Axiomathes (2005) 15:575597 Springer 2005

DOI 10.1007/s10516-005-2780-6

INNA SEMETSKY

FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION, OR: A PROPER

STRUCTURE FOR A PROPER FUNCTION

ABSTRACT. It is suggested that Charles Sanders Peirces triadic semiotics provides

a framework for a diagrammatic representation of a signs proper structure. The
action of signs is described at the logical and psychological levels. The role of (un-
conscious) abductive inference is analyzed, and a diagram of reasoning is oered. A
series of interpretants transform brute facts into interpretable signs thereby pro-
viding human experience with value or meaning. The triadic structure helps in de-
mystifying the relations between Penroses three worlds when the latter are con-
sidered as constituting a semiotic triangle.

KEY WORDS: abduction, Peirce, Penroses three worlds, process ontology,

semiotic reality, the diagrammatic reasoning, the complex plane

1. INTRODUCTION

Following the framework supplied by the triadic nature of a sign

(linguistic or non-linguistic) as per C.S. Peirces semiotic categories,
this paper will propose a type of structural or formal organization
for what Millikan (1984) identied as proper functions. In other
words, so as to function properly, a certain organizational pattern
let us call it a proper structure must be satised. However, a
proper structure proposed in this paper, and in contrast to
Millikans conceptualisations, is not associated with explicit pur-
pose, design or goal. Rather the goal is implicit or virtual, and as
such is inherent in the dynamical or process-structure per se. The
paper will also demonstrate that for the structure to be functional
and not dis-functional (pun intended, but see also Bickhard 2004),
we ought to assume the existence of a level beyond the reality of
the world of objects out there accessible to sense perception. The
paper will posit this level as semiotic or pre-symbolic, that is, in a

Conference Dynamic Ontology: An Inquiry into Systems, Emergence, Levels of

Reality, and Forms of Causality University of Trento, Italy, September 711, 2004.
576 INNA SEMETSKY

certain way extra-linguistic. So in the most general terms this paper

aims away from the infamous linguistic turn and towards, let me
call it, a semiotic turn.
The paper, rst, will introduce three basic Peirces categories and
connect them with his three types of inference, including abduction.
In the current philosophy of science discourse abduction is usually
taken in one sense only, as an inference to the best explanation; this
paper will posit abductive inference as open to interpretation in psy-
chological and, quite possibly, naturalistic terms. Peirce sometimes
used abduction interchangeable with retroduction. What he meant,
however, is that retroduction is a process encompassing abduction.
The paper, secondly, will propose a model of such a retroductive
process. For this purpose I will employ a mathematical formalism
borrowed from Gauss who left us an ingenious interpretation of a
complex number (Figure 1). Third, and in order to demonstrate the
very dynamics inherent in the retroductive process, I will model the
components as vectors on the Gauss plane (Figure 2). This interpre-
tation, I suggest, is in compliance with Peirce positing logic as a
science of the necessary laws of thought and his also asserting that
the semiotic categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness are
the conceptions of complexity (Peirce CP 1. 526).
The inferential process reected in the triadic relational structure
presupposes the presence of continual feedbacks. The presence of

Figure 1. The complex plane.

 FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION 577

Figure 2. The resultant vector.

feedbacks is, in accord with the dynamical systems theory, a pre-

condition for self-organization. The self-organizing dynamics makes
the positing of a design, or purpose, or external goal a moot point.
However, this does not dispute the directionality, or teleological
dimension, presupposed by Millikans proper functions founded as
such on learning and integration or, as Peirce was saying, synthesis.
In fact, the directionality is maintained and is inherent in the very
denition of a vector, which has both magnitude and direction. It
is just that a goal is immanent to the structure per se, tending
towards what Peirce has rather mysteriously classied as a sign of
itself. The directionality, however, is not meant to represent any di-
rect cause-eect link. A triadic relation is indirect, or mediated, the
very concept of causality therefore begging a question.
Vectors, having both direction and magnitude, are potentially
open to interpretation not only in mathematical, but physical terms
as well; that is, the suggested model may very well represent the
aforementioned hypothetical, semiotic, level of reality. Similarly,
the triadic structure posits a level, which exceeds references: it is a
level of meanings embedded in the ternary structure of the sign.
While staying at the level of mathematical formalism, the triadic
structure, nonetheless, may be considered as also representing phys-
ical qualities, thereby making a generic mental representation open
in principle to explanation in physical and objective terms. Our
conceptualisations in terms of self-organization and the emergence
578 INNA SEMETSKY

of meanings at a dierent level of complexity seem to overcome the

analytic paradox as well as the suspected inconsistency between
articulating representations and meanings as per Peirces semiotics.

2. THE ACTION OF SIGNS

The word sign is ambiguous. While traditionally dened as some-

thing that stands for something else, the notion of a sign as used in
this paper follows Peirces triadic conception so as to underline the
dynamic character of the sign-process. A sign can be anything that
stands to somebody, a sign-user, for something else, its object, in
some respect and in such a way so as to generate another sign,
called its interpretant. In the broadest sense, Peirce used the word
representamen to designate a sign, in agreement with the word
representation describing both the dynamic process and the terminus
of such a process, by which one thing stands for another. Each
representamen, or sign, is related to three things, the ground, the
object and the interpretant . With respect to its ground, the represen-
tamen, as used by every scientic intelligence...may embody any
meaning (Peirce CP 2. 229). Peirce gave the name semiosis to the
process of generation, exchange, and interpretation of signs, that is,
a continuous communication and interaction between signs by vir-
tue of quasi-utterer and quasi-interpreter. The relation of standing
for always involves the mind or quasi-mind, as in the case of qua-
si-utterer that, for example, utters the signs of the weather and is
therefore quasi-intentional: because all thought is sign-process, all
sign-processes are idea-like. Due to the innite stream of interpre-
tants, that is, the systems relating a sign vehicle to its object, the to-
tal number of meanings is potentially innite. Furthermore, it is not
required for the interpretant to actually exist: for Peirce, it being in
futuro accounts for its reality. Signs grow and become other signs,
contributing via their interpretants to learning and the evolution of
human consciousness: a thought that has passed from a genuine
doubt to belief is a sign of signs, or representation.
The modern conception of logic has been developed by Peirce to
include a general theory of signs, making semiotics tantamount to
logic, the latter including what Peirce called abduction, or peculiar
logic of discovery or hypothesis-generation. While representing, in a
narrow sense, the necessary conditions for the attainment of truth,
logic for Peirce is a science of the necessary laws of thought, or,
better still (thought always taking place by means of signs), it is a
 FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION 579

