Relation were invented by Tarski and his collaborators in the middle of the twentieth century. The concept of integrality arose naturally early in the history of the subject, and so did various constructions of finite integral relation algebras. Later the concept of finite-dimensionality was introduced for classifying nonrepresentable relation algebras. This concept is closely connected to the ...

This study examined a historical mixture model approach to the evaluation of ratings made in “gold standard” and two-rater 2 × 2 contingency tables. Peirce’s i and the derived i average were discussed in relation to a widely used index of reliability in the behavioral sciences, Cohen’s κ. Sample size, population base rate of occurrence, the true “science of the method”, and guessing rates were ...

In his 1903 Syllabus, Charles S. Peirce makes a distinction between icons and iconic signs, or hypoicons, and briefly introduces a division of the last ones into images, diagrams and metaphors. Peirce scholars have tried to make better sense of those concepts by understanding iconic signs in the context of the 10 classes of signs described in the same Syllabus. We will argue, however, that the ...

‘Abduction’ was the term Charles Sanders Peirce used in his later writings for a type of inference that he had earlier called ‘hypothesis’ and that is now commonly called ‘inference to the best explanation’. According to Peirce, abduction constituted, alongside induction, a distinct second form of nondemonstrative or probabilistic inference. Especially in his later work, Peirce conceived of abd...

The mobile era of electronic communication has created a huge semiotic system, constructed out of triadic components envisaged by the American scientist and philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914), such as icons, indices and symbols, and signs, objects and interpretants. Iconic signs bear a physical resemblance to what they represent. Indices point at something and say “there!”, and symbols s...

This paper comments upon some of the open problems in artificial life (cf. Bedeau et al 2000) from the perspective of a philosophy of biology tradition called qualitative organicism, and more specifically the emerging field of biosemiotics, the study of life processes as sign processes. Semiotics, in the sense of the pragmaticist philosopher and scientist Charles S. Peirce, is the general study...

In this article I trace the historical development of Peirce’s semiotic rhetoric from its early appearance as a sub-discipline of symbolistic to its mature incarnation as one of the three main branches of the science of semiotic, and argue that this change in status is a symptom of Peirce’s broadening semiotic interest. The article shows how the evolution of Peirce’s theory of signs is linked t...