Abstract

In his presidential address on “Symbols, Signs, and Signals,” given before the Association for Symbolic Logic, December 28, 1938, Professor C. J. Ducasse made and important distinction between what he there called the indicative and the quiddative symbol. He remarked in passing that he thought it possible to show that: 1) “The same entity may function both as indicative and as quiddative symbol: or one part of a complex symbol may be quiddative and another indicative”; and 2) “the difference between the two roles is irreducible: the indicative is not a species of the quiddative nor vice versa.” An indicative symbol is defined as “one of which the distinctive property is to orient our attention to some place in an order system …”; and a quiddative symbol as “one of which the distinctive property is to make us conceive a certain kind of thing—a certain ‘what'—no matter where in any order system it may or may not be existing.”