Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed For Signs

Re: Peirce List (1) (2) (3) • Helmut Raulien

I confess I have never found going on about Firstness Secondness Thirdness all that useful in any practical situation.

• Firstness means you have a monadic predicate in mind as relevant to a phenomenon, problem, or other subject matter.
• Secondness means you have a dyadic relation in mind as bearing on the situation at hand.
• Thirdness means you have a triadic relation in mind relative to the same end.

After that one may consider the fine points of generic versus degenerate cases, and that is all well and good, but until you venture to say exactly which monadic, dyadic, or triadic predicate you have in mind, you haven’t really said that much at all.

What I do think is interesting in all this is the fact that Peirce, from 1865 on, maintains in the background of his thought the idea that information is the solid substance borne by concepts and symbols, while comprehension and extension are its complementary aspects, its shadows.

I have been studying Peirce’s way of integrating comprehension and extension in the form of information for quite a while, and there is my set of excerpts and comments on this page:

• Information = Comprehension × Extension

But I just ran across a shorter sketch of the main ideas I must have begun some time ago but not yet finished:

• Peirce’s Logic Of Information

It has the advantage of presenting a nicely self-explanatory figure right up front.  At any rate, try taking a look at that.

Resources

• Sign Relations
• Triadic Relations
• Relation Theory
• Peirce’s 1870 Logic Of Relatives : The Wiki Article
• Peirce’s 1870 Logic Of Relatives : The Series Pilot

cc: Peirce List (1) (2) (3)