Bibliography

The Fourth Curiosity

…a sign which belongs to a conventional system of possible signs, and which is intended and calculated to produce a belief in the mind to which it is addressed is an assertion.

So, then, there are these three modes of being: first, the being of a feeling, in itself, unattached to any subject, which is merely an atmospheric possibility, a possibility floating in vacuo, not rational yet capable of rationalization; secondly, there is the being that consists in arbitrary brute action upon other things, not only irrational but anti-rational, since to rationalize it would be to destroy its being; and thirdly, there is living intelligence from which all reality and all power are derived; which is rational necessity and necessitation.

A feeling is what it is, positively, regardless of anything else. Its being is in it alone, and it is a mere potentiality. A brute force, as, for example, an existent particle, on the other hand, is nothing for itself; whatever it is, it is for what it is attracting and what it is repelling: its being is actual, consists in action, is dyadic. That is what I call existence. A reason has its being in bringing other things into connexion with each other; its essence is to compose: it is triadic, and it alone has a real power.

…as a pragmaticist I hold a belief to be a determination of a person such that under certain conceivable experiential circumstances he would be led by it to act in a certain way, this determination being usually accompanied by a feeling or a particular quality called a feeling of belief, as well as by special feelings associated with the particular characters of the determination.

The possibility of any definite predicate being true is the being of a corresponding character. That is the signification of the logical term “character.” A character belongs to whatever singulars the corresponding predicate could truly be asserted of; and a character which belongs to anything existent is thereby said itself to exist, and to exist in the singulars of which the predicate is true.

…a class, unlike a kind, is not a character, but is the totality of all those singulars that possess a definite existent character, which is the essential character of the class. Should observation show that two classes having different essential characters embraced the very same singulars, then since it is the singulars, and not the kinds, that constitute the existence of the class, we should say that the two classes, though entitatively, that is, in their possibilities, they were diverse, were yet existentially one. Such, I think, is the modern notion of a class, though I must confess that it appears to me to be rather hazy. The characters which go to define a class are not necessarily permanent characters of the singulars, as a kind is. On the contrary we speak with perfect propriety of the class of human males between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, though there is evidently no such kind.

…while numbers may on occasion be, or represent, multitudes, they can never be collections, since collections are not grades of any kind, but are single things.

The mode of being of the composition of thought, which is always of the nature of the attribution of a predicate to a subject, is the living intelligence which is the creator of all intelligible reality, as well as of the knowledge of such reality. It is the entelechy, or perfection of being.

Coming to Essence, this in its epistemological force is that intelligible character which truly defines what a general or indefinite, that is, what an indeterminate monadic predicate primarily asserts, so that all else that it asserts is the necessary consequence of this epistemological essence. It is easy to state what the essences of artificial objects are: The essence of a stove is that it is intended to diffuse warmth. But as to the essence of natural objects, if they have any, we are unable as yet to give them. We are only able to state the essence of our common names for such things. The metaphysical essence is the intelligible element of the possibility of its Being, or so much of that as is not a mere consequence of the rest…

The essence of a thing consists in its being rendered intelligible by being regarded from a certain general point of view. This gives it an intellectual nutritiousness. For instance, I may be shown a complicated piece of machinery, and while recognizing how many parts of it must or may move together, I may be utterly at a loss to understand it, or to discern what kind of a machine it is until someone tells me what purpose it is intended to subserve. Then I see. That I see gives it a function, an office in the world. But the essence does no more than determine the generic mode of being of the thing.

All to which the senses normally testify without room for critical reasoning is usually and properly said to be “experienced”; and all that is truly experienced is, in the epistemological sense, existent. [—]

In the metaphysical sense, existence is that mode of being which consists in the resultant genuine dyadic relation of a strict individual with all the other such individuals of the same universe.

A brute force, as, for example, an existent particle […] is nothing for itself; whatever it is, it is for what it is attracting and what it is repelling: its being is actual, consists in action, is dyadic. That is what I call existence.

Any object whose attributes, i.e. all that may truly be predicated, or asserted, of it, will, and always would, remain exactly what they are, unchanged, though you or I or any man or men should think or should have thought as variously as you please, I term external, in contradistinction to mental. [—]

The main difference between the external, as I use the term, and the real, as I employ that term, seems to be that the question whether anything is external or not is the question of what a word or other symbol or concept (for thinking proper is always conducted in general signs of some sort) is, I say, a question of what a symbol signifies; while the question of whether anything is real or is a figment is the question what a word or other symbol or concept denotes.

