From time to time I come to the realization that there are ways of reading Peirce that make no sense to me.  When I stop to think about the potential sources of that evident divergence from common sense, the first thing that comes to mind is the fact that people come to reading Peirce with so many different aims, backgrounds, and collateral experiences with the objects that he wraps his signs and ideas around.

Thinking about that leads to all sorts of questions that I see no way of beginning to address with any sense of coherence.  All I can do is try to give a good account of what makes sense to me and why.  My experience with failures to communicate over many trials tells me that the biggest and most numerous rifts in our several understandings of Peirce all point back to the visions of relations, triadic relations, and triadic sign relations that dance in our various and sundry heads.

So that is what I’ll take up first …