by Corry Shores
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[The following is summary. Boldface and bracketed commentary are mine. Proofreading is incomplete, so please forgive my typos.]
Summary of
Charles Sanders Peirce
Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce
Volume 1: Principles of Philosophy
Book 3: Phenomenology
Chapter 2: The Categories in Detail
C: Thirdness
§3: The Reality of Thirdness [1.343-1.348]
(Editor’s note: From the “Lowell Lectures of 1903,” III, vil. 1, 3d Draught. See 324 and 521)
Brief summary:
The categories of phenomena are related to temporal values: the present has Firstness, the past has Secondness, and the future has Thirdness. Also, meaning is a Thirdness, both because it mediates a First and a Second and because it imparts a quality (a Firstness) to reactions (a Secondness) in the future. There are two related types of meaning. There is an intentional sort of meaning, which is a person’s meaning-to-do something. Here the First is the qualitative feeling they desire to attain. The Second is the world around the person that resists that person’s efforts to make them conform to their intentions. And the Third is the intention, the meaning-to-do something, that mediates the desired qualitative outcome and the things that must be changed so to bring about that outcome. The other kind of meaning is the meaning of words. But this sort of meaning must be understood in terms of how it influences people to make changes in the world. So it functions and is structured largely the same way as the first kind of meaning. In this case, the First is the desired qualitative feeling that a word in a proposition suggests (like ‘good’ in ‘it would be good to make change x in the world’). The Second is are the brute interactions of the things in the world that the person will alter though their efforts against the world’s resistance (thereby making goodness be in the external world). And the Third is the word’s meaning, which had this influence on the person (the word ‘good’ had the potential to cause a person to do good, and this is its meaning). These sorts of meanings impart a quality (the First, like ‘goodness’) to reactions (the brute interactivities of external things, that is, the Second) in the future, as the actions take place after the word begins having its influence. Meaning has a triadic structure involving intention in another similar sense, but to understand it, we should first see Peirce’s proof for how the idea of meaning is irreducible to the ideas of quality and reaction, or in other words, of how Thirdness is irreducible to Firstness and Secondness. There are two main premises in this proof. {1} every genuine triadic relation involves meaning. {2} A triadic relation is inexpressible by means of dyadic relations alone. To convince us of the first premise, Peirce takes two lines of inquiry. The first examines how certain physical and chemical phenomena studied in the sciences involve triads that are not reducible to dyadic structures. One example is a chemical phenomenon involving motion which is brought about only from one substance causing another to have that motion. So, when hypothesizing the origin of this chain of causality, we need a third factor that is not restricted to this chain. The second line of inquiry examines the basic structure of the triadic relation to show that it necessarily involves meaning (at least in the sense of intention). The example is of A giving B to C. We suppose first, as in the 1001 Arabian Nights tale of the merchant (A) who accidentally throws a date pit (B) and kills a genie (C), that there is no intention by A for the B that is given to be received by C. Here there is indeed a sort of mediating link, under the form of transitivity. A gives B. B is received by C. Thus in a sense (at least according to how the genie’s father sees the situation), C’s receiving B is inherent to A’s giving B away. But since the merchant (A) had no intention for the seed (B) to reach someone (C), this link is not really triadic. For, A was only connected to B, as far as A was concerned, and A, as far as A knew, was not connected to C. So we have the pairs ‘A to B’ and ‘B to C’, with the transitivity structure being simply a coincidental feature. However, were the merchant to have intended for the seed to hit the genie, then we have a third relation not in the structure of bare coincidental transitivity. When the intention comes into play, then A is bonded to C by means of B, through the mediation of a third bond (the intention) that links all three. So all triadic structures require meaning; for, without meaning, at best we have dyads that are connected immediately. The only real mediation, which is required for the triadic structure, that can come about is if there is some meaningful link between the mediated terms. So we return now to the issue of the other way that meaning is triadic. Peirce has this structure of the sign with three parts, namely, the object (the thing that is being referenced), the sign itself (the structure, thing, or event, like a symbol, that serves as a signifier), and the ‘interpretant’ (that is, the idea in the mind of the person recognizing the sign). Here, there is not a coincidental transitivity between the object and the sign to the sign and the idea. Rather, there is some intention for the idea in the mind of the person recognizing the sign to connect it to the thing in the world which the sign stands for. Thus this way of understanding the meaning of signs requires more than mere dyadic relations and as well needs the triadic relation of the object, sign, and interpretant. And, since real structures in the world are triadic, that means by default they involve some thought (that is, some meaning as intention for different things to be bonded that would not be directly bonded merely from dyadic relations), this means that thought is an inherent component of the real world, in a panpsychic sense. Another reason to take this view is that laws of nature are subject to change, but since they are laws, that probably could not happen in an unlawful way. Rather, there would need to be some thoughtful intention (meaning as meaning-t0-do) of some kind that guides those changes of laws in a rational way. And the fact that children naturally in that stage when they are acquiring language understand the world to have thought in it means it is natural to have this panpsychic view, which gives us more reason to believe it. So yes it is good to be a skeptic. One thing people are often skeptical of this sort of panpsychic thinking. Nonetheless, we should not be skeptical of this panpsychic idea, because it is both natural to have it and also because the triadic structures in the real world imply that thought is inherent to it. Now recall that the second premise of the proof for how the idea of meaning is irreducible to the ideas of quality and reaction is that triadic relations cannot be reduced to dyadic relations. If we consider the valency structure of monads (which have one ‘tail’ to connect with other ‘tails’ to form a bond), dyads (with two open ‘tails’), and triads (with three), then we cannot form a structure with three valencies (three open ‘tails’) by combining relational structures with one and two valencies. And there is a triadic sort of identity by which something given at three different occurrences are all taken to be as identical to one another. Also, all higher ‘–adic’ structures above triadic are reducible to combinations of triads and should be thought of as such.
Summary
1.343
[The present has Firstness, the past has Secondness, and the future has Thirdness. Also, meaning is a Thirdness, both because it mediates a First and a Second and because it imparts a quality (a Firstness) to reactions (a Secondness) in the future. There are two sorts of meaning that are very closely related. There is a person’s meaning to do something. Here the First is the qualitative feeling they desire to attain. The Second is the world around the person that resists the person’s efforts to make it conform to his intentions. And the Third is the intention, the meaning to do something, that mediates the desired qualitative outcome and the things that must be changed so to bring about that outcome. The other kind of meaning is the meaning of words. But this sort of meaning must be understood in terms of how it influences people to make changes in the world. So it functions largely the same way as the first kind of meaning. But here the First is the desired qualitative feeling that a word in a proposition suggests (like ‘good’ in ‘it would be good to make change x in the world’). The Second are the brute interactions of the things in the world that the person will alter though their efforts against the world’s resistance (thereby making goodness be in the external world). And the Third is the word’s meaning, which had this influence on the person (the word ‘good’ had the potential to cause a person to do good, and this is its meaning). These sorts of meanings impart a quality (the First, like ‘goodness’) to reactions (the brute interactivities of external things, that is, the Second) in the future, as the actions take place after the word begins having its influence of motivating the person to act.]
