Content and Context (TS ·15)

·15 Content and Context

You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notions what the forest he all means.
— The Restored Finnegans Wake, 89

The forest is context of the path. _[next]

To understand a sentence means to understand a language.
— Wittgenstein, PI I.199

For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
— Wittgenstein, PI I.43

Let the use of words teach you their meaning. (Similarly one can often say in mathematics: Let the proof teach you what was being proved.)
— Wittgenstein, PI II.xi (p. 220)

What a word means may depend on where and when you use it. “Queen Anne's Lace” is one of several popular names for the common weed Daucus Carota – in North America. In England, “Queen Anne's Lace” is the name of an entirely different plant, Anthriscus sylvestris (Heiser 2003, 44). _[next]

A Gregory Bateson essay in Steps to an Ecology of Mind

extends the notion of informational control to include the field of morphogenesis and, by discussing what happens in absence of needed information, brings out the importance of the context into which information is received.…
Message material, or information, comes out of a context into a context, and in other parts of the book the focus has been on the context out of which information came. Here the focus is rather upon the internal state of the organism as a context into which the information must be received.

Of course, neither focus is sufficient by itself for our understanding of either animals or men. But it is perhaps not an accident that in these papers dealing with non-human organisms the “context” which is discussed is the obverse or complement of the “context” upon which I have focussed attention in other parts of the book.

Consider the case of the unfertilized frog's egg for which the entry point of the spermatozoon defines the plane of bilateral symmetry of the future embryo.

The prick of a hair from a camel's hair brush can be substituted and still carry the same message. From this it seems that the external context out of which the message comes is relatively undefined. From the entry point alone, the egg learns but little about the external world. But the internal context into which the message comes must be exceedingly complex.

The unfertilized egg, then, embodies an immanent question to which the entry point of the spermatozoon provides an answer; and this way of stating the matter is the contrary or obverse of the conventional view, which would see the external context of learning as a “question” to which the ‘right’ behavior of the organism is an answer.
— Bateson (1972, 395-6)

Somebody says: “It's raining.” You could say that that sign is made up of two words, or three: it, is, raining. In French it could be said in one word: pluit. It is the same sign in either language. It could be the answer to a question: What's happening outside? Where is the question coming from? Is the content of the answer inside or outside of the sign? Where is its context?

At this point it must be noticed that the simplest assertion uses two signs. This is true even of so simple a proposition as “pluit”, where one of the signs is the totality of the circumstances of the interview between the interlocutors, which makes the auditor think that what is happening out of doors is referred to. This is evident, since if he simply heard the word “pluit” pronounced, though he might be ever so determined to believe what was meant, yet if he knew not at all whence the sound came, whether from somebody recounting a dream or telling a story or from a planet of a distant star, and did not know at what time the word was uttered, he could not in the least guess what he was expected to believe. Nor could any mere words tell him, unless they referred to something in his immediate experience, as a sign (and if he were, for example, told that the rain was “fifty miles north of where you are standing.”) It must be something common to the experience of both interlocutors.
— Peirce, ‘Basis of Pragmatism’, R 284, 42-3 (1905)

One sign is verbal, the other circumstantial and experiential. _[next]

Vygotsky cites an incident observed by Dostoevsky in which a complex sense was carried by a single word – or rather the sign was interpreted so that only one word was needed as its verbal component. ‘When the context is as clear as in this example, it really becomes possible to convey all thoughts, feelings and even a whole chain of reasoning in a single word’ (Vygotsky 1934, 144).

A turning word is like the tip of the proverbial iceberg, or rather like the pivot of a turning sign, ‘at the still point of the turning world’ which is its context. _[next]

The universe is the only text without a context. Every particular mode of being is universe-referent, and its meaning is established only within this comprehensive setting. This is why this story of the universe, and especially of the planet Earth, is so important. Through our understanding of this story, our own role in the story is revealed. In this revelation lies our way into the future.
— Thomas Berry (2006, 23)

Use, purpose and meaning depend on context. How can that which provides the context for everything have its own use, purpose or meaning? _[next]

Conversation is a matter of swapping texts. Dialogue includes as well the practice of providing contexts for each other's texts, and answers to each other's questions. Dialog as inquiry aims at a common text suitable for the common experiential context, which is the system in which it lives. The text is woven of hypotheses.

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.
— Wittgenstein (1969, #105)

Such a system can have any degree of complexity, since it is not only syntactic but semantic as well. Implicit in this system is an ‘explanation’ of how the sign is related to its object, or how its objects are related to one another, as Peirce explains in CP 2.230, (1910). This system can work only if the sign's interpreter is already acquainted with its object(s).

The Sign can only represent the Object and tell about it. It cannot furnish acquaintance with or recognition of that Object; for that is what is meant in this volume by the Object of a Sign; namely, that with which it presupposes an acquaintance in order to convey some further information concerning it. No doubt there will be readers who will say they cannot comprehend this. They think a Sign need not relate to anything otherwise known, and can make neither head nor tail of the statement that every Sign must relate to such an Object. But if there be anything that conveys information and yet has absolutely no relation nor reference to anything with which the person to whom it conveys the information has, when he comprehends that information, the slightest acquaintance, direct or indirect—and a very strange sort of information that would be—the vehicle of that sort of information is not, in this volume, called a Sign.
Two men are standing on the seashore looking out to sea. One of them says to the other, “That vessel there carries no freight at all, but only passengers.” Now, if the other, himself, sees no vessel, the first information he derives from the remark has for its Object the part of the sea that he does see, and informs him that a person with sharper eyes than his, or more trained in looking for such things, can see a vessel there; and then, that vessel having been thus introduced to his acquaintance, he is prepared to receive the information about it that it carries passengers exclusively. But the sentence as a whole has, for the person supposed, no other Object than that with which it finds him already acquainted. The Objects—for a Sign may have any number of them—may each be a single known existing thing or thing believed formerly to have existed or expected to exist, or a collection of such things, or a known quality or relation or fact, which single Object may be a collection, or whole of parts, or it may have some other mode of being, such as some act permitted whose being does not prevent its negation from being equally permitted, or something of a general nature desired, required, or invariably found under certain general circumstances.
CP 2.231-2 (1910)

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Conversation degenerates when we lose sight of the polyversity of language, and of the ineluctable vagueness of all symbolic expression. According to Peirce, ‘No concept, not even those of mathematics, is absolutely precise; and some of the most important for everyday use are extremely vague’ (CP 6.496, c. 1906). Genuinely informative communication depends on taking this necessary vagueness into account. Properly understanding any utterance requires us to interpret it with the degree of vagueness appropriate to the situational context. To meet this requirement, every language user has to develop a sensitivity to context at an early age, though few are conscious of it.

