"Firstness", "Secondness" and "Thirdness" are hypostatic abstractions. I'm afraid those who can't see the difference between hypostatic abstraction and prescission - see Natural Propositions 6.10 - are always left "bending over backwards" to force Peirce's terms into their own prior categories, because the practice of prescission eludes them. This produces the kind of muddle that confuses semiotics with phaneroscopy, and both with introspective psychology.
The elements of the phaneron, which those hypostatic abstractions give names to, are undiscernible in that muddle. Once you've made their acquaintance, they are unavoidable; but words can't furnish that acquaintance, and if your universe of discourse is totally verbal, I suppose it's quite inaccessible. Perhaps some people, even some accomplished philosophers and scientists, are constitutionally (genetically?) unable to practice phaneroscopy - even such a distinguished Peircean as Joe Ransdell didn't see a difference between phaneroscopy and semiotics! - and there's no hope of understanding it without practicing it. I guess one way of coping with the situation (of not knowing what Peirce was talking about) is to argue that Peirce didn't know what he was talking about. Unfortunately such arguments are impervious to experience, and thus to logic as an experiential science (CP 7.526). gary f. -----Original Message----- From: Joseph Brenner [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 30-Nov-14 7:22 AM The Peircean semiotic doctrine could be made more acceptable, to me at least, by the elimination of just one word - pure. I do not see, even in its own universe of discourse, why Firstness and Secondness must be totally disjunct. It is this that makes them, as Howard says, abstractions. A vague, semi-unconscious awareness of general aspects of existence is something that can be experienced or observed but is qualitatively different enough from everyday experience to justify (I am leaning over backwards) the designation of Firstness. But there is no necessary ontological 'boundary' between Firstness and Secondness. They are inseparable categorial features of existence, one or the other of which is (primarily) actualized or predominates in any real (cognitive) situation, at the expense of the other. Joseph
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