[Pierce notes that we cannot deem everything in our consciousness as being matters only of firstness or of secondness. Peirce then relates firstness and secondness to dimensions of time. Things in the past (or ‘what has been done’) have the character of secondness. He does not explain why. (Perhaps past things can only be understood as past things in relation to the present as coming after them. But I am not sure.) Peirce then claims that immediate consciousness of the present is a pure fiction. However, the present pure quality of which we are immediately conscious is not a fiction. Yet he does not say why or elaborate on the difference. At any rate, if we could become directly aware of the immediate present, it would merely have the character of Firstness. He then makes a point of clarification. He is not saying that immediate consciousness (the fictional thing) is itself Firstness. Rather, the quality of which we are immediately conscious (the not-fictional thing) is Firstness. Peirce’s next point is that we are constantly predicting “what is to be”. And he says that “what is to be” can never become completely past. I assume he means “what is to be” in a general sense. For, particular things we might predict often do become wholly past. Yet as a structure or category, “what is to be” always remains temporally in front of the present. But I am not sure I am following Peirce’s thinking there. Peirce then turns to the topic of meanings, but it is not immediately obvious how these ideas relate to what he is saying about time. That connection comes from the relation between a person meaning to do something (and in that sense having in mind “what is to be”) and the way that words have meaning. He clarifies this connection by drawing from Josia Royce’s The World and the Individual. Peirce says that for the most part, a person meaning to do something and a word having a meaning are largely the same thing, with one difference. (The phrasing in Peirce’s next sentence is a little difficult to parse. Let me quote it first: “when a person means to do anything he is in some state in consequence of which the brute reactions between things will be moulded [in] to conformity to the form to which the man's mind is itself moulded.” So we have the brute reactions between things. I am not sure exactly what these things are. Perhaps they are the ways that physical objects, maybe including human actors, affect one another through physical contact or other sorts of influence. The ways things brutely react to one another is something that can be molded. It seems also that when a person means to do something, they mold their own mind. Maybe the idea here is that we create certain structures in our mind in accordance with our determination. If I had to guess at an example, I would propose the following. Suppose that we mean to take some difficult action, like doing some unpleasant chore. Perhaps we have avoided it by considering all the other things that we deemed more important. So maybe when we actually mean to do the chore, we mold our mind in such a way that we do not allow ourselves to consider other possibly more important tasks. The next idea is that when a person means to do something, the way they have molded their mind then structures the way that things brutely interact with each other. I again am not exactly sure how this works. I specifically do not know if the things that are brutely interacting are the determined person’s body interacting with other objects, or if instead of that interaction (or perhaps in addition to it) we consider the ways that objects outside us brutely interact in a determinate way. At any rate, he will distinguish this sort of meaning-to-do with the meaning of words. Here again the phrasing is a bit hard to parse. So I will again quote: “the meaning of a word really lies in the way in which it might, in a proper position in a proposition believed, tend to mould the conduct of a person into conformity to that to which it is itself moulded.” So let us again try to break this into its component concepts, then build its sense up to the full thought, as best we can. So we have a word, and it is found in a proposition. We are to think of a word being in the “proper position” of that proposition. I am not sure exactly what is meant by that. Perhaps the idea is that were the word in an improper position, it would have less effect or meaning. Maybe the position is merely whether or not it is grammatically well positioned. Or maybe it is a distinction between two equally grammatical positions, with one position have greater effect, as with positions of emphasis for example. At any rate, we begin with this notion of the word in the proper position of the proposition. The next thing is that this proposition is believed. I am assuming it is believed by a person who is somehow affected by this proposition or maybe is simply stating it or considering it. The next thing we need to try to understand is the notion that the word’s meaning is somehow molded in a certain way. I am not sure how. Perhaps it is molded by its position or by the words used in conjunction with it. At any rate, the next thing we have here is a person whose behavior can be molded, and in this case, it would be molded by the word’s meaning. I am not sure how. From the way the sentence is structured, it could also be that the person’s behavior is molded by the proposition that the person believes. This would be obvious for propositions that assert some moral value, like “It is wrong to do x” or maybe as in our example, “It would be good to do chore x”. The problem is that Peirce’s sentence as it is written does not seem to me to suggest that interpretation. It again is: “the meaning of a word really lies in the way in which it might, in a proper position in a proposition believed, tend to mould the conduct of a person into conformity to that to which it is itself moulded.” Here ‘proposition’ seems not to be the antecedent of the ‘it’ in question, because if we remove the part of the sentence set of in commas, we get: “the meaning of a word really lies in the way in which it might tend to mould the conduct of a person into conformity to that to which it is itself moulded.” So the ‘it’ would seem to be either the word or its meaning. Let me propose the following interpretation. A word will have some meaning in a proposition. That is determined by the way that some variance it has undertaken (as a result of its placement in the sentence and in the overall construction of the sentence) has some variance on the behavior of the person who believes that sentence. Without an example, all of this is very vague. We should probably read Royce’s book to really understand what Peirce means here. But let us just look briefly at our example, “It would be good to do chore x”. The meaning of “would be good” is found in the fact that it compels the person to do an action rather than not do an action. “chore x” has its meaning in the act that the person would perform were they to fully believe in the truth and importance of this proposition. At any rate, we now finally have one last difficulty in understanding this paragraph. We now need to think of meaning in terms of thirdness. From the wording, I am not sure if Peirce is referring just to word meanings or both (and perhaps then to just meaning in general). But it seems that what makes meaning have the thirdness is that it molds reactions to itself, and it is just in this fact that its being consists. In the case of a person meaning to do something, they mold the brute interactions of the things in the world to their intentions. There is this idea of thirdness as a mediation between a first and a second. Perhaps here the idea (of the word or proposition, or the qualitative feelings bound up with it somehow) is a first and the things in the world are seconds, and the meaning-to-do something is the third which links the idea of what should be done (or the feeling bound up with it) to the things outside in the world which resist our efforts. Peirce gave an example for this in the prior section 1.338-1.342 of the Collected Papers. Let me quote from my brief summary (found between ellipses):
...
An example of thirdness, or generality in terms of rules, is a cook who will make an apple pie. The firstness here is the dream the cook has of the pleasure she will enjoy when eating the pie. It is a first, because there is simply the pure quality of feeling of the pleasure of eating the pie. The secondness are the acts of preparing the pie and of eating it. These are seconds, because the cook’s volition meets external resistance from the things in the world when preparing and eating the pie. What bridges this firstness to this secondness is the desire which begins from the dream and leads to the preparation for and realization of the dream. Given that it is a medium that mediates a first and second, it is thus a third.