The perspectival nature of linguistic systems means that as children learn to use words and linguistic constructions in the manner of adults, they come to see that the exact same phenomenon may be construed in many different ways for different communicative purposes depending on many factors in the communicative context.
— Tomasello (1999, 213)

To construe is to simplify, and to simplify is to generalize: a symbol, by referring to a type of experience, can thus refer to many tokens of it on various occasions, including future occasions. Even proper nouns (names of specific things, places, people etc.) are general signs insofar as each implies the continuity of its object through time: each momentary manifestation of the object is a token of that type, and some features of it may vary from one occurrence to another – especially if the object is a complex adaptive system.

Things we talk about, whether we perceive them to be in the external or the internal world, are already construed, categorized and “framed” by the time we mention them. But each actual reference to them can affect our framing habits; and these in turn affect our way of talking about them, or hearing others talk about them. Since everyone has a history of cycling through such loops countless times, and this history determines for each a “natural” idiom, synchronizing reference between speakers is not always easy.

The upshot of this in communication is that in trying to connect words with referents or experiences, ‘all sorts of risks are taken, assumptions and guesses made’ (Sperber and Wilson 1995, 19). This is the only practical way to reduce the many possible ‘construals’ of phenomena – or meanings of words – to the simplicity required for the maintenance of a conversation.

Sperber and Wilson take this as an argument against what they call ‘the mutual-knowledge hypothesis,’ but they are using the word knowledge here in an absolute sense, as equivalent to objective certainty (Sperber and Wilson 1995, 19-20). In reality, the common ground that people must have in order to carry on a conversation is a network of rather vague default assumptions. Actual conversation often consists of attempts to render some of the ‘mutual knowledge’ more precise, but in the actual context, there are pragmatic limits to this precision.

William James, in typically elegant fashion, gives a more psychologically realistic account of cognition as ‘virtual knowing.’

Now the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond this virtual stage. It never is completed or nailed down. … To continue thinking unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, our practical substitute for knowing in the completed sense. As each experience runs by cognitive transition into the next one, and we nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure. We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path.
— James, ‘A World of Pure Experience’ (Kuklick 1172)

Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception takes a slightly different perspective:

My set of experiences is presented as a concordant whole, and the synthesis takes place not in so far as they all express a certain invariant, and in the identity of the object, but in that they are all collected together, by the last of their number, in the ipseity of the thing. The ipseity is, of course, never reached: each aspect of the thing which falls to our perception is still only an invitation to perceive beyond it, still only a momentary halt in the perceptual process. If the thing itself were reached, it would be from that moment arrayed before us and stripped of its mystery. It would cease to exist as a thing at the very moment when we thought to possess it. What makes the ‘reality’ of the thing is therefore precisely what snatches it from our grasp.
— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 271)

This is, in context, quite consistent with Peirce's definition of ‘reality’:

I define the real as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to be, or ever will have thought them to be, here using thought to include, imagining, opining, and willing (as long as forcible means are not used); but the real thing's characters will remain absolutely untouched.
CP 6.495 (c. 1906)

None of this denies that thoughts can make a difference to the future character of real things. Nor does it deny Peirce's assertion that ‘we have direct experience of things in themselves’ (CP 6.95). Experience is not knowledge, although it is involved in knowing, as Secondness is involved in Thirdness, which in turn will determine ‘future facts of Secondness.’ In the process of inquiry or of learning, what James called ‘our sense of a determinate direction’ is a feeling of being about to know more than we did before, or getting closer to the Truth. But semiotic experience teaches that our knowledge is never completely determinate.

No cognition and no Sign is absolutely precise, not even a Percept; and indefiniteness is of two kinds, indefiniteness as to what is the Object of the Sign, and indefiniteness as to its Interpretant, or indefiniteness in Breadth and in Depth.
— Peirce, CP 4.543 (1906)

Any knowledge that will prove useful as guidance into the future must be general, and thus indefinite in that sense.

Yet every proposition actually asserted must refer to some non-general subject …. Indeed, all propositions refer to one and the same determinately singular subject, well-understood between all utterers and interpreters; namely, to The Truth, which is the universe of all universes, and is assumed on all hands to be real. But besides that, there is some lesser environment of the utterer and interpreter of each proposition that actually gets conveyed, to which that proposition more particularly refers and which is not general.
CP 5.506 (c. 1905)

That ‘lesser environment’ is evidently what Peirce elsewhere called ‘the common stock of knowledge of utterer and interpreter’ (EP2:310), i.e. the commind or commens (EP2:478). Its particular subject may be ‘determinately singular,’ but predicates are always general to some degree, so the proposition actually conveyed still involves some indeterminacy. Thus we can't say that a proposition is necessarily and absolutely either true or false unless we deny the reality of indeterminacy, i.e. of both generality and vagueness. This denial is formulated as the “principle of excluded middle.”

To speak of the actual state of things implies a great assumption, namely that there is a perfectly definite body of propositions which, if we could only find them out, are the truth, and that everything is really either true or in positive conflict with the truth. This assumption, called the principle of excluded middle, I consider utterly unwarranted, and do not believe it.
— Peirce, NEM 3:758 (1893)

Even if the dynamic Object of a symbolic utterance is a fully determinate singular, the sign itself is still ‘indefinite as to its Interpretant’ (as explained above). ‘No communication of one person to another can be entirely definite, i.e., non-vague’ (Peirce, CP 5.506). _[next]

As the focal text is to its context, so body is to environment, model is to mind, and mind is to the intelligible reality beyond it, which Peirce calls The Truth.

Imagine, if you can, a mind without an external world to offer resistance to its intentions – a mind to which all phenomena are entirely internal, as a dream is internal to the dreamer. A panentheist might call it “the mind of God.”

Such a god would fit the description left us in the extant fragments from the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Xenophanes. Here are some key points of his theology (translated by Kirk and Raven, 1957):

One god … in no way similar to mortals either in body or in thought.
Always he remains in the same place, moving not at all; nor is it fitting for him to go to different places at different times, but without toil he shakes all things by the thought of his mind.
All of him sees, all thinks, and all hears.
Sitting, he nevertheless at once accomplishes his thought, somehow, from his holy resting-place.

