In May 1867, Peirce published "On A New List Of The Categories"[32] - in itself a highly compact, and in many ways doctrinal piece of writing - which was basically a summing up of the previous ten years work on the categories carried out between 1857 and 1867. The "New List" consists of fifteen sections, labelled by Peirce as such, and each representing separate stages of his attempt to validate what he describes as a theory based on "a conception of graduation among those conceptions which are universal" [CP 1.546] from which are to be derived "the most fundamental ones [...] in the sphere of logic" [CP 1.558], with his argumentation being based on the already established idea that "the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity." [CP 1.545]
It is here for the first time that Peirce introduces the idea of the interpretant in a coherent context of the triadic sign relation. In this particular paper, Peirce does not seem to make any distinction, which Kant of course had done, between analytic and synthetic unity. Murphey attributes this largely to the fact that he was working on his theory of cognition (which was published a year or so later) at more or less the same time as he produced "The New List", and that in his working out of this theory, Peirce had taken the position of arguing strongly against the notion of intuitions (or "ultimate premisses", as he also referred to these), which, in the view presented in this theory, could not be proved to exist since all concepts are determined by some prior cognitions. The Kantian distinction between synthetic and analytic unity had therefore to be left undiscussed in the "New List" in order for the theory of the categories to be, as Peirce had proposed, one of the key parts of his theory of cognition. So when Peirce refers to "the manifold of sensuous impressions" in the "New List", he is therefore using this term in a very restricted sense to mean, in Murphey's reading (Murphey 1993, p. 69) of this, "something very close to the set of all nerve excitations at a given time", rather than in Kant's considerably wider sense of the term.
This particular point is rather important because in the "New List", Peirce first develops a fundamental distinction between "being" and "substance", where the latter is derived from the idea of "the present in general", this being a somehow non-unified concept, in the following way:
"... 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." [CP 1.547]
The "present in general" (the "manifold of substance") is then not a synthesis of the manifold of impressions, but rather something which is conceptualisable but nonetheless prior to any kind of synthesis, and thus more akin to an "aggregation of elements", to use Murphey's formulation (p. 72). This places it in Peirce's terms "nearest to sense". In the next section, the concept "being", which represents an opposite polarity in that it is considered to be "furthest from sense" is derived on the basis of the semantic role of the copula in simple propositions in the following way:
"Sec. 4. The unity to which the understanding reduces impressions is the unity of a proposition. This unity consists in the connection of the predicate with the subject; and, therefore, that which is implied in the copula, or the conception of `being', is that which completes the work of conceptions of reducing the manifold to unity. The copula (or rather the verb which is copula in one of its senses) means either `actually is' or `would be', as in the two propositions, "There `is' no griffin," and "A griffin `is' a winged quadruped." The conception of `being' contains only that junction of predicate to subject wherein these two verbs agree. The conception of being, therefore, plainly has no content."
Substance and being can then be taken to be "the beginning and end of all conception." [CP 1.548]. Since the conception of substance cannot "predicated of a subject, nor in a subject", and since the conception of being has no content, then the unity of a proposition must derive from the application of being to substance.