...
So we have a fairly clear way to understand how someone’s meaning to do something can be a sort of thirdness. But what about the meaning of a term? What is the firstness and secondness in that case? The firstness would need to be a pure quality of some sort. We might think for example of the feeling of goodness in relation to our example proposition “It would be good to do chore x”. I really do not know the first in this situation. But my best guess is that it is the feeling of good in the person that this person wants to attain in life. In the pie example, the first was the dream of the cook of the feeling of pleasure from attaining that goal. So here, the dream of the person feeling the good feelings from doing good are perhaps the first in a similar way. The second could then perhaps be the influence of the sentence on the person, who may at first resist the influence of the word’s meaning, or perhaps it is again the brute interactions of the world that change in accordance with (but also with resistance to) the person’s actions. The third, as I understand it, is the word’s meaning. The meaning was defined as the influence it has on changing the person’s behavior. So perhaps the word’s meaning mediates between our desire to to do (a first) and the things in the world (seconds) which are changed for the good, by causing a person to act on their desire to change the world. Peirce finally says that Thirdness is “what it is by virtue of imparting a quality to reactions in the future”. I am not exactly sure what is meant by this. We have the intention to do something, and it imparts a quality to reactions in the future, so perhaps the meaning of “good” imparts the quality of goodness to the reactions of things in the future, which have been changed through a person’s intervention in things of the world.]
. . . It is impossible to resolve everything in our thoughts into those two elements [of Firstness and Secondness]. We may say that the bulk of what is actually done consists of Secondness – or better, Secondness is the predominant character of what has been done. The immediate present, could we seize it, would have no character but its Firstness. Not that I mean to say that immediate consciousness (a pure fiction, by | the way), would be Firstness, but that the quality of what we are immediately conscious of, which is no fiction, is Firstness. But we constantly predict what is to be. Now what is to be, according to our conception of it, can never become wholly past. In general, we may say that meanings are inexhaustible. We are too apt to think that what one means to do and the meaning of a word are quite unrelated meanings of the word "meaning," or that they are only connected by both referring to some actual operation of the mind. Professor Royce especially in his great work The World and the Individual has done much to break up this mistake. In truth the only difference is that when a person means to do anything he is in some state in consequence of which the brute reactions between things will be moulded [in] to conformity to the form to which the man's mind is itself moulded, while the meaning of a word really lies in the way in which it might, in a proper position in a proposition believed, tend to mould the conduct of a person into conformity to that to which it is itself moulded. Not only will meaning always, more or less, in the long run, mould reactions to itself, but it is only in doing so that its own being consists. For this reason I call this element of the phenomenon or object of thought the element of Thirdness. It is that which is what it is by virtue of imparting a quality to reactions in the future.
(173-174)
[1.344]
[It is good to be a skeptic. But suppose we find some idea in our minds which rather than being the product of our own mental activity is instead an idea we received somehow from the world around us. In that case, we should not be skeptical about this idea and its true origins.]
[Peirce then discusses a skepticism we might have regarding there being “any real meaning or law in things”. Peirce says that he applauds skepticism when it has the following four traits: {1} it is sincere, {2} it is “aggressive” (I am not sure what that means), {3} it pushes inquiry, and {4} one having this skepticism will lose it if evidence shows it to be wrong. Peirce then says that he would not object if a skeptic thinks that “any any account can be given of the phenomena of the universe while they leave Meaning out of the account”. (I am not sure what is meant here by ‘Meaning’. But with what Peirce will say in the following, I think he might have in mind something like a rational, panpsychic consciousness in the world that influences the course of events or least the way things in the world relate to each other. I also do not grasp the next idea very strongly. It seems to be the following. A skeptic might argue that in our minds there is no idea that is irreducible to any other idea. If instead they did think there is some idea that is not reducible to others, then it would have to have come not from within their minds but from outside in nature. I do not know if that is what Peirce is saying. But even if it is, I am not sure what the reasoning is and what it means. I suppose the thinking here is the following. Suppose in our minds there are concepts that we made by combining other simpler concepts in our minds. This composite concept then is something we provided on our own accord and was not something we gained from experience for example or somehow from some other external sources. But suppose instead that we have some notion in our mind that cannot be traced to any other composing conceptual elements. This then would not be something we came up with ourselves. It would have to be something we gained from an external source. I am not at all certain, but maybe Peirce is saying that skeptics should not be so skeptical as to think that there is no external source for our ideas but rather that everything we know is the product of our own conceptual invention. This idea that has no internal source but rather one in “environing Nature” seems to be what he means by Meaning with a capital M. But if that were so, I do not understand why. (Judging from what he says later, I wonder if Peirce’s point is that the reason we have thoughts of any kind in our mind is because they existed already in the structures of the real world, and that is where we discovered them in the first place). Let me quote so you can see.]
There is a strong tendency in us all to be sceptical about there being any real meaning or law in things. This scepticism is strongest in the most masculine thinkers. I applaud scepticism with all my heart, provided it have four qualities: first, that it be sincere and real doubt; second, that it be aggressive; third, that it push inquiry; and fourth, that it stand ready to acknowledge what it now doubts, as soon as the doubted element comes clearly to light. To be angry with sceptics, who, whether they are aware of it or not, are the best friends of spiritual truth, is a manifest sign that the angry person is himself infected with scepticism – not, however, of the innocent and wholesome kind that tries to bring truth to light, but of the mendacious, clandestine, disguised, and conservative variety that is afraid of truth, although truth merely means the way to attain one's purposes. If the sceptics think that any account can be given of the phenomena of the universe while | they leave Meaning out of account, by all means let them go ahead and try to do it. It is a most laudable and wholesome enterprise. But when they go so far as to say that there is no such idea in our minds, irreducible to anything else, I say to them, “Gentlemen, your strongest sentiment, to which I subscribe with all my heart, is that a man worthy of that name will not allow petty intellectual predilections to blind him to truth, which consists in the conformity of his thoughts to his purposes. But you know there is such a thing as a defect of candor of which one is not oneself aware. You perceive, no doubt, that if there be an element of thought irreducible to any other, it would be hard, on your principles, to account for man's having it, unless he derived it from environing Nature. But if, because of that, you were to turn your gaze away from an idea that shines out clearly in your mind, you would be violating your principles in a very much more radical way.”
