Parallels between govern and measure

There is a formal parallel between the terms “govern” and “measure”. My “guess at the riddle” is that there are several terms besides these that have a similar “triadic relational” structure, but for now I’ll lay out the parallels in these terms.

Since the “fundamental” logical modality that Peirce considered was temporal, and any verb can be expressed with present, past, and future tenses (tense is derived from the old French term “tens” meaning time), then it’s no suprise that a formal triadic relation could be expressed from any verb. The Wikipedia article on (grammatical tense)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_tense] says that tenses are not universal in every language, and that not every language has three distinct tenses, so I could be working from an implicit language bias.

English has only two “morphological tenses: the present and the past. It does not express the future with a specific verb tense, and uses auxiliary “modals” to talk about future points in time.

So from this formal basis, no suprise that the verbs “govern” and “measure” can be arranged in a triadic relationship. In Peircean order, these are present (firstness), past (secondness) and future (thirdness). Peirce strongly emphasized the “would-be” nature of the future tense and linked “thirdness” to the idea of purpose. Both “govern” and “measure” can be transformed into nouns using the “latin-derived” suffix “-ment”, so that we have the terms “government” and “measurement”. According to Gemini, there are a variety of meanings that can result from the suffix.

Lincoln’s formulation of the triadic relation of “govern” strongly emphasized the notion of “purpose” in the future category in a way that is very reminiscent of Peirce. I’ve commented on the triadic relational nature of Lincoln’s formulation of self-government in the Gettysburg address in a previous post. In Peircean order, these are “government by the people”, or governing; “government of the people” or governed, and “government for the people,” which does not have a specific tense in English. Lincoln highlights the sense of purpose, or the normative, in the last formulation, which is similar to how Peirce considered the future tense. Since Lincoln proceeds from the noun “government,” his formulation somewhat obscures the relationship with the grammatical tenses.

Measurement follows a similar relationship. “Measurement by a system” is the measuring system, “measurement of a system” is the measured system (aka measurand) and “measurement for a system” doesn’t have a specific tense in English but could be called the “evaluation system”. Although there is a close parallel between “value” and “norm,” measurement tends to downplay the notion of purpose in it’s idea of “valuation,” but it seems that one of Mari’s goals is to develop the relationship between “evaluation” and “purpose” (although as of this writing I have not read Chapter 7).

Cybernetics is the name of the transdisciplinary framework developed around “goven”. Measurement has no such “catchy?” term - Mari’s title of “Measurement across the sciences” points to such a framework without naming it.