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is an idea, it is the idea of that second sign, which should have its own representamen independently of that idea. Moreover, the idea here intervenes in order to reduce the haecceitates of the given object: this object is only such insofar as it is thought under a certain profile. It is thought of as an abstraction and a model of a possible biased experience.
It is absurd to maintain that Peirce intended by object a given concrete thing. This would be possible, at most, when considering the expression 'that dog' (and in this case only the object is a hecceity, 5.434). But according to Peirce even 'to go', 'up', and 'whenever' are representamens. Obviously, for a realist such as Peirce, even these expressions are referred to concrete experiences; and also from the point of view of a theory of signification oppositions such as 'up' vs. 'down' or 'to go' vs. 'to come' are established as elements of the content insofar as they reflect and legitimize our concrete experience of space and time relations. But according to Peirce 'to go' is an expression that has no identity other than the agreement between its several manifestations; therefore its object is only the natural existence of a law, and an idea is a thing even though it has not the mode of existence of a hecceity (3.460). As for an expression such as 'Hamlet was insane', Peirce says that its object is only an imaginary world (therefore the object is determined by the sign), whereas a command such as 'Ground arms!' 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). The fact that in this passage Peirce mixes up the response of the soldiers and the intention of the captain by defining both as objects shows that there is something ambiguous in his definition of object. In fact, the first case represents an interpretation of the sign, as we shall see later. But in either case it is clear that the object is not necessarily a thing or a state of the world but a rule, a law, a prescription: it appears as the operational description of a set of possible experiences.
As a matter of fact, Peirce speaks of two kinds of objects (4.536, in 1906). There is a dynamic object, which "by some means contrives to determine the sign to its representation," and there is an immediate object, which is "the object as the sign itself represents it, and whose Being is thus dependent upon the Representation of it in the Sign."
7.2.2.
To understand the relationship between representamen (or sign), object, meaning, and interpretant, we should examine the concept of ground. In 2.418 the object is more accurately defined as a correlate of the sign (the sign 'man' can be correlated to the sign 'homme' as its object), and the third element of the correlation, along with the interpretant, is not the meaning, but the ground. A sign refers to a ground

 
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