Ideoscopy   

Ideoscopy

Commens
Digital Companion to C. S. Peirce
Ideoscopy
1904-10-12 | Letters to Lady Welby | SS 23-24; CP 8.328

You know that I particularly approve of inventing new words for new ideas. I do not know that the study I call Ideoscopy can be called a new idea, but the word Phenomenology is used in a different sense. Ideoscopy consists in describing and classifying the ideas that belong to ordinary experience or that naturally arise in connection with ordinary life, without regard to their being valid or invalid or to their psychology. In pursuing this study I was long ago (1867) led, after only three or four years’ study, to throw all ideas into the three classes of Firstness, of Secondness, and of Thirdness.