(174-175)
1.345
[Peirce gives a proof of how the idea of meaning is irreducible to the ideas of quality and reaction, or in other words, of how Thirdness is irreducible to Firstness and Secondness. There are two main premises in this proof. {1} every genuine triadic relation involves meaning. {2} A triadic relation is inexpressible by means of dyadic relations alone. Now, to convince us of the first premise, Peirce takes two lines of inquiry. The first examines scientifically how certain physical and chemical phenomena involve triads that are not reducible to dyadic structures. One example is a chemical phenomenon involving motion which is caused only from one substance to another, so in hypothesizing the origin of this chain of causality, we need a third factor. The second line of inquiry examines the basic structure of the triadic relation to show that it necessarily involves meaning (at least in the sense of intention). The example is of A giving B to C. We suppose first as in the 1001 Arabian Nights tale of the merchant (A) who accidentally throws a date pit (B) and kills a genie (C), that there is no intention by A for the B that is given to be received by C. Here there is indeed a sort of mediating link, under the form of transitivity. A gives B. B is received by C. Thus in a sense (at least according to the interpretation of the genie’s father), C’s receiving B is inherently a part of A’s giving B. But this link is not really triadic. For, A was only connected to B and not to C, as far as A was concerned (or intended or meant-to-do). So we have the pairs ‘ A to B’ and ‘B to C’, with the transitivity structure being simply a coincidental structural feature. However, were the merchant to have intended for the seed to hit the genie, then we have a third relation not in the structure of bare coincidental transitivity. When the intention comes into play, then A is bonded to C by means of B. So all triadic structures require meaning; for, without meaning, at best we have dyads that are connected immediately. The only real mediation, which is required for the triadic structure, that can come about is if there is some meaningful link between the mediated terms.]
[Peirce will now give a proof that the idea of meaning is irreducible to the ideas of quality and reaction. So recall what he said above. If we find some idea in our mind that is not reducible to other ideas in our mind, then this idea had to come from an external source. For, anything that is reducible to other ideas in our mind could have come simply from combining those other ideas. Peirce then might want to show that the idea of meaning has an external source. (Note also from a couple paragraphs before in section 1.343 that meaning was a Third.) The proof for the irreducibility of the idea of meaning to quality and reaction (that is, the irreducibility of Thirdness to Firstness and Secondness) involves two main premises. The first main premise of this proof is that “every genuine triadic relation involves meaning, as meaning is obviously a triadic relation”. (Although he seems to make this point already in section 1.343 above, he will now show it more rigorously). The second premise is that “a triadic relation is inexpressible by means of dyadic relations alone”. (We will return to this notion in a bit.) Peirce says that it will take some consideration to be convinced of the first premise that “every triadic relation involves meaning”. To conduct these considerations, Peirce will take two lines of inquiry. The first line of inquiry involves the physical forces. Peirce says that Helmholtz in his paper On the Conservation of Forces assumes that all physical forces appear to subsist between pairs of particles. (Perhaps Peirce is saying this is a triadic relation, because you have the dyadic relations between each pair and then you have the force which holds between those pairs. But I am not sure if this would be a triadic relation or not. It is also possible that Peirce’s point here is that this is the wrong conception of forces, because in the next sentence he writes, “there is ample evidence that it never was produced by the action of forces on mere dyadic conditions.” So I cannot make out what Peirce is doing here.) Peirce then discusses facts in physics of the triadic kind, but it is not apparent to me if this is a continuation of the idea about particles. What makes a fact triadic is if it can only be defined by reference to three things. He gives the example of defining a hand as a right hand. The three things that are referenced for this determination, it seems, are the east, the north and the zenith. The basic thinking here might be that to determine a hand as right, it needs to be situated in relation to three spatial coordinates. Suppose we just have one coordinate. And also suppose we say it is the hand pointed to the east. But of course either hand can be pointed toward the east, depending on where we are standing. So let us pick a second coordinate and see if that makes the determination. We will say that our right hand is the one facing east when we are facing north. But even that is not enough, because suppose we are standing on our heads or are upside for some other reason. Were that the case, then our left hand would be facing east. Thus we add a final coordinate. Our right hand is the one that faces east when we face north, with our heads pointing upward (toward the zenith). Peirce then gives an example from chemistry, but I do not know what he means here. He writes, “Consequently chemists find that those substances which rotate the plane of polarization to the right or left can only be produced from such [similar] active substances. They are all of such complex constitution that they cannot have existed when the earth was very hot, and how the first one was produced is a puzzle. It cannot have been by the action of brute forces.” I can only guess what he is talking about here. He might be saying that there is some kind of motion happening in chemical substances (perhaps the motion of tiny particles, but I do not know). And if the substance is rotating to the right or left, it only could have begun doing so by the causal action from a similar substance. So far that is no problem. If we find a substance that is rotating to the right or left, then we can assume there was some other similar substance moving to the right or left that caused the motion of the first one we considered. And this other substance would have been caused by yet another, and so on. But then Peirce notes we have a puzzle when trying to understand how the first one was set in motion. So maybe he is saying that secondness (the interaction of bodies upon each other) is not enough to account for the motion of these particles. Some third thing is needed. So I do not follow so well, and then it gets even more puzzling. It seems we are supposed to think of the third thing that set these substances in motion as somehow being meaning. But I do not know what Peirce is explaining here. At any rate, it seems we put aside discussion of physics and chemistry and think more specifically about triadic relations themselves. It seems that what we have just done was the first line of inquiry, and we move to the second line, where “you must train yourself to the analysis of relations, beginning with such as are very markedly triadic, gradually going on to others. In that way, you will convince yourself thoroughly that every genuine triadic relation involves thought or meaning.” The next thing Peirce says might seem odd without a little context. He writes, “A gives B to C. This does not consist in A's throwing B away and its accidentally hitting C, like the date-stone, which hit the Jinnee in the eye.” Later in this collection, Peirce refers to the date-stone again:
366. Among thirds, there are two degrees of degeneracy. The first is where there is in the fact itself no Thirdness or mediation, but where there is true duality; the second degree is where there is not even true Secondness in the fact itself. Consider, first, the thirds degenerate in the first degree. A pin fastens two things together by sticking through one and also through the other: either might be annihilated, and the pin would continue to stick through the one which remained. A mixture brings its ingredients together by containing each. We may term these accidental thirds. “How did I slay thy son?” asked the merchant, and the jinnee replied, “When thou threwest away the date-stone, it smote my son, who was passing at the time, on the breast, and he died forthright.” Here there were two independent facts, first that the merchant threw away the date-stone, and second that the date-stone struck and killed the jinnee's son. Had it been aimed at him, the case would have been different; for then there would have been a relation of aiming which would have connected together the aimer, the thing aimed, and the object aimed at, in one fact. What monstrous injustice and inhumanity on the part of that jinnee to hold that poor merchant responsible for such an accident! I remember how I wept at it, as I lay in my father's arms and he first told me the story. It is certainly just that a man, even though he had no evil intention, should be held responsible for the immediate effects of his actions; but not for such as might result from them in a sporadic case here and there, but only for such as might have been guarded against by a reasonable rule of prudence. Nature herself often supplies the place of the intention of a rational agent in making a Thirdness genuine and not merely accidental; as when a spark, as third, falling into a barrel of gunpowder, as first, causes an | explosion, as second. But how does nature do this? By virtue of an intelligible law according to which she acts. If two forces are combined according to the parallelogram of forces, their resultant is a real third. Yet any force may, by the parallelogram of forces, be mathematically resolved into the sum of two others, in an infinity of different ways. Such components, however, are mere creations of the mind. What is the difference? As far as one isolated event goes, there is none; the real forces are no more present in the resultant than any components that the mathematician may imagine. But what makes the real forces really there is the general law of nature which calls for them, and not for any other components of the resultant. Thus, intelligibility, or reason objectified, is what makes Thirdness genuine.
