Danko, I don't know if this will help but I'll give it the old college try.
In almost 50 years of studying Peirce I have found that it helps to distinguish two broad types of writing that he does, which for lack of better descriptions I may call "technical" and "popular" writing. Both have their uses and Peirce does both as masterfully as anyone could hope to do, but there are limits to what can be accomplished with non-technical accounts of technical notions when it gets down to the "brass techs" of applications to real world phenomena and practical problems. When it comes to Peirce's categories, the best way to understand them if one has applications, and especially systems-theoretic applications in mind, is to regard them as referring to the orders of phenomena or situations that are adequately described or aptly modeled by monadic, dyadic, or triadic predicates, respectively. It is always a step forward in our thinking when we recognize that a particular phenomenon is most fittingly captured by a particular class of predicates or relations, but that is only the first step. The next step is to discover exactly what relation does the job. Regards, Jon -- academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/ inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ isw: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/JLA oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache
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