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Page 190
ters). But what about the fact that "if triturated with lime and if refused then partly dissolving in muriatic acid"? To be grey is a quality, to react in a given way to a given excitement is a sort of behavior or a sequence of facts confirming a hypothesis. Obviously, this sequence of facts 'interprets' the first sign, but this would only mean thateven though characters are interpretantsnot all interpretants are mere characters. Nevertheless, also "a portrait with the name of the original below is a proposition" (5.569). This statement involves a double consequence: on one hand, an icon is basically a ground, a quality, a Firstness; on the other hand, what we commonly call icons (for instance, paintings) are not mere icons but, rather, hypoicons or iconic signs, that is, complex interpretants of the name below them, and only in this way can they act as a subject-term in a proposition. Moreover, suppose that a painting represents the fall of Constantinople: it is undeniable that it should be interpreted and that it could arouse many possible inferences in the mind of its possible interpreter.
To generate a further question, it should be remembered that in some cases also the Dynamic Object of a sign can act as its interpretant. The most typical case is the command Ground arms! which has as its proper object either the subsequent action of the soldiers or "the Universe of things desired by the Commanding Captain at that moment" (5.178): a very ambiguous definition, since the response of the soldiers seems to be at the same time both the interpretant and the object of the sign. Undoubtedly, many subsequent behavioral responses, verbal answers, images interpreting a caption, and vice versa are interpretants. 5 Are they characters?
To solve this point one should state that (i) even qualities are always as complex as sequences of facts, and (ii) even sequences of facts are capable of being generalized as marks.
7.2.9.
Now, Peirce says with absolute clarity that, even though marks are qualities, they are not mere Firstnesses; they are general and there is no 'redness' which is not the result of a perceptual construction, not a pure perception, but a percept (the percept "is a construction," and the perceptual fact is "the intellect's description of the evidence of sense," 2.141). But, in order to have this intellectual construction, one passes from a mere percept (a Rheme) to a Perceptual Judgment of which such a fact is the Immediate Interpretant (5.568). And a perceptual judgment is "a judgment asserting in a propositional form what a character of a percept directly present to the mind is" (5.54). To say that something is red does not mean that we have seen it; we have received an image, but the assertion that this something has the attribute of being red is already a judgment. Thus every mark never being a mere Firstness, and being always and already inserted into a correlation as a fact, its predication is

 
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