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THE COMPREHENSIVE CATEGORIES OF LIFE

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 THE COMPREHENSIVE CATEGORIES
OF LIFE

STEPHEN WOOD
21B Gwendolen Avenue, Putney, London SW15 6ET
[email protected]
06/03/2005

1. AN EXPLORATION OF THE PHILOSOPHY

OF C. S. PEIRCE
I came to the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) through
Stanley Salthe. I had been interested in the theory of hierarchies for some
years and reading Salthe’s Evolving Hierarchical Systems (1985) and
Development and Evolution (1993), I was intrigued by his suggestion that
Peirce’s triadic philosophy held the key to such a theory. Specifically,
Salthe draws attention to Peirce’s theory of signs and his triad of object,
sign and system of interpretance. In my PhD thesis, I had identified three
stages to the process of classification and three founding relations –
features, similarities and homologies (Wood, 1996: 43-44). In my paper
for ANPA 23, I made the first attempt to describe these findings in
Salthe’s terms (Wood, 2002: 216-217).

Returning to Salthe’s works, I was challenged to come to understand

Peirce’s thought better. Having started researching, I quickly found that
it was not only Peirce’s theory of signs that was important for me, but
also his philosophy of the comprehensive categories. The categories of
first, second and third, while finding expression in his semiotics, have
much wider implications. It was to his metaphysical categories that
Peirce turned when describing the key ideas of biology and each of the
sciences.

In this paper, I show how Peirce’s triadic philosophy – present in his

categories of first, second and third and in his semiotics of sign, object
and interpretant –illuminates the study of living things. Connecting
Peirce’s philosophy to the three levels of living organization described by
Maturana and Varela (1987), I justify Peirce’s conclusion that all living
things have a primitive form of mind.
Turning to classification, I discuss different schools in terms of
preference for different kinds of relation, monadic, dyadic or triadic. I
reveal that Peirce discovered the triadic logic of cladistics almost a
hundred years before Nelson and Platnick (1981). I describe the three
stages of cladistic classification in semiotic terms, showing that each
involves the discovery of a particular kind of sign.

2. FIRST, SECOND, THIRD

Firstness is freshness, life, freedom, immediacy, feeling, quality, vivacity,
independence, being-in-itself, potentiality, concrete yet undifferentiated.
Secondness is action, resistance, facticity, dependence, relation,
compulsion, effect, reality, result, stability. Thirdness is mediation,
synthesis, living, continuity, process, moderation, learning, memory,
inference, representation, intelligence, intelligibility, generality, infinity,
diffusion, growth, conduct. (These descriptions come from Esposito,
1980: 162-163.)

A second comes into relation with a first, and a third mediates between
the two. The first is the beginning; the second is the end. The third is the
process, the journey from one to the other. ‘… the whole organism of
logic may be mentally evolved from the three conceptions of first,
second, and third, or more precisely, An, Other, Medium’ (Peirce in
Hoopes, 1991: 184). ‘The starting point of the universe, God, the
Creator, is the Absolute First; the terminus of the universe, God
completely revealed, is the Absolute Second; every state of the universe
at a measurable point in time is the third’ (Peirce in Hoopes, 1991: 192).

Firstness is all that is spontaneous and free, secondness is hard and

resisting. Firstness is the fullness of youth; secondness, the face of
experience. ‘In youth, the world is fresh and we seem free; but limitation,
conflict, constraint, and secondness generally, make up the teaching of
experience.

‘With what firstness

The scarfed bark puts from her native bay
with what secondness
doth she return
With overwreathed ribs and ragged sails.

‘First and Second, Agent and Patient, Yes and No, are categories which
enable us roughly to describe the facts of experience, and they satisfy the
mind for a very long time. But at last they are found inadequate, and the
Third is the conception which is then called for. The Third is that which
bridges over the chasm between absolute first and last, and brings them
into relationship’ (Peirce in Hoopes, 1991: 190). Thirdness is the
maturity that denies neither freshness nor experience and incorporates
both into its own habits of wisdom and thought.

A single fact, or monadic relation, is something such as ‘A is white,’ or

‘B is large.’ A dual fact, or dyadic relation, expresses a relation between
two, ‘A is smaller than B,’ or ‘C is the parent of D.’ A triple fact, or
triadic relation, expresses a relation between three parties which cannot
be dissolved into dyadic relations. Take ‘A gives B to C’. There is no act
of giving if we remove the giver, the gift or the recipient. What of more
complex relationships, such as ‘A gives B to C in exchange for D’?
These can be broken down into triadic relations: ‘A makes a sale, E, to C’
and ‘E is the sale of B in exchange for D.’ (See Peirce in Hoopes, 1991:
182.)