general semeiotics, treating not merely of truth, but also of the

general conditions of signs being signs (Peirce CP 1. 444). Peirce
also included in his conceptualisations the ideas of a set of beliefs,
which as habits of thinking are both culturally produced and
also derived from a common layer of shared experiences.
The triadic nature of relations between signs leads to Peirces
classifying signs in terms of three basic ontological categories:
First is the conception of being or existing independent of any-
thing else. Second is the conception of being relative to, the con-
ception of reaction with, something else. Third is the conception of
mediation, whereby rst and second are brought into relation.... In
psychology, Feeling is First, Sense of reaction Second, General
conception Third, or mediation...Chance is First, Law is Second,
the tendency to take habits is Third. Mind is First, Matter is Sec-
ond, Evolution is Third (Peirce CP 6.7). Firstness is quality, possi-
bility, freedom, spontaneity, and novelty. Secondness, as a relation
of the First to the Second, is of opposites, this or that of reality,
billiard-ball forces, rigid deterministic laws, direct cause and eect,
action and reaction. Thirdness relates seconds to thirds; it is syn-
thesis, communication, memory, and mediation in general.
By virtue of their meanings, the ideas play a part in the real
world (Peirce MS 967. 1). The relationship between meanings and
habits is one of reciprocal presupposition: meanings may change
depending on the formation of new habits; in turn, the new mean-
ings eventually aect the change in habits, despite the seemingly
xed character of the latter. For Peirce, the meaning of a thing lies
in the habits it involves (Peirce CP 5. 4). Precisely because of the
xed nature of habits, the abrupt change in meaning may come
about by what Peirce identied as a cataclysm in the otherwise
continuous evolutionary process.
Peirce asserted that growth, evolution, and complexity represent
the basic facts in the universe. He further noticed that these facts
lead to a possibility that there is probably in nature some agency
by which the complexity and diversity of things can be increased
(Peirce CP 6.58). The mechanical law alone would not explain this
complexity; the infallible mechanical laws are insucient. How
can the regularity of the world increase, if it has been absolutely
perfect all the time? asks Peirce (CP 1.174). Physical laws them-
selves are, in semiotic terms, the result of habits: matter (Second),
for Peirce, is eete mind (First), and the mind (First) has to be
entrenched in habits (Thirds) so as to congeal, as Peirce says, into
580 INNA SEMETSKY

matter (Second). Peirces basic categories are expressed in numbers

that are not simply ordinal or sequential but cardinal, that is, the
Thirdness, by denition, includes Secondness and Firstness. Peirce
refused to conceive of the psychical and the physical aspect of
matter as two aspects absolutely distinct (Peirce CP 6. 268). His
holism implies the coordination between the two dierent aspects
of one total process: matter is mind, whose habits became so xed
and rigid that the mind in question is unable to either take a
new habit or break an old one. Habit taking as an evolutionary
process the cardinality of Thirdness exists only providing it
includes Firstness in itself, in a form of chance, feeling, creativity,
novelty, or freedom, as a necessary condition of its own dynamics.
The result of abductive inference is the guess proered or the
hypothesis drawn. If reasoning from premises to conclusion is con-
sidered to be either deductive, or inductive, or fallacious, then an
abductive guess understood as an inference to the best explanation,
that expresses merely some likelihood in reasoning, would seem to
represent a fallacious kind, indeed, and is considered as such within
the analytic discourse. In a Peircean sense, however, abduction sug-
gests that something might possibly be the case (Peirce CP 5. 171).
For Peirce, what is real cannot be in any way reduced to the
actual, in fact the will-bes, the actually-iss and the have-beens
are not the sum of the real. They only cover actuality. There are
besides would bes and can bes that are real (Peirce CP 8. 216),
such would-be-ness constituting the realm of the virtual, however,
still semiotically real, world.1 The semiotically real world therefore
includes possibilities articulated by means of abduction.
At the ontological level, Firstness as a mode of being is possibility,
Secondness actuality, that is, existence, and Thirdness potential-
ity. But because thoughts as the signs in the category of Thirdness
must include Firstness as qualities and Secondness as facts, the
ontological and experiential levels interpenetrate: the potentia of
Thirdness is what connects the possible with the actual. By the same
token, although Peirce assessed meanings as altogether virtual ...
[because located] not in what is actually thought, but in what this
thought may be connected with in representation by subsequent
thoughts (Peirce CP 5. 289) in futuro, that is they are still maxi-
mally real due to their ability to produce real eects in terms of con-
sequences, or practical bearings (Peirce CP 5. 402) in accord with
Peirces pragmatic maxim. The realm of the virtual nonetheless con-
stitutes Reality which by some means contrives to determine the
 FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION 581

Sign to its Representation (Peirce CP 4. 536), the contrivance indi-

cating a possession of an implicit goal or purpose.

