• The verb’s utterance kick-starts the process of thought-expression by substituting itself for them; it is in the verb’s inability to specify its own object that its sign-power resides: it leaves them to be determined by the situation. The sign points to their determination. It stands for what actions may come next that leads to their determination. The power of the sign is to determine a process of determination to take place that must move collaterally into the situation of the utterance, and supplement it with follow-on actions
• The sign’s sense – its meaning, import, enunciative force – is none other than this powering of an expressive movement inviting a relay into collateral observation and an embodied movement of exploration supplementing the action of the verb
• but at the same time dynamizes it from within
• This thirdness interposes itself between the subjects involved, over-filling the gaps between their utterances. It is also what is left over and above the finitude of the individual subjects involved in the situation. It is what exceeds them, so that there must be a sign without an utterer or an interpreter – and, substituting for them, something essential for thought’s moving-out pragmatically into process
• It is the Object of expression that can never be fully expressed, but without which expression would have nowhere to go but into generality
• It is the Object as incumbent in the texture of the situation, replete with would-bes: all that is potentially sought for collaterally. The all surrounding the some of the sign: the Object become environmental. The essential ingredient, the “Object,” is what Peirce calls the environmental “form of fact.” It is the all-around of the in-situation, as triangulated by potential
• Something else entirely is at stake: that “the minds of the utterer and the interpreter have to be fused in order that any communication should take place.” This Peirce enigmatically names the Commind (commens).
• the Commind is not just “what is forced upon the mind in perception, but includ[es] more than perception reveals.”
• the continuum potentially inhabiting the gaps in the situation into which the quaesitum recedes
• In every case, it is essentially the situation’s virtual thinking of itself that self-reports through the process of semiosis.

8 more annotations...