Surely, you will say that ‘A is white’ implies ‘X is black’ or that ‘B is

large’ implies ‘Y is small’? So easily is firstness destroyed that express it
and already has it gone. Firstness captures that initial feeling of
whiteness or hugeness, preceding any attempt at comparison. Firstness
leaps out at us from its context, and for a fleeting moment obliterates all
else with its sense of uniqueness. ‘What the world was to Adam on the
day he opened his eyes to it, before he had become conscious of his own
existence [the uroboric state of Wilber, 1996: 48], – that is first, present,
immediate, fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid,
conscious, and evanescent. Only, remember that every description of it
must be false to it’ (Peirce in Hoopes, 1991: 189).

‘A sign …is a First which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a

Second, called its Object, as to be capable of determining a Third, called
its Interpretant, to assume the same triadic relation to its Object in which
it stands itself to the same Object … Anything which determines
something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers
(its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and
so on an infinitum ‘ (Peirce in Liszka, 1996; see figure 1). ‘The stove is
black’ is a sign, a firstness, a unity which can be analysed into its ground,
the quality of blackness, and its object. The object comes second,
prescinded of all qualities, hypothesised as that which is other to the sign.
The interpretant provides the context, the way in which the sign comes to
be a sign for some sign-user. The interpretant may be ‘Ooh, it’s an Aga’
or ‘My goodness, it needs cleaning.’ The seemingly straightforward
information provided by ‘The stove is black’ only flows to the user along
a local logic, expressed in the interpretant. The meaning of the sign, its
life, lies in thirdness, the interpretant, which is itself another sign. Signs
lie within a network of other signs; they lie within an implicate sea of
ideas.

Figure 1: The triad of sign, object and interpretant

3. KOESTLER’S EXAMPLE
Arthur Koestler gave an early account of hierarchy theory in The Ghost in
the Machine (1967). A journalist and acclaimed novelist, Koestler also
published in experimental psychology. In The Ghost in the Machine, he
attempted to find a third way between Gestalt psychology and
Behaviourism. The Gestalt school looked for the monads of experience,
wholes that could not be further broken down. Behaviourism divided all
interaction into dyads of stimulus and response. A conversation, for
example, can be reduced to a chain of mutually determining
stimulus/response units.

Koestler (1967: 20-21) quotes a passage from a Behaviourist textbook,

describing a dialogue between a man and a woman. He asks her the time.
She tells him. He thanks her. She says ‘Don’t mention it’ and he
responds by asking ‘How about lunch?’ How, Koestler asks, can the
man’s request be determined by the woman saying ‘Don’t mention it’?
And how can the two be regarded as a unit of behaviour? The woman
could colour her words in so many ways – did she say the sentence
briskly, brushing him off, or lingeringly, with a sexy smile? Whether the
man asks her out is also very much affected by whether he finds her
attractive, is free for lunch and can afford it.

Koestler has drawn attention to the interpretant and the whole network of
other signs that bring meaning to the conversation and make it alive for
its participants.
4. LIFE = SIGN = MIND
Or, the Difference between a Thermostat and a Living Cell

Cells have the ability to move towards or away from light, to sense and
avoid heat, and to move towards sources of food. These responses are
called taxes. What is their significance?

In each cell, there is a web of molecular interactions that gives the cell its
life. This dynamic web is the way the cell makes itself, perpetuates itself
and defines itself, i.e. creates its own boundary. This is the autopoietic
organization of the cell (Maturana and Varela, 1987: 43-47).

Different substances enter into the life of the cell in different ways.
Heterotrophic organisms, such as the bacterium Escherichia coli, obtain
energy from external sources of food. Phototrophic organisms, such as
the alga Chlamydomonas, obtain energy from light. E. coli swims
towards high concentrations of glucose, a molecule on which it feeds.
Chlamydomonas orientates itself in the direction of blue-green light, but
not to red light, which it is unable to utilise.

Heterotrophic cells orientate themselves in a world according to the

concentration gradients of food sources. Phototrophic cells orientate
themselves in a world according to the intensity of sources of light to
which they are sensitive. Each brings forth this world through the role
that these sources play in the business of living.

The chemotactic response of an E. coli cell moving up a glucose gradient

can be modelled as a feedback mechanism, as a dyad of stimulus and
response. The feedback mechanism accommodates the sign of high
concentration and its object, glucose. However, it misses the interpretant,
namely the web of metabolic signs that is the cell’s life, and that give
meaning to the organism’s tactic response.

