxim, syntactic bounds (A) and pragmatic rules
(B) in diverse logical systems, etc. Along this back-and-forth horos, along a web of
borders and frontiers, Peirce’s genius grows in full agreement with Bakhtin’s dictum:
“Every cultural act lives essentially on the boundaries, and it derives its seriousness
and significance from this fact. Separated from these boundaries it loses ground and
becomes vacuous, arrogant, degenerates and dies”200. The arrogance and degeneracy
of some badly labeled “hard” currents of Analytical Philosophy may be an example
to oppose to Peirce’s “mudded” pragmaticism.
A beautiful quote, hardly used in spite of its originality and fertility, shows
how the cenopythagorean categories can be understood, in an etymological way, as

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full horotic modalities, around a study of origins, obstructions and transits of
knowledge, that is, a study of contaminating acts through dynamic boundaries:

The simplicity and pervasiveness of the categories render metaphorical

designations quite impossible, since such a term, if at all appropriate, would
contain the very category. There can be no resemblance to a category. A
metaphorical name would probably contain the category in the first syllable, and
the rest of the word would be padding. I prefer, therefore, to borrow a word, or
still better, to compose one, which, etymologically, if it may be, but by similarity
with familiar words, indispensably, shall suggest a number of shapes in which
the category is prominent. I propose to take the following terms on probation.
Originality is being such as that being is, regardless of aught else. Obsistence
(suggesting obviate, object, obstinate, obstacle, insistence, resistance, etc.) is
that wherein secondness differs from firstness; or, is that element which taken in
connection with Originality, makes one thing such as another compels it to be.
Transuasion (suggesting translation, transaction, transfusion, transcendental,
etc.) is mediation, or the modification of firstness and secondness by thirdness,
taken apart from the secondness and firstness; or, is being in creating
Obsistence.201

The very ancient roots OR (from er1, “to move”, “set in motion”), OB (epi, “towards”,
“opposed”), and TRANS (from tera, terh, trare, “through”, “pass”) are thus hidden in
the archetypical bottom of the cenopythagorean categories. They capture concisely,
in their kernel, the basic characteristics of first, second and third. More precisely,
following a reading of Watkins202 suggested by Roberto Perry, OR (Latin or!r!, “to
arise”, “appear”, “be born”) points to emergence, OB (Greek epi, Latin ob) subjects
those emergencies to polar tensions, and TRANS (Latin trans, “passage”, “crossing”)
elongates the polarities along different webs of passages.
Horotics is linked to ideas of “continuity” and “plasticity”, understood as
“generality” instances in a Peircean way: “Continuity is nothing but perfect
generality of a law of relationship”203 – “But we must search for this generalizing
tendency rather in such departments of nature where we find plasticity and evolution
still at work”204. Continuity is obtained as a correlative “perfect generality”, that is, a
generic contiguity where individuations, particulars, actual marks are erased. In the
continuum, beyond an object’s singularity or its external contingencies, the structure
and the intrinsic richness of concepts take precedence. On the other hand, the
progressive forces which transform the particular into a habit (“generalizing
tendency”) may be better observed in plastic contexts. Where plasticity is at work,

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beyond the statics of particulars, dynamic transformations and extrinsic evolution are
at hand. In some sort of simplified Pascalian oscillation, the horotic dialectics
continuity/plasticity can then be codified through the corresponding “reasons”:

continuity plasticity
--------------------------------- : ---------------------------------------- .
general intrinsic structure general extrinsic transformation

Plasticity requires postulating a space of possible deformations. Those

deformations enter the realm of esthetics (“OB-sistent” firstness: 2.2.1 position in the
classification of sciences), when they are oriented to enlarge the summum bonum
(“process of evolution whereby the existent comes more and more to embody
generals”205, that is, a sort of reasonable continuous growing of potentiality/
generality). Continuity, on its side, provides the realm of all possibilia, thanks
precisely to Peirce’s continuum, generic, supermultitudinary, reflexive, modal. An
initial investigation of that continuum is done inside mathematics (“OR-iginal” form
of firstness: position number 1 in the classification). Peirce’s “bog” acquires then its
reason (“its seriousness and significance”) when continuity and plasticity begin to
combine, to contaminate each other.
Some transformations (or hierarchic mixtures, in Lautman’s sense206) of
continuity and plasticity inside Peirce’s graphs are particularly impressing. In fact,
Peirce’s chef d’oeuvre approaches the summum bonum with a strong, reflexive force,
since the iterative development of the graphs can itself be understood as a canonical
form of continuous growing. The very genesis of the graphs shows how they emerge
progressively, always amplifying their potential. Coming from a bounded
diagrammatical experiment on quantifiers (Letter to Mitchell, 1882), going through
general variations on mathematical form (Commentaries to Kempe, 1889), until
arriving to the invention of existential graphs (Logic Notebook, 1896), and finally
organizing the ALPHA, BETA and GAMMA systems (Lowell Lectures, 1903), Peirce’s
journey shows a pervasive growing of expressive, inventive and demonstrative
possibilities.

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The appearances of continuity and plasticity’s horotic themes in the Collected
Papers are scarce, but fundamental. In 1903, the line of identity, which represents the
existential quantifier, is considered in all its threshold richness, since it appears at the
same time as a symbol (representing a general law), as an index (fixing an orientation
of attention), and as an icon (“it appears as nothing but a continuum of dots, and the
fact of the identity of a thing, seen under two aspects, consists merely in the
continuity of being in passing from one apparition to another”207). The continuity of
the passage between two points, through a line, forces the identity of opposites
("x"y(x=y)). Going beyond that, in 1906, Peirce asserts that diverse forms of
continuity incarnate, respectively, in the blank sheet and in the line of identity (see
note 159). There, some horotic variations over a generic continuum open the way to
two forms of continuity: “linear” continuity, when considering Beta’s line of identity,
and “planar” continuity, when considering Alpha’s assertive universe. When the
systems are developed, it may be observed how the “generic” –a potential gluing of
all possibilities– diverts itself through two actual operative modes, apparently
contradictory: in Alpha’s context, break operations over the continuum (cuts,
markings of propositional letters), while in Beta’s context, linear extensions or
retractions (transformations of the line of identity).
Following Plato, this Multiplicity is really an architectonic Unity:

In the gamma part of the subject all the old kinds of signs take new forms (...)
Thus in place of a sheet of assertion, we have a book of separate sheets, tacked
together at points, if not otherwise connected. For our alpha sheet, as a whole,
represents simply a universe of existent individuals, and the different parts of the
sheet represent facts or true assertions made concerning that universe. At the cuts
we pass into other areas, areas of conceived propositions which are not realized.
In these areas there may be cuts where we pass into worlds which, in the
imaginary worlds of the outer cuts, are themselves represented to be imaginary
and false, but which may, for all that, be true, and therefore continuous with the
sheet of assertion itself, although this is uncertain. You may regard the ordinary
blank sheet of assertion as a film upon which there is, as it were, an undeveloped
photograph of the facts in the universe. I do not mean a literal picture, because
its elements are propositions, and the meaning of a proposition is abstract and
altogether of a different nature from a picture. But I ask you to imagine all the
true propositions to have been formulated; and since facts blend into one another,
it can only be in a continuum that we can conceive this to be done. This
continuum must clearly have more dimensions than a surface or even than a
solid; and we will suppose it to be plastic, so that it can be deformed in all sorts

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of ways without the continuity and connection of parts being ever ruptured. Of
this continuum the blank sheet of assertion may be imagined to be a
photograph208.

Carrying on Peirce’s metaphors, one could say that GAMMA graphs and BETA
transformations are forms of cinematography, while ALPHA graphs are forms of
photography. A plastic montage theory (which brings the graphs nearer to Walter
Benjamin’s Passages de Paris and to diverse theoretic film considerations209) should
then govern Peirce’s graphic representations. Two ways are, in principle, feasible: to
construct (in a practical way) the cinematographical roll as a gluing of photographs,
or, to imagine (in an ideal way) the film as a virtual continuum which produces, cut
by cut, the photographs. Peirce’s scholastic realism, with all its plastic
transformations, forces us to consider a contaminating mediation between those
alternatives. In fact, a third way, technically suggested by those cuts where “we pass
into other areas”, is easy to grasp. Our knowledge modes are nothing but deformed
passages between a continuum which exceeds us (the film of evolutionary
cosmology, for instance) and partial, local phenomenological representations (the
cinematographical rolls). Along the cuts we pass into other areas: we jump from our
cinematographic construction, illusively continuous, to the conscience of a film, truly
continuous, where we are just insignificant actors, and which seems to be an instance
of Novalis’ general flux of Nature.
Peirce introduced later his tinctures strategy210 as another graphic resort to
represent realm of possibilia, similar to the richness of the book of sheets. Instead of
crossing, from a given sheet, through a cut, into another world, Peirce proposed to
tincture fragments of the actual sheet and to construct a tincture calculus to handle
passages between possible worlds. Virtual plastic madness of a weary Peirce, one
would say, if it wasn’t that, a century later, Jay Zeman would actually construct such
a calculus211, where accesses between worlds are obtained through additive color
contaminations (access from blue to green allowed thanks to adding yellow,
obstruction from green to blue, impossible to obtain adding new colors, etc.) As we
see, many problems linked to horotics in Peirce’s system possess surprising
concretions inside the existential graphs. In many senses, Peirce’s chef d’oeuvre

110
includes extraordinary reflecting capabilities. Privileged local laboratory of the
global system, the graphs acquire a singular relevance, not just in the bounded range
of logic and mathematics, but also along the wide general inquiries of thought.
Beyond architectonic reflections, structural transits and horotic modulations,
that is, fluxions of forms, the existential graphs help also to study some fundamental
grounds in philosophy and mathematics. We have seen that some epistemological
perspectives on the graphs force us to adopt a dynamic posture, to balance analysis
and synthesis. Further, a powerful metaphysics emerges in the laboratory of the
graphs. Understanding “metaphysics” in its original sense (something “beyond”
physics), or in the “linguistic turn” sense (something “beyond” language), one can
see how the existential graphs submerge themselves fully in a metaphysic ocean: the
waters of continuity and synechism. In that continuum laboratory, graphs are not just
physical marks on the sheet, but, above all, residues of the strong polar tensions
which agitate their underlying continuous medium. The graphs’ pragmatic rules are
not just fragments of language games, but, above all, instances of big, abstract
dialectics. The graphs, with all their figurative power, serve precisely as sight
witnesses for what we do not see (bringing us near to Tarkovsky’s films212 or Viola’s
videos213): the underlying continuum which reintegrates the physical world with our
phenomenological and cognitive endeavors. Possibly, the unending bottom of the
graphs is related to that unusual visual power which nevertheless points to the
limitations of vision, profound antinomy which propels the richness of Peirce’s
diagrammatical thought. Following Florenski, one of the major thinkers of the 20th
century, any really profound knowledge must be antinomic214, and it is a compelling
fact that the existential graphs embody, in an exact way, that antinomic metaphysical
ground.
The visual antinomies hidden in the graphs are also very close to the major
antinomies which impulse the development of mathematics. The foundational aporia
of mathematics, that is, the unsolvable antinomy between the Discrete and the
Continuous215, lies deeply in the double unity and contraposition of ALPHA and BETA
systems. In fact, the hidden semantics beyond the graphs, that Peirce could not

111
imagine, are the ones that express better the multivalent mathematical bottom,
underlying to the graphs. Multiple models –topological (Burch), intuitionistic
(Oostra), category theoretic (Brady & Trimble), complex variable and sheaf theoretic
(Zalamea)– are just beginning to reveal an unsuspected mathematical richness. Later,
we will explore in detail some of those mathematical structures, but, from the aerial
perspective adopted in this chapter, we can already point out some of the major
tensions at play.
Firstly, Peirce’s topological thought, particularly attentive to a multitude of
semeiotical transits exemplified in the graphs (continuity/cut, iteration/deiteration,
forth/back), opens the way to their contemporary topological understanding, as a
synthetic entangling of topological relations, far distant from an analytic
accumulation of set-theoretic relations. The central result in Burch’s monograph216
proves mathematically that thirdness is required in a topological combinatorics, as
Peirce had advocated many times, and cannot be reduced to a discrete combinatorics
of units and couples217. In this way, the existential graphs necessarily embody a
synthetic counterpart, beyond its analytical origins. Both the method (pragmatic) and
the bottom (semantic) of the graphs turn then to be pendulous, third, horotic.
Secondly, Oostra has recently obtained what may be considered as the
greatest inventive advancement218 in the existential graphs since their creation.
Extending the language with a new graphic symbol and extending canonically
Peirce’s pragmatic rules for the new language, Oostra has been able to create diverse
systems of intuitionistic existential graphs, underlying ALPHA. The new symbol, the
“scroll”, a gluing of two nested Alpha cuts, was originally used by Peirce, but then
considered –by him and his successors, Roberts and Zeman– equivalent to the two
disjoined cuts, something which does not happen in Oostra’s systems. Thus, the
emergence of genuine intuitionism in the graphs becomes strongly linked with
Burch’s “topological logic”, since it is well known (Tarski, 1930’s) that the intrinsic
logic of topological spaces is intuitionistic and not classical. Intuitionistic logic, the
logic of change (Kripke non static models), becomes thus naturally linked with the
dynamics of Peirce’s architectonics.

