[Arisbe] Re: Logic As Semiotic

[Jon Awbrey]

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| The first distinction we found it necessary to draw --
| the first set of conceptions we have to signalize --
| forms a triad
|
| Thing   Representation   Form.
|
| Kant you remember distinguishes in all mental representations the
| matter and the form.  The distinction here is slightly different.
| In the first place, I do not use the word 'Representation' as
| a translation of the German 'Vorstellung' which is the general
| term for any product of the cognitive power.  Representation,
| indeed, is not a perfect translation of that term, because it
| seems necessarily to imply a mediate reference to its object,
| which 'Vorstellung' does not.  I however would limit the term
| neither to that which is mediate nor to that which is mental,
| but would use it in its broad, usual, and etymological sense
| for anything which is supposed to stand for another and which
| might express that other to a mind which truly could understand
| it.  Thus our whole world -- that which we can comprehend -- is
| a world of representations.
|
| No one can deny that there are representations, for every thought is one.
| But with 'things' and 'forms' scepticism, though still unfounded, is at first
| possible.  The 'thing' is that for which a representation might stand prescinded
| from all that would constitute a relation with any representation.  The 'form' is
| the respect in which a representation might stand for a thing, prescinded from both
| thing and representation.  We thus see that 'things' and 'forms' stand very differently
| with us from 'representations'.  Not in being prescinded elements, for representations
| also are prescinded from other representations.  But because we know representations
| absolutely, while we only know 'forms' and 'things' through representations.  Thus
| scepticism is possible concerning 'them'.  But for the very reason that they are
| known only relatively and therefore do not belong to our world, the hypothesis
| of 'things' and 'forms' introduces nothing false.  For truth and falsity only
| apply to an object as far as it can be known.  If indeed we could know things
| and forms in themselves, then perhaps our representations of them might
| contradict this knowledge.  But since all that we know of them we know
| through representations, if our representations be consistent they
| have all the truth that the case admits of.
|
| CSP, CE 1, pages 256-257.
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, "Harvard Lectures 'On the Logic of Science'", (1865),
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 1, 1857-1866',
| Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.

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