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Home > Quote from "Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness, and the Reducibility of Fourthness [R]"

Commens
Digital Companion to C. S. Peirce
‘Thirdness’ (pub. 16.03.18-11:43). Quote in M. Bergman & S. Paavola (Eds.), The Commens Dictionary: Peirce's Terms in His Own Words. New Edition. Retrieved from http://www.commens.org/dictionary/entry/quote-firstness-secondness-thirdness-and-reducibility-fourthness-r-8.
Term: 
Thirdness
Quote: 

…Thirdness, or that which is such as it is in bringing a second into relation to a third. That thirdness cannot be reduced to any combination of secondnesses follows at once from the fact that combination is itself a triadic relation; so that a combination of secondnesses would itself involve an irreducible thirdness.On the other hand, [there] can be no irreducible Fourthness or mode of being defined by a relation between more than three correlates, since it is easily shown that every such relation is definable as a triadic relation among triadic relations.

Source: 
Peirce, C. S. (1904). Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness, and the Reducibility of Fourthness [R]. MS [R] 914.
References: 
MS [R] 914:5
Date of Quote: 
1904
URL: 

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