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Thirdly, since Brady & Trimble’s work219, what may be considered the
natural models for systems of existential graphs are beginning to emerge: certain
classes of categories where one can mimic with precision –thanks to the very
structural axioms of the categories at play– the transference principles of the graphs.
In particular, Brady and Trimble have shown that (i) behind ALPHA lie monoidal
categories (MacLane), algebraic theories (Lawvere) and functorial forces (Kelly), (ii)
behind BETA lie string diagrams (Joyal) and Beck-Chevalley conditions. In the next
chapters, we will observe more carefully those surprising phenomena. but one can
guess already all the mathematical richness implicit in the graphs. The fact that the
web of transit processes of the graphs –a profound, but until now marginal and fairly
unknown creation of the mind– approaches structurally a parallel web of transit
processes in Category Theory –recognized, instead, as a major breakthrough in 20th
century mathematics– situates Peirce’s graphs in a central place, unexpected at first
sight.
Fourthly, following a similar strategy of locating anew the place of existential
graphs inside mathematics, our work220 points to another natural emergence of
graphs’ models inside the theory of complex variables. If complex functions may be
well considered as the heart of mathematics (full irradiation to other mathematical
regions, from logic to number theory, functional analysis, differential equations or
non commutative geometry), the vicinity of Peirce’s graphs to complex variables
reinforces its unexpected centrality. In particular, we will see below how we can
model some typical processes of the graphs through fundamental constructions in
complex variables: sheaves of germs of analytic and meromorphic functions (linked
to ALPHA), analytic continuation (linked to BETA) and Riemann’s surfaces (inked to
GAMMA). The situation of Peirce’s graphs seems then to be truly exceptional in
many senses, either architectonical, philosophical or mathematical. The ongoing
sliding of the graphs’ place, back-and-forth between margins and center, witnesses
their huge ductility. Their insularity is just apparent, and the recognition of their fair
position will depend on learning to circumnavigate better the continuum ocean which
surrounds them.

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195
The study of passages from Essence to Existence in Modern mathematics has been studied in depth
in Lautman’s Theses (1937-1938), available in Albert Lautman, Les mathématiques, les Idées et le
réel physique, Paris: Vrin, 2006 (Spanish, critical presentation of Lautman’s Complete Works in
Albert Lautman, Ensayos sobre la dialéctica, estructura y unidad de las matemáticas modernas (ed.
Zalamea), Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2011).
196
See Fernando Zalamea, El continuo peirceano, Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2001,
Jérôme Havenel, Logique et mathématique du continu chez Charles Sanders Peirce, Ph. D. Thesis,
EHESS, Paris, 2006, and Matthew Moore (ed.), New Essays on the Mathematical Philosophy of C. S.
Peirce, Chicago: Open Court, 2010.
197
“The Bedrock beneath Pragmaticism” [1906; CP 4.561, note 1].
198
Arnold Oostra, at the Universidad del Tolima, has taught several years, in parallel, propositional
calculi through ALPHA and through Hilbert’s systems, with a much clearer understanding for the
students when the Peircean way is adopted.
199
See [MS 899, c. 1904], an unpublished manuscript, translated in Rossella Fabbrichesi, Peirce –
Categorie, Bari: Laterza, 1992, p. 129.
200
Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Art” (1924), in: M.
Bakhtin, Art and Answerability. Early Philosophical Essays, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.
201
“Minute Logic” [1902; CP 2.88-89].
202
Calvert Watkins (ed.), The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2000, pp. 23, 91.
203
“Synechism” [1901; CP 6.172].
204
“Eight Class Lectures on Reasoning and the Logic of Things” (Cambridge Lectures) [1898; CP
7.515].
205
“What Pragmatism is” [1905; CP 5.433].
206
Albert Lautman sensed all the importance of mediations and mixtures (“mixtes”) in Modern
mathematics. For Lautman, the mixtes were precisely related to creative processes, where some
breaches of continuity and some plasticity turns inaugurated new notions in mathematics. See note
195.
207
“Logical Tracts, No. 2” [c. 1903; CP 4.448].
208
“Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed” (Lowell Lectures) [1903; CP 4.512, our
emphasis].
209
See Felicity Colman, Film, Theory and Philosophy. The Key Thinkers, Durham: Acumen, 2009.
210
“Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism” [1905; CP 4.553]
211
Jay Zeman, “The Tinctures and Implicit Quantification over Worlds”, in Jacqueline Brunning, Paul
Forster (eds.), The Rule of Reason. The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1997.
212
“Images are an impression of truth, to be perceived with our blind eyes”. Andrei Tarkovski, Le
temps scellé, Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2004, p. 123.
213
Bill Viola, “Sight Unseen: Enlightened Squirrels and Fatal Experiments”, in Bill Viola, Reasons for
Knocking at an Empty House. Writings 1973-1994, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
214
See Fernando Zalamea, Por una re-visión de la mirada creativa. Imágenes, saber y continuidad en
Warburg, Florenski, Auerbach, Merleau-Ponty, Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2008.
215
René Thom, “L’aporia fondatrice delle matematiche”, Enciclopedia Einaudi, Torino: Einaudi,
1982, pp. 1133-1146.
216
Robert Burch, A Peircean Reduction Thesis. The Foundations of Topological Logic, Lubbock:
Texas Tech University Press, 1991.
217
Burch’s breakthrough lies precisely in the fact that, from a topological point of view, triadic
relations do not reduce to binary and unary relations (something that, instead, does happen in Set
Theory).
218
Arnold Oostra, “Los gráficos Alfa de Peirce aplicados a la lógica intuicionista”, Cuadernos de
Sistemática Peirceana 2 (2010), to appear. Arnold Oostra, “Gráficos existenciales Beta

114
intuicionistas”, Cuadernos de Sistemática Peirceana 3 (2011), to appear. Arnold Oostra, “A Lattice of
Intuitionistic Existential Graphs Systems”, in preparation.
219
Geraldine Brady & Todd Trimble, “A Categorical Interpretation of C. S. Peirce’s Propositional
Logic Alpha”, Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 149 (2000), 213-239. Geraldine Brady & Todd
Trimble, “A String Diagram Calculus for Predicate Logic and C. S. Peirce’s System Beta”, preprint
(2000).
220
Fernando Zalamea, “Towards a complex variable interpretation of Peirce’s existential graphs”, in
Mats Bergman et.al. (eds.), Ideas in Action. Proceedings of the Applying Peirce Conference,
Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatism Network, 2010, pp. 254-264. Fernando Zalamea, “A Category-Theoretic
Reading of Peirce’s System: Pragmaticism, Continuity and The Existential Graphs”, in Matthew
Moore (ed.), New Essays on Peirce’s Mathematical Philosophy, Chicago: Open Court, 2010, pp. 203-
233.

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CHAPTER VI
SKELETONS AND CATEGORIES.
ALPHA: CLASSICAL PROPOSITIONAL CALCULUS
AND INTUITIONISTIC VARIATIONS

We review in this chapter the emergence (Logic Notebook) and consolidation (Lowell
Lectures) of the classical Alpha existential graphs, the horotic transformations of
their skeletons, and their intuitionistic variations, following Oostra’s new handling of
the scroll and Brady & Trimble’s investigations around the underlying intuitionistic
categories.

VI.1. Emergence

Some lines to represent binary relations, drawn in an early letter to Mitchell

(1882)221, seem to be the first appearance of a Peircean diagram destined to be used
in some logical calculus (a task adopted by illustrious predecessors: Llull, Leibniz,
Euler, Lambert, Hamilton, Venn, etc.)222 From the point of view of the genesis of
invention, then Beta precedes historically Alpha. Nevertheless, in the sequel, we will
adopt the conceptual precedence of Alpha over Beta, in the sense of their lesser
logical complexity: propositional calculus prior to relational calculus. In fact, when
diverse entries on the existential graphs will be written for the first time (1898) in the

116
Logic Notebook223, these will concentrate at the beginning on presentations of what
would soon become the system ALPHA.
The very first appearance of the graphs in the Logic Notebook, “Existential
graphs: a system of logical expression – The constitutive conventions of this
language” (June 9 1898), emphasizes the “dynamic, or experiential, reaction” (p.
102r) of the signs at play. Thus, the graphs force a dynamic gesture from the reader,
as the global architectonics require. Some days later, after several rewritings (pp.
103r-113r), Peirce proposes some “Basic formal rules” (June 15, p. 114r). Of the
eleven rules then advanced, the first (I-IV) are related to general markings, the
penultimate (VIII-X) explain the use of relational symbols and the line of identity,
the last (XI: “Some possible graph cannot be written”) ensures the consistency of the
system (another premonitory stroke of Peirce’s modern views), while, at the center,
rules V-VIII deal exclusively with Alpha negation, in a sort of intuition of the
topological and dynamic character of the graphs. (V) expresses a weak transposition,
intuitionistically valid: if A transforms to B, a cut (“oval”) around B transforms in a
cut around A; (VI) states the introduction of double negation, also intuitionistically
valid: any graph can be transformed in another graph with a double cut around; (VII)
is a form of expressing the erasure of double negation, only classically valid: any
graph may be proved equivalent to another graph inside a cut.
From the beginning of manipulations on graphs, we can then see how a form
(“dynamic (...) reaction”) and a bottom (rules V-VI, topological and intuitionistic)
correspond to each other, in a detailed prescision of the TRANS program. We will
show in this chapter that it is not a casual correspondence, but one which lies deeply
in the entire construction of the graphs. Independently that intuitionistic logic had not
yet invented (or discovered) in Peirce’s time, our central contention is, in fact, that
Peirce was thinking topologically224 and intuitionistically225 avant la lettre.
In “A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic”, a supplement to the Lowell
Lectures (1903), Peirce presents systems ALPHA and BETA, pointing to incipient
features in GAMMA. In ALPHA’s “Convention III”226, Peirce describes the Alpha cut
as delimiting an area “severed from the sheet”. A few lines ahead, that passage to the

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back, to the verso of the sheet, is linked to the pseudograph (defined before as an
“expression (...) of an impossible state of things”227), and Peirce proceeds to define
(as he had already done algebraically, in 1885) what would become the intuitionistic
negation:

The filling up of any entire area with whatever writing material (ink, chalk, etc.)
may be used shall be termed obliterating that area, and shall be understood to be
an expression of the pseudograph on that area. Corollary. Since an obliterated
area may be made indefinitely small, a single cut will have the effect of denying
the entire graph in its area. For to say that if a given proposition is true, everything
is true, is equivalent to denying that proposition.228

To negate A (“life” on verso) corresponds then to affirm that from A (“life”

on recto) anything can be deduced, that is, we have a form of the intuitionistic
negation (¬A : A7F). Most interesting, negation may be obtained by infinitesimal
deformation, making the pseudograph indefinitely small (“Corollary”). Negation
occurs thus as the result of a topological transformation of the impossible. This
extraordinary vision of an intuitionistic and topological negation is confirmed in
another of the many trial experiments to render ALPHA:

Convention No. 10. The pseudograph, or expression in this system of a proposition

implying that every proposition is true, may be drawn as a black spot entirely
filling the close in which it is. Since the size of signs has no significance, the
blackened close may be drawn invisibly small.229

At left appears (A7F), at right (¬A), and from one to the other we obtain an
equivalence by a topological transformation of the pseudograph. Its transit towards
the “invisibly small” shows that dualities/cuts/ovals are just limit situations of
indeterminate and vague states, another embodiment of the general architectonics.
What seems characteristic of ALPHA is to be able to express, in a manageable, simple
calculable way, an array of ideal limits which occur in breaking processes
(pseudograph, cuts) of the continuum (sheet of assertion). The dialectics of the
foundational antinomy –continuous/discrete– acquires a truly innovative turn.

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VI.2. Horotic skeletons

The existential graphs’ systems provide profound diagrammatic invariants for the
horotic dialectics between recto and verso. In fact, in a memory for the National
Academy of Sciences, where he tackles GAMMA, Peirce writes:

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.230

As we will see in chapter VII, this unique “mode of combination” shows, in Beta,
that the front of the sheet covers indefinite states, that is, existentials ("), while the
back explores general states, universals (!). On the other hand, from an ALPHA
perspective, the mutual limit (cut) is the one that progressively determines
propositions. In fact, propositions must be written using nested Alpha cuts, since
ALPHA insertion rules indicate that only in odd regions, that is, on versos, new graphs
can be inserted.
Horos is the indispensable concept underlying ALPHA information transits.
Now, the concept becomes incarnate through a dual, polar diagram, that is, Alpha’s
classical cut, but also, as we will see further in this chapter, it can be realized through
a triadic, dialectic diagram, Alpha’s intuitionistic scroll. The horos –border,
boundary, frontier– can classically section (“sever”) knowledge, but it can also
intuitionistically mediate. An strong understanding of that mediation is ALPHA’s
bipolar iteration/deiteration: the simultaneous back-and-forth through negation,
expressed by the law p%¬q G p%¬(p%q). Going even further, without knowing
Peirce’s ideas, Xavier Caicedo has shown231 how, beyond iteration/deiteration, lies a
general back-and-forth which allows to define an arbitrary intuitionistic connective
H: the “congruence” law p%Hq G p%H(p%q). The horotic pendulum, a double
transit of information, lies thus in the very bottom of intuitionistic processes.
Behind ALPHA’s iteration/deiteration, valid both classically and
intuitionistically, lies another, much more general, horotic transference principle,

119
fundamental for Peirce’s architectonics. Coming and going along a wide spectrum of
boundaries –frontiers in the triadic map of knowledge, ramification points in the
special sciences, evolutive links between determination and indetermination, ribbons
between resonableness and creativity, borders in axiomatic calculi of topological
logic– Peirce’s thought reveals some generic osmotic modes that cross over both the
phaneron and our phanerology. An archetypical form of those modes appears when
some relational context R is determined, an additional piece of information p is
inserted inside R, a fabric of actions-reactions is impelled, the obtained changes are
registered, and, finally, the datum p is erased, deiterating it back away from R. It is a
strong instantiation of the horotic pendulum, one which Peirce constantly uses in his
creative processes. Actually, it increases the summum bonum (continuous growing of
potentiality) since, in many ways, the context R becomes richer and richer with each
iteration/deiteration act.
The logical, epistemological, even metaphysical consequences of this
“enrichment” are diverse and complex. From a logical point of view, pendulous
iteration/iteration through a boundary serves simultaneously to characterize the
notion of a propositional intuitionistic connective, as we have seen, but also to
advance a calculus of normal forms in first order logic, as we will see in the next
chapter. From an epistemological point of view, the active-reactive oscillation
through a frontier eliminates the possibility of final foundations for knowledge, but,
instead, allows an extremely important orientation inside the relative. From a
metaphysical point of view, the iterative extension of the horos, understood as a
reflexive concept, turned onto itself, gives clues to understand it as a “First
Philosophy”. In reality, the horos approaches a generic and universal thirdness, a
genuine one if it is seen as a border for information transits, or a degenerate one if it
behaves as a cut, in order to section, or sever, information.
Over the continuous bottom of the sheet of assertion, Alpha’s discrete marks
draw basic skeletons which help to adjust, grow and embody many transference
processes. In this way, the “living body” (BETA, GAMMA) lays over a sustaining
“skeleton” (ALPHA). From a mathematical modeling perspective, the entrance of

