List: I was digging through my burgeoning collection of Peircean secondary literature this morning and came across Gary Richmond's PowerPoint presentation on "Trikonic" (http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/ menu/library/aboutcsp/richmond/trikonicb.ppt). It helpfully summarizes various characterizations of the three Categories/Universes.
- Basic Categories: unit, correlate, medium. - Universes of Experience: ideas, brute events, habits. - Universal Categories: possibility, actuality, necessity. - Existential Categories: feeling, action-reaction, thought. - Logical Categories: vague, specific, general; or may be, actually is, must be. - Valencies: monad, dyad, triad. I also found two papers by Tony Jappy that, upon re-reading them, I found to be relevant to this topic--"Speculative Rhetoric, Methodeutic and Peirce’s Hexadic Sign-Systems" (2014) and especially "The Evolving Theoretical Framework of Peirce's Classification Systems" (2016), both of which are available online at https://univ-perp.academia. edu/TonyJappy/Papers. His book, *Peirce’s Twenty-Eight Classes of Signs and the Philosophy of Representation*, is coming out in December ( http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/peirces-twenty-eight-classes- of-signs-and-the-philosophy-of-representation-9781474264839/); unfortunately, it looks like the price will be quite steep ($128 list). Jappy's hypothesis is that Peirce fundamentally changed his theoretical framework for sign classification--from phenomenological Categories to ontological Universes--during the time period between 1903 (three trichotomies, 10 sign classes) and 1908 (six or ten trichotomies, 28 or 66 sign classes). From the conclusion of the second paper ... TJ: The three categories, which, irrespective of their origin, had accompanied all his work in the classification of signs from the earliest period until approximately 1904, was superseded in 1908 by a broad ontological vision embracing three universes, receptacles with respect to which the sign and its correlates could be referred in the course of the classification of a sign. The logical principles supporting this later typological approach to signs, the fruit of an evolution in Peirce’s conception of the object and of the rapid theoretical development that his conception of sign-action experienced in those years between 1904 and 1906, are, therefore, radically different from those of the earlier approach, and it is doubtful that the two will ever be combined in a satisfactory manner in the quest for the sixty-six classes that Peirce hoped to identify. In the body of the same paper, Jappy twice quotes from "Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism" to explain the difference between Universes and Categories in this context. TJ: 1906 was the year, finally, in which Peirce explicitly introduced a fundamental distinction between categories and universes ... making explicit the universes to which the subjects mentioned in the extract (RL463 26–28) quoted earlier belonged: CSP: Oh, I overhear what you are saying, O Reader: that a Universe and a Category are not at all the same thing; a Universe being a receptacle or class of Subjects, and a Category being a mode of Predication, or class of Predicates. I never said they were the same thing; but whether you describe the two correctly is a question for careful study. (CP 4.545, 1906) TJ: In short, the passage suggests that Peirce is turning his back on the logico-phenomenological framework within which he had established his theory of signs since the mid-1860s, and that he is evolving towards an ontological approach to classification, anticipating in this field, too, the definitions advanced in the 23 December 1908 letter ... TJ: ... The theoretical framework within which Peirce is now working is ontological in the widest sense, involving the three universes defined above, three universes which are entirely different from the phenomenological categories of 1903-1904. A universe, says Peirce, is not the same as a category: "Let us begin with the question of Universes. It is rather a question of an advisable point of view than of the truth of a doctrine. A logical universe is, no doubt, a collection of logical subjects, but not necessarily of metaphysical Subjects, or ‘substances’; for it may be composed of characters, of elementary facts, etc." (CP 4.546, 1906). In this way, the correlates involved in semiosis figure ... as subjects susceptible of belonging to one or other of these universes ... the correlates thus described are not subdivided in any way by Firstness, Secondness or Thirdness but are subjects or members of a given universe: the dynamic object is one subject, the sign is another, etc. Unfortunately, Jappy confines his analysis to the six semeiotic correlates--Dynamic/Immediate Object, Sign, Immediate/Dynamic/Final Interpretants--and does not address the four semeiotic relations, except to note how Peirce described them in a 1904 letter to Lady Welby (CP 8.327-341), when he was still employing Categories rather than Universes. So I guess the questions that I posed earlier today must be preceded by this one--are relations in general, and semeiotic relations in particular, more properly treated as Subjects in Universes or as Predicates in Categories? If the latter, then that may explain why Peirce never managed to arrange all ten trichotomies into a definitive order of determination to establish the 66 sign classes, and why Jappy is skeptical that this can even be done. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
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