[Inquiry] Re: Examples Of Inquiry

[Jon Awbrey]

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EOI.  Note 5

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For future reference -- if I may in fact refer
to a reference in the future -- here is a further
explanation of what Peirce meant by a sign relation:

| A 'Sign', or 'Representamen', is a First which stands
| in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called
| its 'Object', as to be capable of determining a Third,
| called its 'Interpretant', to assume the same triadic
| relation to its Object in which it stands itself to
| the same Object.
|
| The triadic relation is 'genuine', that is, its three members
| are bound together by it in a way that does not consist in any
| complexus of dyadic relations.  That is the reason the Interpretant,
| or Third, cannot stand in a mere dyadic relation to the Object, but
| must stand in such a relation to it as the Representamen itself does.
|
| Nor can the triadic relation in which the Third stands be merely
| similar to that in which the First stands, for this would make the
| relation of the Third to the First a degenerate Secondness merely.
| The Third must indeed stand in such a relation, and thus must be
| capable of determining a Third of its own;  but besides that, it
| must have a second triadic relation in which the Representamen,
| or rather the relation thereof to its Object, shall be its own
| (the Third's) Object, and must be capable of determining a Third
| to this relation.  All this must equally be true of the Third's
| Third and so on endlessly;  and this, and more, is involved in
| the familiar idea of a Sign;  and as the term Representamen is
| here used, nothing more is implied.
|
| A 'Sign' is a Representamen with a mental Interpretant.
|
| Possibly there may be Representamens that are not Signs.
|
| Thus, if a sunflower, in turning towards the sun,
| becomes by that very act fully capable, without
| further condition, of reproducing a sunflower
| which turns in precisely corresponding ways
| toward the sun, and of doing so with the
| same reproductive power, the sunflower
| would become a Representamen of the sun.
|
| But 'thought' is the chief, if not
| the only, mode of representation.
|
| C.S. Peirce, "Syllabus" (c. 1902), 'Collected Papers', CP 2.274

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