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Category Theory into the realm of existential graphs helps thus to capture (i) initial
schemes, sketches, skeletons ALPHA, and (ii) subsequent existential embodiments
BETA. In fact, certain categories with generic and free structures (monoids, strengths)
help to model ALPHA, while categories with additional structural tensions, closer to
continuum physics (strings, transference diagrams) help to model BETA. Before
entering into the details of the constructions advanced by Brady & Trimble for
ALPHA, it will be interesting to observe how the very methodology of Category
Theory is intrinsically close to the heart of the existential graphs.
Let us recall the triple objective sought by Peirce with his logic diagrams:
simplicity, iconicity, analyticity232. Category Theory answers, in its initial paradigms,
a triple objective (among others) very close to the objective of the graphs: (i)
simplicity, (ii) iconicity, (iii) syntheticity. In fact, (i) Category Theory first order
axioms are sensibly easier that Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms for Set Theory. On the
other hand, (ii) Category Theory emphasizes visual perspectives where universal
definitions (through existence and uniqueness) force diverse forms of canonicity,
naturality, iconicity. Instead, an important difference would seem to arise with
respect to (iii). Nevertheless, we have remarked how the analyticity of the graphs, on
their recto, is intermingled horotically with their synthetic verso. The synthetic
bottom of the graphs (topological logic, à la Burch) seems to contrast its analytical
forms (diagrammatic sectioning), but, actually, the integration of bottom and form in
the graphs, through the horotic pendulum, happens to be one of its major forces. In
this way, in their very methodological tensions, Category Theory and the existential
graphs approach each other.
Category Theory and Peirce’s graphs answer in a similar way to Thom’s
foundational antinomy of mathematics233: the unsolvable tension of continuity and
discreteness. ALPHA skeletons (either classical or intuitionistic) render discrete a
primordial continuum. Categories (in their natural hierarchies, from regular
categories to topoi, for example) render discrete a primordial geometrization
(classifying topoi). In both cases, the limiting processes turn out to be crucial, and
show how knowledge is generated through successive marks/erasures over an initial

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archetype (not genetic nor historic, but conceptual): either the sheet of assertion or
the free topos. The arkhê (first) propounds a beginning (arkhô) but, above all,
commands (arkhên). In Peirce’s graphs, the blank sheet commands its evolution,
projecting diverse spaces for insertion and iteration. On another hand, universal
definitions in abstract categories command their projection in concrete categories.
Thus, the impressive projective capacity of both graphs and categories grow from
their skeletons, their simplicity, iconicity and horotic plasticity. In turn, that
projective capacity is related to a peculiar universal situation, reflected in the graphs’
ability to integrate multiple logical calculi and in the categories’ ability to integrate
multiple classes of structures.
Now we will look at an interesting skeleton tension –classicism versus
intuitionism– through (i) types of diagrams (classical double cut, intuitionistic
scroll), (ii) types of categories (*-autonomous categories, monoidal categories). In
reality, the skeleton Alpha tension correspond to a thorough philosophical
alternative. The partition of ways –nominalism versus realism– which covers all the
history of philosophy is surprisingly mold in the existential graphs. A nominalist
position would approximate the graphs as forms of language, or logical games,
independent of any such similar fabric in Nature; on the other hand, a realist position
would contemplate them just as fragments of an ubiquitous continuum234. For Peirce,
the second option is the one that must prevail, since the graphs are reflections of an
architectonic synechism, which, in turn, tries to reflect a continuous universal
cosmogony. A situation of the graphs in this broad realistic perspective forces then to
understand classical cuts as fictitious nominalist markings, which, in reality, must
hide realist features of a non dividable continuum. Under that perspective, the
classical cut emerges once more as an “ideal” limit, while other intuitionistic
diagrams, much more “real”, should embrace the underlying topological canvas.

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VI.3. Intuitionistic existential graphs

Those real strokes were discovered by Arnold Oostra in 2007, by purely logical and
mathematical means, guided by his intuitionistic knowledge and topological insights,
independently of any metaphysical speculation (as the ones we are providing here).
The first obstruction that Oostra had to confront was to eliminate ALPHA’s erasure of
double cuts, corresponding to the classical law ¬¬A7A, intuitionistically false
(observe that, in the first presentation of the graphs, given in the Logic Notebook,
June 9 1898, this would correspond to eliminating Rule VII). Unfortunately, a brutal
elimination of erasing double cuts, or Rule VII, damages the good behavior of
deductions: Modus Ponens cannot be deduced in ALPHA. Oostra then realized that a
program of constructing intuitionistic existential graphs would not succeed if just a
modification of rules was explored, since intuitionistic connectives are not definable
from each other(s). An extension of the language had to be imagined, and Oostra
began a search (abduction) of new Alpha diagrammatic signs for implication and
disjunction. After many calculations (deduction) and adjustments (induction), Oostra
proposed the following diagrams:

B
A B A
C

A"B A " (B$C)

intuitionistic implication mixture of intuitionistic implication and disjunction
(to be generalized to n propositions)

Little time later, to our great wonder, we found with Oostra exactly those
same signs, with the same interpretations, in Peirce’s writings (1903):

scroll235 many inloops in one sep236

123
Trying diverse options, Peirce had in fact defined implication in two ways: as a curve
with two nested, glued cuts (“scroll”), or as an inlay of two nested, separated cuts.
The two definitions are classically equivalent (after drawing the scroll with a
continuous stroke, Peirce says that it “may equally be drawn”237 with two disjoint
cuts), but they cannot be so intuitionistically, since A7B (continuous scroll) is not
intuitionistically equivalent to ¬(A%¬B) (discrete double cut). The differences for
intuitionism are crucial, but it is easily understandable that Peirce did not insist on
them, since they were still far from being raised. All in all, Peirce’s continuous Alpha
scroll shows an unfailing topological intuition, underlying the existential graphs
calculi.
The first forms of what Oostra would finish to define as the continuous
strokes appropriate for the development of intuitionistic existential graphs appear
already in the Logic Notebook:

The “scroll” is found in December 11 1900 (pp. 177r, 179v), at some places where
Peirce seems to work on propositional normal forms. The “many inloops in one sep”
occurs in November 26 1902 (p. 235v), in a loose form, not connected to other
calculations in the page. It is clear that only some small buds of the intuitionistic
existential graphs are there present. A long century would be needed before Oostra
would be able to germinate those ideas. The fundamental result238 states that with the
same rules (insertion/erasure, iteration/deiteration, scrolling: a weak form of double
cut) applied to an extended intuitionistic language (Alpha*, including scroll, many
inloops in one sep, and a convention for negation), one can obtain sound and
complete diagrammatic presentations for several intuitionistic intermediate calculi.
Between the many interesting variations obtained by Oostra in a new
intuitionistic system ALPHA*, a beautiful deduction shows how the intuitionistic

124
scroll can be transformed into the classical double cut, but not viceversa. In full
accord with Peirce’s thought, one can see how intuitionistic existential graphs codify
thus a plastic fabric of transferences (possibility to detach the glued scroll) and
obstructions (impossibility of gluing the severed double cut). In fact, a major
demand imposes on the “glued” diagrams –instead of some relaxations in the
“severed” ones– a solidarity condition that, on one side, emphasizes the ideal priority
of a plastic connected unity over a disconnected multiplicity, and, on another side,
concurs with intuitionistic thought, where strong control and constructibility are
required, conditions that usually disappear along disconnected classical disjunctions.
A continuous solidarity (Peirce’s global pragmatics) is reflected in the gluing of the
“scroll” and the “many inloops in one sep” (local syntactics), showing, yet another
time, the amazing coherence of Peirce’s system (extended by his followers, as it
should be). The very fact that Peirce’s seeds may have germinated in unexpected and
improbable ways, reveals the strength and cohesiveness of an integral thought that
just needs a small pressure in remote provinces of intelligence (USA’s Illinois at
mid-century, Colombia’s Tolima at the beginning of a new century) to progressively
fulfill its potential.
Another novel perspective for ALPHA (classical or intuitionistic) has come
forth in the last decade thanks to new semantics with relevant mathematical (not just
logical) content. The road opens with Brady & Trimble categorization of ALPHA239, a
true revelation in the study of existential graphs, which should mark a before and
after in their thorough understanding. The context of interpretation is provided by
monoidal categories, that is, categories equipped with a “tensor” functor which helps
to define an abstract monoid notion in a natural way (monoidal categories are
ubiquitous: cartesian, endofunctors, R-modules, etc.; abstract monoids embody in
groups, triples, R-algebras, etc.) Inside those monoidal categories, Brady & Trimble
show that (i) every (classical) Alpha graph gives rise to an algebraic operation in a
Lawvere algebraic theory (particular case of a monoidal category), (ii) the (classical)
ALPHA deduction rules are factorized through functorial forces (given a monoidal
category C with tensor %, and given a contravariant functor F: C ! C, a “force” for

125
F is a natural transformation !ab : F (a) % b ! F (a % b); forces, introduced in the
80’s by Kelly to solve delicate coherence problems, that is, reducing the
commutativity of an infinite set of diagrams to the commutativity of a finite subset,
have then appeared in the most disparate domains: curvatures in Grassmanians and in
subriemannian geometry, weak forces in subatomic physics, counting operators in
linear logic, etc.) Brady & Trimble show thus the existence of a universal algebraic
bottom (semantics) behind the pragmatics of the existential graphs: (i) association of
operations to graphs, (ii) asssociation of forces to rules. The fact confirms also the
universality of the graphic gesture. In fact, if we have seen how that doing is already
connected with the logical and the topological, its emerging connection with
algebraic universal processes supports further, well away from any nominalistic
perspective, the real richness of the existential graphs.
In reality, here may lie the most enigmatic and attractive characteristic of the
graphs, that is, a sort of homological program behind graphic gestures. One of the
major conquests of 20th century mathematics has been a partial understanding of the
continuum (topological spaces) through adequate discrete invariants (algebraic
objects), that is, homologies (chains of abelian groups which measure, in an exact
way, the web of transferences and obstructions in the deformation of a topological
space) and cohomologies (dual chains, easier to handle and calculate). Cohomologies
constitute, in Grothendieck’s words, “the more powerful instruments of the
century”240, since they detect profound forms behind classes of structures. When we
observe how the logical structure of the existential graphs (centered on intuitionistic
iteration/deiteration and its corresponding fabric of transferences/obstructions) is
combined with topology and algebra, it is natural then to ask if (i) graphs can be
understood as invariants of underlying groups (Klein’s program redux), (ii) rules can
be codified through eventual transformations of those groups. In case of success in
that homological program, still to be precisely drawn, the emergence of canonical
groups behind the existential graphs would confirm even more their importance and
specificity.

126
On our count, we have opened two other roads which may help to
complement the work of Oostra, Brady and Trimble: (i) introduction of intuitionistic
Category Theory semantics for ALPHA241, (ii) introduction of new mathematical
semantics for the graphs thanks to complex variable constructions242. On one side,
Brady & Trimble’s model, which used *-autonomous categories (generalized
Boolean algebra models), seems able to be freed from classical assumptions, towards
arbitrary monoidal categories where the commutative functorial equations for
iteration/deiteration hold intuitionistically: the forces’ path a % b ! (¬¬a) % b !
¬(b % ¬(a % b)) % b ! ¬¬(a % b) (where the second arrow is double iteration and
the third combined deiteration/erasure) turns out to be a path of intermediate
intuitionistic forces which coincides also with the path a % b ! ¬¬(a % b). The
double cut elimination does not need to be used in this context.
On another side, since Alpha’s sheet of assertion can be immediately modeled
by the complex plane, the recto may be understood as an analyticity context (in the
sense of holomorphic functions of a complex variable), while the verso should
represent a meromorphic context. Our preliminary work indicates that graph marks
on even regions could be modeled by instances of the sheaf of germs of analytic
functions on those regions (respectively, marks on odd regions correspond to the
sheaf of meromorphic functions). The interest of such a model, in case its soundness
would be confirmed, is double: (i) Alpha polarity (recto/verso, even/odd, true/false)
would then be obtained, in a structural way, as a natural limit of other intermediate
sheaves, between the analytic and the meromorphic, (ii) the emergence of complex
variable would confirm the central place, universal, “privileged” (in a Proustian
sense) of the graphs, since complex variable stands, in many forms, at the very heart
of Modern mathematics.

221
Don Roberts, The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce, The Hague: Mouton, 1973, p. 18. Also
in [1882; W 4.394-399].
222
See Chapter 11, “Logical notation”, in William Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic,
Volume IV, Edimburgh: Blackwood, 1890.

