Cell Language Theory, The: Connecting Mind And Matter

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“6x9” b2861 The Cell Language Theory: Connecting Mind and Matter

Chapter 9

The Universality of the Irreducible

Triadic Relation

9.1 The Peircean Sign as the Origin of the Irreducible

Triadic Relation

The American chemist, logician, and philosopher, C. S. Peirce (1839–1914)

defined a sign as follows (http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/rsources/76DEFS/

76defs.HTM):

Anything that stands to someone for something other than itself. (9.1)

Anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an

object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, the interpretant

becoming in turn a sign, and so on an infinitum. (9.2)

I define a sign as something, A, which brings something, C, its

interpretant, into the same sort of correspondence with something,

B, its object, as that in which itself stands to C. (9.3)

The Peircean sign defined in (9.1)–(9.3) can be diagrammatically repre-

sented as shown in Figure 9.1.

The arrows f, g, and h in Figure 9.1 are analogous to (or examples of)

the “structure-preserving mappings” of the category theory in mathematics

[370, 371]. Mappings f, g, and h are said to satisfy the commutativity

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