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Page 192
"The idea of meaning is such as to involve some reference to a purpose" (5.166). All this can become clearer if one thinks that the so-called Scotist realism of Peirce cannot be viewed but in the perspective of his pragmaticism. Reality is more a Result than a mere Datum. And in order to understand clearly what the meaning of a sign is destined to produce as Result, one must consider the notion of Final Interpretant.
7.3.2.
By producing series of immediate responses (energetic interpretants), a sign establishes step by step a habit, a regularity of behavior in the interpreter or user of that sign. A habit being "a tendency . . . to behave in a similar way under similar circumstances in the future" (5.487), the final interpretant of a sign is, as a result, this habit (5.491). This is the same as to say that the correspondence between meaning and representamen has assumed the format of a law; but this also means that to understand a sign is to learn what to do in order to produce a concrete situation in which one can obtain the perceptual experience of the object the sign refers to.
But the category of 'habit' has a double sense, a behavioral (or psychological) sense and a cosmological one. A habit is a cosmological regularity: even the laws of nature are the results of habit taking (6.97), and "all things have a tendency to take habits" (1.409). If a law is an active force (a Secondness), order and legislation are a Thirdness (1.337): to take a habit is to establish or assume an ordered and regulated way of being. Therefore, coming back to the definition of lithium, the final interpretation of it stops at the production of a habit in a double sense: there is the human habit to understand the sign as an operational precept, and there is the cosmological habit according to which there will always be lithium every time nature behaves in a certain way. The final interpretant expresses the same law governing the Dynamic Object by prescribing both the way in which to experience the perception of it and the way in which it works and is perceptible.
7.3.3.
At this point we can understand what kind of hierarchy rules the disposition of interpretants in this tentative model of semantic representation: it is an ordered and purposeful sequence of possible operations. Marks are organized not according to some 'logical' embedding in terms of genuses and species but, rather, according to the essential operations to be performed by an agent, using a certain instrument upon a certain object in order to overcome the resistence of a counterobject and thus to attain a certain goal.
In this way the apparent opposition between the intensional semantics of infinite semiosic regression and the extensional semantics of reference

 
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