127
223
“Logic Notebook” [MS 339], now available on line at the Houghton Library:
http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/15255301. A pagination of the Notebook was proposed by Don
Roberts: we follow it here.
224
See Fernando Zalamea, El continuo peirceano, Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2001,
and Jérôme Havenel, Logique et mathématique du continu chez Charles Sanders Peirce, Thèse de
Doctorat, Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2006. A not always explicit
topological flavor is nevertheless also present in A.-V. Pietarinen, “Moving Pictures of Thought II:
Graphs, Games, and Pragmaticism’s Proof”, Semiotica 186 (2011), pp. 315-331.
225
Oostra’s contibutions signaled in note 218.
226
“A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic” [1903; CP 4.399-402].
227
“A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic” [1903; CP 4.395].
228
“A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic” [1903; CP 4.402].
229
“Logical Tracts No. 2” [c. 1903; CP 4.454-455].
230
“Recent Developments of Existential Graphs and their Consequences for Logic” [1906; CP 4.583].
231
Xavier Caicedo, “Conectivos intuicionistas sobre espacios topológicos”, Revista de la Academia
Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales XXI (81) (1997), 521-534. Xavier Caicedo,
Roberto Cignoli, “An Algebraic Approach to Intuitionistic Connectives”, Journal of Symbolic Logic
66 (2001): 1620-1636.
232
“The Bedrock beneath Pragmaticism” [1906; CP 4.561, note 1].
233
See note 215.
234
It may be said that the nominalistic approach characterizes Pierre Thibaud, La logique de Charles
Sanders Peirce, Aix: Université de Provence, 1975, and, particularly, Sun-Joo Shin, The Iconic Logic
of Peirce’s Graphs, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002, where not only Philosophy and the World
disappear, but also any mathematical reference is carefully avoided. A realistic approach is adopted
instead by Jérôme Havenel, Logique et mathématique du continu chez Charles Sanders Peirce, Thèse
de Doctorat, Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2006, and also strongly commands
this monograph. On middle ground, stand the fundamental works, Don Roberts, The Existential
Graphs of Charles S. Peirce, Ph. D. Thesis, The University of Illinois, 1963, and Jay Zeman, The
Graphical Logic of C.S. Peirce, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Chicago, 1963.
235
“Logical Tracts No. 2” [c. 1903; CP 4.435]
236
“Logical Tracts No. 2” [c. 1903; CP 4.457]
237
“Logical Tracts No. 2” [c. 1903; CP 4.436].
238
Arnold Oostra, “Los gráficos Alfa de Peirce aplicados a la lógica intuicionista”, Cuadernos de
Sistemática Peirceana 2 (2010), to appear. Arnold Oostra, “A Lattice of Intuitionistic Existential
Graphs Systems”, in preparation.
239
Geraldine Brady & Todd Trimble, “A Categorical Interpretation of C. S. Peirce’s Propositional
Logic Alpha”, Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra 149 (2000), 213-239.
240
Alexander Grothendieck, Récoltes et semailles, unpublished manuscript, 1985-1986, p. 43.
241
Fernando Zalamea, “A Category-Theoretic Reading of Peirce’s System: Pragmaticism, Continuity
and The Existential Graphs”, in Matthew Moore (ed.), New Essays on Peirce’s Mathematical
Philosophy, Chicago: Open Court, 2010, pp. 203-233. Fernando Zalamea, “Category-Theoretic
Models for Intuitionistic Existential Graphs Systems”, in preparation (presentation at CT2010:
http://ct2010.disi.unige.it/slides/Zalamea_CT2010.pdf).
242
Fernando Zalamea, “Towards a complex variable interpretation of Peirce’s existential graphs”, in
Mats Bergman et.al. (eds.), Ideas in Action. Proceedings of the Applying Peirce Conference,
Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatism Network, 2010, pp. 254-264.

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CHAPTER VII
IDENTITIES AND LOGOI.
BETA: RELATIVE LOGIC AND FUNCTIONAL VARIATIONS

As we have mentioned, the first diagrammatic means invented by Peirce expresses a

form of quantification (Letter to Mitchell, 1882), in the years of blooming of the
logic of relatives. In the midst of algebraic and calculus notations, coming from
Boole and de Morgan, and adopted by Peirce himself, his interest for that occasional
diagram is significant. In fact, Peirce will remember it at the end of his life, when he
will produce a small genealogy of the graphs243, underscoring how he used some
ideas of Ladd Franklin and Mitchell, his brilliant students at Johns Hopkins. At the
bottom of the logic of relatives lie then submerged the existential graphs, a situation
which metaphorically recalls the ocean bottom where wisdom lives, according to
Pip’s immersion in deep waters in Moby Dick:

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.
Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths,
where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his
passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps (...)244

In a similar form, in an “unwarped primal world”, Peirce’s graphs lied, “drown

alive” for years, until their definitive emergence in the Logic Notebook245. “To and
fro”, the “wondrous depth” of iteration and deiteration was yet to come.

129
VII.1. Identities

The existential graphs, as their name tells, beyond drawing visual representations,
refer to “existence”, and, in reality, following Mitchell’s endeavors, deal with the
eventual identity of existent things: “It was the genius of my gifted student, Dr. O. H.
Mitchell, that first opened our eyes to the identity of the subject of all assertions (...)
The entire Phemic Sheet and indeed the whole Leaf is an image of the universal field
of interconnected Thought (for, of course, all thoughts are interconnected)”246.
Observe how the “sheet” of assertion (Phemic Sheet) is here the recto of a Leaf,
inserted in fact in a wider Book. Between two isolated relation symbols, Beta’s line
of identity glues two of their free valences, identifies and interweaves fragments of
information. A “severed” existence ("xR(x), "yS(y)), that is, a difference, is to be
contrasted with a common existence, that is, an identity ("zR(z)&S(z)).
As happens with the intuitionistic Alpha graphs (possibility to transform a
glued scroll into a severed double cut, but not conversely), a gluing condition is
much more demanding than a separation condition. In areas of positive knowledge,
that is, in even regions, a fragment of a line of identity can be erased, allowing a
transit from a common existence to a severed one, but not conversely. We see how
Peirce’s architectonics is reflected, once more, on its components: the abstract
differential and integral calculus underlying the pragmaticist maxim and general
semeiotics (that is, the understanding of signs as their pragmatic integral of
differential action-reaction representations, see figure 10 and discussion) corresponds
here to breaks (differences) and gluings (integrals) of the line of identity. Further,
that discrete/continuous dialectics is embodied in the normal forms of the existential
quantifier –that is, the transits and obstructions of quantifiers and connectives– which
are codified247 by the iterations and deiterations of Beta’s line of identity through an
Alpha cut.
We have reviewed in chapter V some horotic forms which arise when we
consider continuity reflections between Alpha’s sheet and Beta’s line. The analytic
decomposition of the line of identity provides some other peculiar instances of

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horotics. From the iteration rule applied to a fragment of the line of identity, a BETA
derived rule allows to ramify the line: to pass from a linear identity to a ramified
teridentity (a typical use of such a ramification appears in a proof of Barbara’s
syllogism248). In the teridentity, horotics acquires a profound richness, since the
ramification opens the possibility to search for a new identity, amplifying thus the
very frontier of a connectivity spectrum. The “universal field of interconnected
Thought” uses teridentity (and, inductively, n-identity) as an opening device. The
central importance of ramification in mathematics is well known (for example,
Grothendieck unifying with the idea of ramification Galois separability and Riemann
surfaces), and it is thus fascinating to check its diverse guises, not only in BETA’s
rules (pragmatics), but also, in certain GAMMA models (semantics), as we will see in
our final two chapters.
The line of identity draws, iconically, a dynamical idea of identity:
permanence within change. The continuity of the line evokes permanence, the transit
between endpoints evokes change. This peculiar construction of identity (remember
that the line represents "x"y(x=y)) shows that an identity between extremes is really
a trans-identity, agreeing once again with the general trends of Peirce’s
architectonics. This is an important philosophical fact, since BETA leaves thus aside a
search for supposed “essences” and, instead, proceeds towards definitions through
invariants in action-reaction processes or through functionalities in given contexts.
The jump from “substance” to “function”, indispensable in Cassirer249, is thus
implicit from the very symbolical beginning of the line of identity. Beta’s line of
identity hooks up perfectly with horotics, gathered as a third way beyond the polarity
analysis/synthesis. Giovanni Maddalena has proposed to understand analysis as what
“dissolves/decomposes an identity through a change” and synthesis as what
“recognizes/recomposes an identity through a change”250. Extending Maddalena’s
ideas, horotics would be what “limits/delimits an identity through a change”.
Referring to the line of identity, the limitation processes are associated to the invalid
deformations (obstructions) of the line, while the delimitation processes go along the
valid deformations (transferences) through cuts. In this case, the central rule

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iteration/deiteration applied to the line of identity, i.e. its continuous
extension/retraction, turns out to be an archetypical –“unwarped”, “primal”– form of
horotics. Metaphysically –let’s not fear the word–, that is, as a reality beyond
existence, the semiotic richness of the line of identity approaches then a First
Philosophy.
As is well known251, one of the major merits of the existential graphs consists
in presenting common rules for ALPHA and BETA, unitary pragmatic modes which,
in Alpha’s propositional language, produce derived rules for (representations of)
connectives, and, in Beta’s relational language, produce derived rules for
(representations of) quantifiers. This is a meta-example of a trans-identity, of
permanence behind change (see figure 21). In reality, the situation may be seen as
what we could call, not fearing ghosts, a truly metaphysical discovery: beyond very
diverse concrete levels –pragmatic rules, syntactic iconic signs, semantic Category
Theory models– the existential graphs achieve a description of a web of primal
processes in information transfers. In this perspective, change, transit, transfer, are
initial conditions of thought (in a wide sense, as universal semiotics beyond Man).
Afterwards, identities come to be described as relative invariants with respect to
transformations codified in the initial conditions. The jump from an identity
(singular, absolute, essential) to many identities (plural, correlative, functional) is a
crucial process for the (Trans)Modern World, well built-in inside Peirce’s
architectonics, his logic of relatives, or BETA.
The first appearance of the identity line occurs in the Logic Notebook, on
June 14 1898. Peirce writes (p. 110r):

Continuity of a heavy line signifies the individual identity of all its parts. The whole
graph may be conceived as connected by a heavy line with an index of the individual
state of things described, but this line is not written.

States of things, singular, indexical, second, are connected by the identity line,
continuous, symbolic, third. Below that continuous line, where parts are glued,
underlies a not written line where indexical witnesses of singular differences live.
Under the integral line of identity is hidden a differential line of distinctions. The

132
fundamental antinomy between the continuous and the discrete –an “abstract integral
and differential calculus”– stands thus in the very roots, the inventive “heart” of the
existential graphs. Next day, June 15, rewriting his rules, Peirce notes down: “VIII.
Every heavy line is a graph and can have attached to it a capital letter (index of some
designate individual)” (p. 114r). The precedence of the line over the capital letter,
which “can” or not appear, is of some importance. In fact, we have before all a
continuum –primal, original, symbolic– which only afterwards is discretely marked
with singular indexes. The fact becomes even clearer if we look at the genesis of the
manuscript sentence: Peirce writes first the term “individual”, but then he crosses it
over, replaces it by “index of a designate individual”, and finally decides to leave
“index of some designate individual” (our emphasis, emergence of the existential
quantifier related to the indexical). The following convention reads: “IX. Any two
capital letters, transformable into one another, can be joined by a heavy line” (p.
114r). Two months later, on August 4th, the rule is further accentuated: “IV.
Mutually transformable indices can always be joined by a heavy line” (p. 127r,
Peirce’s underlining). The possible transformations of relational indexes is then
restricted to continuous connections, and a normative understanding of trans-identity
through a topological logic is conjectured (Burch would confirm in detail that
necessity of topological bonds almost a century later252).

VII.2. Functionality

If relational indexes can be well maneuvered through BETA’s apparatus, in the

following Logic Notebook developments Peirce becomes nevertheless aware of the
major problem of the system: “An Extension of Existential Graphs permitting
Abstraction” (p. 128r). In fact, BETA constitutes a very plastic and ductile instrument
for a pure relational calculus, without function symbols. Functionality, instead,
seems to introduce formidable representational barriers. Between August 4 and 8,
1898, Peirce uses an outstanding number of pages of his Logic Notebook (pp. 128r-
140r) to try to define graphically, in BETA, the concepts of pair, sequence and order,

133
fundamental to represent functions following a set-theoretic approximation. The
pretty and original diagrams, too complicated and difficult to understand, do not
seem to lead anywhere.
Again, time and confidence were needed. In a masterful undergraduate thesis,
Oostra & Rueda have been able, not only to define functionality in a clear-cut way,
which also helps to compare diverse types of functions, but also to use it in dealing
with Cauchy sequences253. Peirce’s gribouillis in the Logic Notebook acquire a new
life. What seemed an array of obstructions is, again, well surrounded. Still, the new
road does not pretend to substitute old ways. The functionality developments in 20th
century Set Theory have a profound richness, inherent from sophisticated axioms
oriented to that end. If we remember the triple objective pretended by Peirce with his
graphs –(i) simplicity, (ii) iconicity, (iii) analyticity– it is plain that a foundational
calculus is not intended, but, rather, a processes revealing calculus is sought. It is
nice that mathematical functions may be represented and non trivially used in BETA,
as Oostra & Rueda have shown, but the true impact of that BETA development lies in
the revealing processes obtained. For example, the fact that uniform continuity
implies continuity is handled in BETA with just writings and iterations254. The bottom
of the usual proof (a change of the order of quantifiers) corresponds to an extremely
simple iteration of an appropriate line of identity. In this way, a topological resort
(extending the line of identity) reflects exactly a topological main theorem (going
from uniform continuity to continuity), and a collection of horotic definitions reflects
exactly the symmetrical boundaries between functionality and bijectivity255. We are
in front of another confirmation of a main Peircean paradigm:

Continuous Topology Discrete Set Theory

-------------------------------------- : -------------------------------------- .
Intuitionistic and Relative Logic Classical and Functional Logic

Peirce’s interest for the left hand ratio is explored deeply via the existential graphs.
Synthesis, at left, collides with analyticity, at right.

