Understanding Semiotics: Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness

“The door handle is the handshake of the building.” ― Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses

As humans, we are often exposed to external stimuli and internal thoughts and ideas. There is a wide array of possible thoughts, ideas and images that can be present in a person’s mind at a given instance of time. We have always been intrigued by the question of how we come to perceive or think the way we do.

When a man tries to analyse and study his own stream of thoughts, he is trying to uncover phenomenology. Charles Sanders Peirce has elucidated a structural classification system for phenomenological elements. In his intriguing writings, he introduces and discusses principle subdivisions of those elements that are possible to be present in any sense to the mind.

Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness

Peirce has developed a classification system of phenomenology. He calls it as ‘phaneroscopy’ which is the study of ‘phanerons’. Phanerons are a sum total of all possible elements that can come into consciousness of a person’s mind. These elements need not be restricted to ‘real’ physical objects present in the external world. These can also include elements that are created by the mind in the internal ‘semiotic’ world of the person.

Peirce classifies these elements into three philosophical categories and explains how these three levels operate in the process of meaning-making called semiosis.

Peirce has a special liking with the number ‘three’. He divides consciousness into three levels of firstness, secondness and thirdness. He considers semiosis as a triadic process of the relationships among a sign or representamen (a first), an object (a second) and an interpretant (a third). He also classifies three types of signs, namely, icons, indexes and symbols. In the book, Peirce first explains the basic characteristics of the concepts of firstness, secondness and thirdness.

He explains the notions of monads, dyads and triads and discusses the presence of triads in metaphysics, psychology, physiology, mathematics and evolutionary biology. In this review, I will summarize and discuss the key characteristics of firstness, secondness and thirdness as elucidated by Peirce, interspersed with my personal understanding of his writings.

FIRSTNESS

“His face was neither handsome nor anything else. It just was.” ― Tarjei Vesaas, The Birds

Peirce’s conception of firstness is a beautiful, fragile, fresh and free entity. It is a sense of feeling that cannot be described in words.

“The idea of First is predominant in the ideas of freshness, life, freedom. The free is that which has no another behind it…. If the idea of another enters, then the Firstness goes” (p.148)

For example, the feeling or idea of “yellow-ness”. The conception of “yellow-ness” is independent of any object that is yellow in colour. Firstness belongs to the realm of possibility. Elements that are categorized in firstness are monads that do not refer to anything else except itself.

Peirce defines feeling of firstness as “an instance of that kind of consciousness which involves no analysis, comparison or any process whatsoever… it has its own quality which consists of nothing else” (p. 152).

Firstness is about feeling (emotion), as distinct from objective perception, will and thought. It is like a blank thought-less feeling that one may experience while meditating on a candle flame. If a person continuously looks at the candle flame, and only at the candle flame for a long period of time, he may lose cognizance of the candle or the flame as external objects and may only ‘feel’ the ‘yellow-ness’ of the flame.

These are sensations minus any attribution to any object. It is a general sensation of a certain quality or latent potentiality. Yellow-ness is a quality or state of being, but it cannot exist by itself. It needs another object to manifest or embody itself. When another object acts as an embodiment, it leads to secondness.

SECONDNESS

‘She likes red,’ said the little girl.

‘Red,’ said Mr. Rabbit. ‘You can’t give her red.’

‘Something red, maybe,’ said the little girl.

‘Oh, something red,’ said Mr. Rabbit.

Charlotte Zolotow, Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present (as quoted in Keane 2003)

Secondness is the mode of being that is in relation to something else. Secondness is the level of consciousness where the idea of ‘reality’ comes into play. While firstness is about being, secondness is about existence (in some experiential universe).

It involves a dyadic relationship where effort is made to link a latent quality with an object manifestation. While firstness was pure sensation, secondness is intellectual categorization. This is the level of tangible ‘existence’ and practical experience. For example, the firstness of the quality of “redness”, when attributed to a red rose, becomes secondness. Even negation of redness attributed to a white rose becomes secondness.

Secondness manifests itself when firstness relates to another object through either relation, compulsion, effect, dependence, independence, negation, occurance, result or reality.

The example that Peirce uses to illustrate secondness is that when one sees a beam of light, he may sense the fundamental experience of only the beam of light (firstness); or he may perceive the beam of light as ‘God’s creation’ which is a secondary, derivative interpretation (secondness).

Peirce says that secondness acts as a constraint or force on firstness. However, secondness results from arbitrary will or blind force, a universal association, without any influential mediation. In case any influential mediation is involved that tends to move the direction of interpretation, it leads to thirdness.

THIRDNESS

Thirdness is the mediator through which a first and a second are brought into relation. The Second is the ends and the Third is the means. Thirdness is the mould of the interpreter’s mind that defines the path taken between the First and the Second. Thirdness corresponds to the conformity to the form in which the man’s mind is moulded. This can be seen as the pre-determined or habituated mode of thinking.

Usually, these moulds are designed to match the pragmatic purpose of the interpreter. Thirdness is the category of thought, language, representation, and the process of semiosis; it makes social communication possible. Thirdness corresponds to intellectual experience.

Thirdness of the intellectual ‘mould’ is a result of cultural socialization. Here, the interpreter becomes a third element between the sign and the object. The Third is a bridge between the First and the Second. It is a “synthetic consciousness driven by the sense of learning, thought, memory and habit."

