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"through its object, or the common characters of those objects." The interpretant is very significantly defined as "all the facts known about its object." |
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In 1.551 (1867) there is a clue capable of explaining why the term 'ground' may have been sometimes substituted with meaning, and vice versa. The proposition 'this stove is black' assigns to the word stove a 'general attribute'. This kind of attribute is elsewhere called a 'quality', and as such it should be a mere Firstness. But a quality, even though being in itself a pure monad, is something general when we are 'reflecting upon' it (4.226). In a Scotist line of thought, it is an individuala monadinsofar as it is a quality of the thing, but it is universalan abstractioninsofar as it is caught by the intellect. A quality is a 'general idea' and an 'imputed character' (1.559); it is an intelligibile.
3 Being a 'general attribute' (1.551), it is, among the possible general attributes of the object, the one which has been selected in order to focus the object in some respects. This expression is explicitly formulated later (for instance, in 2.228, thirty years later), but it is implicit in 1867 (1.553) when it is said that the interpretant represents the relate 'as standing for' the correlate. The ground is an attribute of the object as far as it (the object) has been selected in a certain way and only some of its attributes have been made pertinent, thus constituting the Immediate Object of the sign. The ground being only one among the possible predicates of the object (the stove could also be perceived and described as hot, big, dirty, and so on), it is a 'common character' and a 'connotation' (1.559; here connotation being opposed to denotation as meaning is opposed to denotatum). We shall see later that the meaning seems to be something more complex than one imputed character or attribute; it is 'a sort of skeleton diagram', an 'outline sketch' of the object considering "what modifications the hypothetical state of things would require to be made in that picture" (2.227). In can therefore be suggested at this point that the ground is only a meaning component; in fact, symbols which determine their grounds of imputed qualities, that is, terms, are 'sums of marks' (1.559). The purport of such a statement will be more clear in section 7.2.5. For the moment it is sufficient to recognize that both ground and meaning are of the nature of an idea: signs stand for their objects, "not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which we have sometimes called the ground of the representamen," and 'idea' is not meant in a Platonic sense, but rather "in that sense in which we say that one man catches another man's idea" (2.228). The ground is what can be comprehended and transmitted of a given object under a certain profile: it is the content of an expression and appears to be identical with meaning (or a basic component of it). |
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