We might say that the phenomenal universe is “in God” just as ‘he’ is in ‘his holy resting-place.’ The universe then would appear to those within it (like ourselves) as the god's body or manifestation, while his ‘thought’ is the sole determinant of what happens in the universe: ‘he shakes all things.’ The god does not move since there is nowhere else to go, and he requires no external source of energy to ‘accomplish his thought.’

Now, clearly this god-thought cannot be conscious, nor can it include any kind of “plan,” because those would involve some delay between thought and actualization, and some effort; but this god at once accomplishes his thought without toil. Conscious intentions and planning are symptoms of human (or ‘mortal’) limitations. In this case our conscious planning, or purposing, or meaning, would constitute a minuscule part of the divine minding. The god's knowledge of events would be immediate, since no media come between the events and the thought of them, nor is there any source of semergy such as a sign receives from its object.

Being an organism in an environmental context means that you need an internal guidance system including a “map of the world” and an internalized source of energy to power both acting and thinking. ‘Internalized’ means that the energy has been transformed from, or informed by, an external source. A universal “mind” or “will,” however, having no context to occupy or contend with, no territory to navigate or map, has no model of what it “sees,” “hears” or “thinks”: the objects of its ubiquitous attention are not the dynamic objects of signs but its own immediate creations. In the absence of an external world, it has no need (or possibility) of anticipating or explaining what happens, as we do in the meaning cycle of scientific inquiry. The “mind of God,” considered as a Sign, would be that ‘Sign of itself, containing its own explanation’ of which Peirce wrote (CP 2.230). Any ‘additional explanation’ would only dissipate its semiotic energy, so to speak, increasing its entropy.

This thought-experiment has a parallel in physics. We begin with a classic scenario of thermodynamics: a closed container of two chambers filled with a gas at different temperatures, in which the gas can pass freely from one chamber to the other. The second law of thermodynamics predicts that the temperature gradient will dissipate itself: heat will distribute itself uniformly through the whole container, thus achieving equilibrium, which is equivalent to maximal disorder or ‘entropy.’ In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell imagined a way that this law could be violated: set up two containers connected only by a microscopic gate just big enough to allow passage of a single molecule at a time from one side to the other. Now suppose a tiny ‘demon’ can detect the speed of any particle and open the gate momentarily to let fast particles through in one direction only, and slow particles in the other direction only. This would increase the temperature gradient, and thus reverse the entropic process, without using any energy to do the work – supposing that the actual opening and closing of the gate uses no energy.

In 1929, however, Leo Szilard published a paper showing that in order to know enough about the particles to sort them out in this way, the demon would have to create at least as much entropy as was eliminated by the sorting process. That's because it takes work to assemble and represent the information needed by the demon in order to discriminate between fast and slow particles, and the amount of energy it takes to accomplish this knowledge of any particle is no less than the energy of the particle itself. So if we look at the whole system containing those representations (or symbols) as well as the particles being sorted, its entropy is increasing even as the smaller system inside the container is growing more orderly by creating a gradient.

Our scenario above is similar in that any explicit knowledge (or “purpose,” or “meaning”) of the whole determinate universe would disrupt it, since there is no extra energy, either physical or semiotic, available to represent it. It can't be outside the universe (the god's mindbody), because the universe has no “outside” (by definition). In short, there's no room for explication apart from events themselves, which are signs of one another. The train of the God's thought is the express train that cannot be expressed.

Our scenario, then, presents human conscious intentions as a small part of the cosmic mind, arising from the local limitations which constitute existence. Explicit intentions can therefore serve some implicit purpose, though we can only guess at their relations with the whole course of time – for as Xenophanes also said, ‘No man knows, or ever will know, the truth about the gods and about everything I speak of: for even if one chanced to say the complete truth, yet oneself knows it not … ’ and ‘the gods have not revealed all things to men from the beginning; but by seeking men find out better in time.’ This sounds very much like the essentials of scientific method as Peirce and Popper saw it; and indeed Popper credited Xenophanes with the first clear formulation of ‘the true theory of knowledge’ (Popper 1968, 205). _[next]

Perception furnishes the context of action, activity the context of perception, and the meaning cycle the context of their relationship. _[next]

Is it possible for one person to be “enlightened” separately from others? We might ask the same question about a single symbol.

Is it possible that one single symbol could be awakened in isolation from all others? Probably not. Just as objects in the world always exist in a context of other objects, so symbols are always connected to a network of other symbols. This does not necessarily mean that symbols can never be disentangled from each other. To make a rather simple analogy, males and females always arise in a species together: their roles are completely intertwined, and yet this does not mean that a male cannot be distinguished from a female. Each is reflected in the other, as the beads in Indra's net reflect each other.…
The fact that a symbol cannot be awakened in isolation does not diminish the separate identity of the symbol; in fact, quite to the contrary: a symbol's identity lies precisely in its ways of being connected (via potential triggering links) to other symbols. The network by which symbols can potentially trigger each other constitutes the brain's working model of the real universe, as well as of the alternate universes which it considers (and which are every bit as important for the individual's survival in the real world as the real world is).
— Hofstadter (1980, 359-60)

On this page, Hofstadter is referring to the instantiation of symbols in the brain, perhaps as ‘a neural network plus a mode of excitation.’ But what he says here is consistent with the concept of ‘symbol system’ in Turning Signs, with Peirce's use of the word ‘symbol,’ and with his remarks about the ‘perfect sign.’ As for “enlightenment” – ‘A buddha's practice is to practice in the same manner as the entire earth and all beings. If it is not practice with all beings, it is not a buddha's practice’ (Dogen, SBGZ ‘Yuibutsu yobutsu’). _[next]

When we try to “decode” an ubiquitous symbol such as fire, everything depends on the context. Consider for instance Saying 82 in the Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, ‘He who is near me is near the fire, and he who is far from me is far from the kingdom.’
— (Lambdin)

Much of Christian (and Islamic) tradition associates ‘the kingdom’ with heaven and ‘the fire’ with hell, and elsewhere in Thomas, being burned is the fate of useless weeds (57). So what do we make of this connection between ‘the fire’ and Jesus? We can read it by the light of Sayings 10, 13 and 16 in Thomas, where ‘fire’ is an image of the disruptive, revolutionary, purifying force embodied in Jesus. Perhaps the reason that ‘fire’ is an element and an archetype, a part of the central repertoire of symbols in so many cultural systems, is its basic ambiguity, its mix of power and danger. Thomas 82 is just cryptic enough to remind us of this polysemy, and of how we have to play with meanings to fit the interpretant to the context of the sign.

