The Stoic theory of lekta did include the notion of "primitive" lekta, which they called "axioms" or "basic sayables." These were the most fundamental lekta, from which all others could be derived through a process of combination and modification.

However, the Stoics did not have a formal theory of definition or decomposition of lekta into primitive lekta beyond the basic grammatical structure. They believed that lekta were directly apprehended by the mind and were not reducible to anything more basic.

That being said, the Stoics did have a method of analyzing complex lekta into simpler components, which they called "analysis." This involved breaking down a complex lekton into its constituent parts and identifying the relationships between them. However, this method was not intended as a formal theory of definition or decomposition, but rather as a tool for understanding the structure and meaning of lekta.

I use the 'symbols' tab in Microsoft Word. For example: ∧, Σ, Ω, ⊂, ⇔.

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@Agnieszka Matylda Schlichtinger

I am intrigued by the Stoic concept of 'lekta'. In modern linguistics

we can consider merely formal (surface) syntactic (and morphological) analysis of linguistic expressions but there are also formal approaches to semantics and semantic relations.

I wonder if the lekta take a kind of intermediate place between the two approaches. They are linguistic entities but they also carry meaning. The sayable is also what is meaningful.

In my preprint Logic and Semiotics in Aristotle's Topics I have now included the observation:

The medieval scholastics used to distinguish between primary and secondary intensions. Consider the sentence : the term Man is subordinate to the term Animal. When using the expression 'term Man' we are not referencing a concrete man or even a collection of men. Nor are we referencing an inscription or physical or perceptual sequence of tokens.

Rather we are referencing a complex consisting both of linguistic and semantic data and their relationship.

In this paper we take the approach that such complexes can be formalised as linguistic data (in a suitable ideal language) together with a collection of first-order predicates applying to such data which formalise both grammatical and semantic information and relations. We are inspired by the work of Richard Milton Martin and David Parsons' account of the Inscriptional Meta-Language with the difference that we do no think of linguistic entities as concrete 'inscriptions' but in a slightly more abstract and ideal sense which yet preserves all the crucial formal combinatoric structure of concrete inscriptions.

Husserl wrote in First Philosophy Lectures (1923-24) :

The Stoic logic, which further developed the great project of

Aristotelian analytics, has the great merit of having for the first

time explicitly worked out the necessary idea of a truly rigorous formal logic

in a reasonably pure way. It laid the ground for this

development through its significant—though disregarded, indeed

completely forgotten—doctrine of the lektón. In this doctrine the

idea of a proposition, as the judgment judged in the act of judging

(judgment in the noematic sense), is succinctly expressed for the

first time, and the syllogistic laws are related to its pure forms.

Are Stoic unsaturated lekta expressing qualities such as 'X is red' or 'being red' ontologically distinct (for the Stoics) from the quality/qualia itself ?

George Bealer's 'properties' seem to be actually identified with qualities and thus his whole ontology is not that close to Stoicism...?

We should of course distinguish 'redness' as i) a certain optic property of physical objects, ii) as a type of immediate sensation/perception/experience and iii) as an abstract idea or concept.