3. ABDUCTION AND INSIGHT

Meanings exist in virtue of the relational sign-process in which the

whole triadic relation of the sign to its object via interpretant
becomes the object of the new sign. As the First logical category,
abduction therefore is part of the total inferential or reasoning pro-
cess.2 All cognition, for Peirce, is sign-mediated, however the First-
ness of abduction is presented in an instance and is directly had
prior to the Thirdness of mediation. Abductive inference blends
into a perceptual judgment, which is subconscious...[and] does not
have to make separate acts of inference but performs its acts in one
continuous process (Peirce 1998, p. 227). Abduction does seem to
function instantaneously not because there is no temporal interval
of inference, but because the mind remains unaware of when it be-
gins or ends: psychological immediacy and logical mediation consti-
tute what Peirce has called a mediated immediacy (Peirce CP. 5.
181). It is amenable to a clear insight, therefore becoming con-
scious: sure enough, the abductive suggestion comes to us as a
ash. It is an act of insight (Peirce CP 5. 181). Albeit fallible, it
still has a mysterious power of guessing right (Peirce CP 6. 530)
even while being pre-conscious and not rationally controllable so
that it leads to judgment forced upon ones acceptance by the
totally involuntary mental process.
At this level of the real and physically ecient (Peirce CP 5.
431) generals, a hypothetical idea constitutes what Peirce called a
psychological ground for a habit that carries a avour of anticipa-
tion: it is already determinative of acts in the future to an extent
to which it is not now conscious (Peirce CP 6. 156). Describing
the structure of perceptual abduction, Peirce pointed out the rst
premise is not actually thought, though it is in the mind habitually.
This, of itself would not make the inference unconscious. But it is
so because it is not recognized as an inference; the conclusion is ac-
cepted without our knowing how (Peirce CP 8. 6465). For Pei-
rce, the hint to conjecture or hypothesis is derived from experience:
the stimulus to abductive guessing is out there, in the specic, here-
and-now, conditions present in the phenomenal world.
At the psychological level, abduction is an intuitive and quasi-
immediate perception of the object. Peirces genuine doubt is not a
582 INNA SEMETSKY

personal doubt of a Cartesian subject but has an external origin by

virtue of a surprising, anomalous or perplexing, instance: it is an
objective uncertainty constituted by tension or dierence between
the present experience and the whole of the organismenvironment
system.3 It is just a feeling, the First, indeed an imaginative hint
amounting to sensations so faint (Peirce and Jastrow 1884, quo-
ted in Hacking 1990, p. 205) so as to bypass the level of cognitive
awareness.4 Peirce emphasized the feeling-tone of abduction saying
that every abductive inference involves a particular emotion: the
various sounds made by the instruments in the orchestra strike
upon the ear, and the result is a peculiar musical emotion... This
emotion is essentially the same thing as a hypothetic inference
(Peirce CP 2. 643). In a characteristic language, Peirce and Jastrow
commented that the insight of females as well as certain tele-
pathic phenomena may be explained in this way. Such faint sensa-
tions ought to be fully studied by the psychologist and assiduously
cultivated by every man (in Hacking 1990, p. 206).
An unconscious inference functioning abductively as intuition is
the cognitively unmediated, as Firstness, access to knowledge. The
knowledge organization that proceeds in a habitual way becomes
fully accepted (Peirce CP 7. 37) and as such tends to obliterate
all recognition of ...premises from which it was derived (CP 7. 37):
the inferential steps per se stay out of consciousness, we are not
aware of them. Sure enough, Peirce considered intuition not as a
capacity of the mind, but just the opposite, as one of the four
so-called incapacities articulated by Peirce in 1868: we cannot intuit
knowledge directly as every cognition is logically determined by
previous cognition. But if we were to subject this subconscious
process to logical analysis, we should nd that it terminated in
what this analysis would represent as an abductive inference
(Peirce CP 5. 181). What seems to be a paradox is part and parcel
of the tri-relative, synechistic, and self-generative (Peirce CP 1.
409) semiotic process, described by a general law ultimately dened
in terms of the tendency of all things to take habits (Peirce CP 6.
101). Habits, for Peirce, are dispositions to act in a certain way
under specic circumstances and when actuated by a given mo-
tive (Peirce CP 5. 480), a motive performing therefore a pur-
poseful, teleological function.
The mind hidebound with habits (Peirce 1955, p. 351) is what
we call matter; there is life in the diversication of structures
and combination of forms; those forms embody ideas. An act of
 FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION 583

imagination that in-habits the Firstness of possibilia is potentially

transformative, according to Peirce, in its function to generate a
meaning for a habit. Peirce called these ontological possibilities
airy nothings to which the mind of a poet, pure mathematician,
or another might give local habitation and a name within that
mind (Peirce CP 6. 455). New information, derived from as
though nothingness of the unconscious with the help of an
insight and as the eect of interpretation, not only conceptualises
an idea but also embodies it in the physical world of action: it is
the Thirdness of interpretation that governs Secondness because it
brings information ...determines the idea and gives it body
(Peirce CP 1. 537). Interpretation contributes to trans-formation of
in-formation from the unconscious into consciousness, implying a
possibility of not only habits taking but also habits breaking.
This transformation, or habit-change inscribed in the evolution-
ary process, would be impossible if not for the Thirdness of medi-
ation, which is the continuity of it [and] is brought about by a real
eective force behind consciousness (Peirce 1955, p. 237), as well
as for the Firstness as a category of tychism. Peirces philosophy is
evolutionary not because of its sole reliance on Darwinian principle
of natural selection but because the greater realizations of mean-
ings due to the chain of interpretants involved in a continuous
semiotic communication is a feature of organic evolution: the
man-sign acquires information and comes to mean more than he
did before (Peirce 1955, p. 249). Peirces typology of signs, in
terms of the dierent manner in which signs stand for their objects,
includes icons (or images), indices, and symbols, and a perfect sign,
for Peirce, would have had an ideally equal admixture of the ico-
nic, indicative, and symbolic characters (Peirce CP 4. 448). As for
utterances, however, the fact of substituting an index for the mean-
ing more often than not, impoverishes the linguistic signs because
of mistaking the part for the whole (see note 14 further below),
analogous to the mechanistic Secondness considered to be all there
is, at the expense of Firstness and Thirdness.