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VII.3. Logoi

The Antique Greece’s logos (word, discourse, reason) has determined our Western
approach to knowledge. The root *leg denotes recollecting, that is, observing the
whole, synthesizing. With Heraclitus, the logos hopes to find some order in the
Universe. We have seen that intuitionism and topology provide a specific synthetic
order of reason. In this way, close to an intuitionistic topological logic, the
existential graphs enter into one of the primal wombs of logos. On another hand,
from the perspective of contemporary findings in Category Theory, Freyd has
defined a logos as a relational, ordered and dialectic category256 – that is, a regular
category (allowing then composition of relations) whose subobjects form lattices
(introducing then an order) and with right adjoints for inverse functions (opening a
space for dialectics). Freyd’s logoi can be linked to Peirce’s graphs in at least three
relevant and unexpected ways: (i) the philosophical bottom interrelates relational and
dialectic objectives (the central ALPHA rule, iteration/deiteration, is a particular case
of an adjunction), (ii) the logical bottom reveals a construction of existence as a
trans-identity (BETA’s continuous line corresponds to a category theoretic
understanding of the existential quantifier as an adjoint), (iii) the mathematical
bottom hides a profound topologization (an order, seen as a category, is a logos if and
only if the order is a Heyting algebra; thus, logoi, Heyting algebras and topological
spaces constitute equivalent semantics for intuitionistic logic).
Peirce had indicated that the construction of a logic of continuity had to be an
indispensable task for future generations:

A satisfactory evolutionary logic of mathematics remains a desideratum. (...)

This defect cannot be remedied until topology –or, as I prefer to call it,
mathematical topics– has been further developed and its logic accurately
analyzed.257

The existential graphs constitute the finest tool proposed by Peirce to begin that
accurate analysis of the logic of topology. Afterwards, following alternative paths,
other fundamental contributions studied in depth the logic of continuity: Brouwer’s
breakthroughs in topology and intuitionism (1904-1920), Tarski’s result on the

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soundness and completeness of the semantic of topological spaces for intuitionistic
logic (1938), Kripke’s models (1963), Lawvere’s elementary topoi (1970), Freyd’s
logoi (1990), Caicedo’s sheaf semantics (1995). It is interesting to observe how,
following all these diverse ways, Peirce’s original problems (even if unknown for all
subsequent mathematicians) were always at bottom of future considerations: (i) a
dialectics between word and figure, algebraic symbol and topological diagram,
calculus and geometry, logoi and topoi, (ii) a search for multiple analytic tools
(axioms, definitions) which, in counterpoint, helped to organize unitary synthetic
landscapes (natural classes of models), (iii) a thorough investigation of a pendulous
horotics, going back-and-forth between delimitation of axiomatic borders and
limitation of semantic classes.
Brady & Trimble have presented another strategy for modeling BETA thanks
to appropriate categories258. Two basic stages can be distinguished in their approach:
(i) given a language L with enough relation symbols, Brady & Trimble define a free
monoidal category M(L) associated to L and, also, a class JS(L) of Joyal-Street
diagrams (natural conditions in M(L), through diagonals and projections) with
allowed transformations of those diagrams (unity/counity conditions in adjunctions),
(ii) they use a well known categorical logic procedure which, given a first-order
categorical theory (C,T) (C category with finite products, T functor from the dual of
C to Boolean algebras, with existential adjoints and Beck-Chevalley conditions),
produces a category of relations Rel(C,T) which generalizes Tarski’s first-order
relational calculus. Combining (i) and (ii), Brady & Trimble show that Peirce’s
logical deformations in BETA(L) correspond to Joyal-Street’s categorical
transformations in JS(L), that diagrams in JS(L) correspond to types in Rel(M(L),T)
for an appropriate T, and that the congruence associated to this correspondence
consists precisely in the Joyal-Street transformations. As a consequence, the quotient
BETA(L), adequately divided by transformations, turns out to be isomorphic to
Rel(M(L),T), providing thus a new mathematical model for BETA.
BETA is notably enriched with Brady & Trimble’s model, since Joyal-Street
diagrams had emerged in completely different contexts. On one side, they modeled

136
string theory diagrams related to Feynman and Penrose’s diagrams in theoretical
physics; on the other side, they helped to display interchange operators in linear
representations of Hilbert spaces259. The information exchange in Peirce’s
iteration/deiteration, a universal semiotic process if there is one, is confirmed and
encrypted in these new models. In fact, the category theoretic models fix exactly
exchanges as sharp adjunctions: at Alpha’s level, an algebraic operation whose
adjuncts are the connectives; at Beta’s level, an algebraic relation whose adjuncts are
the quantifiers. We have seen (Oostra and Caicedo’s results mentioned in the
previous chapter) that connectives are, in fact, intuitionistic. No obstruction seems to
exist in order to obtain a similar situation at the level of quantifiers. To confirm the
conjecture, one has to transform functors T, whose range lie in Boolean algebras, to
functors into Heyting algebras and, then, one has to debilitate the Joyal-Street
transformations. Since the logic underlying free monoidal categories is already
intuitionistic and since Beck-Chevalley conditions are also intuitionistic, a modified
Brady & Trimble model provides a first-order intuitionistic semantics for BETA260.
Beyond logoi and relational categories, a third way to construct mathematical
semantics for BETA may consist in modeling the extension/retraction calculus of the
identity line as a calculus of analytic continuations in the theory of functions of a
complex variable. For that, one should understand Alpha cuts as regions of the
complex plane with singularities which serve as obstructions for analytic
continuation. BETA’s allowed deformations of the line would then correspond to
holomorphic deformations, while restrictions on the deformations would enter into
the meromorphic realm. Some conformal representations would help to calibrate
deformations, while Cauchy’s residue calculus would be the witness of logical rules.
The normal forms of the existential, codified by iteration/deiteration of Beta’s line
through Alpha’s cuts, could then correspond to some calculations with removable
singularities, close to Cauchy’s integral formula. Nevertheless, even if the idea seems
natural and open to many ramifications261, one must emphasize that, at present
(2012), the situation is just speculative.

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The new mathematical models for BETA (2000-2010) enlarge its correlative
spectrum and connect Peirce’s graphs with vibrant contemporary advancements. The
mathematical perspectives help to “dig well inside” (as Musil’s “Mathematical Man”
(1913) would assert), and, thus, to define better an underlying metaphysics. In fact,
even if the existential graphs possess deep multivalent values –logical (pragmatic
unification of propositional and quantificational rules), mathematical (crossings of
logic, algebra, topology, Category Theory, and, possibly, complex variables),
architectonical (web of reflections of Peirce’s system)– their major duty may lie in
helping to clear the road for a sound mathematical metaphysics. For Peirce,
metaphysics “is an imitation of mathematics”262, and “has always formed itself after
the model of mathematics”263. In his Cambridge Lectures (1898), Peirce tackles the
problem of bounding a “mathematical metaphysics, or Cosmology”264 through his
logic of continuity. Even if the lectures are mainly directed to explain Peirce’s
continuum and the synechistic conjecture, they occur just three months before the
existential graphs crop up in many pages of the Logic Notebook. It is difficult to
think that Peirce did not sense then the outstanding “metaphysical” and
“cosmological” potentialities of the existential graphs. In any case, their growing
approximation to the summum bonum will arise in Peirce’s final decade, when he
will connect a proof of pragmaticism with the logic of abduction (see chapter IV), in
turn linked with the graphs.
The mathematical models for BETA reinforce its metaphysical potential. The
category theoretic readings indicate that the graphs correspond to universal concepts,
both in their syntactics (through free monoidal categories) and in their pragmatics
(through adjunctions). Their universality, that is, their freeness, away from
particulars and singulars, allow their projectivity over an extended mathematical
range: algebra, topology, complex variables, string theory, etc. That mathematical
universality confirms, locally, some sort of metaphysical universality. In fact, if
metaphysics is to be constructed as an “imitation” of mathematics, the existential
graphs may be occurring as faithful witnesses for profound metaphysical currents. As
far as we know, that seems precisely to be the case: (i) ubiquitous forms of universal

138
semeiosis (traction and retraction of information) reflected on iteration/deiteration,
along the full ALFA, BETA and GAMMA, (ii) ubiquitous forms of universal continuity
(genericity / gluing / modalities) reflected on Alpha’s sheet of assertion, Beta’s line
of identity and Gamma’s book of sheets (see chapter VIII), and (iii) ubiquitous forms
of a universal archê (origin / polarities / pendulum) reflected in the forced
introduction of double cuts in ALPHA’s proofs, in BETA’s ramification of the line of
identity and in GAMMA’s pendulous oscillation between broken cuts and Alpha cuts.
In his Essence and effect of the concept of symbol (1959), Cassirer mentioned
that “Logic begins with strangeness, with the philosophical wonder of how pure
thought (...) can be in condition to assert identities and retain them in a lasting way”.
It is a “strangeness” also repeated in the astonishment that existential graphs produce,
with their plasticity to diagram identities and the universal kernel of rules lastingly
associated to pragmatic thought. Variation (plasticity) and permanence (kernel)
embody the logical richness signaled by Cassirer. As many of the key concepts in
philosophy, in cultural theory or in mathematics, the fabric of differentiation and
integration, the Many and the One, governs the pragmatic development of the graphs.
Peirce’s discovery of common rules for all his systems shows how apparent
differences are nothing more than dynamical variations of universal forces
(insertion/elimination, iteration/deiteration, etc.) Metaphysics is, thus, con-sol-idated:
(i) made whole, (ii) paradoxically made compact, i.e., solid, firm, and (iii) made
healthy, safe, unbroken (see sol- in Watkins' dictionary). The construction of
intuitionistic existential graphs, following Oostra, shows how a self-reflexive
reflection (unity), around the severing/gluing dialectics of the graphs, can codify both
intuitionistic logic and its topological semantics (multiplicity). Brady & Trimble’s
category theoretic models show how a free dialectics (unity) underlies beyond
various strengths and functorial forces (multiplicity). With the existential graphs, the
logos of Platonic dialectics – simultaneously, a metaphysical place of creative
tensions and a mathematical and logical place for variations and permanence–
revives from the ashes.

243
“Some Amazing Mazes” [1908; CP 4.618].

139
244
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or The Whale (1849-51) (eds. H. Hayford, H. Parker, G.T. Tanselle),
Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988, p. 414.
245
June 1898 is the date of first appearance of the graphs in the Logic Notebook. Nevertheless, in the
“genealogy” [1908; CP 4.618], Peirce states that he would have discovered them already in January
1897.
246
“The Bedrock beneath Pragmaticism” [1906; CP 4.553 note 2].
247
See, for example, Pierre Thibaud, La logique de Charles Sanders Peirce: De l’algèbre aux
graphes, Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1975.
248
See, for example, Don Roberts, The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce, The Hague: Mouton,
1973, p. 61.
249
Ernst Cassirer, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (1910, French translation: Substance et
fonction, Paris: Minuit, 1977).
250
Giovanni Maddalena, Fernando Zalamea, “A new analytic/synthetic/horotic paradigm: from
mathematical gesture to synthetic/horotic reasoning”, Kurt Gödel Research Prize Fellowships,
submitted (2011), p. 4.
251
Don Roberts, The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce, The Hague: Mouton, 1973; Pierre
Thibaud, La logique de Charles Sanders Peirce: De l’algèbre aux graphes, Aix-en-Provence:
Université de Provence, 1975; Arnold Oostra, Lógica gráfica (book in preparation on Peirce’s
graphs).
252
Robert Burch, A Peircean Reduction Thesis. The Foundations of Topological Logic, Lubbock:
Texas Tech University Press, 1991.
253
Ricardo Rueda (under Arnold Oostra), “Matemáticas básicas con gráficos existenciales Beta”,
Undergradute Thesis, Universidad del Tolima, 2011.
254
Ibidem, pp. 54-56.
255
Ibidem, pp. 50-53.
256
Peter Freyd, André Scedrov, Categories, Allegories, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1990.
257
“The Logic of Relatives” [1897; CP 3.526].
258
Geraldine Brady, Todd Trimble, “A String Diagram Calculus for Predicate Logic and C. S. Peirce’s
System Beta”, preprint, 2000.
259
André Joyal, Ross Street, “The Geometry of Tensor Calculus I”, Advances in Mathematics 88
(1991): 55-112.
260
Fernando Zalamea, “Category-Theoretic Models for Intuitionistic Existential Graphs Systems”, in
preparation (presentation at CT2010: http://ct2010.disi.unige.it/slides/Zalamea_CT2010.pdf).
261
Fernando Zalamea, “Towards a complex variable interpretation of Peirce’s existential graphs”, in
Mats Bergman et.al. (eds.), Ideas in Action. Proceedings of the Applying Peirce Conference,
Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatism Network, 2010, pp. 254-264.
262
“Review of Royce’s The Religious Aspects of Philosophy” [1885; CP 8.45].
263
Fragment on “Axioms” [1893; CP 1.132].
264
“Eight Class Lectures on Reasoning and the Logic of Things” (Cambridge Lectures) [1898; CP
6.213].

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CHAPTER VIII
MODULATIONS AND TREES.
GAMMA (I): MODAL PROPOSITIONAL CALCULI

The first appearance of the modal system GAMMA seems to be in the Lowell Lectures
(1903). The “broken cut” is defined as the topos of contingency (possibility of
negation) and, applying the general writing/erasure rules to the broken cut as a new
Gamma sign, Peirce proves the fundamental laws of normal modality265:

p deduces p deduces p

¬#¬p ¬¬p #¬¬p

!p p #p
necessity actuality possibility

[by insertion in an odd area, the [by erasure in an even area,

Gamma broken cut is “filled” an Alpha cut is “half erased”
into a complete Alpha cut] into a Gamma broken cut]

As happened with BETA, some general modes of action continue to be the

ones which, applied to new syntactics, produce the derived rules, proper to each
system. The writing/erasure action, for example, initiates and commands (through
modus ponens) any proof in ALPHA, ramifies the line of identity and allows
syllogistic proofs in BETA, forces the normal hierarchy between modalities in
GAMMA. The beauty of the graphs (a form of approximation to the summum bonum)

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is explained, in part, by their high pragmatic unity. On the other hand, if the
writing/erasure rule produces, from the very beginning, the normal laws of modality
(system K), diverse derived forms of iteration/deiteration through broken cuts
produce afterwards many of the well known intermediate systems of modalities
(Lewis’ systems S)266. The general strategy of using obstruction and transit tactics
continues thus to lead the logic of the graphs.

