MS 292-295 (1906) - Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism

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essential nature of thought. Those whom we hear all-confidently asserting that anything like reasoning is a phenomenon peculiar to human consciousness or to the specific type of consciousness to which the human variety appertains, have not sufficiently considered the subject, and in particular fail to recognize that the question is not what happens to be extant but what the essential nature of reasoning allows. What exists is no proof of what must be; but it is certainly conclusive in affirming a may be. The honey bee's solution of the problem of isoperimetry suffices to show that human consciousness is not indispensible for the virtual accomplishment of inference; and it is amusing to note how vastly those who seek to belittle this instance really aggrandize it by showing that the bee simply does what it is

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mechanically constrained to do, thus drawing attention to the plenum of reason throughout the material universe. Among logical machines none are feebler than those that have been expressly designed as such. The fast yacht is a reasoning machine that solves problems in hydrodynamics far exceeding the powers of the mathematical analysis of our age.

In order to ascertain the relations between thought, thinking, and a sign, it will be necesary to give some defintions of these terms, unsatisfactory though these definitions may be. A sign seems to be connected with a purpose or end. An object may be said to have an end, if it has such a tendency to bring about a certain description of result, that if one mechanism for bringing that result about be pre-

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vented, this will cause the same sort of result to be brought about by different means. The finality, or tendency to the end, may have different degrees according as the variety of alternative mechanisms or methods of bringing about the final result is greater or less.

A Sign may be defined as something (not necessarily existant) which is so determined by a second something called its Object that it will tend in its turn to determine a third something called its Interpretant in such a way that in respect to the accomplishment of some end [circumscript?] in an effect made upon the interpretant the actual sign is (more or less) equivalent to what that of the Object might have been had the circumstances been different. For example, if an infantry captain

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drilling his compnay gives the order "Ground arms," the soundwaves of his voice constitute a sign whose object is the captain's will and whose interpretant is the muscular action of his men, this action being substantially the same as if his will had been able directly to control their muscles. Again, that general type of order "Ground arms" whether given by an American officer in Engligh to U.S. soldiers, or given by a Japanese officer in Japanese to Japanese soldiers, (no longer therefore any actual event but only a general type of possible events) is one sign whose single object is whatever officer's will it may be that his soldiers ground arms and whose single interpretant is the type of action of the soldiers conformally to U.S. tactics if it be an American order, but to Japanese tactics if it be a Japanese order is the

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interpretant. It is, however, necessary to remark that there are two different acceptions or aspects of the object of a sign. The one is the Dynamic Object, which is the object in its mode of being as an independent agent determining the sign. The other is the Immediate Object, which is the immediate determination of the sign considered as equivalent to the Object in its determination of the sign. So likewise the Interpretant may be spoken of in these senses. The Dynamical Interpretant is the determination produced by the sign as it actually occurs. Thus, in the example of the actual order of the infantry company, the whole series of events is the organisms of the soldiers as they are as a fact effected with all their accidental circumstances. The Immediate Interpretant is the determination

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