MOTION IS THE act of the agent in the patient: so goes the classic definition of dynamic action or "brute force", what the scholastics called "transitive action", that is, action that passes from one thing to another through the production of change. In Aristotle's categories of physical being, action and passion (punching and being punched, say) are dyadic, strictly correlative, the one as initiating and the other as terminating. The resultant change is the action of the agent transpiring in the patient, that is, in the one undergoing the action, and its traces endure as part of the physical order itself (principally in the patient as outcome but in the agent, too, as vestiges and clues).

The action of signs is entirely different. It is not productive of change directly. It is always mediated. It lacks the directness of punching and being punched. Even when the semiosis is involved with dyadic dynamicity, as it always is, though to varying degrees, what gives the action of signs its curiously detached and ethereal quality is precisely its indirection, what Peirce rightly characterized as its irreducible triadicity. The sign not only stands for something other than itself, it does so for some third; and though these two relations—sign to signified, sign to interpretantmay be taken separately, when they are so taken, there is no longer a question of sign but of cause to effect on one hand and object to knowing subject on the other. In short, for the relation of sign to signified to exist in its proper being as semiotic (smoke as a sign of fire, let us say), regardless of whether that relation exists dyadically as well (say, as an effect to cause relation between smoke and something burning), reference to the future in a third element, the interpretant, is essential. And this third element is essential, regardless of whether the thirdness is actual here and now or only virtual and "waiting to be realized" (as in a bone to be discovered next year as having belonged to an extinct species of dinosaur not previously known to have wandered as far as Montana).

Seeing that the being proper to signs has, historically, this essentially and irreducible triadic character was an insight hard come by, as Poinsot's survey of the opinions contesting as late as 1632 attests (Tractatus de Signis, Book I, Question 2, esp. 154/35ff.). In certain respects, the point did not become fully centralized thematically within the doctrine of signs until Peirce displaced the ontological typologies of earlier semiotic analyses with the epigenetic typologies of the sign considered as the nexus and but temporarily "fixed foot" in a continuing and continuous process of signification, wherein the relation between objective and physical being constitutive of experience and modificative of each physical status quo is sustained dynamically (and hence dependent throughout). Nonetheless, the essential point was established early that (Poinsot 1632a: 157/38-41) "in the very innards and intimate rationale of such a substitution for and representation of a signified", as is a sign, there is an indirection over and above any directly physical connection. Peirce's later work serves to underscore that the original controversies had resulted in a definitive achievement of semiotic analysis, which Poinsot formulated thus (1632a: 156/23-157/10, 157/19-27):

Although an object in respect of a power is not constituted essentially in a relation to that power, but rather does the power depend upon the object, nevertheless, in the case of a sign, which is vicegerent for an object in the representing and exhibiting of itself to a power, this relation is necessarily included, and by a twofold necessity: both because a substitution for anything is always in an order to something, and since a sign substitutes for and functions in the capacity of the thing signified in an order to the office of representing to a power, the sign must necessarily express an order to a power; and because to represent is to make an object present to a power, therefore, if a sign is a medium and substitute of the signified in representing, it necessarily involves an order to that to which it represents or makes present. For in the case of these relations which exist in the mode of substituting and representing, it is impossible that they should respect that whose vicegerent they are, and not that on account of which or in an order to which they substitute, because it is in substituting or functioning in the capacity of another according to some determinate rationale and in an order to some determinate end that one thing is a vicegerent of that other.

The sign first of all depends on something other than itself. It is representative but only in a derivative way, in a subordinate capacity. The moment a sign slips out from under this subordination, as frequently happens, at just that moment does it cease for a while to be a sign. A sign seen standing on its own is not seen as a sign, even though it may remain one virtually.¹¹ Thus on its own, it is a mere object or thing become object, waiting to become a sign, perhaps, or having formerly been a sign, perhaps, but, on its own, not actually a sign at all.

