On a New List of Categories
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~5,050 words · 24 passages
Cite this work
- APACharles Peirce. (n.d.). On a New List of Categories. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-peirce/on-a-new-list-of-categories
- MLACharles Peirce. "On a New List of Categories." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-peirce/on-a-new-list-of-categories.
- ChicagoCharles Peirce. On a New List of Categories. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-peirce/on-a-new-list-of-categories.
What it is about
The 1867 paper in which Peirce, at twenty-seven, proposed to replace Kant's categories with three alone.
Context and history
Peirce is after the same thing as Aristotle and Kant — what are the basic ways in which anything is — but he gets there by way of the sign: by analysing what is needed to pass from a sense impression to a proposition. Three come out, which he would later call firstness, secondness and thirdness: quality alone, considered without anything further; reaction, the clash of two things; and mediation, the sign that relates two for a third. The rest of his work is in large part the application of this scheme to logic, to science and to metaphysics, and he always said himself that this was the text where everything began. It is dense, short and written for specialists; anyone who does not know Peirce would do well to begin with 'The Fixation of Belief' and come back to this afterwards.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
§ 1. paper is based upon the theory already established, that the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity, and that the validity of a conception consists in the impossibility of reducing the content of consciousness to unity without the introduction of it. § 2. This theory gives rise to a conception of gradation among those conceptions which are universal. For one such conception may unite the manifold of sense and yet another may be required to unite the conception and the manifold to which it is applied; and so on. § 3. That universal conception which is nearest to sense is that of the present, in general. This is a conception, because it is universal. But as the act of attention has no connotation at all, but is the pure denotative power of the mind, that is to say, the power which directs the mind to an object, in contradistinction to the power of thinking any predicate of that object, — so the conception of what is present in general, which is nothing but the general recognition of what is contained in attention, has no connotation, and therefore no proper unity. This conception of the present in general, of IT in general, is rendered in philosophical language by the word “substance” in one of its meanings. Before any comparison or discrimination can be made between what is present, what is present must have been recognized as such, as it, and subsequently the metaphysical parts which are recognized by abstraction are attributed to this it, but the it cannot itself be made a predicate. This it is thus neither predicated of a subject, nor in a subject, and accordingly is identical with the conception of substance.