Abstract
In "Three Essays on Infinity and God" (1859, W 1: 37-43) as well as some other early writings Peirce presented an account of how something unthinkable could be represented. Understanding representation as a "modification of consciousness" (e.g. 1859, W 1: 42; 1861, W 1: 85; March 1862, W 1: 68), Peirce needed to show how the mind can objectively relate to something which cannot be present in it, i.e. cannot be thought.
The aim of my paper is to offer a reconstruction of Peirce's theory of mental representation which generated the problem in the first place. I shall argue that Peirce's early view could be interpreted as a species of representationalism in the statement that the immediate contents of consciousness are representations.
But by his insistence on that a representation has, as its source, the object thought-of (1859, W 1: 40), it is a representationalism of a very peculiar kind.