“I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.”

— Charles Sanders Peirce

Letter to Victoria, Lady Welby (1908) SS 80-81

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Charles Sanders Peirce 121

American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist 1839–1914

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

p, 125
War and Change in World Politics (1981)

“In every organization there must be some function that decides or determines the objective and the procedure necessary to its attainment… may be called the determinative… in secular government always known as the legislative.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 47, as cited in Lyndall Urwick (1937;50)

“What I declare and believe to have demonstrated in this work as well as in earlier papers is that following the finite there is a transfinite (transfinitum)--which might also be called supra-finite (suprafinitum), that is, there is an unlimited ascending ladder of modes, which in its nature is not finite but infinite, but which can be determined as can the finite by determinate, well-defined and distinguishable numbers.”

Georg Cantor (1845–1918) mathematician, inventor of set theory

From Kant to Hilbert (1996)

“Administration is the process and agency which is responsible for the determination of the aims for which an organization and its management are to strive, which establishes the broad policies under which they are to operate and which gives general oversight to the continuing effectiveness of the total operation in reaching the objectives sought.”

Ordway Tead (1891–1973) American academic

Ordway Tead (1945) Democratic administration. p. 67.

“The process in which something functions as a sign may be called '. This process, in a tradition which goes back to the Greeks, has commonly been regarded as involving three (or four) factors: that which acts as a sign, that which the sign refers to, and the effect on some interpreter in virtue of which the thing in question is a sign to that interpreter. These three components in semiosis may be called, respectively, the sign vehicle, the designatum, and the interpretant; the interpreter may be included as a fourth factor. These terms make explicit the factors left undesignated in the common statement that a sign refers to something for someone.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 3

“Only by the concrete whole which comprises the object and the situation are the vectors which determine the dynamics of the event defined.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, The conflict between Aristotelian and Galileian modes of thought in contemporary psychology, 1931, p. 165.

“Aside from Cauchy, the greatest contributory to the theory [of determinants] was Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi. With him the word "determinant" received its final acceptance. He early used the functional determinant which Sylvester has called the Jacobian, and in his famous memoirs in Crelle's Journal for 1841 he considered these forms as well as that class of alternating functions which Sylvester has called alternants.”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2

“I cannot conceive, how a body, destitute of understanding and sense, truly so called, can moderate and determine its own motions; especially so as to make them conformable to laws that it has no knowledge of.”

Robert Boyle (1627–1691) English natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor

"A Free Inquiry into the Vulgar Notion of Nature" Sect.1 ibid.

“The balance of political power at any given moment is determined under the influences of fundamental and secondary factors of differing degrees of effectiveness, and only in its fundamental quality is it determined by the state of the development of production.”

Leon Trotsky book Terrorism and Communism

Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 1

“I call a sign which stands for something merely because it resembles it, an icon. Icons are so completely substituted for their objects as hardly to be distinguished from them.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

On The Algebra of Logic (1885)
Context: I call a sign which stands for something merely because it resembles it, an icon. Icons are so completely substituted for their objects as hardly to be distinguished from them. Such are the diagrams of geometry. A diagram, indeed, so far as it has a general signification, is not a pure icon; but in the middle part of our reasonings we forget that abstractness in great measure, and the diagram is for us the very thing. So in contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction of the real and the copy disappears, and it is for the moment a pure dream, — not any particular existence, and yet not general. At that moment we are contemplating an icon.

“I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.”

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Charles Sanders Peirce 121

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