VIII.1. The verso. Horotic modalities

Three years after the Lowell Lectures, Peirce proposes a deep reading of cuts (either
Alpha or Gamma): “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”267. The new vision is fundamental: “This improvement gives
substantially, as far as I can see, nearly the whole of that Gamma part which I have
been endeavoring to discern”268. It is indeed a modal interpretation with strong
consequences, where his pragmaticist maxim (i.e. the modal rendering of the
pragmatic maxim, see figure 10 and prior discussion) turns out to be succinctly
codified. The verso of the assertion sheet does not represent negation, but the
possibility of negation. In the verso one passes to other possible worlds, to
mediations, interstices, ramifications, modalities, beyond a yes/no polarity. Actuality
is contrasted with contingency. As pragmaticism asserts, a given sign can only be
known through its renderings in possible (or contingent) contexts.
Through the looking-glass, logic multiplies. Peirce indicates the force of a
hidden verso with a beautiful metaphor: “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”269. Sounding the Deep –remember Melville’s Pip or Musil’s
Mathematical Man– the hydrographic surveyor finds all sort of strong and strange
currents. The verticality of the World is reflected in the graphs’ horotics between

142
recto and verso: “two indefinite propositions define, or rather partially define, each
other on the recto and (...) two general propositions mutually limit each other upon
the verso”270. The horotic pendulum works all the way: delimitation, definition,
determination on the recto, limitation, finiteness, termination on the verso; sections
and existence marks on the recto, possible gluings and universal strokes on the verso.
Requiring each other, the actual and the possible evolve together in the
existential graphs. As Peirce himself signals, an understanding of GAMMA as a
counterpoint to ALPHA leads to a heavy philosophical consequence: the eventual
“reality of some possibilities”271 (verso), thus, the finding of a local logical reflection
of Peirce’s global Scholastic Realism. The structural connection between the
Possible and the Real, sustained in many of the fundamental arches of Peirce’s
system –synechism, cenopythagoreanism, pragmaticism– is reflected in the
sophisticated horotics of the broken cut. On one side, syntactically, the broken cut is
a horotic sign of unusual strength: its half erasure delimits the plane of Truth (recto)
and, on the boundary (horos), many paths unfold towards diverse possibilities
(verso). On another side, semantically, the horotic back-and-forth between recto and
verso show that the sheet is multiplied in its verso (we will soon see that we are in
front of a ramification similar to the natural tree-shaped Kripke models for modal
logics), generating thus multiple new information transits (horotic pragmatics).
The logic of modulation, modal horos, inversion, is even more visible if we
look at the multiple gradations of the iteration/deiteration principle when applied to
Gamma cuts. One must observe, before all, that if one allows arbitrary insertions of
the necessity cut (double cut formed by a broken cut inside an Alpha cut) for graphs
marked on the page –a fact which corresponds to modal necessitation: 1 provable
forces !1 provable–, then a GAMMA system cannot accept also arbitrary
iteration/deiteration through broken cuts, since then one can prove that Alpha and
Gamma cuts are equivalent272. In Gamma emerges thus an important obstruction to
arbitrary iteration/deiteration, and a series of partial resolutions of that obstruction is
precisely what gives rise to intermediate modal systems. Specifically, the following
representations of intermediate systems emerge273: (i) Lukasiewicz’s weak L, in case

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of not having necessitation and accepting arbitrary (de)iterations (one movement
forces then the inverse one); (ii) Lewis’ S4, accepting necessitation and just
(de)iterations of necessary graphs; (iii) S4.2, accepting necessitation and both
(de)iterations of necessary graphs or (de)iterations of graphs surrounded by a double
broken cut (“possibly necessary” graphs); (iv) S5, accepting necessitation and
(de)iterations of graphs whose minimal components are surrounded by a broken cut.
This is a truly amazing situation. The deep transit/obstruction dialectics in
Peirce’s global system acquires in local GAMMA a rare subtlety. We may call
autopoietic (Maturana) that horotic dialectics, since the richness of the broken cut
multiplies itself thanks to a vital self-reference: the broken cut, boundary between
actuality and contingency, boundary between recto and verso, boundary between
gluing and breaking –iconical form of horotics– is also the spot where
iteration/deiteration transits become modulated, limited and delimited, and where a
hierarchy of obstructions determines the underlying logics –symbolical bottom of
horotics–. The Gamma cut, at the same time tupos (figure, diagram) and topos
(place, spot), combines form and bottom of horotics, and erects itself as one of the
most astonishingly plastic signs created by Peirce.

VIII.2. Trees and books

The multiplicative range of GAMMA systems is linked to the ramification of

possibility trees, hidden inside any modal system. Since Leibniz, necessity is
interpreted as validity in every world, while possibility indicates validity in some
world. Leibnizian semantics is formalized by Kripke models (1963) for modal logic.
The frames which support the semantics are just sets of points (“worlds”) connected
by a binary relation (“accessibility”): they can be metaphorically visualized as trees
whose ramifications (in any direction) expand the possible realms. From the point of
view of Kripkean semantics, the hierarchy of allowances in GAMMA’s
iteration/deiteration correspond to a hierarchy of algebraic properties of the

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accessibility relation: S4 is characterized by preordered frames, S4.2 by directed
preordered frames, S5 by equivalence relations. The “One and Many” dialectics
acquires a new force in the context of modalities, since some algebraic properties
apparently distant (preorder, directedness, equivalence) can be seen, in a unitary
way, as derived forms of the universal iteration/deiteration principle. Moreover,
since preorders and equivalences are the two main canonical relations in set
theoretic mathematics (acting as distinguished indexes of ordinal expansion and
cardinal size), it is very revealing to be able to approach those canonical behaviors
by precise bounded forms of iteration/deiteration.
On another hand, a well known fact since the Polish school, the modal
propositional spectrum may be represented by a monadic first-order classical
calculus. From an algebraic perspective, Peirce already fathomed the situation
(“Schröder, with the majority of the Boolians, abandoned Boole’s conception that
every logical term has one or other of two values. For my part (...) I introduced
relative terms which correspond to what Sylvester called the umbræ of quantities (the
conception is due to Leibniz), and employed various signs of operation upon these
umbræ”274), but, above all, it is in GAMMA’s topology where those possibilia umbrae,
expanding binary logic, acquire their full operative power. To that end, Peirce
introduced his tinctures, monadic color predicates, with which he expected to codify
the modalities275. After some failed manipulations, Peirce thought that the tinctures
led to a “nonsensical” path276, but, in detriment of that final disappointment, Zeman
has instead proved the wonderful coherence of Peirce’s initial intuition, being able to
characterize diverse modal logics by a pragmatics of color transits (and obstructions)
easy to be modeled in the personal computer277. GAMMA’s umbrae, either through
the broken cut which half-lights the sheet, or through tinctures which open the
penumbra of possibilities, multiply the logical depth.
Since the Lowell Lectures (1903), Peirce had guessed that the logical depth
could be represented thanks to a book of sheets. The extensive citation given on a
“book of separate sheets” (see supra, chapter V) shows the richness of the ideas,
inside a plastic dialectics of continuity and cuts. A century later, with modal models

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at hand, it is easy to see how Peirce’s book and Kripke’s tree are close to each other.
In fact, while Kripke’s tree captures modal transits and obstructions thanks to
accessibility and non accessibility properties between its nodes (possible worlds),
Peirce’s book conceives modal transits and obstructions thanks to “cuts [where] we
pass into other areas”, sort of “imaginary worlds”278. The book understood as a tree
has the advantage of not having to bear on how the sheets are glued together (“tacked
together at points”), since the accessibility relation (usually discrete) serves as a
substitute for that tacking. Nevertheless, in better agreement with Peirce’s ideas, the
book of sheets could also be imagined as a continuous surface. In that case, Riemann
surfaces, with their leaves continuously tacked at ramification points and with
projectivity as accessibility relation, seem perfect candidates to model GAMMA279.
Further, a sheaf of sheets could serve as another natural model for Peirce’s Gamma
intuitions, since the sheaf combines, over a continuous bottom (the base of a sheaf is
a topological space), the double dialectics unity/multiplicity and globality/locality of
the book of sheets. As complex variables constitute the canonical mathematical
context where both Riemann surfaces and sheaves emerge, this new approximation
for GAMMA could be related with the partial models we have suggested for ALPHA
(chapter VI) and BETA (chapter VII).
In the entry “Unity and Plurality” for Baldwin’s Dictionary280, Peirce explains
that the methodological background for compositionality, that is, for a synthetic
understanding of the World, is related to modalities:

Composition is divided into real, rational, and modal. Real composition is the
union of distinct entities in the real thing itself. It is either actual or potential.
Actual composition is either per compositionem, as when water and alcohol are
mixed, or per aggregationem (as in an army). Potential composition is when one
thing is united in potentia to another. It is either per informationem or per
inhaerentiam; a distinction peculiar to a certain kind of Aristotelianism. Rational
composition is either of things which differ by reason alone, or of things brought
together in one concept; it includes, firstly, genera, species, etc.; secondly,
equality, similitude, etc.; thirdly, agreement in effects, external causes, etc. Modal
composition is composition from a thing and a mode.

GAMMA’s hierarchy of rules constitutes a perfect example of potential composition

per informationem, since transits and obstructions of information, in the

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iteration/deiteration rule, determine the intermediate systems. It should be noticed
that Peirce situates potential composition as counterpoint of real composition, “union
of distinct entities in the real thing itself”. The existential graphs are in fact handled
over a natural continuum, inside Peirce’s universal synechism. Far from being a
logical artifice, the graphs constitute a very sophisticated web of icons, indexes and
symbols, where a much more extensive Unity is reflected.
An understanding of compositionality as a full triadic form appears in “Some
Amazing Mazes, Fourth Curiosity”, one of Peirce’s last articles: “A triadic
relationship cannot be built up from dyadic relationships. Whoever thinks it can be
so composed has overlooked the fact that composition is itself a triadic relationship,
between the two (or more) components and the composite whole”281. Forty years
later, Eilenberg and MacLane would indeed axiomatize Category Theory –that is, the
canonical mathematical context for compositionality and synthesis– thanks to five
very simple axioms on the triadic relation of composition R(f,g,h) G f # g = h. As
Peirce guessed, one has a triadic relation between parts (components f, g) and whole
(composition h), a primal, archetypical, inaugural relation, basis of all Category
Theory. On another hand, eighty years later, Burch would demonstrate the
irreducibility of 3 (not constructible from 1 + 2) in the realm of the topological logic
of existential graphs. Even if we know that, discretely, in Set Theory, triadic relations
are reducible (any relation is an appropriate set of ordered pairs, represented through
Kuratowski’s “1+2”: (x,y)={{x},{x,y}}), the results just mentioned show instead that,
both in Category Theory and Topological Logic, the situation is very different. We
are thus confronted to a forced emergence of thirdness, linked to a modal,
continuous, synthetic underlying substratum.
Diverse forms of horotics, characteristic of Peirce’s continuum (see Part I),
are interwoven with modal perspectives. First, the continuum’s generality, beyond
particulars and determinate marks, regularizes the connection modes (boundaries,
horos) between parts and whole, between the local and the global. This
regularization of synthetic transfers of information governs both potential
composition, a “general real”, and GAMMA’s hierarchy of iteration/deiteration rules,

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a “concrete real”. Second, the reflexivity of Peirce’s continuum asserts that each of its
parts possesses another part similar to the whole (horos of the horos), a pattern that
generates its inextensibility, that is, its non definability through an accumulation of
points (see section I.4). Accordingly, we have seen that along Peirce’s graphs
(Alpha, Beta or Gamma) many self-reference processes stand out. Third, since the
intrinsic logic of the graphs is intuitionistic, we are thus close to some sort of
topological logic or “neighborhood logic” (see section I.6), where boundaries (horos)
come to be primal than points. Fourth, the continuum’s plasticity ensures an adequate
transit of modalities, a gluing of boundaries and neighborhoods. All strategical forms
of GAMMA are intended to capture, in a diagrammatic form, that indispensable
plasticity of modal thought.
If we go over the triadic classification of the sciences, we can observe how
the existential graphs (and, particularly, GAMMA) enter in very sharp structural
counterpoints with Peirce’s architectonics. Going inside mathematics (1), we have
signaled the semantic back-and-forth of the graphs with many advanced structural
objects (categories, algebras, topologies, complex variable constructions). Through
phenomenology (2.1), the recursive fabric of the three cenopythagorean categories
“resounds” in the over-reaching syntactics/semantics/pragmatics of the graphs. In
esthetics (2.2.1), GAMMA’s multiplicative patterns approach the summum bonum, a
continuous growing of potentiality, a structural beauty measured in the expansions
of possibilia. From a semeiotics perspective (2.2.3), the recto/verso polarity and its
mediating hierarchy constitute true Peircean symbols, that is, structural signs which
embody multiple tensions between secondness and thirdness; also, Gamma’s broken
cut emerges, in its immediateness, as a fleeting icon of firstness itself. In logic
(2.2.3), some profound dialectical principles are discovered (insertion/erasure,
iteration/deiteration) which serve as structural kernels for apparently distant
deduction systems (propositional, relational, modal). Finally, along metaphysics
(2.3), Peircean synechism and tychism (real generals) attain some calculating,
concrete evidence thanks to Beta’s continuity (sheet, line) and Gamma’s severance
(broken cuts, recto/verso).