4. A DIAGRAM OF REASONING

Peirce asserted that all logical relations, and accordingly the

process of semiosis, could be studied by means of being displayed
in the form of existential graphs, or iconic representations; such
diagrammatic reasoning may yield solutions to the otherwise
584 INNA SEMETSKY

unsolvable logical problems. A diagram is an icon in Peircean cate-

gorization, and because icons are described in term of structural
properties common with their referents, the diagrammatic reason-
ing is especially advantageous in semiotics or logic of relations, as
well as bringing out experimental and exploratory character of rea-
soning (Greaves 2002). Unlike the sentential dyadic reasoning, an
abstract diagram is open to the Thirdness of interpretation thereby
creating meaning, which is implicit in its very structure.
In this section I suggest a model of abductive inference based on
Peirces triadic structure of a sign.5 The spatial representation of
the structure is a grid, although non-Cartesian: the two coordinate
axes are located on a Gauss (or Argand) plane and marked with
imaginary, on a vertical axis, and real on a horizontal axis, num-
bers, respectively. An imaginary number i is the square root of
minus one. Descartes had a rather derogatory attitude towards
imaginaries: it was he who rst coined the name. There was no
place for them in Newtons mechanistic philosophy either: he con-
sidered them plainly impossible. Leibniz recognized their intermedi-
ary character and positioned them at the ontological level between
being and non-being. The true metaphysics of imaginary number
was elusive even for Gauss. He, however, agreed that their geomet-
rical or diagrammatic representation establishes their meaning.
Imaginary and real numbers together form a plane, on which a
point represents a complex number a+bi. The point therefore
stands for the pair, a of the real numbers and b of the imaginary
numbers (Figure 1).
Abductions place would be on the vertical axis: because it is an
act of insight, an intuitive leap, a jump in imagination, an imagi-
nary number seems to be the appropriate symbol to signify the
Firstness of abduction, especially considering its indeterminate and
elusive character. The level of Secondness is marked along the hori-
zontal axis by means of real numbers, in the actuality of the physi-
cal world of action that includes linguistic behaviour. So in this
model the syllogistic reasoning is complemented by imagination,
insight, and intuition, such logic being represented by means of
complex numbers as the ordered pair on a complex plane. The ana-
lytical representation of direction is also possible, by means of a
vector: the two vectors along the horizontal and vertical axes add
up, geometrically, to a resultant vector r on a complex plane rep-
resented by an arrow from the origin to the point a+bi (Figure 2).
 FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION 585

A vector, by denition, has both magnitude and direction, that

is, it can be described in principle both by a mathematical quantity
and a physical property. A vectorial diagram, therefore, represents
the dynamics inherent in abstract structure: it is an organisational
pattern or a process-structure reecting Peirces process ontology.
The process organisation is what determines the structures causal
power. Everything that has causal power is organized, and has the
particular causal power that it does by virtue of...its organization
(Bickhard 2004, p. 124). The cause in question is what Peirce con-
sidered to be the other kind of causation, the one that forms a
strange loop embodied in the closed shape of the triangle on
Figure 2.
The resultant vector may be considered to represent evolution in
meaning as dierent from the preceding, infamous, prior knowl-
edge, because abduction contributes to explicating that what was yet
tacit and implicit; but also by virtue of it enabling a transition from
the level of real numbers onto the succeeding level of numbers on
the complex plane, it therefore contributes to the complication of
knowledge. Peirce indeed distinguished between what he called an
ampliative and explicative forms of reasoning, suggesting that the
former aims at plainly increasing existing knowledge while the
latter, by contrast, is capable of making hidden or implicit knowl-
edge explicit, of making manifest what has been latent. Indeed, the
addition vector as a whole is irreducible to the (arithmetical) sum of
its parts, making the mind as a whole, represented by the shaded
area, greater than its Cartesian cogito. Without the Firstness of
abduction, all knowledge would remain pretty sequential, because
signs would stay at the level of Secondness: they would be growing
in magnitude solely because of the arithmetical progression along
the horizontal axis, yet not being able to change their direction. It is
merely some prior knowledge that would be amplied, precluding
the emergence of novelty because the tacit and preconscious,
implicit and pre-conceptual knowledge would lack any possibility
of explication so as to enable the new knowledge, represented now
as a vector on a complex plane, with a denite direction, determined
by both horizontal and vertical evolutions and pointed to by the
end of the arrow, to enter cognition.6
It is the Thirdness as a diagonal transversal line that enables the
coming into being of the new objects of knowledge, for us, as the
newly created concepts. The dyadic relation alone would not lead
to the creation of meanings: a sign, in order to fulll its oce, to
586 INNA SEMETSKY