Danesi (2004), associates the first step of physical sensation as firstness, the mind as secondness and culture as thirdness. However, on reading Peirce’s book, I feel that firstness is much beyond mere physical sensation. It is the sense of ‘being’ or a quality that is pure in itself. Firstness can be defined for any latently potential quality or state of being, without physical sensation. For example, one can conceive the idea of “large-ness”, “healthy-ness”, “success-ness”, “peace-ness” which can manifest itself either through secondness or thirdness via signs.

I agree to the connection of thirdness with culture because socialization plays a major role in the way our streams of thoughts are wired to move in our minds. Danesi says that, “we are born into an already fixed semiosphere that will largely determine how we view the world around us” (p.22).

How Does Semiosis Occur In Thirdness?

Peirce establishes the structure of meaning as a triad. The process of semiosis involves a triadic relationship between a sign or representamen (a first), an object (a second) and an interpretant (a third).

The representamen is a thing that represents another thing: its object. Before it is interpreted, the representamen is a pure potentiality: a firstness. The object is what the sign represents. Upon being interpreted, the representamen has the ability to trigger an interpretant, which in turn becomes a representamen by triggering another interpretant referring to the same object as the first representamen. And so on, ad infinitum.

This process reflects the ‘stream of thoughts’ that a man goes through when exposed to a sign. This continuous chain constitutes a trajectory known as a semiotic flow.

For example, I may ‘see’ black clouds in the sky (representamen) and it evokes the thought in my mind ‘It will rain’ (interpretant). The thought of ‘it will rain’ becomes a new representamen in my mind, which further evokes the next interpretant as “I need to get an umbrella”, and so on.

Different individuals, or same individuals at different contexts can go on different trajectories of meaning making. Hence, thirdness remains relative to the context. However, cultural habit and conventions are strong forces that keep trajectories within bounds.

Nicole (2011) in her summary of Peircian semiotics notes that, although the process of semiosis is theoretically unlimited, it is limited in practice. In practice, it is short-circuited by force of habit - our habit of attributing a certain signification to a certain sign in a certain context with which we are familiar.

Force of habit temporarily freezes the infinite recursivity of one sign to other signs, which allows interlocutors to quickly reach consensus on reality in a given communication context. Contemporary culture and language shapes meaning and allows for communication by usage of conventional signs and symbols.

THREE TYPES OF SIGNS

A representamen can refer to its object by virtue of firstness, secondness or thirdness, that is, through relationships of similarity, contextual contiguity or law. Following this trichotomy, the sign is called (1) an icon, (2) an index or (3) a symbol, respectively.

An icon is a sign that is physically similar and almost a direct depiction of the object. For example, an image of an apple represents a real apple fruit.

An index is a sign that is relative or hints at another object without direct resemblance. For example, smoke represents fire.

The third type of sign is a symbol that is a conventional or a general sign which obtains meaning through habitual connection. For example, the no-parking sign which is a red circle with a diagonal through it.

Pragmatic Appeal of Peirce’s Ideas

Peirce’s semiotic theory is general and pragmatic. It is general in the sense that it includes facets of emotional, practical and intellectual experiences of the mind. It is pragmatic in the sense that it accounts for the context in which the signs or representations are produced and interpreted, as it includes the interpreter (and his/her cultural socialization) in the definition of the triad.

Thirdness is farthest away from ‘pure perception’ because it is coloured and moulded by socialization of the interpreter.

As researchers, we may wish to believe that our research should be perceived as absolute firstness or secondness, but the fact is that all knowledge in this world that is not directly perceived, and that which is shared through ‘language’ constitutes thirdness. Language is a mediator which brings in thirdness into meaning.

Thirdness is always relative, and not absolute. As researchers, we work in the domain of thirdness. As a communicators, can one cue interpreters to follow a pre-determined trajectory of thirdness?

I came across an intriguing field of study which tries to ‘hack’ people’s minds and engineer the semiosis trajectory of the mental experiences of psychedelics. (Details of this study can be found here). In this study, psychologists discuss that if the contextual elements are engineered in a certain fashion, the individual’s mental thought trajectory will follow a predictable path (pre-determined thirdness?). Are we, as individuals, losing our peculiar idiosyncrasies? Are all our minds being ‘normalized’ to think alike due to cultural conditioning of thirdness?

ABOUT PEIRCE

Charles Sanders Peirce (September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist, sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". An innovator in mathematics, statistics, philosophy, research methodology, and various sciences, Peirce considered himself, first and foremost, a logician. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics, of which he is a founder. Karl Popper viewed Peirce as "one of the greatest philosophers of all times".

References:

Peirce, C. S., Hartshorne, C., Weiss, P., & Burks, A. W. (1960). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss: Principles of philosophy and Elements of logic (Vol. 1). Harvard University Press.

Brent, J. (1998). Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life. Indiana University Press.

Danesi, M. (2004). Messages, signs, and meanings: A basic textbook in semiotics and communication (Vol. 1). Canadian Scholars’ Press.

Keane, W. (2003). Semiotics and the social analysis of material things. Language & Communication, 23(3), 409-425.

Merrell, F. (1997). Peirce, signs, and meaning. University of Toronto Press.

Nicole Everaert-Desmedt (2011), Peirce's Semiotics, in Louis Hébert (dir.), Signo [online], Rimouski (Quebec), http://www.signosemio.com/peirce/semiotics.asp.