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Some BETA and GAMMA combinations provide fragments of first-order
modal logic. For example, Barcan’s law (1946), which classically links necessity and
universal quantification ('x !Px " !'xPx), may be represented in Beta + Gamma
by means of the following graph (where two double Alpha cuts have been erased in
the first, literal, diagram which corresponds to the formula):

P P

If we extend the insertion/erasure dialectics to broken cuts which intersect the line of
identity, one would have to find the appropriate BETA + GAMMA derived rules which
would permit to prove Barcan’s graph. For example282, the graph on left could be (i)
inserted in the ring of a Gamma necessary cut, (ii) iterated towards the interior, and
then (iii) the broken cut around P (in an odd area, at right) could be completed to
obtain an Alpha cut (graph inside the broken cut). Here, an iteration of graphs with
broken cuts through broken cuts is assumed, that is, an underlying S4 calculus has to
be presupposed. Something new in the mixture BETA + GAMMA is then emerging,
since, instead, the propositional translation of the formula is trivial (contingency
implies contingency).
We have indicated how modal GAMMA must still reveal many of its
“unwarped, primal” secrets. Its richness includes prominent features in fundamental
domains of knowledge –mathematics, phenomenology, esthetics, semeiotics, logic,
metaphysics– and constitutes one of the more original expressions of Peirce’s
architectonics. But Peirce was able to look even further, and proposed an extended
GAMMA (that we will name GAMMA II) as the topos of systematic invention in logic,
beyond propositions, quantifiers or modalities. Explicitly, Peirce fathomed GAMMA

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II as a place for metalanguage (!), but he also predicted that it would serve as a topos
for creativity, where the new generations would extend exact thought, would advance
indefinitely their approximation to the summum bonum, and would continuously help
to grow the logical potentiality of mankind.

265
“Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed” (Lowell Lectures) [1903; CP 4.516].
266
See Jay Zeman, The Graphical Logic of C.S. Peirce, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Chicago, 1963, or
Fabián Molina (under Arnold Oostra), “Correspondencia entre algunos sistemas de lógica modal y los
gráficos existenciales gama de Peirce”, Undergraduate Thesis, Universidad del Tolima, 2003.
267
“Recent Developments of Existential Graphs and their Consequences for Logic” [1906; CP 4.577].
268
“Recent Developments of Existential Graphs and their Consequences for Logic” [1906; CP 4.578].
269
“Recent Developments of Existential Graphs and their Consequences for Logic” [1906; CP 4.581].
270
“Recent Developments of Existential Graphs and their Consequences for Logic” [1906; CP 4.583].
271
“Recent Developments of Existential Graphs and their Consequences for Logic” [1906; CP 4.581].
272
We thank here especially many personal communications of Arnold Oostra.
273
Jay Zeman, The Graphical Logic of C.S. Peirce, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Chicago, 1963,
constituted the first important breakthrough in a better understanding of GAMMA. Building on Zeman,
Fabián Molina (under Arnold Oostra), “Correspondencia entre algunos sistemas de lógica modal y los
gráficos existenciales gama de Peirce”, Undergraduate Thesis, Universidad del Tolima, 2003,
provides fuller details.
274
“Notes on the List of Postulates of Dr. Huntington’s Section 2” [c. 1904; CP 4.327].
275
“Prolegomena to an Apology of Pragmaticism” [1906; CP 4.553].
276
“Letter to Woods” [1913; CP 8, Miscellany 22].
277
Jay Zeman, “The Tinctures and Implicit Quantification over Worlds”, in: Jacqueline Brunning,
Paul Forster (eds.), The Rule of Reason. The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1997.
278
“Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed” (Lowell Lectures) [1903; CP 4.512, our
emphasis].
279
Fernando Zalamea, “Towards a complex variable interpretation of Peirce’s existential graphs”, in
Mats Bergman et.al. (eds.), Ideas in Action. Proceedings of the Applying Peirce Conference,
Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatism Network, 2010, pp. 254-264.
280
“Contributions to Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology” [1902; CP 6.377].
281
“Some Amazing Mazes, Fourth Curiosity” [c. 1909; CP 6.321].
282
Personal communication of Arnold Oostra (2010).

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CHAPTER IX
TYPES AND TOPOI.
GAMMA (II): EXTENDED LOGICS

Peirce emphasized that “In the Gamma part of the subject all the old kind of signs
take new forms”283, and that he would hail as a “new Columbus” the person who
would discover a graphical sign radically different from those already introduced.
Even if that “new Columbus” is still to come, both Zeman, with his modal tincture
calculus (1997), and Oostra, with his intuitionistic existential graphs (since 2007),
have really conquered some of the non-classical subcontinents fathomed by Peirce.
For the next generations, the current mathematical turmoil around the graphs may
open other possibilities of success. We have suggested that, perhaps, time has come
for freer, liberating interpretations, beyond Peirce himself. In this chapter, we will
explore some alternative paths for the development of Peirce’s graphs.

IX.1. Types

Peirce constructed new forms for old types of signs when he introduced self-reference
processes for diagrammatical thought, that is, when he began to express some
properties of the graphs using also a graphic metalanguage. For instance, Peirce
extended Beta’s line of identity, P Q, where existent individuals are
identified, to a Gamma line, X Y, where graphs are identified (Y is able to

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be substituted by X, or Y is coincident with X). Associated to this extended Gamma
line, Peirce introduced new signs in the metalanguage (“potentials”), in order to
represent the sheet, an area, a cut, an individual, a monad, a binary relation, etc.284
Even more astonishingly, well before Hilbert’s school, Peirce also detected the
interest of managing not just a metalanguage, but also a logical metacalculus (“It is
necessary that we should be able to reason in graphs about graphs”285). Diverse
examples in unpublished manuscripts [MS 467, 468, 511]286, show how a
metacalculus of higher order (II) is applied to the underlying calculus (I) of the
graphs: proof type (II) that a graph (I) is correct, expression type (II) of the double
cut rule (I), proof type (II) of partial erasure in even areas of a line of identity (I)
(using the fact (II) that a line (I) is a superposition of two lines that become
shrunk/deiterated), etc.
Peirce never had the chance to carefully study the last subentry (3.3) of his
triadic classification of the sciences287, that is, the sciences of scientific classification
(“No classification of the science of review has been attempted”288). Nevertheless, an
important reflection of that “science of review” lies exactly at the place (2.2.3.3)
where existential graphs live. The “science of review” realm (3.3) covers what, at the
end of 20th century, would be called systemics289 –a hierarchical, typed, organizational
web of multilayered knowledge, full of reflexive icons and transitive levels– close to
Peirce’s Gamma II attempts. Now, reflexivity works in both directions, in a yet
informal dialectics but which may be modeled through category theoretic
“adjunctions”. In fact, if systemics is reflected in Gamma II, the basic procedures of
the graphs are in turn reflected along systemics. We have indicated how
iteration/deiteration goes well beyond its logical frame, and constitutes an extremely
general, universal semeiotic process. In particular, iteration/deiteration acts on the
classification of sciences itself, revealing subreflections and symmetries (see figures
17, 24). The very emergence of Gamma II and its hierarchical systemics can be seen
as partial realizations of a much wider iteration/deiteration strategy, inside a
thoroughly coherent architectonics. Self-reference techniques enrich the relational

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panorama. Multiplicative systemics reinforce an evolving, iterative approximation to
the summum bonum.
“New forms” for old signs in existential graphs must then begin to be
liberated. In that direction, Oostra has suggested290 that the sheet of assertion –tacitly
assumed by Peirce as formed by an entire euclidean plane– could also be weakly
interpreted as just locally euclidean. This would give rise to non-euclidean models of
the sheet: surfaces of Sphere type, of Möbius Band type, of Torus type, etc. Without
doubt, the logics on these surfaces would be fairly strange. The topological logic of
the sphere, for example, would lead to counterintuitive laws of the form p%¬q (
¬p%q : take the cut around q, deform it (in case of not having anything more written
on the sphere) and turn around one of its boundaries, circumnavigating completely
the sphere, until q is liberated and p enclosed. Thus, the logic of the sphere has to be
paraconsistent, since a writing of a (classical) double cut on the sphere leads,
through deformation, to a (double) assertion of the pseudograph. On another hand,
the logic of the Möbius Band identifies recto and verso, and invalidates all
considerations on cuts and passages to other worlds. It is difficult to assess the
eventual interest of such a trivialization of the modal imperative, but stranger logics
and geometries have been discarded in the history of mathematics, before an
opportunity be given to an understanding of their potentiality.

IX.2. Topoi

Changes of types, changes of topoi291, are deep Peircean strategies. A general

architectonics of transit, Peirce’s systemic system summons change and looks for
knowledge through dialectic residues, relational remnants or permanence levels
behind movement. Many of Peirce’s universal invariants, as cenopythagorean
categories or synechistic gluing, emerge precisely as archetypes behind the variations
of topoi. The transformations of given places (topoi) carry on their natural logic
types. Again, Category Theory provides here many useful guides292. First, Lawvere’s
elementary topoi model collections of variable sets, with underlying intuitionistic

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logics codified by inclusion archetypes (“subobject classifiers”). As a particular case,
actions of monoids conform topoi whose logics are non-classical precisely when the
monoids are not groups. One could ask if some deformations/extensions of GAMMA
(II) may correspond to some types of monoidal actions. In order to guess an answer,
one would have first to introduce crucial homologies/cohomologies for the graphs,
perhaps its most demanding and ambitious mathematical development (see remarks
at the end of section VI.2).
Second, the systemic hierarchy in elementary topoi works perfectly, either
between morphism levels (internal connectives in the classifier related to external
operators between subobjects), or through an ubiquitous use of iteration/iteration
(topoi connectives automatically intuitionistic). In fact, beyond their eventual
connections with existential graphs, elementary topoi embody already many systemic
procedures –both in their philosophy (change and invariance in the crossings of logic
and geometry) and in their technique (enough limits, Yoneda representation)–
procedures that may be called typically Peircean: (i) positioning of many sign levels,
(ii) construction of passages between them, (iii) representation of transit invariants
thanks to relative universals, or archetypes, (iv) attainment of global structure by
means of archetypical local actions. Peirce is thus well alive at the beginning of a
new millennium293.
First-order graphs (Alpha, Beta, Gamma I) may also be extended to second
order in Gamma II, introducing quantification on relations (and not just individuals).
As an example, we refer to the (half) proof of pragmaticism presented in section
IV.2. Recalling that the proof could be undertaken if “necessary possibilities” (#!)
would reduce to actualities (something that happens between S4.2 and S5), it is
interesting to notice how some second-order goals force first-order substrata. Behind
these interwoven systemics may lie other category theoretic interrelations, in
particular, limiting processes between (first-order) elementary topoi and (second-
order) higher topoi294, where, again, “old kind of signs take new forms”.

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IX.3. Open perspectives

For Peirce, the existential graphs constituted a true laboratory of thought. In the
moderate and bounded context of the graphs, the general architectonics had to be
tried out. As we have seen, many crucial forces –pragmatic rules, semeiotic transit,
modal realism, cenopythagorical categories, synechism, abductive logic– attain
“privileged reflections” in the space of the graphs (recall Proust’s moments
priviligiés). The plasticity of the delimited laboratory (in nuce, going to the basics) is
able to reflect the plasticity of the illimitable system (in extenso, propagated over the
cosmos). In fact, some of Gamma’s extensions correspond in nuce to eventual
enlargements in extenso of the architectonics. In the following scheme, we indicate
two open programs (A, B) in the exploration of Peirce’s synechism (in extenso)
through category theoretic tools, and we signal some of their indexical reflections (in
nuce) in Gamma II.
A first program may be called (A) Pragmata of the continuum. The idea is to
construct (i) a “categorical topics” that studies global synthetic correlations between
a continuum of cognitive places, and (ii) a “modal geometry” that handles the local
connection modes between those places, providing modal/model invariants. The two
subprograms are vague and indeterminate (in Peirce’s sense), but must propose
alternatives295 for an analytical philosophy whose origins were excessively
determined by foundations, Set Theory and classical logic. In short, the pragmata of
the continuum would propose a reconstruction of mathematics as a relative
differential of real modalities, in an evolutionist, dynamically Platonic context. Each
term in the preceding sentence is to be contrasted with a corresponding opposite
inside the analytical construction of classical Set Theory. Indeed, from a Category
Theory perspective, mathematics is (a) evolutionist (objects in topoi are variable
sets, developed through time), a fact which contrasts with fixed and rigid sets; (b)
dynamically Platonic (categories propose a dynamical web between abstract
naturalness and concrete artificiality, looking always for a hierarchy of real
obstructions in the mathematical world), a fact which contrasts with a “vulgar” Plato

155
just situated along Ideas and which instead approaches evolving gradations, much
closer to the original Plato296; (c) relative differential (categories discover an abstract
integral unity behind differences, but assume differentiation as the main impulse for
mathematical creativity), a fact which contrasts with classical set theoretic
reductionism; (d) real modal (categories behave in a pendulous calculus between real
universals –existence and uniqueness, abstract universal definitions and proofs– and
interpretative modulations/modalizations), a fact which contrasts with the uniform
classical reconstruction of mathematics through Cantor’s actual infinite. As can be
observed, this wide program (in extenso) possesses some well bounded reflections
(in nuce) in Gamma II: the evolution of signs is a key feature, a Platonic dynamism is
embodied in the growing hierarchy of permissions and obstructions, relative
differentials are summed up in the lines of identity (first or second order), real
modalities conform the crux of all Gamma.
A second program, which includes many themes studied in the previous
chapters, may be called (B) Mathematical modeling of existential graphs. The goal
here is to construct relevant models at the heart of mathematics: topology, complex
variable, sheaf theory, monoidal categories. One should not any more be allowed to
think about graphs as a mere language or as a curious graphical syntax. Instead, its
full semantic and pragmatic complexity has to be revealed, along main mathematical
channels. Some fundamental natural transits must be explored and distinctly
formalized: (i) between intuitionistic logic, its topological models and Peirce’s
logico-topological frame of mind, following Burch, Havenel and Oostra; (ii) between
Category Theory and the hidden underlying structures of the continuum and the
graphs, following Brady & Trimble and our own work; (iii) between sheaf theory,
complex fibrations, Riemann surfaces and Gamma’s extensions, a perspective just
opened which needs further developments. Other ideas would have to enter into a
wider mathematical dialog: genericity in Model Theory, cobordism in Algebraic
Geometry. An ubiquitous category theoretic tendency to look for initial archetypes
(classifying topoi, free allegories, motives) must help to channel Peirce’s search for a
primal continuum, to be afterwards projected over partial continuity contexts. This

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could be the case of Alpha’s sheet, Beta’s deformations of the line or Gamma’s book
pages, understood, respectively, through the complex plane, the analytic continuation
of functions or the leaves of a Riemann surface. We could be thus be looking to three
different expressions of the One, three derived representations of the primal unity of
complex variables.
Recalling the advantages to look at the verso of graphs (through the looking-
glass), Peirce wrote: “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”297. We have registered the
amazing superiority of that laboratory, when the system is projected towards other
fields of knowledge. Much water has flowed since Quine stated their supposed
inferiority, considering them as “good entertainment” in his obliging review (1934)
of Collected Papers IV:

The other material on exact logic has to do with logical graphs. A series of
extensions and modifications of Euler’s scheme of diagrams leads Peirce to an
elaborate scheme of his own, designed for the expression of propositions
involving any manner of complexity in point of relational structure, quantity and
even modality. The system is intended rather for the analysis of logical structure
than for the facilitation of inference; because of its cumbersomeness it is less
suited to the latter purpose than is the algebraic form of logic. One questions the
efficacy of Peirce’s diagrams, however, in their analytic capacity as well. Their
basic machinery is too complex to allow one much satisfaction in analyzing
propositional structure into terms of that machinery. While it is not
inconceivable that advances in the diagrammatic method might open possibilities
of analysis superior to those afforded by the algebraic method, yet an
examination of Peirce’s product tends rather, apagogically as it were, to confirm
one’s faith in the algebraic approach. [...] The volume as a whole recommends
itself to the logico-mathematical reader above its predecessors in the series. Its
600 pages contain a generous variety of good entertainment.298

Time has confirmed the appropriateness of Peirce’s faith in the graphs and has put in
its right place the clumsy review of Harvard’s young rising star. Oriented towards
language, grammar and classical logic, Quine could not foresee the pragmatic,
topological and modal richness of the graphs. The matter would have little
importance if it weren’t for the author’s prestige: his superficial review discredited in
turn a profound potential.

