Is Peirce's reduction thesis gerrymandered?

Abstract

We argue that traditional formulations of the reduction thesis that tie it to privileged relational operations do not suffice for Peirce's justification of the categories, and invite the charge of gerrymandering to make it come out as true. We then develop a more robust invariant formulation of the thesis by explicating the use of triads in any relational operations, which is immune to that charge. The explication also allows us to track how Thirdness enters the structure of higher order relations, and even propose a numerical measure of it. Our analysis reveals new conceptual phenomena when negation or disjunction are used to compound relations.