actualise its potency, must be compelled by its object (Peirce CP

5.554) therefore it strives to abductively leap from the unconscious
into being integrated into consciousness as though driven by a pur-
pose or goal. However, if we imagine positioning ourselves in the
very midst of this resultant line, there are two perspectives that may
emerge: Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations
of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter.
Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as
feeling, it appears as consciousness (Peirce CP 6. 268). Respec-
tively, we may view the resultant vector as embodying two dimen-
sions simultaneously, external and internal, therefore representing
the dynamics inscribed in the indiscernible succession of mental
states.7 The complex number a+bi pointed to by the arrow of the
vector represents a single synchronic slice of the total diachronic
evolution, or a quasi-determinate content constituted by both inter-
nal and external features.8
Millikans (1984, 1999) prominently externalist position consid-
ers past evolutionary history as all there is to a proper function.
The model suggested here, at least with respect to ones cognitive
function, would consider such description as incomplete because of
its disregard towards both the present moment (cf. Bickhard 2004)
and a possible future evolution.9 We remember that, for Peirce, the
object to which a sign refers may not have a solely physical exis-
tence but may very well be a thought, a dream or a totally imagi-
nary entity; ditto for the interpretant whose being in futuro, as a
non-manifest goal, will suce (Peirce CP 2. 92). The abduction
as a quasi-instantaneous action is informed (literately, as informare
in Latin means giving material form) by the instance of the real,
here-and-now experience, and the magnitude along the vertical axis
of imaginary numbers would inadvertently aect the direction the
diagonal resultant vector would have taken.
A novel hypothesis might literally, as we can see on the
Figures 1 and 2, bring a new direction into the line of reasoning,
and the semiotic categories of Firstness and Thirdness, the two cat-
egories outside the formal logic, functioning only on the margins
the latter, are capable of constructing the new level of knowledge
brought into being at the dierent level of organization. Abduction
(or intuition, or imagination, or insight, in mentalistic terms) cre-
ates a magnitude along the vertical axis, the logical depth, that is, a
leap towards the dierent level of order in the complex knowledge-
system.10 Peirces semiotics reects the novelty that alone provides
 FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION 587

uberty or richness of thought (Deely 2001, p. 627) contained in

the Firstness that carries the level of reality over and above the
customary mechanistic Secondness usually considered as constitut-
ing the whole truth about existence (Deely 2001, p. 627). For
Peirce, signs always move from one to another; they grow and
engender other signs because the triadic logic leads to signs always
becoming something more and something else exemplifying the no-
tion of learning from immediate experience as a necessary condi-
tion for the evolution of signs.
The diagrammatic representation expressed in Figures 1 and 2 is
conceptualised on the premise of what Peirce called a portraiture
of Thought (Peirce CP 4. 11). As such, it conforms to the semiotic
categories of representation, relationality and mediation and
appears to be capable, albeit in a static format, of rendering liter-
ally visible before ones very eyes the operation of thinking in actu
(Peirce CP 4. 571), or demonstrating the very dynamics of the
inferential process. The eld of the complex numbers is undieren-
tiated and would appear to be, in Peirce words, what the world
was to Adam on the day he opened his eyes to it, before he had
drawn any distinctions, or had become conscious of his own expe-
rience (Peirce CP 1.302). The complex plane as a whole contains
what Peirce would have called an admixture or, in other words, the
weighted sum (cf. Penrose 1997; Seager 1999) of real and imaginary
components, a and bi. Peircean holism anticipated a peculiar parts-
whole systems organization, which conceptualises all causal
relations as if owing in two directions at once, bottom-up and
top-down, thereby creating a strange feedback loop.
The triangle as per Figure 2 is a self-organising process-structure
or, in terms of the logic of explanation, a self-cause (cf. Juarrero
1999) disregarded by a science of modernity, which reduced the
four Aristotelian causes, including formal and nal, to a single e-
cient causation. Based on Aristotles fourfold scheme, the Latins in
the later times rened the latter to account for the objective order
of physical phenomena.11 The external, ideal, causality a type of
blueprint, or plan, or design is introduced from without, in con-
trast to the natural Aristotelian formal cause that organises its
material from within. One more causal type, however, pertains to
the role of observer who exercises a type of objective causality.
Deely (2001) explains its functioning in the following way: On the
subjective side, a thinker may try to turn attention toward or away
from [the object]; but the measure of success lies not in the
588 INNA SEMETSKY

subjective eort but in the objective content surviving the eort.

And since presenting objects is exactly the function of signs, the ac-
tion of signs is a species of this...extrinsic formal causality, called
specicative (Deely 2001, p. 633), which is irreducible to either
ideal or intrinsic formal cause but is retaining, as embedded in the
total system, the objective signicance for the human subject.
Peirces categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness
demand such an admixture of mind-dependent and mind-indepen-
dent relations that are ultimately supposed to solve the problem of
intelligibility and understanding. The eld Adam has awaken up to
is the infamous blooming, buzzing confusion, indeed the weighted
sum of dream and reality, possibility and actuality (Deely 2001,
p. 645) in its as yet undierentiated state of both mind-dependent
and mind-independent relations that comprise the totality of hu-
man experience.
In other words, the causal loop demands a quasi-mind, as we
said earlier, that is, a dialogical organismenvironment communica-
tion, an intervention of cognition, or interaction (see Bickhard
2004) so as to ensure the signs potential relation to itself as a con-
dition for ultimate intelligibility. For the function so as to fulll its
purpose, that is, to be proper, it has to have a triadic structure as a
necessary condition of this very fulllment. Specically, for the cog-
nitive function of us, biological beings, to function properly, that
is, comprise all three Peircean categories, means to reason (Third-
ness) properly, that is, analytically (Secondness) but also insight-
fully or intuitively (Firstness).12
The sign, reduced to Secondness only, is what Peirce called
de-generate or we may call dis-functional, that is, not capable of
performing its function properly. Only as genuine, the triadic sign
would amount to the Thirdness of synthetic consciousness, ...sense
of learning (Peirce CP 1.377). Abduction or intuition is a neces-
sary condition for production of meanings; the very etymology of
the word conrms this: to in-tuit means to learn from within, even
if the parish of percept [is] out in the open (Peirce CP 8. 144) of
the experiential world, in conformity with the total retroductive
process demanding the two-directional evolution. Without the
Firstness of insight or abduction no closed loop would be formed.
Functioning at the level of as yet pre-conscious presentations, it
nonetheless posits itself, as Peirce has said, as a real force behind
consciousness. As a powerful and quiet possibly real physical
force because of its vectorial quality, it reaches the representation
 FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION 589

