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(2.414). In this sense the depth of a term, or its intension, is the sum of intensional or semantic marks that characterizes its content. Those marks are general units (nominantur singularia sed universalia significantur, 2.433, from John of Salisbury's Metalogicon). Therefore they are those imputed characters called 'ground'.
This set of features (or marks) is destined to grow along with the growing of our knowledge of the objects; the rheme attracts, so to speak, as a lodestone, all the new marks that the process of knowledge attributes to it: "every symbol is a living thing, in a very strict sense that is no mere figure of speech. The body of the symbol changes slowly, but its meaning inevitably grows, incorporates new elements and throws off old ones" (2.222). All this seems to suggest that the term is in itself an encyclopedia containing every character it can acquire in every new general proposition. But all this is something more than a mere suggestion.
Peirce clearly stresses many times the fact that any term is in itself an inchoative proposition (any rheme is potentially the dicent in which it can be subsequently inserted), and it is so in a way which recalls the contemporary semantic concept of a term as a predicate with n arguments. The meaning of logical terms is a rudimentary assertion (2.342) in the same way in which a proposition is a rudimentary argumentation (2.344): this is the basic principle of interpretation, that is, the reason why every sign produces its own interpretants. A term is a rudimentary proposition because it is the blank form of a proposition: "by rheme, or predicate, will here be meant a blank form of proposition which might have resulted by striking out certain parts of a proposition, and leaving a blank in the place of each, the part stricken out being such that if each blank were filled with a proper name, a proposition (however nonsensical) would thereby be recomposed" (4.560). In 2.379, even though speaking of the forms of propositions, Peirce shows that, given the verb to marry, it can be semantically represented as 'marriesto', which is the same as saying that, in order to represent generatively the syntactic nature of to marry, one should write 'm(x,y,z)' (see also 3.64). This procedure, duly developed, implies that the semantic representation of a term concerns phenomena of entailment and of semantic "presupposition." In terms which recall Carnap's meaning postulates, Peirce says that hiá di "means that on the occasion i, if the idea h is definitively forced upon the mind, then on the same occasion the idea d is definitively forced upon the mind'' (2.356). This is the principle of nota notae of traditional logic, but in the same pages Peirce insists on the possibility of an intensional logic to be opposed to the ordinary logic of general classes of things. He separates the problem of propositions in extension from that of propositions in comprehension, therefore elaborating twelve types of propositions in which the subject is a class of things but the predicate is a group of marks (2.520,521). One could object that the method of

 
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