Through the method of abstraction (or in Peirce's terms "precision"), which is more closely defined by being seen in relation to "discrimination" and "dissociation" in section 5, Peirce begins to search out "whatever universal elementary conceptions there may be intermediate between the manifold of substance and the unity of being" [CP 1. 549] These he goes on to find to be "reference to a ground" ("Quality") which is "the first conception in order in passing from being to substance" [CP 1.551]; "reference to a correlate" ("Relation"), which cannot be abstracted from reference to a ground, but from which reference to a ground may be abstracted [CP 1. 552]; and "reference to an interpretant" ("Representation"), which cannot be abstracted from reference to a correlate, but from which reference to a correlate may be abstracted
The idea of reference to an interpretant is justified in the following way by Peirce in section 10:
"Reference to an interpretant is rendered possible and justified by that which renders possible and justifies comparison. But that is clearly the diversity of impressions. If we had but one impression, it would not require to be reduced to unity, and would therefore not need to be thought of as referred to an interpretant, and the conception of reference to an interpretant would not arise. But since there is a manifold of impressions, we have a feeling of complication or confusion, which leads us to differentiate this impression from that, and then, having been differentiated, they require to be brought to unity. Now they are not brought to unity until we conceive them together as being `ours', that is, until we refer them to a conception as their interpretant. Thus, the reference to an interpretant arises upon the holding together of diverse impressions, and therefore it does not join a conception to the substance, as the other two references do, but unites directly the manifold of the substance itself. It is, therefore, the last conception in order in passing from being to substance." [CP 1.554]
The five categories thus arrived at are presented sequentially as follows:
"BEING Quality (Reference to a Ground), Relation (Reference to a Correlate), Representation (Reference to an Interpretant), SUBSTANCE
The three intermediate conceptions may be termed accidents." [CP 1.555][33]
From this Peirce goes on in section 13 to develop the ideas of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness in the following way:
"Sec. 12. This passage from the many to the one is numerical. The conception of a `third' is that of an object which is so related to two others, that one of these must be related to the other in the same way in which the third is related to that other. Now this coincides with the conception of an interpretant. An `other' is plainly equivalent to a `correlate'. The conception of second differs from that of other, in implying the possibility of a third. In the same way, the conception of `self' implies the possibility of an `other'. The `Ground' is the self abstracted from the concreteness which implies the possibility of an other." [CP1.556]
and he continues from this to section 14 where he makes a discussion of the relationship between these, his now fundamental categories, and three types of representations, which he later would develop into the three sign functions of icon, index and symbol:
"First. Those whose relation to their objects is a mere community in some quality, and these representations may be termed `Likenesses'.
Second. Those whose relation to their objects consists in a correspondence in fact, and these may be termed `Indices' or `Signs'.
Third. Those the ground of whose relation to their objects is an imputed character, which are the same as `general signs', and these may be termed `Symbols'." [CP 1.558]
In section 15 [CP 1.559], Peirce turns to a brief and now truly compact discussion of how, since the notions of reference to ground, object and interpretant can be considered fundamental to logic, here conceived of as a universal science, then such a science must have three interdependent but nonetheless distinct branches or areas of study, namely "formal grammar", concerned with "the formal conditions of symbols having meaning, that is of the reference of symbols in general to their grounds or imputed characters"; "logic", concerned with "the formal conditions of the truth of symbols"; and finally "formal rhetoric", concerned with "the formal conditions of the force of symbols, or their power of appealing to a mind, that is, of their reference in general to interpretants". These three "sciences" would also presuppose a general division of symbols into "terms", "propositions" and "arguments", which would be common for all three. In the case of arguments, the premisses form "a representation of the conclusion", which may be in the form of a "likeness, index or symbol of the conclusion", which further requires and justifies a division of arguments into three kinds: hypotheses (where "the premisses form a likeness of the conclusion"), inductive (where "the premisses are an index of the conclusion") and deductive (where "the conclusion is represented by the premisses as a general sign under which it is contained"). Finally, there is a reference to the distinction between extension and comprehension, based on the notions of denotation ("direct reference of a symbol to its objects"), connotation ("reference of a symbol to its ground, that is, its reference to the common characters of its objects"), and information ("its reference to its interpretants through its object, that is, its reference to all the synthetical propositions in which its objects in common are subject or predicate"). Since increments in the information value of a term are carried out by means of additions in the form of propositions to what it connotes or denotes, then extension and comprehension stand in an inverse relationship to one another, every increase in information being accompanied by an increase in either connotation or denotation.
If we return for a moment to our discussion of Peirce's terminology, the "New List", which is in many ways a central edifice in the transition from Peirce's earlier "Kantian" phase to his more Berkeley-like semiotic phenominalism (see Murphey 1993, p. 90 for a much more detailed discussion of this particular transition) treats of the derivation of universal conceptions or categories, while at the same time Peirce is actually making the first systematic declaration of a doctrine of a triadically based science of logic which is to be the foundation for the subsequent development of his architectonic. It therefore presents no great anomaly to find that he chooses to use the terms "formal grammar", "logic" and "formal rhetoric" in this particular context in 1867.
Somewhat earlier, in an unpublished paper entitled "Grounds of Induction" Peirce had written on more or less the same theme that:
"As every symbol is determined in three ways, Symbols as such, are subject to three laws one of which is the condition sine qua no of its standing for anything, the second of translating anything, the third of its realizing anything. The first law is logic, the second Universal Rhetoric, and the third Universal Grammar".
