[Inquiry] Re: Logic Of The Sciences

[Jon Awbrey]

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LOTS.  Note 2

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| Chapter 1
|
| The term 'representation' denotes with Hamilton a mediate cognition,
| with Hegel a mental image, and with Kant a cognition in the widest sense.
| Its original and ordinary meaning, is that it is something which stands
| for another thing.  In the present work instead of being restricted to
| something within the mind, it will be extended to things which do not
| even address the mind.
|
| We are capable of understanding representations only by having conceptions
| or mental representations, which represent the given representation as a
| representation.  Then, why is not every representation which translates
| another or otherwise represents it in its representative character,
| addressed by it?  A conceptualist might reply, that the conception
| actually realizes the abstraction which the word only indicates;
| but it does not realize what is in the thing, and so it stands
| on the same footing as the word.
|
| Man has sensation or receptivity, but so has has a looking-glass.
| Man has the power of testing the truth of representations by comparison;
| but so has a syllogism on paper.  Man elaborates knowledge by abstraction;
| but so does a proposition.  Man first made words not words man;  but the mind
| itself has been made by natural representations.  It would be false to say, that
| man makes use of words, any more than words employ man.  A word may be written down
| over and over again, and every inscription of it is necessarily the same in sense;
| while man is in one place and in one time, -- that is, has identity.  But it is
| not the man himself but his conceptions, which are representations;  and these
| have no more individuality in their representative character than words have.
|
| Conceptions comprehend themselves, while words require conceptions to
| understand them.  It is true;  but if conceptions require nothing else
| to translate them into conceptions, no more do words require anything
| to translate them into words.
|
| Thus we are forced to say that a representation which represents another
| representation as a representation is the 'subject' of that representation, --
| in the same sense in which the human conception is.  We must thence also admit
| that a thing in its attributes is a representation of the same thing in itself.
|
| C.S. Peirce, 'Chronological Edition', CE 1, 323-324
|
| C.S. Peirce, "Logic of the Sciences", MS 113 (1865), pp. 322-336 in:
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce:  A Chronological Edition, Vol. 1, 1857-1866',
| Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.

NB.  Longer paragraphs in the original text have been
broken up for the sake of easier study and discussion.

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