in consciousness at the level of Secondness, along the horizontal

axis of real numbers. It will surely have a dierent magnitude:
using a trivial example, pain is directly had, but may be interpreted
as a toothache or as an eect of being burned and hence judged to
be a singularity of a specic kind.
The diagonal resultant vector casts its own shadow (cf. note 14
further below) on the horizontal axis emerging as though from
nowhere because its end-point a+bi exists at the level of complex-
ity exceeding the realm of real numbers. The very function of
abduction is to create a semiotic bridge that joins the infamous gap
between existence and essence. Its eect consists in the inward [or]
potential actions...which somehow inuence the formation of hab-
its (Peirce CP 6. 286) precisely because these actions were initiated
due to the causal loop, the circularity of Thirdness having provided
conditions for the ight of abductive inference because of the dif-
ference perceived in experience. This inward direction creates an
internal dimension, the logical depth of meaning, as a necessary
outcome within the process of semiosis. We never have a total
tabula rasa. If there were no triadic structure, then the leap of
imagination or insight as a sign of Firstness, if such indeed were to
take place, would have sunk back into the dyadic existence, back
to the point of its own departure and, worse, we would not even
know this as there would not be any dierence for us to interpret
and, respectively, to make a dierence in the world of action, to
create novelty. The dierence in the present experience brings in
novelty and change that, instead of eliciting adaptation as a sole
consequence of the natural selection, aects and transforms the to-
tal organismenvironment situation as a whole.
The natural world is not limited to its solely mechanical aspect
similar to experience as not being reduced to action and reaction
taking place at the level of Secondness. Thirdness enters the pro-
cess as mediation and learning, it takes time and self-reection; it
enables response to meanings rather than to direct physical stimuli,
and meaning is dened as that form in which the proposition
becomes applicable to human conduct (Peirce CP 5. 425), thereby
contributing to further habits taking. Nature is much broader and
includes its own virtual or semiotic dimension, which is, however,
never beyond experience. But in semiotic terms experience itself is a
relational category. Structured by sign-relations, human experience
is an expression of a deeper semiotic process. Because every
sign conveys a general nature of thought, and the Thirdness is
590 INNA SEMETSKY

ultimately a mode of being of intelligence or reason, the generality

does come about from a quasi-mind comprising what Peirce called
a repository of ideas or signicant forms.
Signs do catch on, that is, they are capable of receiving infor-
mation, or signicant meaning, that cannot be reduced to either
merely a physical [or] even merely a psychical dose of energy
(Peirce c.1907: ISP nos. 2056 as quoted in Deely 2001, p. 629).
This level of signicance is semiotic in its core and, by analogy
with the biosphere, it has acquired a name semiosphere during the
post-Peircean times.13 This other, semiotic, level would have
encompassed the biological in itself like two nested circles, similar
perhaps to Pythagorean tetractys encompassing natural numbers
that are inside the integers that are inside the rationals that are
inside the reals, and the real themselves being just a line among the
complex numbers populating the whole plane, notwithstanding an
increase in dimensions, and hence order.14

5. SEMIOTIC REALITY

For Peirce, the whole universe is perfused with signs; signs are all
there is; yet nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign
(Peirce CP 2. 308). The semiotically real world does address possi-
bilities; by the same token, the realists view asserts the reality of
potentialities not yet actualised. The natural world is not reduced
to the facts of Secondness but becomes an object of interpretation,
and human understanding is the necessary Thirdness in this rela-
tionship, for man is natures interpreter (Peirce CP 7. 54) in a
continuous ow of semiosis. The actualisation of many potentiali-
ties through the magnitude of Thirdness appears to take place due
to subjective bottom-up intervention of the mind (Shimony 1993,
p. 319) that performs the role of an interpretant in the semiotic
triad into a signifying chain of semiosis.
Says Shimony: It is honorable to be an epigone of Peirce
(1993, p. 245). The continuity of inference, even if only in a proba-
bilistic sense, dees the idea of some unknowable thing-in-itself, the
latter being only hypothetical like any other First and is to be ulti-
mately known as a sign, or Thirdness of Firstness, after it being
present to me (Peirce CP 5. 289). Yet this very intervention may
be considered objective in a sense of itself being implemented by a
choice of a global, top-down, character, analogous perhaps to the
 FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION 591

semiotic functioning of some relationis transcendetalis. A choice of

this kind may be accounted for by means of what Shimony,
addressing the hypothetical status of mentality in nature (Shimony
[Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright, Hawking] 1999, pp. 144160), dub-
bed a super-selection rule in nature. Considering that the genuine
Thirdness, as thought and reason (intelligence, consciousness,
potentiality), and it being the cardinal, always includes the First-
ness of abduction (or intuition, the unconscious, possibility) in
itself and governs Secondness (actuality, which in turn encompasses
the Firstness of possibility) by bringing information and embodying
the ideas, the process of making the unconscious conscious (in
other words, actualisation of the virtual) thereby completing the
causal circuit is crucial.
Process ontology, as non-physicalistic, that is, irreducible to the
Secondness solely, posits potentiality as a semiotic bridge. This
connection enables the very transition between consciousness and
unconsciousness [which] need not be interpreted as a change of
ontological status but as a change of state, and properties can pass
from deniteness to indeniteness and conversely (Shimony
[Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright, Hawking] 1999, p. 151). Peirce con-
sidered consciousness a rather vague term and has noted that if it
was supposed to mean Thought it is more without us than within.
It is we that are in it, rather than it in any of us (Peirce CP 8.
256). We have to remember that a genuine sign has a triadic struc-
ture, while the relations at the level of Newtonian laws are dyadic.
An active interpretation (or interaction, in Bickhards conceptuali-
sation) and not a passive adaptation is what transform the brute
facts of natural world into interpretable signs with which the uni-
verse is always already perfused. And interpretation creates the
meaning, or provides an experience with value that, albeit implicit
in each and every triadic sign, is as yet absent among the brute
facts of Secondness.
We remember that because every sign is capable of transmitting
something of the thoughts general nature and, respectively, receiv-
ing a signicant meaning, Peirce posited the quasi-mind as reposi-
tory of ideas or signicant forms. Process metaphysics and the
absence of the ontological dualism therefore presuppose what
Roger Penrose, non-incidentally, has dened in terms of a contact
with some sort of Platonic world (Penrose [Penrose, Shimony,
Cartwright, Hawking] 1999, p. 125). The relationship between the
three worlds, namely the physical world, the Platonic world of
592 INNA SEMETSKY