(191-192)
And later:
The merchant in the Arabian Nights threw away a date-stone which struck the eye of a Jinnee. This was purely mechanical, and there was no genuine triplicity. The throwing and the striking were independent of one another. But had he aimed at the Jinnee's eye, there would have been more than merely throwing away the stone. There would have been genuine triplicity, the stone being not merely thrown, but thrown at the eye. Here, intention, the mind's action, would have come in. Intellectual triplicity, or Mediation, is my third category.
(from CP 2.87, Vol.2 p.49)
There is a story in the 1001 Arabian Nights that is very similar to Peirce’s description, so I think it must be what he is referring to. Let me quote from a translation that has the sort of language we find in Peirce’s description:
TALE OF THE TRADER AND THE JINNI.
It is related, O auspicious King, that there was a merchant of the merchants who had much wealth, and business in various cities. Now on a day he mounted horse and went forth to recover monies in certain towns, and the heat sore oppressed him; so he sat beneath a tree and, putting his hand into his saddle-bags, took thence some broken bread and dry dates and began to break his fast. When he had ended eating the dates he threw away the stones with force and lo! an Ifrit appeared, huge of stature and brandishing a drawn sword, wherewith he approached the merchant and said, “Stand up that I may slay thee, even as thou | slewest my son!” Asked the merchant, “How have I slain thy son?” and he answered, “When thou atest dates and threwest away the stones they struck my son full in the breast as he was walking by, so that he died forthwith.”1
[Footnote 1 (quoting): 1 Travellers tell of a peculiar knack of jerking the date-stone, which makes it strike with great force: I never saw this "Inwa" practised, but it reminds me of the watersplashing with one hand in the German baths.]
(Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night 24-25)
Peirce’s main point that he is illustrating with this story is that triadic relations involve meaning. His reasoning with this example seems to be the following. The fact that the merchant did not mean to hit the genie suggests that there is no relation between them except for a bare coincidental causal interaction. There is no stronger relation between them than this sort of dyadic secondness where there are two elements, but the bond between them is immediate and that bond itself does not mediate between them nor can it be considered an entity in its own right. (Note. This interpretation is based on his Genesis example from sections 1.327-1.328.) Suppose instead that the merchant were aiming the date pit at the genie, and hits and kills him. This intention then in a way creates a bond between them that is more than a coincidental, unintentional collision. (But if the determination of the right hand involves a triad, then where is the meaning or intention there?) So this story was given as illustration to his example of meaning in thirdness. The example is the relation of giving, which as we saw, was structured as A gives B to C. Peirce says that if there is no meaning (intending) to the act, then it is two dyadic relations, namely, ‘A throws B’ and ‘B hits C’. So let us try to articulate Peirce’s insight here. Relations without meaning can at most be dyadic. This is perhaps because transitivity is structurally no different than the bare addition of relations with a common middle term and thus is fundamentally no different than binary relations that have simply been combined. In order for the relation to become ternary, there needs to be more than simply the transitivity of binary relations. There must also be an additional relational bond between the first and third terms that mediates them despite the structural mediation of the middle term. So in the case of the merchant and the genie, because the merchant had no intention to kill the genie, the extent of the merchant’s relations only goes as far as the date pit, which he only intended to toss away. But were he to mean to hit the genie, then the bond between A and C, the man and the genie, is more than merely the coincidental transitivity mediated by the middle term B, the date pit. There is the meaning-to-do, the directedness, the intention, the reaching-over-and-beyond of the middle term, which links the two poles. Peirce’s next point is a bit hard to grasp, but it seems to be the following. In our example, the act of giving involved the physical transfer of the date pit from one person to the genie. Peirce says that there need not be such a physical transfer in acts of giving. This is because “Giving is a transfer of the right of property”. So far nothing is confusing here. He then says, “Now right is a matter of law, and law is a matter of thought and meaning. I there leave the matter to your own reflection, merely adding that, though I have inserted the word ‘genuine,’ yet I do not really think that necessary. I think even degenerate triadic relations involve something like thought.” Regarding the notion of law being a matter of thought and meaning, that is not so hard to grasp. But how it relates to our discussion of triads is less obvious to me at this point. However, I think he might discuss this issue further in sections we will summarize later. And regarding the genuine and degenerate, he will discuss these cases in the next section (this is where we got one of the merchant quotations). So let us leave these two matters for when Peirce elaborates on them later.]
I will sketch a proof that the idea of meaning is irreducible to those of quality and reaction. It depends on two main premisses. The first is that every genuine triadic relation involves meaning, as meaning is obviously a triadic relation. The second is that a triadic relation is inexpressible by means of dyadic relations alone. Considerable reflexion may be required to convince yourself of the first of these premisses, that every triadic relation involves meaning. There will be two lines of inquiry. First, all physical forces appear to subsist between pairs of particles. This was assumed by Helmholtz in his original paper, On the Conservation of Forces. Take any fact in physics of the triadic kind, by which I mean a fact which can only be defined by simultaneous reference to three things, and you will find there is ample evidence that it never was produced by the action of forces on mere dyadic conditions. Thus, your right hand is that hand which is toward the east, when you face the north with your head toward the zenith. Three things, east, west, and up, are required to define the difference between right and left. Consequently chemists find that those substances which rotate the plane of polarization to the right or left can only be produced from such [similar] active substances. They are all of such complex constitution | that they cannot have existed when the earth was very hot, and how the first one was produced is a puzzle. It cannot have been by the action of brute forces. For the second branch of the inquiry, you must train yourself to the analysis of relations, beginning with such as are very markedly triadic, gradually going on to others. In that way, you will convince yourself thoroughly that every genuine triadic relation involves thought or meaning. Take, for example, the relation of giving. A gives B to C. This does not consist in A's throwing B away and its accidentally hitting C, like the date-stone, which hit the Jinnee in the eye. If that were all, it would not be a genuine triadic relation, but merely one dyadic relation followed by another. There need be no motion of the thing given. Giving is a transfer of the right of property. Now right is a matter of law, and law is a matter of thought and meaning. I there leave the matter to your own reflection, merely adding that, though I have inserted the word "genuine," yet I do not really think that necessary. I think even degenerate triadic relations involve something like thought.
