Peirce and Quality

Peirce's modal triad of Possibility-Actuality-Necessity seems to replicate Kant's arrangement of them, but he ascribes more to them than does the latter. For Kant, they are primarly Logical categories, e. g. 'Possibility' means 'non-contradictory', whereas Peirce imputes more to them, e. g. 'Possibility' also means 'germinal'. Complicating Peirce's treatment of Possibility is his attribution of it to another First, Quality, a notion that is itself unsettled in his System. His notion of Quality vacillates between an Empiricist interpretation, as an immediate monadic datum of experience, e. g. bare Red, and a Platonist account, as a Form that transcends any awareness of it, e. g. Redness. Both interpretations are difficult to reconcile with other aspects of his System. In the one case, his analysis elsewhere of Sensation as an homogenization of a manifold of neural irritations seems to conflict with his assertion here of it as simple and immediate. In the other, his criterion of the Truth of a proposition, namely experienceable effects, seems grounds to reject his assertion here that a Quality exists even when it is not being perceived. Furthermore, this confusion over the nature of Quality may be the root of the complications in his Semiotic theory that have been under discussion. It may be that the main reason that he insists that a Sign is a First, and, therefore, that it precedes its Object, is that Qualities are main examples of Signs, and he has committed himself to according Firstness to Qualities. In contrast, in Evolvementalism, the immediate object of any awareness, even sensation, is some bodily process, so, a Quality, qua Sign, represents some preceding Actuality. From that perspective, Peirce's insistence that a Sign precedes its Object may be vestigial Platonism in his System.