So a sign is a representative, but not every representative is a sign. Things can represent themselves within experience. To the extent that they do so, they are objects and nothing more, even though in their becoming objects signs and semiosis are already invisibly at work. To be a sign, it is necessary to represent something other than the self. Being a sign is a form of bondage to another, to the signified, the object that the sign is not but that the sign nevertheless stands for and represents.

This is the most important fact about the sign, because it is what is most decisive for it: its thorough relativity. There are signs that are also objects in their own right, just as there are objects that are also things. But there are no signs that are not relative to some object other than themselves, and that object or those objects to which the sign is relative we call the signified or significate, the essential content of the sign insofar as it is a sign.

Because the essential content or being of the sign is relative, the key to understanding what is proper to the sign is the notion of relativity, relation, or relative being. Without this content, the sign ceases to be a sign, whatever else it may happen to be. Stripped of its thirdness, the sign slips back into the dyadic order of mere actual existence or, perhaps even further, into the monadic order of mere possibilities and dreams beyond which there is nowhere to go. Conversely, what enables some mere possibility or some actual physical entity to become also a sign is the fact, contingent or necessary as the case may be, that it acquires a relation to something else such that it stands for that other. So, if we can understand what it means to say that a being is a relative being, we will be in a fair position to say further what a sign is in its proper being, since this being is perforce relative. And, as we shall see, it is the peculiar and unique character of relative being—in the sense that pertains to the sign in its proper being, but that also obtains physically in the order of nature independently of being experienced—that explains why such a peculiar activity as semiosis and such a peculiar phenomenon as truth and falsehood (which is an offshoot of semiosis) is possible in the first place.

Here again we deal with a matter that has a lengthy and tangled history. As our concern is doctrinal, however, I do not have to presume intimate knowledge of the history of the question of relative being on the part of the reader. It will be enough for the present if the reader understand the terms and distinctions that will be here directly made. Then, later, he or she may investigate the historical materials that made the terms and distinctions of the present explanation possible, in order to evaluate what other reading of the historical development might also be possible and useful for advancing the understanding of semiosis.

I will proceed, therefore, to merely state the matter directly, without burdening the reader with detailed citations from and references to the many authors since Aristotle who contributed to the development of the matter to the point where a direct statement of the present sort became possible. I will instead cite only a few texts clarifying the most central points, and only from those authors, particularly Poinsot, who were able to point out directly how these central points contribute directly to establishing the basics of a doctrine of signs.

And further to ease the reader's grasp of the basic notions, let me frame the discussion of relative being with a very concrete example, put in the form of a question: When a child dies, in what sense is the child's parent a parent? The concreteness of the question may serve as an antidote to the inevitable and perhaps extreme abstractness of the subject to be explained. For in dealing with the question of relative being, particularly in that aspect decisive for understanding the activity and being proper to signs, even though we are dealing with what is most basic to the experience of all of us in its being as experience, we are yet dealing with that one aspect of direct experience which escapes entirely direct sensory perception. For relative being in this sense—the intersubjective as such—is indirectly given even at the level of sensation rationally distinguished from and within perceptions. A lover may not be understood but can at least be seen and touched. A relation in the sense constitutive of the sign in the being proper to it as sign can not be seen or touched. It can be understood, but, without that understanding, it cannot be grasped directly at all. Animals make use of signs without knowing that there are signs, Maritain noted—that is to say (1957: 53), "without perceiving the relation of signification".

"Perceiving", moreover, may be understood in several senses. There is at one level a purely sensory perception, distinct from and superordinate to (as containing and further specifying) external sensations. At this level the relation of signification can be grasped in actu exercito, that is to say, grasped in a practical way as employed in interaction to make one's way in the physical surroundings and especially to get control over them or turn them to one's advantage. There is at another level an intellectual perception, also containing the lower levels of sensory perception and external sensation in a superordinate way, and at this level the relation of signification can be not only used and manipulated in actu exercito but also distinguished from the vehicle conveying it and the object it conveys. It can be considered in actu signato, that is, directly and according to what is proper to it, not as an object directly experienced (for directly we experience only the objects related, sign vehicle on the one hand and object signified on the other hand, albeit as connecting in a single experience). This possibility, we will see, underlies anthroposemiosis in its difference from zoösemiosis. But first it will be necessary to achieve an understanding of relation in this abstract sense, only indirectly given in experience, and then to see how it applies to both zoösemiosis in the establishment of an Umwelt and to anthroposemiosis in the transformation, principally through language, of the biological Umwelt into the distinctively human Lebenswelt (if yet species-specific, at least no longer closed upon itself).