Peirce's third set of terms for the "three laws" mentioned by Fisch as belonging to the earliest period of Peirce's thought, namely: "General Grammar", "General Logic" and "General Rhetoric" more likely than not made their appearance as a result of Peirce's easy familiarity with Kant's terminology, since the latter often equated general and universal concepts; with universality being associated with the highest possible level of generality. In this particular context it is in fact rather interesting to note that in the second draft of the "New List", Peirce initially chooses to use the term "generalization" rather than the term "precision" (which he later goes on to form a preliminary definition of in the same draft) when he, for instance, writes:
"Reference to a ground i.e. possession of a character is not a conception given in the impressions of sense but is the result of generalization". [D2 2]
and he also refers in the same draft to what was subsequently to become "substance" in the final version of the "New List" as "intuition in general" [D2 3]
Here, finally too, it is worth noting that in the fourth draft he chooses to introduce the notions of what he calls the "three phases" of the "general conceptions" as follows:
"Each of these three general conceptions reference to the ground, reference to the object and reference to the subject, has three phases Grammatical, Logical and Real, or as I prefer to say the Rhetorical" [D4 1]
In the years from 1867-1880 Peirce went on to develop the basic doctrine put forward in the "New List" into his New Theory of Cognition, (1867-1870), which again formed the basis for his Theory of Reality and his subsequent Theory of Inquiry which were developed in the years between 1871 and 1879. Of these three, the notion of Pragmatism associated with the Theory of Inquiry is probably the best known. Time and space constraints do not allow us at this juncture to go into the development of these three theories in detail, so for the moment we shall content ourselves with a few remarks on the philosophical transition precipitated by the integration of the newly discovered logic of relatives into Peirce's second system which gave rise to the Theory of Inquiry, and thus to the Pragmatic Maxim, which provided the foundational basis for Peirce's Pragmaticism.[34] In Murphey's excellent account of this transitional period (see Murphey 1993, pp. 151-179) he makes the point that Peirce had read Augustus De Morgan's innovative work "On the Syllogism IV and the Logic of Relations"[35] already six years after it had been published, in 1866. He had however not discerned all the possible implications of the discovery of relative propositions for his own work at that time, and it was not until 1869-70 that he began to work seriously with this emerging new area of logic[36]. Prior to this, his theory of logic had been based on the notion of the subject-predicate theory of propositions, but with the discovery of propositions not reducible to subject-predicate form, it is not clear if his prior theory would hold for these too. When such propositions are admitted, the notions of Substance and Being lose their universality, and this poses serious problems for Peirce's original five category system. Peirce solved this problem by revising his concept of meaning. This was done by returning to the Scholastic notion of habitualiteter, which allowed him to state that universals can exist in the mind as habits, allowing them to produce concepts without necessarily being able to become actualised in consciousness. The nature or principle of the operation of the thing, its essence, which Peirce regarded as the qualitative meaning of the concept of the thing, is then identified with the habits it involves. Thus, the real object can only be known as a regularity in phenomenal experience, and the concept of the object becomes translatable into a conjunction of conditional propositions, which are themselves general laws, or habits. This idea Peirce then proceeded to work into the Maxim of Pragmatism:
"Consider which effects, which might possibly have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object" [CP 5.402]
Peirce's Theory of Inquiry built upon the Pragmatic Maxim, as well as upon a theory of doubt and belief, formulated originally by the Scottish psychologist Alexander Bain, which defines belief as those opinions, or habits of mind, which are so strongly held as to cause us to be able to act upon them. Within this framework, which has a clear evolutionist flavour, doubt is seen as a kind of state of general irritation of the organism, caused by some surprising observation or other which in some way or other does not cohere with currently held beliefs, or for which we have no prior beliefs; and thus constituting a stimulus for a further process of inquiry which in the long run, and if it is pursued in a correct fashion, will eventually lead to a resolution of doubt, and a new state of belief. As is asserted by pragmatism, the concept of the object can mean nothing to us more than all the habits which it involves. The goal of inquiry is therefore, in this view, no more than attainment of stable beliefs, i.e. beliefs than can be shown to stand without becoming subject to doubt in the long run of evolution.