ideas, and the mental world has been considered a mystery, heavily
debated, and dubbed as gaps in Penroses toilings (Grush and
Churchland 1995).15 The core of Penroses argument is that the
physical world may be considered a projection of the Platonic
world and the world of mind arises from part of the physical
world, thus enabling one in this process to insightfully grasp and,
respectively, understand some part of the Platonic world.
Because the Platonic world is inhabited by mathematical truths,
but also due to the common feeling that these mathematical
constructions are products of our mentality (Penrose [Penrose,
Shimony, Cartwright, Hawking] 1999, p. 96), the mysterious depen-
dence of the natural world on strict mathematical laws and the tri-
relative relationship can be inscribed in the following diagram on
the Figure 3.
The relations stop being mysterious though if we consider
Penroses three worlds as constituting a semiotic triangle and
encompassing Peirces three modes of being. The mathematical
laws express the Thirdness of habit taking that would have been
represented, for Penrose, by a part of Platonic world which
encompasses our physical world (Penrose [Penrose, Shimony,

Figure 3. Three Worlds and three mysteries (reproduced with permission from
Penrose [Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright, Hawking] 1999, p. 96).
 FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION 593

Cartwright, Hawking] 1999, p. 97) of matter, or Seconds. Bits of

Thirdness, we may say, are accessible by our mentality (1997,
p. 97) by virtue of the Firstness of insight or abduction, the latter
intrinsically non-computable. Indeed, what in-habits the Platonic
world is not only the true but also the good and the beautiful,
which are all non-computable elements for example, judgement,
common sense, insight, aesthetic sensibility, compassion, morality
(Penrose [Penrose, Shimony, Cartwright, Hawking] 1999, p. 125),
all the moral attributes of the psyche that necessarily mediates
between the world and the intellect. The causal circuit closes up on
itself in the process of creative semiosis.
The rules of projective geometry, which indeed serves as a basis
for conceptualising the diagram as per Figure 3, establish the one-
to-one correspondence like in a perspectival composition towards a
vanishing point implying therefore isomorphism, or mapping of the
archetypal ideas of the Platonic world onto the mental and physical
worlds.16 The level of meanings exceeds references because it
encompasses our thinking (mental world) as belonging with (cf.
Seibt 2004) our doing (physical world, the world of action), that is,
the very organismenvironment interaction, which proceeds in ac-
cord with the speculative grammar of Peirces semiotics. Abduction
enables the grasp of moral meanings as primum cognitum making
therefore the aforementioned relationis transcendetalis in fact imma-
nent in perception!
The brute facts of the physical world intervene in practice and
not only supervene in theory: Firstness is a dream out of which
ens reale, the category of Secondness, inevitably at times awakens a
sleeper (Deely 2001, p. 661). An ex-sleeper that has been awaken
has changed her perspective or her point of view literally: a per-
spectival point is now in the mental world, leading to isomorphism
appearing between a generic mental representation and the other
two worlds, the world of ideas together with the world of action.
The archetypal ideas that are, intrinsically, forms without content
acquire this very content relationally within the dynamics of
self-organising semiotic process. The informational content there-
fore always already is, albeit potentially or unconsciously.17,18 The
self-organising dynamics of sign-relations overcomes the paradox of
new knowledge as well as what appears to be an inconsistency
between articulating representations and meanings in terms of
Peirces logic of signs.
594 INNA SEMETSKY