So we take up our question: In what sense is the parent of a dead child still a parent?

To answer this somewhat unpleasant question, let us begin by considering the notion of parenthood itself, a clearly relative form of being. It is early enough in the development of reproductive technology to confine our consideration here to the traditional form of parenthood, that which results from a sexual exchange between a male and a female of the species, as a result of which the female conceives and comes to term. At that moment, initially unknown to the couple responsible, they have become what formerly they were not, parents of this offspring.

Right away it is easy to see that "being a parent" or "becoming a parent", in the minimal sense, results from an action that is over and above the being of each of the individuals taken as independent biological organisms in their own right. It is true, of course, that there are also cultural notions of parent and parenthood that overlay and are in some degree detachable from this biologically rooted notion, according to which one may "be a parent" in the cultural sense by raising offspring not begotten by one's own sexual actions or "not be a parent" by failing to live up to the responsibilities ensuing from one's own sexual action. But the observing of these refinements serves here to make clear the more determinate and limited sense in which we are posing our question.

Thus, the being of a parent is identified with, but not identical with, the being of each or either of the two organisms begetting the child. Being a parent is an aspect of the being of both, a characteristic of the being of each of them, but not in the sense that each has an individual skin color, say, or weight.¹² This characteristic we are considering, newly acquired, attaches to the generating organisms not as independent individual organisms in their own right, nor even as dyadically interacting organisms, but only as organisms interacting in such a way as to have achieved, deliberately or not, "a third kind of being, consisting in and resulting from the coordination in time of two extremes", the generating pair taken together as one extreme (the unity of transitive action, "the act of the agent in the patient"), the child generated taken as the other. In short, the characteristic of being a parent rests not on the dynamic interaction of sexual activity alone but on that taken together with, coordinated with, a certain outcome that exists precisely as a trajectory independent of either parent in his or her individual being.

At the same time, the child is "their child", and they are "this child's parents", as it were, permanently. But, of course, all three may die, separately or together. What is permanent is not in the material and biological order but in the order of discourse and understanding. It is a matter of a truth, whether it be known or not, forgotten or remembered: that child was of those parents.

At a certain moment, the individual organisms existing unto themselves acquired as a permanent part of their being, not from the standpoint of existence, but from the standpoint of understanding, the quality of being parents of that child; and the child, from the first, had as a quality of its being, being the offspring of those parents. To be fully understood, the individuals who became parents must be understood with regard to the child, and the child, to be fully understood, must be known in relation to the parents.

Of course, on the side of existence, the parents are not a mere relation to the child, and the child is not a mere relation to the parents. Each exists in its own right, separate from the others. Nonetheless, although neither is the relation characterizing their being, neither can be fully known unless that relation be included.

Here we have the first and most general sense in which being is relative: according to the requirements of understanding. Within experience, every individual exists in such a way as to require being thought of in terms of things that the individual is not, in order to be understood for what the indiviudal is. This requirement transcends the independent aspect of the individual existent and in fact reveals that independent aspect to be itself dependent upon other factors, some present and still essential (like the atmosphere and gravity, for example) and others past and essential no longer to the individual existing before us (like the dead parents, say, or the prehistoric organisms that began the process of establishing an oxidizing atmosphere).