As for ‘the kingdom,’ here as elsewhere it can be identified (metaphorically at least) with life itself. This reading is reinforced by the parallel saying in the recently discovered Coptic Gospel of the Savior:

Whoever is near me, is near the fire. Whoever is far away from me, is far away from life.
— (DeConick 2007a, 247)

As for the connection between fire and life, that is obvious enough in the light of energetics. _[next]

The familiar ‘parable of the sower’ is all about context:

(1) Jesus said, “Look, the sower went out, took a handful of seeds, and scattered them. (2) Some fell on the road, and the birds came and pecked them up. (3) Others fell on rock, and they did not take root in the soil and did not produce heads of grain. (4) Others fell on thorns, and they choked the seeds and worms devoured them. (5) And others fell on good soil, and it brought forth a good crop. It yielded sixty per measure and one hundred twenty per measure.”
— Thomas 9 (NHS)

If the seed is a sign, the soil is the context in which its meaning appears (or fails to appear). But the internal context – the guidance system of the sign's interpreter – is crucial to whatever is communicated. The sower of signs cannot always predict whether the seed-signs he scatters will “bear fruit” for a given interpreter. The ‘scattering’ then amounts to a test which many will fail, but those who prove worthy of hearing the turning word will be highly “productive.” Those who fail (and not the sower) are to blame for the lack of communication.

In the synoptic gospels, parables like that of the sower may be intended not so much to reveal spiritual truth as to conceal it from the unworthy.

And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.
— Matthew 13.10-17 (KJV)

As Anthony Freeman (1999, 33) points out, this episode in Matthew ‘comes as something of a shock’ to those who assume that Jesus wanted to be understood by everyone. Here he seems to be punishing the gross of heart by casting pearls before them to increase their swinishness, or to widen the gap between those who have understanding and those who have not – ‘as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats’ (Matthew 25:32-3). The context here is a strongly dualistic sense of justice, with mercy at a minimum. _[next]

The interpretation of Scripture often involves constructing a context in which the text can exemplify general guiding principles. For instance, Deuteronomy 22:6-7:

If you chance to come upon a bird's nest, in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs and the mother sitting upon the young or upon the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young; you shall let the mother go, but the young you may take to yourself; that it may go well with you, and that you may live long.
— (RSV)

In the Kabbalistic reading of Moses Cordovero, this refers to ‘probing the essence’ of the ten sefiroth or stages of emanation. It is improper to delve into the essences of the three highest ‘since they constitute the Divine Mind, Wisdom and Understanding.… However, it is not wrong for us to explore’ the lower seven, which are metaphorically ‘children’ of the third, Binah.

Concerning this it is written: ‘Let the Mother go’ (referring to Binah (Understanding); ‘the children you may take,’ to search and explore.
— (Matt 1995, 44)

In the ecologically-oriented reading of Calvin B. Dewitt, on the other hand, the point of this precept is that ‘we must not destroy the ability of the bird to produce more offspring; we must preserve its fruitfulness’ (Kellert and Farnham 2002, 40). This is quite different both from the Cordovero reading and from the ‘rationale’ suggested at the end of the original text; these are not differences of opinion about the author's intent, but differences among various contexts of interpretation.

The ecological reading of Dewitt represents an ethic of stewardship. In the real world of the wild, predators usually do prefer to take the young, not for ethical reasons but because the young are easier to take. But if predators managed to take all of the young, it would destroy the ‘fruitfulness’ of the prey species in the long run. This could be an implicit warning to humanity that if it continues to consume as much of the planet as it possibly can, it will lose its life support system. Any system that consumes its context undermines its own meaning. But neither the authors of Deuteronomy nor its later interpreters seem to have noticed that hidden meaning of this primary revelation. _[next]

Whole-body or enactive sign-turning involves mutual illumination of conceptual space and the current of the time.

A sentence can mean something to you consciously only in the context you can construct at the time of meaning. Its deeper meaning is beyond your consciousness to the extent that its wider context is beyond your construction.

On the other hand, we could also say that your context constructs you – that is, the self as a role in the biosocial ecosystem is constructed by the act of filling an ecological niche. The niche and its occupant, text and context, shape each other and co-evolve. _[next]

How much difference does a genetic difference make in development of an organism? It depends on the context of its expression.

A gene that has a major effect on a phenotype in one context could appear as a modifier gene of small effect in a different context, and could not be detected at all in yet another context (even though its characteristics and amount of variation do not change). The degree to which genetic variation is associated with phenotypic variation is, therefore, a property not of the genes but of the developmental system in which the genes play a role.
— H. Frederik Nijhout (Oyama, Griffiths and Gray 2001, 140)

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St. Paul's letters to Christian communities are not third-person monographs but true epistles, written in the second-person mode: each one directly addresses a particular person or group and takes into account the internal context into which it will be received. For instance in 2 Corinthians 3, Paul writes that

you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the Living God, not on tablets of stone but on tables of human hearts [καρδίαις σαρκίναις].
— 2 Corinthians 3:3 (RSV)

That last word, sarkinais (“fleshly” or ‘human’), is the adjective from σαρξ. Sarx usually refers to the dead body as opposed to the soma, but in this context the adjective refers to hearts imbued ‘with the Spirit of the Living God’ as opposed the ‘tablets of stone’ representing the old law. What is ‘written in stone’ is of death, ‘for the letter killeth, but the spirit [πνεῦμα] giveth life’ (2 Corinthians 3:6, KJV). So the significance of “sarkishness” depends on the context, which in turn depends on the situation of the addressee. In this case the human hearts are living because they embody the spirit. _[next]

Variables can be evaluated only in relation to constants. But constancy is relative to the scale of the context.

A process is constant relative to the variables named in a description of it. Some terms of description may be constant within the framework of the description. But these constants may become variables when the context is a living process. _[next]

Competition is a context for cooperation. And the reverse: competitors in every normal game must cooperate in their recognition of the rules, the field of play, and the object of the game in order to play against each other. _[next]

We can sometimes account for variation within the scriptures of a religion (for instance, the differences among the various Gospels) in terms of the social context at the time of writing. The same applies to variation in the way central religious concepts are applied; for instance, D.S. Wilson (2002, 217) remarks that ‘Context-sensitivity is the key for understanding the nature of Christian forgiveness’ – ‘turning the other cheek’ is not prescribed in all circumstances. But how do we account for the ability of Christians today to read the Bible as a unit (Frye 1982) even when they do not recognize parts of it as varying with historical contingency?

