[Inquiry] Re: Manifolds Of Diverse Impressions

[Jon Awbrey]

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MODI.  Note 12

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| Section 8.  The Interpretant
|
| Reference to a correlate is clearly justified and made possible
| solely by comparison.  Let us inquire, then, in what comparison
| consists.
|
| Suppose we wish the compare L and |^ [imagine that the latter
| letter is an upper case Greek gamma];  we shall imagine one
| of these letters to be turned over upon the line on which
| it is written as an axis;  we shall then imagine that it
| is laid upon the other letter and that it is transparent
| so that we can see that the two coincide.  In this way,
| we shall form a new image which mediates between the
| two letters, in as much as it represents one when
| turned over to be an exact likeness of the other.
|
| Suppose, we think of a murderer as being in relation to
| a murdered person;  in this case we conceive the act of
| the murder, and in this conception it is represented
| that corresponding to every murderer (as well as to
| every murder) there is a murdered person;  and thus
| we resort again to a mediating representation which
| represents the relate as standing for a correlate
| with which the mediating representation is itself
| in relation.
|
| Suppose, we look out the word 'homme' in a French dictionary;
| we shall find opposite to it the word 'man', which, so placed,
| represents 'homme' as representing the same two-legged creature
| which 'man' itself represents.
|
| In a similar way, it will be found that every comparison requires,
| besides the related thing, the ground, and the correlate, also a
| 'mediating representation which represents the relate to be a
| representation of the same correlate which this mediating
| representation itself represents'.  Such a mediating
| representation, I call an 'interpretant', because
| it fulfills the office of an interpreter who
| says that a foreigner says the same thing
| which he himself says.
|
| Every reference to a correlate, then, unites to the substance
| a reference to an interpretant;  which is, therefore, the next
| conception in the order we have adopted.
| 
| C.S. Peirce, 'Chronological Edition', CE 1, 522-523
|
|["On a Method of Searching for the Categories"], MS 133 (1866), pp. 515-528 in:
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce:  A Chronological Edition, Vol. 1, 1857-1866',
| Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1982.

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