In the middle ages, the philosophers were mainly concerned with understanding and classifying the ways in which an individual could be said to be able to exist in its own right independent of our knowledge of that existence as a matter of individual or actual fact. They were disconcerted to find that certain aspects of even possible existence could not be reduced to a determinate classification, but invaded every possible determinate classification. To their credit, they did not simply trivialize or brush aside these discoveries, despite the fact that they were unwelcome in terms of their theoretical goal and anomalous to it. Instead, they established a rudimentary systematization of these vagrant aspects of being (ens vagans, they said, a rather colorful phrase) by assigning them the name of "transcendentals", that is, characteristics transcending any one determinate mode of possible existence in the physical order of being.

Later on, probably after Duns Scotus (c. 1302-1303), this name of "transcendental" became transferred or extended to that intractable sense of relative being that turned out to pertain to the understanding of even the most independent modes of physical entities, and which previously (after Boethius, c.510) had been called only by the confused and confusing title of relatio or relativum secundum dici, what we have called being relative according to the requirements of discourse or understanding.

However, being a parent whose child is living proof here and now and being relative according to the requirements of discourse, are not the same thing. For the parent was relative in other ways according to the requirements of discourse before the child came along, and to this condition the child added something real. This addition was more than a mere new aspect of the organism become parent, more, that is, than an aspect permanently modifying the discursive demands of that organism-become-parent on an omniscient understanding (indeed, modification of this sort the sexual intercourse alone, without any issue of offspring, would have achieved!). The relativity according to the requirements of discourse is permanent in a way that the prospective nurturing relation between parent and offspring is not. For this relation, both must exist; for the former or transcendental relation, continued existence is not necessary.

So there is a second sort of relative being, one that is not identified with either side of a related pair but that exists between them and exists in no other way. This relation may or may not be known. For example, a male may engage in a sexual relation that results in an offspring only after he is no longer around to know about it. In such a case, the child is determinately the child of this parent, even though the parent does not know he is a parent and the child may never know who its parent is or was. In such a case, while both father and offspring exist, the relation between them is independent of being determinately known, as is proved by the neither of them determinately knowing it, but is nonetheless determinate between them: that one is the father of this child, this child is the offspring of that parent. The relation is purely physical.

In the more acceptable case, where the offspring is both known and nurtured by the parent, the physical relation is objective as well as physical. That is to say, it is recognized as existing as well as existing. This relation, objective and physical or merely physical, is distinct from and superordinate to the individual being of both parent and child. It is not merely that intelligible aspect proper to the individual being of both whereby, henceforward, in order to be fully understood, each must be thought in connection with the other. Unlike this permanent aspect of intelligibility, the physical relation and the objectivity that may or may not accompany it are transitive: they are a type of relation that comes into being for a while and then ceases or, in the case of the objective relation, that may pass in and out of being many times, in each case remaining as a relation unchanged in its essential content.

Moreover, when the child is not only of this parent but known to be of this parent, the physical and the objective relation are the same. This is never true of the transcendental relation. The relation whereby this organism must be understood (if it is to be fully understood, which of course it need not: it is a question of an ideal requirement which becomes actual to the extent full understanding is accomplished) as parent of that organism is never the same as the relation whereby that organism is to be understood as child of this parent. For the transcendental relation in each case belongs to the individual being in what of it is not the other individual. Poinsot summarized the point thus (1632a: 90/23-27): "a transcendental relation is not a form adventitious to a subject or absolute thing, but something imbibed thereto, while connoting something extrinsic upon which the subject depends or with which it was engaged". In short (ibid. 90/33-37):

A transcendental relation is in the subjective entity itself and does not differ from its subjective being, and so its whole being is not respecting another, which is what is required for a relation according to its being.

