Analysis and decomposition in Peirce

Peirce seems to maintain two incompatible theses: that a sentence is multiply ana- lyzable into subject and predicate, and that a sentence is uniquely analyzable as a combination of rhemata of rst intention and rhemata of second intention. In this paper it is argued that the incompatibility disappears as soon as we distinguish, fol- lowing Dummett’s work on Frege, two distinct notions of analysis: ‘analysis’ proper, whose purpose is to display the manner in which the sense of a sentence is deter- mined by the senses of its constituent parts, and ‘decomposition’, which is the pro- cess of dividing a sentence into a predicate and a subject, and whose purpose is to both to explain how quanti ed sentences are constructed and to evidence a pattern within a sentence which it shares with other sentences.