…the question of whether anything is real or is a figment is the question what a word or other symbol or concept denotes. If the attributes of or possible true assertions about an object could vary according to the way in which you or I or any man or actual body of single men, living at any time or times, might think about that object, then that object is what I call a figment.

.. a sign endeavours to represent, in part at least, an Object, which is therefore in a sense the cause, or determinant, of the sign even if the sign represents its object falsely. But to say that it represents its Object implies that it affects a mind, and so affects it as, in some respect, to determine in that mind something that is mediately due to the Object. That determination of which the immediate cause, or determinant, is the Sign, and of which the mediate cause is the Object may be termed the Interpretant…

A character which is not sometimes true and sometimes false of the same singular is a kind. A kind may not exist at all; or it may exist in but one sole singular, which the old logics used to say was the case with the kind called sun. [—]

I consider a kind to be an ens rationis, although that may be open to dispute, at least as regards some kinds; but there can, I think, be no doubt that a class is an ens rationis. For a class, unlike a kind, is not a character, but is the totality of all those singulars that possess a definite existent character, which is the essential character of the class.

Any object whose attributes, i.e. all that may truly be predicated, or asserted, of it, will, and always would, remain exactly what they are, unchanged, though you or I or any man or men should think or should have thought as variously as you please, I term external, in contradistinction to mental. For example, a dream is mental, because it depends upon what passed in the thoughts of the dreamer whether it be true that the dream was of a dog or was of the Round Table of King Arthur or of anything else. On the other hand, the colors of objects of human experience and in particular the contrast between the color of the petals of a Jaqueminot rose and that of the leaves of the bush, although it is relative to the sense of sight, is not mental, in my sense of that word.

If two kinds, A and B, are so related that of whatever singulars A could possibly be true, B would necessarily also be true, then A is said to involve B.

This necessity may be of any of the modes of necessity. In particular, if A involves B because of the definitions, or very ideas, of the two kinds, A is said essentially to involve, or, in other words, to imply B. A kind all whose singulars seem, according to experience, normally to belong to other kinds not implied in the former kind, is called (especially if the other kinds are numerous) a natural kind.

When a blank form is such that the result of determining each blank in it to express a proper name is to reconvert it into a proposition, however silly, that blank form is termed a rheme or predicate.

A sign which though calculated to produce belief, that is, though it has the character of possible assertion, is nevertheless not necessarily so intended, nor necessarily used toward that end, and which may even carry a mark to show that it is actually not so intended, is a proposition.

But to say that a singular is known by sense is a confusion of thought. It is not known by the feeling-element of sense, but by the compulsion, the insistency, that characterizes experience. For the singular subject is real; and reality is insistency. That is what we mean by “reality.” It is the brute irrational insistency that forces us to acknowledge the reality of what we experience, that gives us our conviction of any singular.

I have, since 1870, written much about the logic of relations. In those writings, I have usually restricted the terms “relations” and “relationships” to existential relations and relationships. By a relationship I understand the conception of a fact about a set of things abstracted from the representation of the things themselves or, in other words, a predicate which requires more than one subject to complete a proposition, or conception of a fact. A “relation” only differs from a “relationship” in that one of the subjects is regarded as being taken account of first, and is usually called the subject nominative, while the others are called the direct and indirect objects. In other words a relation is a predicate requiring one subject nominative and one or more objects in a definite sequence. In my earlier papers I use the conception of relation chiefly; in my later ones that of relationship. The difference is little more than trifling.

I have, since 1870, written much about the logic of relations. In those writings, I have usually restricted the terms “relations” and “relationships” to existential relations and relationships. By a relationship I understand the conception of a fact about a set of things abstracted from the representation of the things themselves or, in other words, a predicate which requires more than one subject to complete a proposition, or conception of a fact.

A predicate of more than one blank is called a relative predicate.

When a blank form is such that the result of determining each blank in it to express a proper name is to reconvert it into a proposition, however silly, that blank form is termed a rheme or predicate.

… absolute chance – pure tychism …