Relativity in the second sense, to which we have yet to assign a distinct name, is identical with the actual connection between two subjective entities here and now, whether that connection be physical or objective. When a being which is the parent of a child is also known to be the parent of that child, the relation between the parent and the child is both physical and objective. If the child dies, the physical relation between them ceases, but it remains that the erstwhile parent must be thought of as having been the parent of that child if the parent is to be understood according to the full extent of its intelligible being. When the parent is not only knowable as parent of the child now dead (i.e., transcendentally relative), but is here and now thought of in relation to the now dead child, the once physical relation is now re-established in an objective way: the parent is not only thinkable in truth relative to that child, but actually thought in relation to that child. The relative in the first sense is in itself "something absolute on which follows or could follow" a relative in the second sense, which is the difference between something that is relative in the transcendental sense and something relative as a relation purely and strictly so called.¹³

We see then that transcendental relation captures the realization that everything that exists does so through a series of interactions. Some of these interactions preceded the now existing thing; other of the interactions are ones the thing itself is engaged in; and yet other of the interactions are consequent upon those that the thing itself is engaged in, although it is not itself engaged directly in those consequences, either because it is there and then elsewhere engaged or because it has itself ceased to be, period. On the other hand, there are the relations themselves attendant upon all these interactions. They are, comparatively speaking, ethereal. They are not the related things; they are the relations themselves. They are not in the things; they are between them. Yet they exist, physically when not known, objectively when known, objectively and physically when the knowing and the beings related temporally coincide, purely objectively when the two diverge, either through the passage of time (objective historical relations) or because the relations conceived have not yet existed (a future machine) or cannot exist physically in the way that they are conceived (nine-foot insects on the surface of this planet). Transcendental relations are not relations strictly and properly but comparative requirements of action and intelligibility. What are the relations strictly and properly is that which is consequent upon the interactions or actual understandings not as effects but as the patterns according to which effects eventuate and causes act. Thus, parenthood is a relation, but a parent is an agent, and a child is an effect. The foundation of the relation of parenthood in any given case is a determinate outcome of a determinate action, but the relation itself is neither the contingent action nor its determinate outcome. The relation is the pattern, the thirdness, linking the two and superordinate to each.

Let us expand our example for a moment, choosing an illustration no less concrete but even more homely. Consider a room with all its furnishings piled in the center, and that same room with these same furnishings tastefully arranged. Not one thing in the room is different in the two cases, only what is between the things, namely, their pattern or arrangement. Yet what a difference in the room. And the difference is a genuine difference; it is a "physical" difference in our sense.¹⁴ Moreover, the relations cannot be changed directly. Only the things in the room can be directly acted upon, whence the change in the relations follows.

We see then what is singular about the being of relations in the strict sense: when a physical individual or any subjective aspect of a material being is conceived in the mind, what is conceived is not that individual as it exists apart from the mind but precisely that individual in relation to the conception. But, when I conceive of a physical relation strictly as such, both what exists apart from the thinking and what exists through the thinking are identical, are relations in the same sense. A subjective mode of being objectively represented in the mind is in principle other than the represented thing, even though and when the two may coincide: Homer I know in thought, others knew him in person as well; the centaur I know in thought as well as any other man knows the centaur. But an intersubjective mode of being objectively represented is in principle no other than the thing it is represented to be. Both what is thought and the basis on which it is thought, both what is apart from the mind and what is conceived in the mind, are relations in the same sense, are in their content identical, even though and when the two may diverge.

This is a point that seems first to have been made explicitly by Cajetan (1507: in 1. 28. art. 1. par. 9):

Relation is the one type of being for which the qualification "existing in the mind" does not detract from what is proper to it, as this qualification does detract from what is proper to every other type of being. For a rose formed by thought is not a rose, nor is Homer in opinion Homer; but a relation formed by the mind is a true relation.

Nor is the distinction between a rose in physical existence and a rose in objective existence a distinction of essentially diverse entities, of which the one is a mind-independent being and the other a mind-dependent being, as we have said occurs with relations: it is a distinction rather of one and the same essential type according to two different ways of existing, namely, in itself subjectively or in knowledge relatively.

