[2.2.3.] Incapacity #3: Thinking without Signs.

 

Says Peirce:

 

3. “We have no power of thinking without signs.” (EP 1:30)

 

…whenever we think, we have present to the consciousness some feeling, image, conception, or other representation, which serves as a sign. (EP 1:38)

 

 

[2.2.3.1.] Signs and Semiotics.

 

The concept of sign is extremely important to Peirce, who founded the area of inquiry known as semiotics, the theory of signs. (Peirce spelled it “semeiotic.”)

 

Peirce’s definition of a sign: something that represents something to someone (or, more generally, to something).

 

So for Peirce, the sign relationship is triadic–it always involves three things:

1)      the thing that signifies (the sign itself, or as he sometimes calls it, the representamen)

2)      the thing that is signified (the object)

3)      the thing to which something is signified (the interpretant)

 

For example, clouds can serve as a sign of rain to a person…

1)      the representamen is the clouds

2)      the object is rain

3)      the interpretant is a thought in the mind of a person.

 

There are two types of sign:

·         natural – e.g., clouds (which are a sign of rain)

·         non-natural – e.g., traffic signs

The class of non-natural signs includes linguistic signs (language)

 

 

[2.2.3.2.] The Universal Categories.

 

Some earlier philosophers had developed what they took to be exhaustive lists of universal categories, according to which anything whatsoever could be categorized.

 

The earliest example was Aristotle, who believed that anything at all must belong to one of ten categories:[1]

 

1.       substance [this category was primary, for Aristotle]

2.       quantity                        

3.       quality                                      

4.       place                           

5.       state                            

6.       time

7.       relation

8.       position

9.       action

10.   affection (being acted on)

 

 

On the other hand, Kant’s universal categories are based on types of judgments that human beings might make. Any “judgment” or proposition has a specific quantity, quality, relation, and modality:

 

quantity	quality	relation	modality
universal	affirmative	categorical	problematic
particular	negative	hypothetical (“if-then”)	assertoric
singular	infinite	disjunctive	apodeictic

 

On Peirce’s view, both Aristotle and Kant had failed in identifying the most basic, fundamental categories of being. Each of their lists was too long.

 

According to Peirce, there are three fundamental categories of being, which he eventually came to call Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. [2]

 

He describes how he first derived these categories in an attempt to correct mistakes that he identified in Kant:

 

The first question, and it was a question of supreme importance requiring not only utter abandonment of all bias, but also a most cautious yet vigorously active research, was whether or not the fundamental categories of thought really have that sort of dependence upon formal logic that Kant asserted. I became thoroughly convinced that such a relation really did and must exist. After a series of inquiries, I came to see that Kant ought not to have confined himself to divisions of propositions, or "judgments," as the Germans confuse the subject by calling them, but ought to have taken account of all elementary and significant differences of form among signs of all sorts, and that, above all, he ought not to have left out of account fundamental forms of reasonings. At last, after the hardest two years' mental work that I have ever done in my life, I found myself with but a single assured result of any positive importance. This was that there are but three elementary forms of predication or signification, which as I originally named them (but with bracketed additions now made to render the terms more intelligible) were qualities (of feeling), (dyadic) relations, and (predications of) representations. (1.561, MS 318, 1907; not in EP)

 

Anything at all can be categorized according to these three categories.

 

Peirce applied these categories in different ways throughout his lifetime. Here is how he applies them in from “Some Consequences…” (he names them at EP 1:42 and describes them at EP 1:40):

 

	Firstness	Secondness	Thirdness
in terms of semiotics	Quality   The properties that a sign has in itself, … [e.g.] in the word “man” its consisting of three letters—in a picture, its being flat and without relief.” (EP 1:40, CP 5.287)	Dyadic Relation   The “real, physical connection of a sign with its object” (EP 1:40, CP 5.287)	Representation   The representative function of the sign

 

 

[2.2.3.3.] Thought-Signs.

 

Peirce believes that all thoughts are signs. In other words, any thought whatsoever is a representamen, representing something to someone.

 

How does the triadic relation described above apply to thought-signs?

 

The interpretant of a thought-sign is another thought-sign:

 

…every thought-sign is translated or interpreted in a subsequent one, unless it be that all thought comes to an abrupt and final end in death. (EP 1:39)

 

Thinking is a continuous process in which each thought serves as a sign, a sign that is interpreted by a subsequent thought.

 

The object (or as Peirce says here, the suppositum) of a thought-sign is, when the thought is about something external, the external thing that the thought is about[3]:

 

For what does the thought-sign stand…? The outward thing, undoubtedly, when a real outward thing is thought of. (EP 1:39, 5.285)

 

The representamen is the thought-sign itself, as it is interpreted in the subsequent thought-sign which is its interpretant:

 

…it is the thought itself, or at least what the thought is thought to be in the subsequent thought to which it is a sign. (EP 1:40, 5.286)

 

 

 

[2.2.3.4.] Man is a Sign.

 

The claim that all thinking is in signs is central to Peirce’s understanding of what it is to be human. Towards the end of “Some Consequences,” Peirce writes that

 

the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the words homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought. (EP 1:54; CP 5.314.)

 

Again, by “external” Peirce means that which does not depend on how anyone in particular thinks, feels or believes.[4]

 

An external sign is, then, a non-mental sign,[5] so Peirce is claiming that every thought is a non-mental sign. Peirce took thoughts to be, not person-specific mental events, or even contents limited to such events, but “the objects which thinking enables us to know.” (1.27, 1909)[6]

 

The mental life of each person, and thus she herself, consists of a continuous sequence of thought-signs that get interpreted in subsequent thinking. This continuous interpretation of earlier thought-signs gives one’s thinking the structure of a dialogue, wherein a person at an earlier time engages in cognition that is understood by she herself at a later time. (4.6, 1898)[7]

 

What’s more, Peirce’s view seems to be that thought-signs are not limited to items having a propositional structure, i.e., not limited to cognitions: “whenever we think, we have present to the consciousness some feeling, image, conception, or other representation, which serves as a sign.” (EP 1:38, CP 5.283, W 2:223, 1868, emphasis added)

 

Although Peirce is not explicit about this, his view seems to be that, not just thoughts with propositional structures (cognitions), but feelings and images might be external, in the sense that two individuals, in seeing the same sunset, or eating different samples of the same ice cream, might be thinking the same thing, in a very broad sense of “thinking,” just as when they are both entertaining the same claim or assertion.

 

In summary:

·         all thinking is in signs

·         the life of a human being “is a train of thought”

·         so, to be human is to be a sign, to be a continuous flow of thought-signs.

·         such thoughts are not limited to cognitions (thoughts with propositional structure), but include feelings, images, conceptions, etc.

 

 

Stopping point for Monday August 27. For next time, finish reading “Some Consequences” (pp.51-55).