On more thing before I leave for the weekend. It seems to me that 1907’s famous MS 318 is pretty key to all this the more I think about it. That’s partially because he speaks of three habit-interpretants and changes how he talks of habit somewhat. Part of the manuscript is in EP 2:398. I didn’t see it available online anywhere. The primary focus is the pragmatic maxim, but I think he gets at many of the issues we’re discussing.
The main focus is the relationship between the inner world and outer world in terms of the effect of a sign. It is to be noted that in calling a habit “self-controlled,” I do not mean that it is in the power of the man who has it to cast it off,— to cease, in the example just given, to try to make his decorations beautiful; for we well know that he has no such power,— but what I mean is that it has been developed under the process just described in which critical feelings as to the results of inner or outer exercises stimulate to strong endeavors to repeat or to modify those effects. I may mention that I do not recognize pleasure and pain as specific feelings but only as being whatever feelings may stimulate efforts, in the one case to reproduce or continue them, or, as we say, “attractive” feelings, and in the other case to annul and avoid them, or, as we say, “repulsive” feelings. (MS 319 EP 2.431-2, 1907) Now Peirce is explicitly talking here of humans and not general semiosis as we’re concerned with. So I recognize we have to be careful. reiterations in the inner world―fancied reiterations―if well-intensified by direct effort, produce habits, just as do reiterations in the outer world; and these habits will have power to influence actual behaviour in the outer world; especially, if each reiteration can be accompanied by a peculiar strong effect that is usually likened to issuing a command to one’s future self. (MS 319: 94; CP: 5.487, 1907) Also Habit. Involuntary habits are not meant, but voluntary habits, i.e., such as are subject (in some measure to self-control). Now under what conditions is a habit subject to self-control? Only if what has been done in one instance with the character, its consequences, and other circumstances, can have a triadic influence in strengthening or weakening the disposition to do the like on a new occasion. This is as much to say that voluntary habits is conscious habit. For what is consciousness? In the first place feeling is conscious. But what is a feeling, such as blue, whistling, sour, rose-scented? It is nothing but a quality, character, or predicate which involves no reference to any other predicate or other things than the subject in which it inheres, but yet positively is. [...] Our own feelings, if there were no memory of them for any fraction of a second, however small, if there were no triadic time-sense to testify with such assurance to their existence and varieties, would be equally unknown to us. Therefore, such a quality may be utterly unlike any feeling we are acquainted with, but it would have all that distinguish all our feelings from everything else. In the second place, effort is conscious. It is at once a sense of effort on the part of the being who wills and is a sense of resistance on the part of the object upon which the effort is exerted. But these two are one and the same consciousness. Otherwise, all that has been said of the feeling consciousness is true of the effort consciousness; and to say that this is veracious means less if possible than to say that a thing is whatever it may be. There is, then, a triadic consciousness which does not supersede the lower order, but goes bail for them and enters bonds for their veracity. Experiment upon inner world must teach inner nature of concepts as experiment on outer world must teach nature of outer things. Meaning of a general physical predicate consists in the conception of the habit of its subject that it implies. And such must be the meaning of a psychical predicate. The habits must be known by experience which however exhibits singulars only. Our minds must generalize these. How is this to be done? The intellectual part of the lessons of experimentation consists in the consciousness or purpose to act in certain ways (including motive) on certain conditions. (MS 318 EP: 2.549–550, 1907) But feeling simply is chance for Peirce as seen from the inside.
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