(175-176)
1.346
[The second premise of the proof is that triadic relations cannot be reduced to dyadic relations. If we consider the valency structure of monads, dyads, and triads, then we cannot form a structure with three valencies (three open ‘tails’) by combining structures with one and two valencies. There is a triadic sort of identity by which something given at three different occurrences are all taken to be as identical to one another.]
[Let us recap what Peirce is doing in these paragraphs. He is currently giving a proof of how the idea of meaning is irreducible to the ideas of quality and reaction, or in other words, of how Thirdness is irreducible to Firstness and Secondness. He said there are two main premises in this proof. {1} every genuine triadic relation involves meaning, and {2} triadic relations cannot be reduced to dyadic relations. He will now show why this second premise is so by using graphic structures. He calls it an “existential graph”. I am not familiar with Peirce’s existential graphs, but I think we can still discern the insight behind his demonstration, because it is a concept about structures. It seems we need his notion of valency (see sections 1.289-1.292), which he explained as being like the valency of elements in chemistry. Now we are using an idea of tail it seems for a valency. And it seems one thing can be connected to another when an open tail of one is available for connection to an open tail of another. The analysis Peirce seems to be doing here (but I am not at all certain) is to say that a triadic structure is not to be understood as simply something have three terms (for, we can have three terms with for example the combination of a dyadic and two monadic relation perhaps). Rather, a triad here is something having three tails or three valencies. This is perhaps why he is often calling it here a ‘triadic relation’ rather than just a triad. (But I am not sure if we can say a triad is something with three terms and a triadic relation is something with three open valencies. I am inclined to think that a triad and a triadic relation are nearly (or exactly) the same thing, but I cannot discern at this point if there is a difference or not between a triad and a triadic relation and what that difference might be. Another possibility is that a triad is a triadic relation where the three terms are given as ‘arguments’ for the triadic relation, while a triadic relation itself is to be thought of without reference to any terms it may or may not have.) Before we continue with this diagram idea, think again of the triad where A gives B to C. We might think of this as a triad simply because it has three terms. What Peirce might actually be saying is that there is a Thirdness, which is the triple valence bond linking A and B and C, and not simply a combination of bonds that links ‘A to B’ and ‘B to C’ coincidentally through the shared term B. So returning to the diagram procedure, what we want to create is not simply a structure with three terms, but rather a structure with three open valencies or ‘tails’. Peirce will show that structurally speaking it is impossible to create a structure with three open tails on the basis of component parts that have either two or three tails. So let us see if we can work through why this is so. The nodes that can take some number of tails he calls ‘spots’, and he symbolizes the spots of different valencies in the following way:
Spot with single tail (or valency):
—X
Spot with double tail (or valency):
—R—
Spot with triple tail (or valency):
Ү
(Please note that I am not following Peirce directly in how I am making these diagrams. I will probably need to redo everything when I learn better how all this works, as we see other cases. I say this because I am trying to combine this symbolization here with the diagrams he draws in the next paragraph, and I might not be doing it right.) So here is our challenge. Is there any possible way that we can form a structure using just —X and —R— structures to make a combined structure which has three open tails? We have three possible sorts of combinations, namely, combinations with {a} just —X structures, {b} just —R— structures, and {c} mixes of —X and —R— structures. Let us first look at structures composed solely of —X structures.
| With one —X | —X | just 1 open tail |
| With two —X
| X——X | no open tails |
It seems we cannot have any more than these two structures if we only deal with monadic bonds. Let us look at combinations of —R—
| With one —R— | —R— | just 2 open tails |
| With two —R— {A} | —R——R— | just 2 open tails |
| With two —R— {B} | R<>R | no open tails |
| With three —R— {A} | —R——R——R— | just 2 open tails |
| With three —R— {B} | R ∧ R < > R | no open tails |
And any further additions would seem to also have 2 or no open tails. Now what about our possibilities of combining these structures?
| With one —X and one —R— | —R——X | just 1 open tail |
| With two —X and one —R— | X——R——X | no open tails |
| With one —X and two —R— | —R——R——X | just 1 open tail |
| With two —X and two —R— | X——R——R——X | no open tails |
The idea here seems to be that when you combine —X and —R—, you will always either have no tails or just one. Thus structurally speaking, we cannot construct a structure with three open valencies by combining ones with single and double valencies. In other words, a triple valence structure is indecomposable. Now, I am not certain, but what Peirce calls a triad then would not be something of the form —R——R——R— (Or maybe we need to think of it as two —R— relations between three terms, like a—R—b—R—c). For, this is simply a combination of dyads. In order to be a triad, some node (or combination of nodes) needs to be connectable to exactly three terms. So —R——R——R— is the structure of the man killing the genie with the date pit accidentally. (Or perhaps it is something like man—R—date—R—genie or something like that. I am not really sure how these diagrams work.) But were it intentional, then it would be a Ү structure, which links the man, the pit, and the genie together in a way that is more than just the causal chain of ‘A to B’ and ‘B to C’. Peirce’s next point is that when we identify three things as being three instances of the same thing, this would have to involve a Thirdness structure also. (For, we might think it has the structure of two combined dyads, namely, ‘A = B’ and ‘B = C’.) Peirce gives the phenomenological example of seeing on three consecutive days a person we deem to be the exact same person in all three instances. We see the person Monday. Then when we see them again on Tuesday, we say, “that is the exact same person I saw on Monday”. (I am a little confused with Peirce’s next step in the explanation. I would have expected him to say that we would not think on Wednesday upon seeing the person a third time that, “This is the same person I saw yesterday, and thus I can conclude that it is the same person I saw two days ago”. I would have instead thought the response would be, “This is the person I saw both yesterday and the day before.” This to me is both more reflective of these kinds of experiences and reflective of the point I thought he was making. For, we would not need the mediation of Tuesday’s appearance to know that it is the same person as on Monday. That person on Monday will appear identical as that on both Tuesday and Wednesday. There is no need to also perform a logical inference to make the tripled identification. But this is not what Peirce says. He thinks that the experience does in fact involve an inference, but that the inference has the triadic structure. I do not understand, because I would think the structure under the form of the inference would be like simple transitivity. So I might be wrong in my distinguishing simple transitivity in the date pit illustration from one with an intentional bond for all three members. Or, I need to see the inference as a triadic structure. The structure would be A = B, B = C, therefore A = C (or, .... therefore (A = B) & (A = C) & (B = C)). So perhaps the inferential structure of premise-premise-conclusion is a triad, because the two premises are related together and thirdly to the conclusion. Or perhaps, as with the conclusion ‘(A = B) & (A = C) & (B = C)’, the triadic structure is found within the triple bond of the identity between the three terms. If we had to draw one line for each bond of identity, it would look like:
But I do not want to confuse this diagram (which looks like three dyads, as the triadic identity relation can be see as three pairings of identities) with the sort that we are making, where the triadic relation I think is more properly rendered:
) The final point of this paragraph is also a bit hard to grasp, and I will not be able to summarize it accurately for you. But let us take a look at it nonetheless. Peirce next contrasts this situation of seeing the same person on three different days with seeing the person on one day and then seeing two people simultaneously an another day. Peirce says that in this situation there is no way to identify both of the two people who appeared together at the same time with the one who appeared on a previous day. I am not sure where he is going with this. He then says that the only way we could identify these two people with a single prior one is if we consider them not as identical but as two manifestations of the same person. I do not know really what he is talking about there. How can we see two manifestations of the same person simultaneously (he says, “at once”)? I cannot further comment on that idea until I grasp what he means. I can only think of a situation where you have at least one of the second pairing be a false double, like a person in costume and make-up so to look indistinguishable from the person in question. Then it gets a little more confusing. Peirce says “But the idea of manifestation is the idea of a sign.” He then writes, “Now a sign is something, A, which denotes some fact or object, B, to some interpretant thought, C”. I am not sure how this sign structure might apply to the example of the seeing the same man at the same time. I will have to come back to these passages later after we look at the section on signs. But let us at least say something about the triadic nature of the sign, for a moment here. Suppose we have some thing in the world, like an actual horse. We have a sign for it, the word ‘horse’. And that sign is really nothing of any value unless it corresponds to some idea in the mind of the person recognizing the meaning of the sign. So perhaps the structure we have been discussing applies here. Imagine first that these three parts somehow are decomposable into two dyads. Then we have a problem explaining how the sign works. For, the structure would be something like A is related to B (the horse in the world is related to the word ‘horse’, and B is related to C (the word ‘horse’ is related to the idea horse). But there is no way really to conceive how those two coincidental connections were made. There needs to be the intention of the thing in the world be connected with the idea for it, rather then just relying somehow on chance occurrences to bring them together by means of a common sign. Consider however such a coincidental occurrence. Suppose we are early humans with very limited language capacities. I point to myself and make a sound. You then think of this sound as being my name. Here the thing being represented (me) makes the sound (the enunciation of my name). And your hearing that enunciation puts into your mind the idea of me. But did I make the sound without any concern of what enters your mind? And when you heard the sound, did you have no care as to what the idea corresponds to in the real world? It would seem instead to me that when I made the sound, I wanted you to use that sound to have an idea of me myself, and not just have that idea with no relation to me but just to the sign for me. But more generally, as in the horse example, it is not enough for us that the idea corresponds with the sign, and by chance the sign corresponds to the thing being referenced. Instead, the whole functioning of the sign is that the idea in our minds be connected to real things in the world in a meaningful way rather than a mere coincidental, haphazard, accidental way.]
The other premiss of the argument that genuine triadic relations can never be built of dyadic relations and of qualities is easily shown. In existential graphs, a spot with one tail –X represents a quality, a spot with two tails –R– a dyadic relation. Joining the ends of two tails is also a dyadic relation. But you can never by such joining make a graph with three tails. You may think that a node connecting three lines of identity Y is not a triadic idea. But analysis will show that it is so. I see a man on Monday. On Tuesday I see a man, and I exclaim, “Why, that is the very man I saw on Monday.” We may say, with sufficient accuracy, that I directly experienced the identity. On Wednesday I see a man and I say, “That is the same man I saw on Tuesday, and consequently is the same I saw on Monday.” There is a recognition of triadic identity; but it is only brought about as a conclusion from two premisses, which is itself a triadic relation. If I see two men at once, I cannot by any such direct experience identify both of them with a man I saw before. I can only identify them if I regard them, not as the very same, but as two different manifestations of the same man. But the idea of | manifestation is the idea of a sign. Now a sign is something, A, which denotes some fact or object, B, to some interpretant thought, C.
(176-177)
1.347
[All higher ‘–adic’ structures above triadic are reducible to combinations of triads and should be thought of as such.]
[Peirce’s next point is an observation that any valency above three is really no more than a combination of triadic relations. (Here I am a little confused. Peirce shows how all valencies above three can be constructed by combining valencies of three. But does that in itself show it to be impossible that there cannot be any which are more than three? So for example, we can make a tetradic relation by combining two triadic ones:
>a——b<
But why exactly would that mean it is impossible to have one that is simply:
>a<
? The reasoning seems to be that any structure that is reducible to a combination of simpler structures is no more than that combination. But what is the argument for this assumption? I wonder if it has something to do with these being relations. There might be some reason that a relation which can be constructed using simpler components must be thought of as no more that such a construction.) So we can make a tetradic relation with two triadic ones:
>a——b<
Peirce says we can also make a pentadic relation with some number of triadic ones. (But he does not draw it to show how. If I had to guess at a possibility, what about: >a——b<_c<. In other words, triadic relation ‘a’ is just connected to triadic relation ‘b’ (giving 2 ‘tails’), and triadic relation ‘c’ is just connected to ‘b’ (giving 2 ‘tails’) but ‘b’ is connected to both ‘a’ and ‘c’ (giving 1 ‘tail’).) And, as he shows with a diagram, we can make a hexadic relation.
(The following will now quote Peirce.)]
It is interesting to remark that while a graph with three tails cannot be made out of graphs each with two or one tail, yet combinations of graphs of three tails each will suffice to build graphs with every higher number of tails.
And analysis will show that every relation which is tetradic, pentadic, or of any greater number of correlates is nothing but a compound of triadic relations. It is therefore not surprising to find that beyond the three elements of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, there is nothing else to be found in the phenomenon.
(177)
1.348
[Thought is an active factor in the real world. For, laws of nature can change, and those variations would have to be guided by some intentional guiding influence. This is perhaps because a law would not be open to lawless variation.]
[The next idea will require that we note a certain idea Peirce has been investing in this account, which is that reality, even the physical world in its raw physical form, has thought as part of its structures. I do not follow his explanation here. He might be saying that the laws we determine in the sciences are subject to variation, and somehow that variability of laws is indicative of thought being a factor in the external world. (If he is saying that, I am not sure what basis he has for it, unless it is simply just skepticism.) I hope you can help me with the reasoning here. Let me quote. Perhaps the idea is that if there were no thought as an additional layer of reality, then there would be nothing to guide alterations in laws. We cannot think of laws changing erratically (for some reason, perhaps because a law is not subject to unlawful forces, but I do not know why). So there would need to be some guiding factor (a meaning-to-do) shaping them in an intentional way.]