In other words, in the classical terminology of subject of a relation, terminus of a relation, and foundation or ground of a relation (the basis on which subject and terminus are related), the transcendental relation covers the subject of the relation precisely as founding the relation and also the term of the relation in whatever other aspects it may have over and above that of being a terminus purely and strictly, whereas the ontological relation covers strictly the relation itself as an intersubjective mode or pattern between subject and terminus whence they are caught up in common (Poinsot 1632a: 84/45-85/19):

A relation accrues to a subject without any change that is directly and immediately terminated at the relation, but not without a change that is terminated mediately and indirectly at that relation. Just as risibility results from the same action by which a man is produced, so from the production of a white thing is produced similitude to another existing white thing. But if another white thing did not exist, by virtue of the generation of the first white thing that similitude and any other relation that would result from the positing of its terminus would remain in a virtual state. Whence distance neither conduces to nor obstructs the resultance of a pure relation, because these relations do not depend upon a local situation; for near or far, a son is in the same way the son of his father. Nor is the relation in the other extreme produced by the terminus itself through some emission of power when it is brought into existence. Rather is the existence of the terminus the condition for a relation's resulting from an already existing fundament by virtue of the original generation whereby that fundament was brought into being as inclining toward any terminus of such a fundament. Whence even though the generating has now ceased, it yet remains in its effect or power, inasmuch as it leaves a fundament sufficient for a relation to result.

We are now in a position to answer our question about the living parent whose child has died. The parent remains a parent at the level of transcendental relation, while ceasing to be a parent at the level of physical relation, although this physical relation continues to exist objectively to the extent that the parent or anyone else thinks about it. The same relation formed now only in thought formerly existed also physically, and it is by virtue of that same relation that the parent is a parent.

Of course, if, as happens, a supposed father, say, was deceived into thinking that a child was his when in fact it was begotten by another, the objective relation according to which he was called and thought to be, perhaps even by the child, "father", continues without ceasing in any sense upon the death of the child. It is thus by the relation on its physical side that the father is in fact the father, while it is by that same relation (or by what is thought to be that relation even though it is in fact a different relation owing to the nonexistence of a physical relation for the objective relation to be the same as) that the father is called "father". Thus is the truth of dicisigns a consequence of the relations they embody according to whether what is asserted objectively coincides with or deviates from what exists relative to another order of being than the objective.

This peculiarity of ontological relation—whereby it, and it alone in the whole of physical reality, is indifferent to the source or ground of its being—underlies semiosis as a unique type of activity in nature. The same relation or set of relations that exists at one time purely objectively may be transferred as such into the order of physical being. When this happens, the physical order itself is reorganized and realizes possibilities that previously were remote rather than proximate and actual. This, as we will consider in chapter 6, is what happens throughout physiosemiosis, as a given environment becomes modified more and more in the direction of being hospitable to life, and then subsequently still further in the direction of more and more complex or "higher" forms of life.¹⁸ Here it will be enough to show how the ontological singularity unique to relation in the order of physical being provides the ground for the prior possibility of semiosis at the level of the experience of organisms, which is our main concern here, inasmuch as, as we have already seen, it is at the upper levels of biosemiosis that the basic concepts of semiotics have been fully established.

The common ground of biosemiosis lies in what used to be called "natural signs", but what is now more commonly divided, after Peirce, into indices, icons, and symbols (although of course not all icons or symbols are natural signs, either). A footprint in the sand is indexical of a person's passing, and of the direction of the passing, unless the footprints be the skillful work of a man passing east in such a way as to leave the impression of a man passing west, in which event the footprints remain indexically accurate to a degree but iconically misleading in another degree, and are in fact symbols of an exceptional skill.

Natural signs are essential to the survival of most if not all species of animals. They need to be taken for what they are, or, in the reverse case, mistaken for what they are intended to be mistaken for, if the animal in question is to secure its food. What happens in such a case? Precisely that the foundation for a physical relation is taken or mistaken for a corresponding objective relation, as a result of which food is provided or safety secured.

The relation of clouds to rain is a relation of cause and effect. When that relation has also been experienced, an interpretant becomes established. What was formerly a mere physical relation, a relation of secondness, acquires now, through the interpretant, a thirdness whereby that same relation functions also semiotically Because the physical relationship as such need only be dyadic, whereas the semiotic relationship is necessarily triadic, there is the possibility of error, or misinterpretation. There is also the possibility of deception. The objective world wherein actual semiosis transpires is only occasionally the same and in large part different from the physical environment. But to the extent that it is the same, to the extent that it overlaps—and this is the extent to which every species depends for its survival on food, which is a considerable extent—that extent and that overlap result from the indifference of intersubjective being to the difference between what is objective and what is physical, as we have seen.