How do readers of scriptures generally deal with what appear to outsiders as blatant contradictions? They simply construct an optimal context for each verse, and they do it so effortlessly that they do not even notice these “contradictions” unless someone else points them out. _[next]

A paired illustration of the need for context-building:

Jesus says: ‘The harvest is plentiful, but there are few workers. But beg the Lord that he may send workers into the harvest.’
Thomas 73 (5G)

[A person] said: ‘Master, there are many around the drinking trough, but there is nothing in the <well>.’
Thomas 74 (Meyer)

In one case the resource is abundant but few make use of it; in the other, potential consumers are many but the resource is lacking. Either way, we can construct a suitable context, find a fitting interpretation.

In Thomas 75,

Jesus said: ‘There are many standing at the door, but those who are alone [Coptic monakhos] will enter the wedding chamber.’
(Meyer)

According to Meyer (2003, 296), ‘Sayings 73-75 most likely constitute a small dialogue’ (i.e. 74 expresses a disagreement with what Jesus says in 73, and 75 is his response to 74). But if we were committed to taking all three as separate utterances of Jesus, we could probably come up with some other explanation for the difference between 73 and 74. But what's to stop us fooling ourselves when we do so? Can a reader's cleverness teach him anything new? _[next]

Sperber and Wilson (1995, 142) suggest that the goal of the comprehension process is

to maximize the relevance of any information being processed. … people hope that the assumption being processed is relevant (or else they would not bother to process it at all), and they try to select a context which will justify that hope: a context which will maximize relevance. In verbal comprehension in particular, it is relevance which is treated as given, and context which is treated as a variable.

This is another perspective on the process of ‘context construction’ described in Chapter 15. Here it is part of the comprehension process, in which the interpreter of a sign takes its relevance as ‘given’ and selects (among the imaginable contexts) the one that maximizes that relevance. How is this process related to the generation of an interpretant? Peirce in a 1906 text describes that process as involving up to three kinds of interpretant:

In all cases, it includes feelings; for there must, at least, be a sense of comprehending the meaning of the sign. If it includes more than mere feeling, it must evoke some kind of effort. It may include something besides, which, for the present, may be vaguely called “thought.” I term these three kinds of interpretant the “emotional,” the “energetic,” and the “logical” interpretants.
EP2:409

Peirce's later analysis also includes three interpretants, but gives them different names, as we will see below. Here we might question whether “emotional” is the right adjective to designate the ‘sense of comprehending the meaning’ (or any felt sense). “Energetic” is also questionable in that it's not clear whether the ‘effort’ involved is mental or physical (or both), or how it relates to what Peirce called logical energy. But clearly it is the ‘logical interpretant, the conveyed thought’ (EP2:410) which is most crucial for a sign involved in a process of dialog or inquiry.

The ‘essence of the logical interpretant’ (EP2:412) is the habit which is established or modified by that semiosis. Not all signs can have a logical interpretant, and even a sign which would have one if the semiosic process were completed may not produce it in an actual semiosic process, depending on the timing of it:

It is not to be supposed that upon every presentation of a sign capable of producing a logical interpretant, such interpretant is actually produced. The occasion may either be too early or too late. If it is too early, the semiosis will not be carried so far, the other interpretants sufficing for the rude functions for which the sign is used. On the other hand, the occasion will come too late if the interpreter be already familiar with the logical interpretant, since then it will be recalled to his mind by a process which affords no hint of how it was originally produced. Moreover, the great majority of instances in which formations of logical interpretants do take place are very unsuitable to serve as illustrations of the process, because in them the essentials of this semiosis are buried in masses of accidental and hardly relevant semioses that are mixed with the former.
EP2:414

This would explain why the interpreter needs to ‘maximize the relevance’ of the sign as expressed, or its “content,” by means of context construction or selection: to lift the signal out of the ‘accidental’ noise, as it were. How is this done in the process of ‘producing a logical interpretant’? To deal with this question, Peirce constructs a scenario of an inquiry process and conducts a thought-experiment to investigate how it works.

The best way that I have been able to hit upon for simplifying the illustrative example which is to serve as our matter upon which to experiment and observe is to suppose a man already skillful in handling a given sign (that has a logical interpretant) to begin now before our inner gaze for the first time, seriously to inquire what that interpretant is. It will be necessary to amplify this hypothesis by a specification of what his interest in the question is supposed to be.… unless our hypothesis be rendered specific as to that interest, it will be impossible to trace out its logical consequences, since the way the interpreter will conduct the inquiry will greatly depend upon the nature of his interest in it.
EP2:414

The inquirer's ‘interest’ is the ‘relevance’ of the inquiry to him, or the mirror image of it, and is part of the context into which information is received when a sign has a logical interpretant. _[next]

In the 1909 letter to William James (quoted in Chapter 7) where Peirce explains the difference between Immediate and Dynamical Objects, he follows up with a specific example drawn from ordinary conversation to illustrate his distinctions between the two Objects and three interpretants of a Sign:

For instance, suppose I awake in the morning before my wife, and that afterwards she wakes up and inquires, “What sort of a day is it?” This is a sign, whose Object, as expressed, is the weather at that time, but whose Dynamical Object is the impression which I have presumably derived from peeping between the window-curtains. Whose Interpretant, as expressed, is the quality of the weather, but whose Dynamical Interpretant, is my answering her question. But beyond that, there is a third Interpretant. The Immediate Interpretant is what the Question expresses, all that it immediately expresses, which I have imperfectly restated above. The Dynamical Interpretant is the actual effect that it has upon me, its interpreter. But the Significance of it, the Ultimate, or Final, Interpretant is her purpose in asking it, what effect its answer will have as to her plans for the ensuing day. I reply, let us suppose: “It is a stormy day.” Here is another sign. Its Immediate Object is the notion of the present weather so far as this is common to her mind and mine,— not the character of it, but the identity of it. The Dynamical Object is the identity of the actual and Real meteorological conditions at the moment. The Immediate Interpretant is the schema in her imagination, i.e. the vague Image or what there is in common to the different Images of a stormy day. The Dynamical Interpretant is the disappointment or whatever actual effect it at once has upon her. The Final Interpretant is the sum of the Lessons of the reply, Moral, Scientific, etc. Now it is easy to see that my attempt to draw this three-way, “trivialis,” distinction, relates to a real and important three-way distinction, and yet that it is quite hazy and needs a vast deal of study before it is rendered perfect.
EP2:498, CP 8.314

One study into this triad of interpretants might look into relations between the temporal and the logical order of the semioses in this example. As a biological process, semiosis requires a flow of energy as well as the flow of time. The continuity of this energy flow, and thus of the semiosic process, makes it somewhat problematic to label its parts as if they were discrete.

