“Postscript” would be more accurate than “preface” since I am writing this at the end of the thread. I’ll be continuing my reading of Peirce, though my upcoming summer posts will not continue in this thread. What I have done here is the following: Pragmatic Maxim Settled Opinion Principles of Inquiry Signs: Part 1 Signs: Part 2 Grant Franks’ lecture Metaphysics: Part 1 Metaphysics: Part 2 Reality Outside the Mind (Psychology Today) The series was…
We find another triad in Peirce’s categories. They are opaquely named Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness (Atkin, 2016, Chapter 6). In earlier works Peirce more descriptively calls them, respectively, quality, relation, and representation. The term “relation” might be misleading, because–as we find in Peirce’s treatment of signs–there are relations that cannot be reduced to two terms. That is why Peirce considers replacing relation with reaction. He also admits to have stretched “the meaning of the word…
In this post and the next, I am concerned with C. S. Peirce’s metaphysics (Atkin, 2016, Chapter 6) and–as it has been my aim throughout this Peirce series–with drawing connections between the philosopher’s work and the recent work in general psychology (Jens Mammen and Niels Engelsted). Peirce’s method for metaphysical inquiry has something to do with phenomenology or, perhaps more accurately, introspection. Given that phenomenology taps into what every person can find in their experience,…
While reading Atkin’s Chapter 4 on Peircean semiotics, I learned that the 3 aspects of a sign (sign-vehicle, object, and interpretant) are not different entities. Rather, they are interdependent and are parts of a single whole. It is difficult to see the interpretant as a “thing”, something that is easier in the case of sign-vehicle and object, as the interpretant seems more like a process, something that happens (the “immediate object” is similarly closer to…
Finally, we are on the topic of signs (Atkin, 2016, Chapter 4). I might have to revise my initial impressions discussed in this post. We shall see. The first thing that surprised me was that the “interpretant” element does NOT represent a person. It represents the understanding, the translation, which enables the link between the object and the sign (or, sign-vehicle). The second thing that surprised me was that Interpretant itself is potentially a sign…