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always an experience of thirdness (5.182, 5.157, 5.150, 5.183). 6 In this sense there is no substantial difference between saying that lithium is green and saying that lithium "dissolves when triturated." In the former case we have something similar to a dicisign, in the latter something similar to an argument, but both 'signs' interpret the rheme lithium. There is no methodological difference between characters and other sorts of interpretants from the point of view of the description of the meaning of a term. The attribution of a mark is only a perceptual judgment, but "perceptual judgments are to be regarded as an extreme case of abductive inference" (5.153).
On the other hand, the very fact that some soldiers, in different circumstances, accomplish a given regular action every time Ground arms! is uttered by an officer means that this behavior is already subsumed under a concept, has become an abstraction, a law, a regularity. In order to be inserted into this relation, the behavior of the soldiers has become, just as the quality of redness, something general, insofar as it is intended as a character.
7.3. Final Interpretant and Dynamic Object
7.3.1.
What remains to be asked is how, in the philosophy of a thinker who calls himself a Scotist realist, there can be something such as an infinite semiotic regression, the object which has determined the sign never being apparently determined by it, if not in the phantasmatic form of Immediate Object. This can be explained only from the point of view of speculative rhetoric and in the light of the pragmatic notion of final interpretant; and only at that point will it be possible to understand why Peircean semantics assumes a rudimentary format of a case grammar.
How can a sign express a Dynamic Object, belonging to the Outer World (5.45), since "from the nature of things" it cannot express it (8.314)? How can a sign express the Dynamic Object ("the Object as it is," 8.183, an object "independent of itself," 1.538), since ''it can only be a sign of that object in so far as that object is itself of the nature of a sign or thought" (1.538)? How can one link a sign to an object, since in order to recognize an object one needs a previous experience of it (8.181), and the sign does not furnish any acquaintance or recognition of the object (2.231)? The answer is already given at the end of the definition of lithium: ''the peculiarity of this definitionor rather this precept that is more serviceable than a definition is that it tells you what the word lithium denotes by prescribing what you are to do in order to gain a perceptual acquaintance with the object of the word" (2.330). The meaning of a symbol lies in the class of actions designed to bring about certain perceptible effects (Goudge, 1950: 155).

 
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