Dear Gary, John, lists It is correct that Firstness is no abstraction in the sense of Hypostatic Abstraction (even if the term Firstness is such an abstraction). But Firstness as such is an abstraction in the sense of "prescission" or "prescissive abstraction" - It is often overlooked how P's categories, already from their emergence in the 1860s, are tightly connected with the epistemologic means of accessing them - namely, his three types of distinction, dissociation, prescission and discrimination, respectively. In "Diagrammatology" ch. 11 (2007), I made this summary:
(…) the three categories are interrelated as follows (arrow here meaning possibility of distinction; broken arrow impossibility): 1. <--/--> 2. 2. <--/--> 3. The categories may not be dissociated. 1. <---- 2. 1. --/--> 2. 2. <---- 3. 2. --/--> 3. 1. <---- 3. 1. --/--> 3. A lower category may be prescinded from a higher, not vice versa. 1. <---- 2. 1. ----> 2. 2. <---- 3. 2. ----> 3. 1. <---- 3. 1. ----> 3. All categories may be discriminated from the others. So, 3. necessrily involves 2. and 1., and 2. involves 1. - so that 1. can be reached by prescission from 3. and 2. Thus 1. is not "first" in any temporal or phenomenological sense - it is not like we "begin" with firstness in order to build up the higher categories - rather, we isolate, by prescission, the lower from taking our point of departure in the higher. In cognition, this corresponds to the idea that we are always-already within the chain of inferences from one proposition to the next - but preconditions of that chain in terms of simpler signs (e.g. tones, tokens, icons, indices, rhemas) may be adressed by prescission (so that the whole semiotic theory forms a sort of anatomy of the chain of arguments which is really, as a whole, the starting point). This is why neither semiotics nor, correlatively, metaphysics are compositional in Peirce. Best F Den 26/04/2015 kl. 18.04 skrev Gary Richmond <gary.richm...@gmail.com<mailto:gary.richm...@gmail.com>> : John, The percept within the perceptual judgment--as I noted Nathan Houser as saying--is a firstness. The percept is not an abstraction. As a sign its a rhematic iconic qualisign. Best, Gary
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