The first sign mentioned in Peirce's account is his wife's question, ‘whose Object, as expressed, is the weather at that time.’ This must be the Immediate Object of that sign, since the ‘Dynamical Object is the impression which I have presumably derived from peeping between the window-curtains.’ This is a sense ‘impression’ or percept which, as a sign, develops immediately into a perceptual judgment about ‘the quality of the weather.’ The “energetic” or Dynamical Interpretant of the impression then is Peirce's act of answering his wife's question. But we can also call this act the Dynamical Interpretant of the question itself, as the whole exchange is continuous including the percept and the judgment.

Peirce's answer to the question is another sign, whose Immediate Object is the notion of “the present weather,” a notion shared by both parties to the exchange, and thus internal to the semiosis. What is external to it and independent of it is ‘the identity of the actual and Real meteorological conditions at the moment.’ This is the Dynamical Object of the answer, but not of the question, since only Peirce (and not his wife) has had direct experience of it. But that experience was ‘presumably’ real enough to be the Dynamical Object of her question.

The Immediate Interpretant of that perceptual experience was ‘the quality of the weather,’ which is represented in Peirce's answer as ‘a stormy day’. This brings us round to the Significance of the question, its Ultimate, or Final, Interpretant: ‘her purpose in asking it, what effect its answer will have as to her plans for the ensuing day.’ This ‘third Interpretant’ could also be called the Logical Interpretant (given the pragmatism of Peirce's semeiotic logic). Semiosis, including mediation, representation, and triadic relations, is the essence of Thirdness. But here we should notice that the third Interpretant of the question, the ‘purpose’ which initiates the exchange of verbal signs, anticipates the answer: psychologically, it comes first in temporal order. It is “Ultimate” or “Final” only in the logical order of causality, which is essentially nonlinear. This is borne out when we look into the biological basis of semiosic processes in terms of energy flows or energetics, or nonlinear thermodynamics.

In thermodynamics, we typically observe an energy flow from “source” to “sink.” But the energetics of a biosemiotic process such as visual perception involve much more complex, and often recursive, energy flows. These in turn are folded into the symbolic kind of semiosis exemplified by Peirce's conversation with his wife. Due to advances in neuroscience since the time of Peirce and James, we now know that the energy flows within anticipatory systems like ourselves are extremely complex and recursive, producing emergy of high transformity.

Within the hierarchical brain structure, perception involves a top-down flow of memory-based “prediction” and a bottom-up flow from the sense organ's point of contact with the external world (in visual perception, the retina). The form of each flow constitutes information, and the perceptual processing consists mostly of the two flows influencing each other, so that the top-down flow is modified on the way down by news of ‘prediction error’ coming from lower levels of the process, while the bottom-up flow is also modified by (for instance) the top-down control of eye, head and body movements. To fill out the details of this rough sketch of ‘predictive processing,’ see (for instance) Andy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty (2015).

With this in mind, let us return to a biosemiotic analysis of Peirce's ‘impression’ which he identified as the Dynamical Object of his wife's question. We could also take it as an interpretant of the perceptual sign whose Dynamical Object is the form or pattern of the energy flow from his retina toward the higher levels of the visual system of his brain. In that case, the Immediate Object of the perceptual sign would be his memory-based prediction of what he was likely to see when he looked out the window. This is not a conscious prediction, of course; it is embodied as the form or pattern of the top-down energy flow through the various levels of the visual system in his brain. But it fits Peirce's description of the Immediate Object as internal to the sign (process) while the Dynamical Object is relatively external. The same distinction applies to the Immediate and Dynamical Interpretants. We can say that the Dynamicals are relatively external because the entire semiosic/perceptual process is taking place within the nervous system, although it it may be “triggered” or prompted (as well as informed) by light energy flowing from the external visual field to the retina.

Generalizing from this biosemiotic analysis, we might say that the Immediate Object in perception is a top-down energy flow while the Dynamical Object is a bottom-up flow from the point where the sense organs react to the energy flow arriving from the external world. But since these Objects are not separate and independent flows (let alone individual objects), it would be unrealistic to arrange them in a linear order of determination. We would have to represent their relations in the way that Peirce's Existential Graphs represent the Composition process of Terms, Propositions and Arguments: ‘namely, each component must be indeterminate in some respect or another; and in their composition each determines the other’ (CP 4.572, 1906).

More generally still, we can say that perception and action, as constructed by brain processing, are ‘both co-determined and co-determining’ (Clark 2015, 176). They are the two components of practiception. If the same is true of cognition and behavior, which occur at higher spatial and temporal scales, this would suggest that the order of determination among the sign, the two objects and the three interpretants is also nonlinear, at least in some contexts. _[next]

As explained in Chapter 15, mental activities such as walking and thinking are both semiotic and systemic. ‘The system must be, to some degree, indeterminate in order to be sculpted by the dynamic movement context, which includes not only internal and external forces but changes in the goals and intentions of the mover’ (Thelen and Smith 1994, 77). The semiosic process or action of determination can only occur in a context of prior indeterminacy. Many of Peirce's late definitions of ‘sign’ emphasize that its triadic action is partly being determined (by its dynamic object) and partly determining (its interpretant):

a sign endeavours to represent, in part at least, an Object, which is therefore in a sense the cause, or determinant, of the sign even if the sign represents its object falsely. But to say that it represents its Object implies that it affects a mind, and so affects it as, in some respect, to determine in that mind something that is mediately due to the Object. That determination of which the immediate cause, or determinant, is the Sign, and of which the mediate cause is the Object may be termed the Interpretant.
CP 6.347 (1907)

The representation of the Object by the sign is inseparable from the determination (or causation) of the sign by the Object, and from the determination of the Interpretant by the sign. In the last sentence of the quote above, the ‘determination’ (the effect on a mind) which ‘may be termed the Interpretant’ is the result of the determining action, just as what we call “an experience” is a result of experiencing, and ‘for philosophy … experience can only mean the total cognitive result of living’ (CP 7.538). In Peirce's usage, this process of determination does not occur only to human minds, as every animal has a mind adapted to its requirements (CP 5.603, 1903). For our purposes we may define a mind (or ‘quasi-mind,’ as Peirce sometimes called it) as anything capable of being determined by a sign to an interpretant.

