List, On the biosemiotics list Gary F. had quoted Peirce, and Stanley Salthe responded (you'll find the Peirce snippet and his remarks below Gary's just below). Gary's succinct and cogent reply to him seems to me of particular value to those interested in phenomenology.
Gary R. Stan, I don't see it that way. If I were mapping the three universal "elements" onto a subsumption hierarchy, I would do it the other way round (Thirdness subsumes Secondness which subsumes Firstness), because generality belongs to Thirdness, specificity to Secondness, and neither to Firstness, which has no relation to anything else. But I wouldn't attempt such a mapping anyway, because that kind of relation doesn't really apply to the irreducible elements of the universal phenomenon. Nor does any search procedure, which is a form of semiosis. Signs are phenomena, but the elements of the universal phenomenon are not signs (only their *names* are signs.) Once you get to 'know' them, they often turn out useful for classifying complex phenomena or processes, such as signs or sciences; but you can't get to know them by classification or categorization of phenomena, as they are not "categories" in that sense. gary f. *From:* Stanley N Salthe [mailto:[email protected]] *Sent:* 27-Aug-14 9:47 AM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* [biosemiotics:6545] Re: Firstness and essence Gary -- This quote from Peirce: >In my present limited space, I cannot make myself clear, still less convincing. Yet I will give such hint as I can of the three kinds of elements. I might name them "qualities", "occurrences", and "meanings". In order to get an idea of what I mean by a "quality", imagine a being whose consciousness should be nothing but the perfume of a damask rose, without any sense of change, of duration, of self or anything else. Put yourself in that being's shoes, and what of the universal phenomenon remains is what I call a "quality". It may be defined as that whose mode of |104| being consists simply in its being what it is. It is self-essence. ... ]] interests me in that it contains the form of a major conceptual trope -- the subsumption (or specification) hierarchy, thus: {quality (occurrence {meaning }}} which, like a Bayesian search procedure, moves (here) from a more general experience to a located one to an interpretation of it. I like to add that it looks to me much like: {Firstness {Secondness { Thirdness}}} I believe that this is also the general pattern of languaged thought (although not necessarily in that order). STAN.
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