On a New List of Categories

The paper Peirce read to a Boston academy at twenty-seven, cutting Kant's twelve categories down to three and giving the sign its interpretant.

by Charles Sanders Peirce16 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1867(aged 28)
Original language: English

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Overview

Kant's table of categories has twelve entries, and for the better part of a century every philosopher trained on German books had to come to terms with it. On 14 May 1867 a twenty-seven-year-old working for the United States Coast Survey stood up before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and proposed that three would do. Peirce's argument starts from an ordinary sentence — the stove is black — and asks what has to be thought before a predicate can be fastened to a subject at all. Substance is the bare it that attention picks out; being is what the word is contributes and nothing more. Between them he finds exactly three steps: quality, relation and representation. The third is the surprise. To compare two things you need a third that stands between them and reports the one to the other, and Peirce called that third the interpretant. His whole later theory of signs is built on it. The same pages divide signs into likenesses, indices and symbols. The paper ran to twelve pages in the Academy's Proceedings the following year. Peirce went on applying the three-part scheme to logic, psychology, physics and cosmology for the rest of his life. Decades later he called it perhaps the least unsatisfactory thing he had ever managed to produce from a logical point of view. The one full-length book he wrote and saw into print was not philosophy at all but a monograph on the brightness of stars. The philosophy is in the papers: this one was reprinted in the Collected Papers, which began to appear in 1931, sixty-four years after the reading.

Key concepts

What are Peirce's three categories, and what do they replace?

Quality, relation and representation. Kant derived twelve categories from the forms of judgment; Peirce works instead from what must be thought before any predicate can be fastened to any subject, and finds exactly three steps between the bare "it" attention picks out and the "is" a sentence contributes. Anything more is reducible; anything less leaves comparison unexplained.

Substance and being: what do those two words do in the argument?

They are the two poles the categories sit between, not things in the world. Substance is the bare "it" — whatever attention picks out before anything has been said of it. Being is what the word "is" contributes to a sentence and nothing more. The three categories are the steps a mind takes to get from one to the other.

What is the 'ground' of a quality?

The respect in which a thing is taken as having a quality — blackness, rather than the black stove. Peirce needs it because a predicate never attaches to a subject directly; it attaches through an abstracted character. Calling the stove black refers the stove to blackness, and that reference is the first of the three steps.

What does 'prescision' mean — is it just abstraction?

No. Prescision is separating one element in attention while still supposing the other, and it runs one way only: you can suppose space without colour but not colour without space. Peirce uses it as the instrument that finds the categories, because the order in which conceptions can be prescinded from one another is what fixes their order.

What is the interpretant, and why does comparison need one?

A third thing that stands between two others and reports the one to the other. Two terms alone cannot compare themselves; something must mediate, and whatever mediates is itself taken up in a further thought. Peirce introduces the interpretant here as a requirement of predication, and his whole later theory of signs is built on that third place.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Three Categories, Found in a Sentence

What has to be thought before any predicate can be fastened to any subject? Peirce treats that as the test a list of categories must pass, and answers it with three steps where Kant had twelve.

Kant derived his table from the forms of judgment and stopped at twelve; Peirce works from the bare act of predication and finds quality, relation and representation lying between the "it" that attention picks out and the "is" a sentence contributes. The economy is the argument: anything more is reducible, anything less leaves comparison unexplained. Everything he later built, from the logic of science to the evolutionary cosmology, runs on these three, which is why he later called the paper his least unsatisfactory piece of work.

categories
quality
relations
representation
substance
being
predication
abstraction
unity
comparison
propositions
concepts

Enter a dialogue

The Sign Needs an Interpretant

Comparison cannot be done by two things alone; something must stand between them and report the one to the other. Naming that third turns a point about predication into a theory of how anything means anything.

Representation is a category here, not an afterthought about language, and the third term it demands — the interpretant — is what rescues reference from being a bare two-place relation between word and thing. The same pages sort signs into likenesses, which resemble, indices, which point, and symbols, which signify by an imputed character. That division outlived its setting and became the working vocabulary of later semiotics, though the argument which produced it was about how a proposition is possible at all.

semiotics
signs
symbols
indices
representation
denotation
ground
thirdness
meaning

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 16
distinct concepts: 45
by passages held, corpus-wide: #793

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “logic” and “semiotics”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 2 concepts, joined by 1 pairing. 18 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
logic	semiotics	4

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1867 On a New List of Categories you are here EN
1868 Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man
Where Peirce clears the ground. The four denials reached here — no intuition, no introspection, no thought without signs, no conception of the incognizable — are restated as premisses at the head of the sequel.
EN
1868 Some Consequences of Four Incapacities
The sequel, and where the argument arrives. The preceding article asked whether we have certain faculties; this one takes its four denials as premisses and follows them out to a theory of reality and of the self.
EN
1877 The Fixation of Belief
Written for readers with no philosophy behind them: the first instalment of a six-part course in the logic of science, serialised in a general-interest monthly. Everything the other 1877–78 papers do rests on the account of doubt, belief and inquiry set out here.
EN
1878 Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis
The paper that ends the series. Its central idea — guessing, treated as an inference with rules of its own rather than as a lack of them — is what Peirce kept working at for the rest of his life.
EN
1878 How to Make Our Ideas Clear
The second instalment of the 1877–78 series, nominally about a dead distinction in the logic textbooks. Two decades after it was printed, the American pragmatists took it as their charter.
EN
1878 The Doctrine of Chances
Third in the series, and the point where the account of inquiry acquires a price. Half of it is arithmetic — card packs, whist hands, insurance offices — and the other half asks whether a creature who never lives to complete a run of trials may reason from probabilities at all.
EN
1878 The Order of Nature
The religious instalment of the 1877–78 series. It reaches forward to the essay Peirce published at the end of his life: both ask what a scientific habit of mind is entitled to say about God, and they give different answers.
EN
1878 The Probability of Induction
A general magazine's readers are asked here to check a table of black and white balls for themselves. It is the most technical stretch of the 1877–78 series, and the one that takes on the probability textbooks directly.
EN
1891 The Architecture of Theories
A prospectus rather than a treatise, and the first of the five articles of Peirce's metaphysical series in Paul Carus's Monist, 1891–93 — the run in which the cosmology it sketches was built.
EN
1892 Man's Glassy Essence
Three things that do not obviously belong together — the constitution of matter, the chemistry of living tissue, and the question whether a church or a crowd can think — joined by the argument that mind and matter differ only in which side you look from.
EN
1892 The Doctrine of Necessity Examined
It stands second in the series, and it is the one that started a quarrel: Carus attacked it twice in his own journal and Peirce defended it once, so that the argument about chance occupied The Monist for fifteen months.
EN
1892 The Law of Mind
Where tychism acquires its partner. The chance of the April paper needed continuity to work in, and continuity gets its name and its defence here — the idea Peirce came to regard as the one his philosophy could least do without.
EN
1893 Evolutionary Love
Here the cosmology turns into an argument about how people ought to live: chance, necessity and love applied to the history of ideas, and to the ethics of a commercial century. It closed the Monist series.
EN
1893 What is Christian Faith?
Addressed past the theologians to two audiences at once — churchmen keeping their membership narrow, and the scientifically educated, shut out of the churches, who were talking about founding one of their own.
EN
1899 Leibniz Rewritten
The one book review on this shelf, from the years after the Coast Survey when Peirce lived partly by notices and dictionary work. It is the only piece here in which he is weighing someone else's system rather than building his own.
EN
1908 A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God
Thirty years after the logic papers and fifteen after the cosmology, Peirce turns the machinery of hypothesis on the question the 1878 series had left open.
EN

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