157
Going upstream, against Quine and his influence, the doctoral theses of
Roberts and Zeman saved the graphs from oblivion. And still against the tide, the last
two decades of work around the existential graphs, with the spectacular contributions
of Burch, Zeman, Brady & Trimble and Oostra, augur finally the emergence of the
“privileged place” that the graphs should occupy. As Peirce foresaw in one of his
unpublished manuscripts, the existential graphs have required the growing creativity
of a community of researchers:

The above are the conventions establishing the System of Existential Graphs in
its present state. I should be greatly disappointed if this were to be its final state.
For it is at present far from the ideal perfection to which I hope some student
may bring it.299

Peirce’s humble and faithful wish has been realized and we slowly approach the
summum bonum. Thanks to that future “student” –call him Roberts, Zeman, Burch,
Brady, Trimble, Oostra– the continuous growing of potentiality of the existential
graphs continues to expand.

283
“Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed” (Lowell Lectures) [1903; CP 4.512].
284
“Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed” (Lowell Lectures) [1903; CP 4.528-
529].
285
“Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed” (Lowell Lectures) [1903; CP 4.527].
286
Partial descriptions of those manuscripts available in Don Roberts, The Existential Graphs of
Charles S. Peirce, The Hague: Mouton, 1973, pp. 71-74.
287
Beverly Kent, Logic and the Classification of Sciences, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1987.
288
“A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic” [1903; CP 1.202].
289
Following Bunge, Maturana, Luhmann, Watson or Halliday.
290
Personal communication (2010).
291
The mathematical work of Alexander Grothendieck in the 1950’s and 1960’s would take those
strategies at heart (as usual, without even knowing Peirce) and would simply revolutionize
contemporary mathematics.
292
For other connections between Peirce’s general system and Category Theory, see Fernando
Zalamea, “A Category-Theoretic Reading of Peirce’s System: Pragmaticism, Continuity and The
Existential Graphs”, in Matthew Moore (ed.), New Essays on Peirce’s Mathematical Philosophy,
Chicago: Open Court, 2010, pp. 203-233.
293
By different routes, cult Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani reaches a similar multilayered
imperative for relative universals in our era (a truly universal mind, Negarestani builds on chemical,
semiotical, mathematical, political decay and negativity: Peirce’s verso). See, for example, Reza

158
Negarestani, “Undercover Softness: an Introduction to the Architecture and Politics of Decay”,
Collapse VI (2010): 379-430.
294
Jacob Lurie, Higher Topos Theory, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
295
Such alternatives, in the realm of a philosophy for contemporary mathematical practice, are
proposed in detail in Fernando Zalamea, Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics
(translation of Filosofía sintética de las matemáticas contemporáneas, 2009), Falmouth: Urbanomic,
2012.
296
See, for example, Nicolas-Isidore Boussoulas, L’Être et la composition des mixtes dans le
“Philèbe” de Platon, Paris: PUF, 1952, or Léonce Paquet, Platon. La médiation du regard, Leiden:
Brill, 1973.
297
“Recent Developments of Existential Graphs and their Consequences for Logic” [1906; CP 4.581].
298
W. V. O. Quine, “Review – Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce – Volume IV”, Isis XXII
(1934), pp. 551-553.
299
[c. 1906; MS 295, p. 53]

159
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165
NAME INDEX

Aliseda-Llera, Atocha, 101 Burks, Arthur, 7

Annoni, Marco, 6 Burnet, John, 34
Aristotle, 22, 34, 40-41
Auerbach, Erich, 114 Caicedo, Xavier, 7, 48-49, 53, 119, 128, 136-
137
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 106, 114 Calcaterra, Rosa, 7
Baldwin, James, 146 Cantor, Georg, 4, 10-11, 14-15, 19-21, 23, 32,
Banach, Stefan, 101 37-40, 44, 25-53, 74, 156
Barcan, Ruth, 149 Cantù, Paola, 51
Beck, John, 113, 136-137 Carus, Paul, 35, 101
Bénabou, Jean, 45, 52 Cassirer, Ernst, 131, 139-140
Benjamin, Walter, 110 Cauchy, Augustin-Louis, 11, 47, 134, 137
Bergman, Matts, 115, 128, 140, 150, 164 Cayley, Arthur, 35
Bernays, Paul, 52 Chevalley, Claude, 113, 136-137
Bolzano, Bernard, 35, 43-44, 52, 101 Cignoli, Roberto, 128
Boole, George, 53, 70, 127, 129, 136-137, 145 Clifford, William Kingdon, 35
Boussoulas, Nicolas-Isidore, 159 Cohen, Paul, 13
Borges, Jorge Luis, 90 Colman, Felicity, 114
Brady, Geraldine, 112-113, 115-116, 121, Columbus, Christopher, 151
125-128, 136-140, 156, 158 Conway, John, 42-43, 52
Brock, Jarrett, 35 Crick, Francis, 16
Brouwer, L. E. J., 23, 34, 38-40, 44, 51-52, Cruz, Alexander, 6
135
Brunning, Jacqueline, 74, 99, 114, 150 Dalen, Dirk van, 47, 53
Burch, Robert, 51, 99, 112, 114, 121, 133, Dauben, Joseph, 32
140, 147, 156, 158 Dedekind, Richard, 47

166
Dipert, Randall, 32-33, 100 Herron, Timothy, 33, 35, 51-52
Heyting, Arend, 50, 53, 135, 137
Ehrlich, Philip, 42, 52 Hilbert, David, 83, 114, 137, 152
Eiffel, Gustave, 103 Houser, Nathan, 7, 33
Eilenberg, Samuel, 147
Einstein, Albert, 48 Ito, Toyo, 103
Eisele, Carolyn, 7, 34-35
Epicurus, 34 James, William, 35, 75
Esposito, Joseph, 99-100 Johanson, Arnold, 35
Euler, Leonhard, 116, 157 Jónsson, Bjarni, 42
Evra, James van, 33 Jourdain, Philip, 34, 78
Joyal, André, 113, 136-137, 140
Fabbrichesi, Rossella, 7, 35, 73, 75, 114 Joyce, James, 58
Feynman, Richard, 137 Judah, Haim, 32
Fisch, Max, 22, 34-35, 101 Just, Winfried, 32
Florenski, Pavel, 111, 114
Forster, Paul, 74, 99, 114, 150 Kant, Immanuel, 20, 33
Fourier, Joseph, 11 Kelly, Max, 113, 126
Fraenkel, Abraham, 11, 52, 121 Kempe, Alfred Bray, 91, 108
Frege, Gottlob, 10, 14, 44, 52 Kent, Beverley, 64, 74, 158
Freyd, Peter, 41-42, 52, 135-136, 140 Ketner, Ken, 7, 32-35, 100-101
Friedman, Harvey, 101 Klein, Felix, 35, 126
Kloesel, Christian, 7, 34, 101
Galois, Évariste, 6, 131 König, Julius, 13-14, 33
Gödel, Kurt, 13, 33, 52, 140 Krajicek, Jan, 50, 53
Grassmann, Hermann, 35, 126 Kripke, Saul, 53, 112, 136, 143-144, 146
Grothendieck, Alexander, 13, 53, 126, 128, Krynicki, Michal, 53
131, 158 Kuratowski, Kazimierz, 147

Hahn, Hans, 101 Lambert, Johann, 116

Hamilton, William, 35, 116, 127 Ladd Franklin, Christine, 129
Hartshorne, Charles, 7 Lane, Robert, 35
Hausman, Carl, 35, 100 Laugwitz, Detlef, 51
Havenel, Jérôme, 6-7, 114, 128, 156 Lautman, Albert, 99, 108, 114
Hayford, Harrison, 139 Lawvere, William, 42, 47, 50, 113, 125, 136,
Heidegger, Martin, 84, 99, 104 153
Heraclitus, 135

167
Leibniz, Gottfried, 31, 34, 51, 58, 100, 116, Negarestani, Reza, 158
144-145 Nelson, Edward, 45, 52-53
Lewis, Clarence Irving, 99, 142, 144 Neumann, John von, 52
Lindström, Per, 53 Niño, Douglas, 6
Listing, Johann Benedict, 35 Noble, Brian, 32, 35
Llull, Ramon, 116 Novalis, 110
Locke, Gordon, 32, 52 Nubiola, Jaime, 6-7
Lovejoy, Arthur, 75
Löwenheim, Leopold, 53 Oostra, Arnold, 6-7, 112, 114-116, 123-124,
Luhmann, Niklas, 74, 158 127-128, 134, 137, 139-140, 150-151, 153,
Luisi, Maria, 7 156, 158
Lukasiewicz, Jan, 99, 143
Lurie, Jacob, 158 Panza, Marco, 7
Pape, Helmut, 100
MacLane, Saunders, 12, 32, 113, 147 Paquet, Léonce, 159
Maddalena, Giovanni, 6-7, 131, 140 Parker, Hershel, 139
Martin, Donald, 13, 33 Parker, Kelly, 74
Martín, Alejandro, 6 Peiffer-Reuter, Renée, 51
Marty, Robert, 53 Penrose, Roger, 137
Mathias, A. R. D., 32 Perry, Roberto, 7, 102, 106-107
Maturana, Humberto, 144, 158 Petitot, Jean, 7
Melville, Herman, 129, 139, 142 Pietarinen, Ahti-Veikko, 7, 101, 128
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 114 Plato, 49, 109, 139, 155-156, 159
Merrill, Daniel, 33 Potter, Vincent, 32
Mitchell, Oscar, 91, 108, 116, 129-130 Proust, Marcel, 54, 58, 127, 155
Möbius, August Ferdinand, 153 Putnam, Hilary, 33-35
Moerdijk, Ieke, 47, 53
Molina, Fabián, 150 Quine, W. V. O., 32, 100, 157-159
Moore, E. H., 32
Moore, Matthew, 7, 114-115, 128, 158 Reyes, Gonzalo, 47, 50, 53
Morgan, Augustus de, 34, 129 Riemann, Bernard, 35, 48, 113, 131, 146, 156-
Mostowski, Marcin, 53 157
Murphey, Murray, 35, 99, 101, 103 Roberts, Don, 33-34, 82, 99-101, 112, 127-
Musil, Robert, 138, 142 128, 140, 158
Myrvold, Wayne, 52 Robin, Richard, 8, 65, 74, 92, 99-100
Royce, Josiah, 140
Natorp, Paul, 51 Rueda, Ricardo, 134, 140

168
Russell, Bertrand, 52 Watson, James, 16
Watson, Richard, 158
Salanskis, Jean-Michel, 51-52 Weierstrass, Karl, 21, 101
Scedrov, André, 52, 140 Weinberg, Steven, 22
Sebestik, Jan, 52 Weiss, Paul, 7
Sfendoni-Mentzou, Demetra, 74 Woodin, Hugh, 13, 32-33, 52
Shields, Paul, 32
Shin, Sun-Joo, 128 Yoneda, Nobuo, 46-47, 154
Simpson, Stephen, 101
Sinaceur, Hourya, 51-52 Zalamea, Fernando, 112, 114-115, 128, 140,
Skolem, Thoralf, 53 150, 158-159
Sochor, Antonin, 52 Zeman, Jay, 82, 99-100, 110, 112, 114, 128,
Spencer, Herbert, 71 145, 150-151, 158
Street, Ross, 136-137, 140 Zermelo, Ernst, 11, 43-44, 52, 121
Sylvester, James Joseph, 145 Zolfaghari, Houman, 53
Szczerba, Leslaw, 53

Tanselle, Gary, 139

Tarkovsky, Andrei, 111, 114
Tarski, Alfred, 48, 112, 135-136
Thibaud, Pierre, 99, 128, 140
Thom, René, 31, 40-42, 44-45, 47, 52-53, 114,
121
Tienne, André de, 7
Trimble, Todd, 112-113, 115-116, 121, 125-
128, 136-140, 156, 158
Troelstra, Anne Sjerp, 47, 53
Turrisi, Patricia, 7

Venn, John, 116

Veronese, Giuseppe, 37-38, 39, 44, 51, 99
Villaveces, Andrés, 6
Viola, Bill, 111, 114
Vopenka, Petr, 42-44, 52

Warburg, Aby, 114

Watkins, Calvert, 107, 114

169