NOTES

1
Peirce seems to have anticipated contemporary developments in quantum
mechanics. His pragmatic philosophy deals with the might-be-ness of counterfactu-
als and, as Penrose (1997) stated, it is quantum mechanics [that] enables you to
test whether something might have happened but didnt happen...[it] allows real
eects to result from counterfactuals! (Penrose 1999, p. 67). See further below.
2
See Magnani (2001) for the extensive review of abduction in the philosophy of
science discourse and in the eld of AI. Magnani cites H. Simon ([1965]1977) on
the subject of abduction in terms of the logic of normative theories: The prob-
lem-solving process is not a process of deducing... [I]t is a process of ...trial and
error using heuristic rules derived from...experience, that is, sometimes successful
in discovering means that are more or less ecacious in attaining some end...it is a
retroductive process (Simon 1977, p. 151, in Magnani 2001, p. 16). Modern logic
allows accounting for the nonmonotonic or dynamic character of abduction by
means of belief revision (Magnani 2001, p. 24), the latter capable of representing
cases of conceptual change (2001, p. 39). The nonmonotonic logic permits the
jump or leap to the [fallible] conclusion in the absence of immediate contradictory
evidence. This jump is nonetheless inferential and appears to correspond to
Peirces logical form of abduction: The surprising fact, C, is observed; But if A
were true, C would be a matter of course: Hence, there is reason to suspect that A
is true (Peirce CP 7. 202).
3
Deely (2001) expresses the same idea in the following way: Modern philoso-
phy began with the universal doubt whereby Descartes had made being a function
of his thinking. Pragmaticism [Peircean pragmatism] begins rather from a belief in
the reality of what is more than thought, and proceeds by continually putting to
test the contrast between thought and what is more than thought, between merely
objective being and objective being which reveals also something of the physical
universe (Deely 2001, p. 627, brackets mine). See also Bickhards (2004) interac-
tive theory based on error-guided experiential learning. See also Semetsky (2003)
for the ontology of dierence and its function within the process of semiosis.
4
See Kihlstrom (1993) for his description of this now-classic experiment on sub-
liminal perception by Peirce and his student Jastrow. Kihlstrom provides many
references to the contemporary research in experimental psychology and cognitive
science on the topic of psychological unconscious understood as a domain of
mental structures and processes which inuence experience, thought, and action
outside the phenomenal awareness and voluntary control (1993, p. 125).
5
I initially addressed this idea in the paper Learning by abduction: a geometri-
cal interpretation presented at the Peirce Symposium: Cultivating the art of
inquiry, interpretation and criticism, INPE 8th Biennial Conference, August 711,
2002, University of Oslo, Oslo Norway. See also Semetsky 2004.
6
Bickhard would have agreed. He states that process metaphysics is a pre-
requisite for the dierent, novel, emergent causal power. The possibility of emer-
gence is ubiquitous in new organization of process (Bickhard 2004, p. 124).
7
Seager (1999) suggests an analogous approach for addressing the internalist
externalist debate in the philosophy of mind.
8
I guess the whole Swampman argument becomes then a moot point.
 FROM DESIGN TO SELF-ORGANIZATION 595
9
See Bigelow and Pargetter (1999) for the forward-looking theory of functions
that objects to Millikans aetiological position and proposes instead the notion of
dispositions or a survival-enhancing propensity (1999, p. 109) in view of a
future goal.
10
The term logical depth has been elaborated in Homeyer (1993). The infor-
mation theory denes a messages logical depth as the expression of its meaning,
its worth or value. Homeyer labels such logical depth a semiotic freedom
(1993, p. 66). In Peircean terms, freedom is of course the manifestation of First-
ness, the logic of creative abduction.
11
See Deely (2001), chapter 15, Charles Sanders Peirce and the Recovery of Sig-
num, pp. 611668. See also Rescher (2000). Rescher reminds us of medieval causa
as a concept that abolishes a dualism between causes and reasons which the
moderns since the time of Descartes have... insisted on separating sharply (2000,
p. 40).
12
This is logic as an ethics of thinking (see Deely 2001, p. 622), which for Peirce
is inseparable from human conduct, that is, an ethics of doing.
13
In Semetsky (2000) I explored a concept of semiosphere that was rst coined
by Russian semiotician of the Tartu school, Yuri Lotman (1990). Lotmans term
has undergone its second birth when recently posited by molecular biologist
Homeyer (1993) who dened semiosphere as a holistic structure that pene-
trates to every corner of these other spheres [the atmosphere, the hydrosphere,
and biosphere], incorporating all forms of communication [and constituting] a
world of signication (1993, p. vii). Deely (2001) suggests the all-encompassing
term signosphere to pay tribute to what he calls Peirces grand vision, which has
the advantage of being rooted in science rather than in mysticism (Deely 2001,
p. 630).
14
Cf. Thom (1985). Peirces form of the sign, as we said earlier, includes icon,
index, and symbol. Introducing the genesis of image (or copy, or icon) in the con-
text of Peirces semiotic categories, Thom acknowledges the necessary isomor-
phism of forms and makes it clear that the correspondence is produced by
interaction or coupling. In the case of projected shadow, for example, isomor-
phism is maintained because the light, illuminating the original and casting the
shadow, performs the function of interaction. Thom believes that the formation of
copies (that is, representations, for the purpose of this paper) is a manifestation of
the universal irreversible dynamics. He notices that stability of biological forms
has to have a dynamically physical character, that is, depend on constraints
imposed by the physical level: the organic release of evolution allows the appear-
ance of forms, more rened, more subtle, more global...and...charged with mean-
ing (Thom 1985, p. 280). Archetypal forms, for Thom, are located on this
physical level. Thom notices that very often we reduce a whole being to its index
as an act which confers on the latter a symbolic value. In language, this proce-
dure is at the root of many tropes (metonymy in particular: taking the part for the
whole) (1985, p. 282).
15
Rick Grush and Patricia Churchland (1995) argue against Penroses positing a
possible direct insight into Platonic truths, and therefore understanding the mean-
ings of the (mathematical) concepts, over following the logic of computational
rules. But the logic and psychology of abduction, as advanced in this paper,
would have refuted the claim.
596 INNA SEMETSKY

16
This is of course my conjecture solely, albeit supported by Roger Penroses
positing Platonic world as being projected onto the physical. The rigorous proof
would have required a detour to set theory and the concept of innite cardinality
and is out of scope of this paper.
17
Hence the problem of zombies who become automatons (or what Peirce would
have called the de-generate signs), the logic of which is reduced to the dyadic rela-
tions between the world of ideas and the physical world of blind and unconscious
action.
18
What may be called the language of thought is therefore extra-linguistic: it is a
sign-system, that by denition would have included not only verbal symbols but
also icons and indices as per Peirces triad. Lacan was correct when he said that
unconscious too is structured as a language. But the language in question is the
language of signs. Thom (see note 14, above) concludes his article From the Icon
to the Symbol (1985) in those words: Only those who know to listen to response
of Mother Nature will come later to open a dialogue with her and to master a new
language. The other will only babble and buss in the void, bombinos in vacuo. And
where, you may ask, will the mathematician be able to hear Natures response? The
voice of reality is in the signicance of the symbol (Thom 1985, p. 291).

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