How is time transformed when signs appear? In the sign system of the conditioned reflex, the sign (conditioned stimulus) reverses, changes the direction of time, and overcomes its unidirectionality and irreversibility. In a sense, there is a “return” to the past in the form of the future when the sign is introduced. The sign serves as a “Time machine” of sorts. The mechanism of time transformation is possible because a mirror is embedded inside the sign, the surface of which represents (...) the psychological present time. When past experience meets that surface in the present, it may be reflected in the form of a future event. In the course of reflection, time changes its direction: if earlier time flowed from the event (the cause), it subsequently flows to other events (the purpose). Previously inaccessible past experience is now projected into the present, “comes to life” in it and is transformed into the future. In humans, unlike in animals, signs of the second order appear. Inside the signs of the second order, a mirror is built in, and the experience of the past as a subject is reflected in the future form as an object. An individual has the opportunity to consider oneself externally as an object. It goes beyond the subjective form. Thus, secondary signs once again change time direction. Due to this phenomenon, time becomes doubly reversible: first it turns around in a conditioned stimulus, and then in a secondary sign. (shrink)

Starting from the exposition of the fundamental guiding principles of Peirce's philosophy, mainly, its three categories viewed under his Phenomenology and its correlated Ontology, I conjecture about three possible dimensions of Time, considering the function of predicting the future course of events with varying degrees of certainty as the main role of our human rationality. In these three dimensions, the affection of the first of the three Peircean categories occurs with differentiated intensity, this first category precisely the one that includes (...) the way of being of the incidence of Chance, either in the course of a natural Chronos, or in the course of a temporality produced by human actions, or also equally having incidence in the spontaneity of a subjective time, assumed here as Kairós. Inspired by the recent experience of the pandemic that devastated all corners of the planet, this conjecture suggests dimensions of a temporality frayed ontologically in different degrees, leading to a corresponding fraying of our predictive rationality, imposing upon us the condition of being characters who are left to bet on the course of future factuality to the detriment of choices that would be feasible if a history circumscribed by an intense incidence of Chance had not occurred. Keywords: Peirce, Pragmatism, Semiotics, Chance, Time. (shrink)

There seem to be two distinct aspects to the role played by the Interpretant in Peirce’s account of the sign relation. On the one hand, the Interpretant is said to establish the relation between the Sign and Object. That is, the Sign can “stand for” its Object, and thereby actually function as a Sign, only by virtue of its being interpreted as such by an Interpretant. On the other hand, the Interpretant is said to be “determined” by the Sign in (...) such a way that it is thereby mediately determined by the Sign’s Object. How can we understand the relation between these two aspects of the Interpretant? This is the question with which this paper is concerned. I begin by drawing a distinction between what I call the first-order function and second-order function of the Interpretant, and illustrating this distinction using Peirce’s example of comparing the letters p and b in § 9 of the 1867 “On a New List of Categories.” I then show that this same distinction can be discerned in a significant passage in the second section of Peirce’s 1903 “A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic,” as well as in his early definition of the Interpretant in the “New List.” This double function of the Interpretant has been noted in the Peircean literature, specifically by Joseph Ransdell in his 1966 dissertation, and more recently by André De Tienne. However, an important aspect of what I call the second-order function of the Interpretant remains unclarified in Ransdell and De Tienne’s approaches, namely, its relation to the logical operation of hypostatic abstraction. I will show that the Interpretant, in its second-order function, plays a role formally identical in the sign process to the role played by hypostatic abstraction in Peirce’s demonstrations of the Reduction Thesis. This formal identity will afford us with a way of understanding the relation between the two aspects of the Interpretant in terms of hypostatic abstraction. (shrink)