Thus, it is the being proper to relation that is also the being proper to signs, even though relations properly speaking need not be semiosic relations. Not all relations in the ontological sense pass through actual experience, but all relations in the ontological sense are indifferent to the order of physical existence, such that, once taken up into actual experience, they also take on an objective life relatively independent of physical being. It is in this way that they provide the raw material of biosemiosis. The actual being proper to the sign is the being of an ontological relation taken up into the experience of an organism, whether directly from the biological heritage of that organism (so-called "instinctive notions") or culled rather from individual experience, where it serves to connect objectively perceptual and sensory elements. The action of signs first arises precisely from physically related environmental factors coming to be seen objectively as related, and, conversely, from objectively related factors being presented as physically related. The uniqueness of semiosis as an activity and the detached and ambiguous quality it has as an action results from the being peculiar and proper to the ontological relation whereby, as we have seen, it can be neither directly altered nor directly perceived. The permeability of relation as such to realization in either the physical or the objective order also makes the two indistinguishable in direct experience. This is a matter not of confusion but of the reality proper to experience, wherein the objective and the physical are intertwined in the sign. This permeability is why the natural sign provides a common denominator in biosemiosis, even though it can be natural in different ways for different species.

An example of a natural sign unique to the level of anthroposemiosis may help to grasp the general point at stake here. Let us consider the case of a fossil bone. This bone may or may not be known to exist. If not, let us suppose it yet belongs to a class of bones well established among those expert in the Pleistocene. One day the bone is uncovered, but by a gardener, not a paleontologist. Since the bone is in an advanced state of fossilization, let us suppose that our gardener does not even recognize it as a bone, let alone a fossil bone. For that, a more developed interpretant is required, one proportioned more exactly to what the bone relates to in its living past. Nevertheless, a fossil bone is just what it is. Such an interpretant as is required for its recognition nowhere existed actually in the middle ages, let us say, but now, among our postulated Pleistocene specialists, it exists indeed as a common property.

What is this interpretant? Certainly not an idea psychologically considered. It is rather an idea in the semiotic sense, moreover as fashioned publically through the training of paleontologists, such that those who have by training acquired it possess in their minds a foundation or "fundament" whence will result or "dimanate", under appropriate conditions, a network of relations including that bone.¹⁹ But first, one of them at least will have to see the bone in question.

Supposing that occurs. Supposing that one of our students of the Pleistocene visits our gardener just as the gardener is about to deposit into a trash bin the bone which had irritatingly obstructed his gardening. "What is that you have there?" Now our gardener, being also a student of Peirce, may at this point respond, casually tossing the bone toward the trash, "A brute fact at the level of secondness."

But our paleontologist had not asked her question idly. She had spoken out of a glimmer of suspicion, a hint of recognition, as it were—she was voicing in context a low-risk abductive gamble. Into the brute fact at the level of secondness something of thirdness had already, thanks to her training, begun to enter. "Let me have a closer look", she said, moving toward the bone discarded as a peculiarly shaped rock. "This", she announces on careful inspection, "is no rock. This is a rare fossil bone, which just may revolutionize a bit of our understanding of the Pleistocene in this area." Whereupon, clutching the bone with great excitement, she ran off in the direction of the university.

What has happened here? A physical relation, recognized for what it had been, thanks to the dynamic interaction of its fundament (the bone) producing physical changes in the student of paleontology's optic nerves, became at the same moment also a sign of what had been. A transcendental relation, the bone of a dinosaur, which once had a physical relation to that dinosaur, but no more (the dinosaur being dead), yet gave rise to an objective relation corresponding somewhat with the physical relation that had been. The gardener's rock had become the paleontologist's sign.