Another Peircean definition says that a sign

is anything, of whatsoever mode of being, which mediates between an object and an interpretant; since it is both determined by the object relatively to the interpretant, and determines the interpretant in reference to the object, in such wise as to cause the interpretant to be determined by the object through the mediation of this “sign.”
The object and the interpretant are thus merely the two correlates of the sign; the one being antecedent, the other consequent of the sign.
EP2:410 (MS 318, 1907)

That which is antecedent to something is before it in both temporal and logical order; the consequent of it follows ‘as an effect or result, or as a necessary inference’ (CD). Deductive reasoning proceeds from antecedent to consequent, and normally attributes the same sequential order to cause and effect (RLT 201ff.). The object being antecedent and the interpretant consequent of the sign attributes that same sequential order to the determination of the sign by its dynamic object and its interpretant by the sign, and to the mediated determination of the interpretant by the object. Thus determination as the essential sign-action takes time – yet the mediation must take place at the same time as the twin determinations involved in a moment of semiosis.

When we represent this moment as a step in semiosis (analogous to a step in walking), we regard sign, object and interpretant as the three correlates of a triadic relation, as if the three were separate entities or subjects connected by the one relation. The transitive action of determining a subject causes it to become determinate in some respect in which it was indeterminate before. Peirce defines this in logical terms:

A subject is determinate in respect to any character which inheres in it or is (universally and affirmatively) predicated of it, as well as in respect to the negative of such character, these being the very same respect. In all other respects it is indeterminate.
CP 5.447, EP2:350

Predication, like representation, is a kind of sign-action, specifically the action of a propositional sign upon the object denoted by the indexical part of the sign (its subject). Determination works in the reverse direction: object (antecedent) determines sign to determine interpretant (consequent). This latter directionality also applies to what Peirce called ‘the logic of events’ (RLT) – and in Peirce's view, the concept of causal sequence is derived from the concept of logical consequence.

Even a future event can only be determinate in so far as it is a consequent. Now the concept of a consequent is a logical concept. It is derived from the concept of the conclusion of an argument. But an argument is a sign of the truth of its conclusion; its conclusion is the rational interpretation of the sign.
EP2:392-3

‘New Elements’ (1901?) is another essay where Peirce points to the entanglement of causal conceptions with the logical concepts of argument, truth, conclusion and interpretation. Logic, he writes,

speaks of an antecedent as that which, being known, something else, the consequent, may also be known. In our vernacular, the latter is inaccurately called a consequence, a word that the precise terminology of logic reserves for the proposition expressing the relation of any consequent to its antecedent, or for the fact which this proposition expresses. The conception of the relation of antecedent and consequent amounts, therefore, to a confusion of thought between the reference of a sign to its meaning, the character which it attributes to its object, and its appeal to an interpretant. But it is the former of these which is the more essential. The knowledge that the sun has always risen about once in each 24 hours (sidereal time) is a sign whose object is the sun, and (rightly understood) a part of its signification is the rising of the sun tomorrow morning.

This implies that the “right understanding” of a regular or periodic event involves anticipation. Peirce continues:

The relation of an antecedent to its consequent, in its confusion of the signification with the interpretant, is nothing but a special case of what occurs in all action of one thing upon another, modified so as to be merely an affair of being represented instead of really being. It is the representative action of the sign upon its object. For whenever one thing acts upon another it determines in that other a quality that would not otherwise have been there.
EP2:305

The ‘representative action of the sign upon its object’ is the cognitive determination of the character of the object, as when the scientific investigator determines the probable truth or falsity of a hypothesis. In a sense, then, cognitive determination (inquiry), as an action upon the object, is the reverse of the semiosic determination of the sign (and interpretant) by the object, as if it were the other side of the same coin. The ‘confusion of thought’ between signification and interpretation, as it is described by Peirce above, may reflect the mutual interaction of the two sides of the coin, the bottom-up and top-down streams involved in practiception. Cognitive determination is essentially triadic, while ‘action of one thing upon another’ is essentially dyadic; yet Peirce says that cognitive (i.e. semiotic) determination ‘is nothing but a special case’ of causal determination. This ‘confusion of thought’ reflects the nature of argument, which is the main semiotic instrument and embodiment of inquiry, because this kind of sign actually fuses causal with cognitive determination.

According to Peirce (above), ‘an argument is a sign of the truth of its conclusion’ – not a sign of its conclusion, but of the truth, which it thus takes to be its object. Now a dynamic object, ‘since it is conceived to act upon the sign, … must be conceived as singular, not general’ (EP2:404).

Indeed, all propositions refer to one and the same determinately singular subject, well-understood between all utterers and interpreters; namely, to The Truth, which is the universe of all universes, and is assumed on all hands to be real.
CP 5.506 (c. 1905)

‘There is but one individual, or completely determinate, state of things, namely, the all of reality’ (EP2:378). That to which ‘all propositions refer’ may be called ‘The Truth’ because

Truth belongs exclusively to propositions. A proposition has a subject (or set of subjects) and a predicate. The subject is a sign; the predicate is a sign; and the proposition is a sign that the predicate is a sign of that of which the subject is a sign. If it be so, it is true.
EP2:379

‘That of which the subject is a sign’ is the object of the proposition; and ‘there must be an action of the object upon the sign to render the latter true’ (EP2:380). Moreover, this action must be dyadic. A true proposition must involve a genuine index, a sign dynamically or dyadically determined by its object, as the orientation of a weathercock is by the wind (to use Peirce's favorite example). An index does not act as a sign until it determines an interpretant, but when it does act semiosically, its indexicality (its ‘real relation’ to its object) is antecedent to its acting as an index. Indeed the dyadic action of its object upon it may precede the triadic action of reading it by many thousands of years, in archaeology for example. Yet the interpretive action is triadic because it involves the determination of the index by its object, so that the proposition involving that index represents its object as real.

Turning from the proposition to the argument, we find another layer of involvement: the argument must involve a proposition (CP 2.253, EP2:293), just as the proposition involves an index (which in turn must involve an icon in order to convey information). Indeed the argument, being also a symbol and a legisign, involves in its action all of the other sign types listed in Peirce's tenfold classification of them (in his 1903 ‘Syllabus’). This might explain Peirce's claim that the Universe, ‘being precisely an argument’ (EP2:194), is ‘perfused with signs’ (EP2:394), assuming that the Universe perfused with signs is the same ‘universe which we are all accustomed to refer to as “the truth”’ (EP2:394). But does it explain how the object of an argument can be ‘the truth’ (of its conclusion), if the object ‘must be conceived as singular, not general’ (EP2:404), while at the same time the ‘Argument must be a Symbol, or Sign whose Object is a General Law or Type’ (EP2:293)? This apparent contradiction arises partly from another ‘confusion’ related to the concept of an object, which Peirce unravels in MS 318 (EP2:404-9); but mostly it arises from the nature of the Argument.