As to the common aversion to recognizing thought as an active factor in the real world, some of its causes are easily traced. In the first place, people are persuaded that everything that happens in the material universe is a motion completely determined by inviolable laws of dynamics; and that, they think, leaves no room for any other influence. But the laws of dynamics stand on quite a different footing from the laws of gravitation, elasticity, electricity, and the like. The laws of dynamics are very much like logical principles, if they are not precisely that. They only say how bodies will move after you have said what the forces are. They permit any forces, and therefore any motions. Only, the principle of the conservation of energy requires us to explain certain kinds of motions by special hypotheses about molecules and the like. Thus, in order that the viscosity of gases should not disobey that law we have to suppose that gases have a certain molecular constitution. Setting dynamical laws to one side, then, as hardly being positive laws, but rather mere formal principles, we have only the laws of gravitation, elasticity, electricity, and chem- | istry. Now who will deliberately say that our knowledge of these laws is sufficient to make us reasonably confident that they are absolutely eternal and immutable, and that they escape the great law of evolution? Each hereditary character is a law, but it is subject to developement and to decay. Each habit of an individual is a law; but these laws are modified so easily by the operation of self-control, that it is one of the most patent of facts that ideals and thought generally have a very great influence on human conduct. That truth and justice are great powers in the world is no figure of speech, but a plain fact to which theories must accommodate themselves.
(177-178)
1.349
[Since there are triadic relations in the real world, that means there is thought as meaning (intention) in the real world, in the panpsychic sense. It is natural for children to be attuned to this fact. And because it is natural, we have more reason to believe it is true.]
[The final paragraph of this section is fascinating, but like some of the others it is a bit difficult to follow. I will guess at what Peirce is thinking here, but I do not have a grasp yet. For this idea, let me first draw from a fantastic post by Crispen Sartwell, “the era of pseudo-explanation”. (If you by some chance have never read Sartwell’s blog, I highly recommend you do. It is one of the very best.) He writes:
i remember when my son was 2, he had a vocab of fifty words or whatever. now, for whatever reason (he had some mild speech issues, perhaps), it narrowed down to two nouns: “dog” and “ball”. everything was a dog or a ball: cars were dogs, whereas blankets were balls. his sister took to calling him ‘dogball.’ we finally figured out the principle: things that moved themselves were dogs, whereas things that had to be kicked or whatever to move were balls.
(Sartwell http://eyeofthestorm.blogs.com/eye_of_the_storm/2015/11/the-era-of-pseudo-explanation.html)
Here Sartwell is making a different point than what Peirce is doing. (It might even be nearly an opposite point. Sartwell opens the piece with, “one thing that is particularly characteristic of contemporary discourse in many areas, including politics, is the transformation of the merest concepts, or even sheer general terms, into actors or forces or beings with causal effects in the material world.”) Peirce is trying to attribute to the mind of a child a certain capacity for finding thought in the world, and this is somehow related to their natural proclivity to learn language. In his post, Sartwell is commenting on a certain tendency in political discourse, especially among media professionals, to throw out some vague concept to explain richly complicated phenomena in the real world (and there also seems to be the belief that this vague concept is a real factor or even an actor in the physical world). It might seem at first that these vague concepts express some deep insight into the problems they address, but in fact they only in an empty way categorize a complicated matter that should really be analyzed a lot more carefully and precisely. One example he gives is Richard Cohen’s diagnosing of problems regarding religious conflict as simply being the singular problem of ‘intolerance’. But despite the different points being made by Sartwell and Peirce, perhaps Sartwell’s description of how his son was learning language by reducing a diversity of phenomena to two types also might indicate something like what Peirce is describing in how children locate thought in the real world. To regard a car as a dog and a blanket as a ball, because the first pair moves itself and the second must be moved by external influence, seems to be seeing the world as if there is some rational and consistent thinking going on in it. In other words, there is a diversity of phenomena, but that diversity is structured in an organized way that can be understood as being rational or involving thought in some sense, because regularities of a conceptual sort structure the seemingly unregulated diversity of phenomena in the world. Peirce is probably saying something else, but I am not sure what that would be exactly. If all he is talking about is how a child learns the names of things and how to form sentences, then that would not seem by itself to necessarily involve the child thinking that the real world is imbued with thought somehow. Perhaps there is some other element of belief involved. (I wonder if maybe Peirce is saying that adults learn that there is no such thing as for example a ‘horse’ in the real world, but rather that it is merely one of many fictions we use so that we can coordinate our activities by means of speech. And also really most adults know better than to think that our words or concepts for things in the world really mean that those things actually exist. I am not sure how this might be, but consider for example the classic illustration of the Inuit natives having many words for different kinds of snow and other cultures having one or just a small handful. (I do not know if this is a discredited example, but perhaps we can think of others or maybe just the fact that certain words are untranslatable into other languages.) In this case, we see that whether or not we think there are forty different snow entities or just five is a matter of which fictional or arbitrary distinctions we attribute to the real world, which itself admits of so much variety as to allow for countless types of entities to be posited on the basis of the same physical givens. We might also consider how easy it is for children to believe what you tell them, no matter how fantastical (with Santa Claus or similar mythical entities being examples) or how they get certain absurd ideas in their heads for which there is no evidence at all but which nonetheless are frighteningly real, like boogey men hiding in their rooms at night. I also wonder if Peirce’s insight here is that it is natural to think that the world is more than a simple deterministic system involving a chain of simple casual binaries and in fact somehow the real world is imbued with thinking and intentions that influence the dynamics of the real world (as a result of triadic relations of the meaningful/meaning-t0-do, thinking sort). This paragraph also reminds me of sections we saw previously that we might consider to be examples of a panpsychic sort of thinking. (See for example section 1.311, section 1.313, and section 1.329.) But what he is saying here is slightly different than in these other cases. Here the idea seems to be that there is something like a guiding rational mind to the world or at least that the world has meaning in the sense of a kind of intention that acts on all the things in the world.)]
The child, with his wonderful genius for language, naturally looks upon the world as chiefly governed by thought; for thought and expression are really one. As Wordsworth truly says, the child is quite right in this; he is an
“eye among the blind,
“On whom those truths do rest
“Which we are toiling all our lives to find.”
But as he grows up, he loses this faculty; and all through his childhood he has been stuffed with such a pack of lies, which parents are accustomed to think are the most wholesome food for the child – because they do not think of his future – that he begins real life with the utmost contempt for all the ideas of his childhood; and the great truth of the immanent power of thought in the universe is flung away along with the lies. I offer this hypothetical explanation because, if the common aversion to regarding thought as a real power, or as anything but a fantastic figment, were really natural, it would make an argument of no little strength against its being acknowledged as a real power.
(178)
From:
Peirce, C.S. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol 1: Principles of Philosophy. In Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce [Two Volumes in One], Vols. 1 and 2. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1965 [1931].
Or if otherwise noted:
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. Volume 1. Translated and Annotated by Richard S. Burton. “Privately Printed by the Burton Club”. PDF vailable online at:
https://archive.org/details/bookofthousandni1900burt
Crispen Sartwell. “the era of pseudo-explanation”. 2015-11-17. cheese It, the cops! [formerly, Eye of the Storm]. Website / Web log. Accessed 2016-08-15.
http://eyeofthestorm.blogs.com/eye_of_the_storm/2015/11/the-era-of-pseudo-explanation.html
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