Peirce’s Post-Kantian Categories

In Peirce’s terminology to be actualised means to exist. Existence falls within the category of Secondness which is intermediate between the purely qualitative presence of Firstness and the lawfulness of Thirdness in the triad of categories of being based on Kant’s list which he substitutes for the traditional Aristotelian and Scholastic decad. This substitution tallies with Scholasticism in that the argument by some Schoolmen for the reality of universals is succeeded by Peirce’s argument for the metaphysical reality of power and law. Passing from Peirce’s theory of categories to his theory of signs, a passage that is analogous to ones made by Scotus, in Heidegger’s treatise on Scotus, and in Locke’s Essay, we come upon the difficulty of reconciling Peirce’s assertion that the interpretant of a sign can be in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum with his assertion that it is possible to reach the ‘entire general intended interpretant’, ‘the very meaning’. Steps toward a dissolution of this problem are made by recognising the huge part played in Peirce’s theory by the would-be and the if-then of counterfactual conditionality, and by heeding the fact that the meaning is not the finite or infinite series, but a habit or practice conveyed by the series, hence not the sort of thing of which it makes sense to ask whether it is finite or infinite. What in opposition to nominalism Peirce calls his Scholastic realism and his pragmaticism are foreshadowed in the emphasis put on willing and doing by Scotus and Hopkins in their analyses of being.