Abstract
We commonly represent a class with a curve enclosing individuals that share an attribute. Individuals that are not predicated with that attribute are left outside. The status of this outer class has long been a matter of dispute in logic. In modern notations, negative terms are simply expressed by labeling the spaces that they cover. In this note, we discuss an unusual (and previously unpublished) method designed by Peirce in 1896 to handle negative terms: to indicate the position of the terms by the shape of the curve rather than by labeling the spaces.
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Acknowledgments
This note draws upon research supported by the Estonian Research Council PUT 267 ‘Diagrammatic Mind: Logical and Communicative Aspects of Iconicity’ (Principal investigator Professor Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, 2013-2016).
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Moktefi, A., Pietarinen, AV. (2016). Negative Terms in Euler Diagrams: Peirce’s Solution. In: Jamnik, M., Uesaka, Y., Elzer Schwartz, S. (eds) Diagrammatic Representation and Inference. Diagrams 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9781. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42333-3_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42333-3_25
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