List: As I noted in my previous post in this thread ( https://list.iu.edu/sympa/arc/peirce-l/2025-09/msg00119.html), there is widespread consensus that the proper order of the first four trichotomies for sign classification in Peirce's late taxonomies is Od → Oi → S → Od-S. He clearly affirms this in the draft letters to Lady Welby that he wrote in late December 1908 (SS 73-86, EP 2:478-91), and he states that all words are types (here called famisigns), which must be collectives and copulants accordingly. However, he also states that the words "beauty," "color," "mass," and "whiteness" are abstractives; and that predicates, predicative signs, abstract nouns, and particular propositions like "Some S is P" are descriptives. If that were correct, then all these signs would have to be tones (not tokens or types) and icons (not indices or symbols).
Robert Marty seemed to suggest that every word is indeed an iconic tone (and an abstractive) when someone hears or reads an instance of it for the very first time, and a symbolic type only thereafter. This is plausible--on that initial occasion, the actual sound or appearance (embodied quality) of a token of the word is unfamiliar to the interpreter, an "indefinite significant character" not associated with any meaning; and there is a sense in which its dynamical object is the type itself, "a definitely significant Form" (CP 4.537, 1906). In fact, every token of a type *iconically *represents that type (NEM 3:887, 1908 Dec 5), by embodying tones that make it recognizable as an instance of the type. Moreover, we come to know words as types in the same way that we get acquainted with other dynamical objects of signs--by means of collateral experience (CP 8.183, EP 2:495, 1909 Feb 26). The new thread on "Peirce's semeiotic holism" is a timely reminder that ordinary words effectively function as *names*, initially *indicating* their dynamical objects within a propositional context before becoming iconic and then symbolic over time (CP 2.329, EP 2:286, 1903). Nevertheless, this does not strike me as what Peirce had in mind when he said that words representing qualities are abstractives, and it obviously does not explain how particular propositions could be descriptives. My guess is that he simply had not yet thought through all the details of his still-evolving speculative grammar, and maybe that is precisely why those letters are *drafts* that he never actually sent to Lady Welby--he was still working things out as he was composing them, and he ended up being dissatisfied with the results. As I said before, this is not just a matter of terminology, but of enhancing our understanding of signs, their two objects, and the relations between them. In my view, Peirce was right about the order of the first four trichotomies and wrong about the initial sign classifications that were inconsistent with it. For example, the word "beauty" as a type does not refer to an *individual* quality, but to a *continuum* of possible qualities; its dynamical object is not a *specific* kind of beauty, but a *general* concept of beauty, and that makes it a collective. Although the word *vaguely* indicates the concept by means of other qualities in accordance with its verbal definition, it also *implicitly* expresses its logical relations; its immediate object is not just a list of characters, it includes the concept's *valency* as a monadic predicate, and that makes it a copulant. When the word is uttered by someone as a token of the type, its dynamical object is often an *embodied* quality, making it a concretive; and its immediate object is the idea that it *involuntarily *calls up in the mind of an interpreter who understands it, making it a designative. An abstractive descriptive, whose dynamical object is one possible quality that it vaguely indicates by means of other qualities, must *itself* be a quality that is iconically embodied in a token as a tone; and a concretive descriptive, whose dynamical object is an existent thing that it vaguely indicates by means of its qualities, must be that very *combination *of qualities that are iconically embodied in a token as tones. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Structural Engineer, Synechist Philosopher, Lutheran Christian www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt / twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
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