Abstrakt
The aim of the proposed paper is to explain the origins of Peirce's semiotic formulated in his 1865-6 Harvard and Lowell Lectures in the framework of his metaphysical and logical thought of the time. My exposition follows the line of Peirce's understanding of metaphysics as "the philosophy of primal truths" (W1: 59) and the proposal of "logical treatment of metaphysics" (W1: 63).
Peirce's unpsychological treatment of logic can be seen as the actual fulfillment of his conception of metaphysics on the one hand, and on the other hand this view of logic is grounded in semiotic conceived as the "general science of representations" (W1: 303). Peirce's goal in this set of investigations is to work-out the general theory of inference, i.e. both analytic, or explicative, and synthetic, or ampliative, reasoning.
He aims to show that all kinds of inference are at the same time generically united and specifically differentiated. To achieve this goal, he employs the notion of "symbolization" or semiotic conception of inference, according to which every argument consists in making a conclusion-symbol (an interpretant) out of the premisses- symbol, and there are exactly three ways how this can be done, i.e. deduction, hypothesis, and induction, further distinguished by the kind of information they provide.
Peirce's early semiotic is seen to give support to the logical theory, but such logic is in turn conceived as a method of metaphysics (W1: 302).