To repeat the remark quoted above from Peirce's ‘New Elements’:

The conception of the relation of antecedent and consequent amounts, therefore, to a confusion of thought between the reference of a sign to its meaning, the character which it attributes to its object, and its appeal to an interpretant. But it is the former of these which is the more essential.

The sign's reference to the character it attributes to its object is ‘more essential’ to the function of a proposition. But equally essential to the function of an argument, or perhaps more so, is ‘its appeal to an interpretant.’ We may infer this from the following definitions of argument as given by Peirce:

An Argument is a Sign which, for its Interpretant, is a Sign of law. Or we may say that a Rheme is a sign which is understood to represent its object in its characters merely; that a dicisign is a sign which is understood to represent its object in respect to actual existence; and that an Argument is a Sign which is understood to represent its Object in its character as Sign.
CP 2.252, EP2:292

The Interpretant of the Argument represents it as an instance of a general class of Arguments, which class on the whole will always tend to the truth. It is this law, in some shape, which the argument urges; and this “urging” is the mode of representation proper to Arguments.
CP 2.253, EP2:293

This ‘urging’ might be identified with what Peirce calls ‘logical energy.’

an Argument … is essentially intended to be understood as representing what it represents only in virtue of the logical habit which would bring any logical Interpreter to assent to it. We may express this by saying that the Final (or quasi-intended) Interpretant of an Argument represents it as representing its Object after the manner of a Symbol.
CP 4.572 (1906)

An Argument may be defined as a Sign which intends itself to be understood as fulfilling its function.
MS 295, 1906

The function of any action is ‘its purpose together with the general idea,— not, however, the plan,— of the means of attaining that purpose’ (EP2:389). In other words, its final cause only partially determines what actually happens, as it is itself indeterminate to a degree, just as a sign is objectively indeterminate (CP 5.447, EP2:350). Actually carrying out a function such as that of a ‘Sign of law’ requires a cooperation of efficient and final causes. Each moment of semiosis is another iteration of the meaning cycle whose function is to efficiently and continuously modify the habits (or final causes) which in turn determine subsequent (and consequent) actions (as well as their other interpretants). The argument, as the kind of sign that most explicitly ‘appeals to an interpretant,’ manifests the implicit directionality, the feeling/quality of forward motion, which is essential to reasoning, semiosis, intentionality and determination, even to the flow of time itself.

Peirce felt that the best and most iconic representation of the process of ‘necessary reasoning’ was his system of Existential Graphs. As he remarked in his ‘Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism’ (1906),

this System leads to a different conception of the Proposition and Argument from the traditional view that a Proposition is composed of Names, and that an Argument is composed of Propositions. It is a matter of insignificant detail whether the term Argument be taken in the sense of the Middle Term, in that of the Copulate of Premisses, in that of the setting forth of Premisses and Conclusion, or in that of the representation that the real facts which the premisses assert (together, it may be, with the mode in which those facts have come to light) logically signify the truth of the Conclusion. In any case, when an Argument is brought before us, there is brought to our notice (what appears so clearly in the Illative Transformations of Graphs) a process whereby the Premisses bring forth the Conclusion, not informing the Interpreter of its Truth, but appealing to him to assent thereto. This Process of Transformation, which is evidently the kernel of the matter, is no more built out of Propositions than a motion is built out of positions.
CP 4.572

Accordingly, we will perhaps understand the various kinds of signs (and triadic relations) as products of analysis of that Process of Transformation which most fully represents itself in the form of the Argument. In other words, we might best understand the Proposition in terms of its functional involvement in the Argument, the Index in terms of its functional involvement in the Proposition, and so on. We might likewise understand Sign, Object and Interpretant, the three correlates of the one triadic relation, not as subjects or things in themselves, but as concepts abstracted from that Process of Transformation for the purpose of representing how triadic action works. This may be the best way of grounding Peirce's semiotic/logic in his phaneroscopy, which likewise abstracts the concepts of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness as the indecomposable ‘elements’ of the continuous universal process of appearing. For here too the involvement of Firstness in genuine Secondness, and of both in genuine Thirdness, are essential.

In a December 1908 letter to Victoria Welby (EP2:478-9), Peirce gave an account of the ‘three Universes, which are distinguished by three Modalities of Being’:

One of these Universes embraces whatever has its Being in itself alone, except that whatever is in this Universe must be present to one consciousness, or be capable of being so present in its entire Being. It follows that a member of this universe need not be subject to any law, not even to the principle of contradiction. I denominate the objects of this Universe Ideas, or Possibles, although the latter designation does not imply capability of actualization. …

Another Universe is that of, first, Objects whose Being consists in their Brute reactions, and of, second, the facts (reactions, events , qualities, etc.) concerning those Objects, all of which facts, in the last analysis, consist in their reactions. I call the Objects, Things, or more unambiguously, Existents, and the facts about them I call Facts. Every member of this Universe is either a Single Object subject, alike to the Principles of Contradiction and to that of Excluded Middle, or it is expressible by a proposition having such a singular subject.
The third Universe consists of the co-being of whatever is in its Nature necessitant, that is, is a Habit, a law, or something expressible in a universal proposition. Especially, continua are of this nature. I call objects of this universe Necessitants. It includes whatever we can know by logically valid reasoning.

Peirce then applied these terms to the logical order of determination of Signs, their two Objects and their three Interpretants.

It is evident that a Possible can determine nothing but a Possible; it is equally so that a Necessitant can be determined by nothing but a Necessitant. Hence it follows from the Definition of a Sign that since the Dynamoid Object determines the Immediate Object, which determines the Sign itself, which determines the Destinate Interpretant, which determines the Effective Interpretant, which determines the Explicit Interpretant, the six trichotomies, instead of determining 729 classes of signs , as they would if they were independent, only yield 28 classes; and if, as I strongly opine (not to say almost prove) there are four other trichotomies of signs of the same order of importance, instead of making 59,049 classes, these will only come to 66.
EP2:481

Peirce named many of these 66 classes of signs in that same letter. Working out how the linear order of determination given above correlates with the nonlinear causality involved in biophysical semiosis is left as an exercise for the reader.