ONT Re: Just In Time Logic
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JITL. Note 13
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| On Representations
|
| A representation is an object which stands for another so that
| an experience of the former affords us a knowledge of the latter.
| There are three essential conditions to which every representation
| must conform. It must in the first place like any other object have
| qualities independent of its meaning. It is only through a knowledge
| of these that we acquire any information concerning the object it
| represents. Thus, the word "man" as printed, has three letters;
| these letters have certain shapes, and are black. I term such
| characters, the material qualities of the representation. In the
| 2nd place a representation must have a real causal connection with
| its object. If a weathercock indicates the direction of the wind
| it is because the wind really turns it round. If the portrait of
| a man of a past generation tells me how he looked it is because
| his appearance really determined the appearance of the picture
| by a train of causation, acting through the mind of the painter.
| If a prediction is trustworthy it is because those antecedents of
| which the predicted event is the necessary consequence had a real
| effect in producing the prediction. In the third place, every
| representation addresses itself to a mind. It is only in so
| far as it does this that it is a representation. The idea of
| the representation itself excites in the mind another idea and
| in order that it may do this it is necessary that some principle
| of association between the two ideas should already be established
| in that mind. These three conditions serve to define the nature of
| a representation.
|
| C.S. Peirce, CE 3, p. 62.
|
| Charles S. Peirce, "On Representations", MS 212, Winter-Spring 1873, p. 62 in:
|'Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 3, 1872-1878',
| Peirce Edition Project, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1986.
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