‘In 1891 Peirce attributed mind of a rudimentary sort to life-slimes and

protoplasm. Given their reaction to certain stimuli, he argued, they feel,
possessing a primitive form of consciousness, and hence they exercise the
basic functions of mind’ (Merrell, 1991: 131).

The law that blue-green light evokes a phototactic response in

Chlamydomonas, and red light does not, is the cell’s own, grounded in
the structure of its light-capturing molecules. The cell is autonomous,
defining its own laws, which are consistent with its own continued
existence. A thermostat is governed by a law that has been set by an
external designer. The thermostat does not make itself, renew itself or
define its own boundary. It has no life within which its measurements of
temperature become interpreted. It is just a mechanism.

5. THE TRIAD OF LIFE

According to Koestler, a cell can be seen as both an autonomous whole
and a dependent part. A cell is a holon, with the two faces of Janus, one
looking in as a self-assertive whole, and one looking out as an integrated
part. (See the summary in Koestler, 1967, appendix 1, sections 1 and 4.)

If we look to a cell’s autopoietic organization, we see how it is the

mutually sustaining web of interactions that underpins the cell’s
autonomy. If we look to the cell’s structure, we see similar physical
constituents to the environment. We see also how that structure is
maintained through constant exchanges with the environment. As
Schrödinger pointed out in What is Life? (1944), the German word for
‘metabolism’ is ‘Stoffwechsel’, or exchange of stuff. Through its
organization, the cell asserts itself as distinct from its environment.
Through its structure, the cell is integrated into its environment. It is the
process of living – which is also a process of interpreting, a process of
knowing – which reconciles the two. (For the triad of organization,
structure and process see Capra, 1996, particularly chapter 7.)

1 m

Figure 2. Electron micrograph of Magnetospirillum magnetotacticum.

Certain bacteria, such as Magnetobacter and Magnetospirillum (figure 2),

are able to detect magnetic fields and swim in the direction of magnetic
lines of force. They contain a row of particles of magnetite, which acts
like a compass needle and guides the cell towards its hemisphere’s
magnetic pole, whether north or south. Because of the inclination of the
earth'
s magnetic lines of force, this behaviour causes the bacterium to
swim downward and thus to return to the sediments in which it lives. For
an organism as tiny as a bacterium, gravity is of no consequence. So here
is an alternative mechanism by which dislodged bacteria can find their
way back into their normal habitat.

The physical structure of a magnetotactic bacterium is such that it

interacts with the earth’s magnetic field. By orientating itself with
respect to the field and choosing its direction of movement accordingly,
the bacterium undergoes a recurrent interaction with the magnetic
structure of the environment. This is what Maturana and Varela (1987:
75) call structural coupling. The bacterium has nothing as complex as a
representation of its environment. It does not need one; all it needs is
structural coupling.

In the slime mould Physarum (Maturana and Varela, 1987: figure 20),
spores grow into flagellate cells when conditions are moist, but into
amoeboid cells when conditions are dry. The coupling with the
environment involves different structural changes depending on the
external trigger. When food begins to run out, the cells aggregate. Their
cell membranes break down and they form a single plasmodial mass.
Here we have coupling not only with the environment, but between the
cells themselves. Structural changes in one cell – movement, dissolution
of the cell membrane – must be synchronised with similar changes in the
other cells. Here we see the birth of a new level of organization. A cell
is a first-order unity, which maintains its own boundary and undergoes
exchanges across that boundary. Metacellulars, such as Physarum, are
second-order unities. Here structural transformations of the cells are
coordinated into an ontogeny of the whole.

The slime moulds such as Dictyostelium (figure 3, cf. Maturana and

Varela, 1987: figure 21) show another stage in metacellularity. Here
amoeboid cells stream together in times of food shortage to form first a
mound, then a slug, in which the cells move en masse. The slug
transforms into a fruiting body to release spores and complete the life
cycle. The fruiting body is raised up above the ground on a stalk. Cells
in the stalk have strong walls and large vacuoles to give it strength. Cells
at the top of the stalk differentiate into the spore-forming cells of the
fruiting body. So beyond structural coordination, we have structural
complementarity. In truly multicellular organisms, there are a large
number of different cell types with complementary functions, which
result from complex ontogenetic pathways. Colonies of multicellular
organisms, such siphonophores and sea mats, are also second-order
unities.

Figure 3. The life cycle of Dictyostelium discoideum

For a colonial organism, there is no society, since each member is

identical to all others. In a family, by contrast, we have the society of
male and female. Here we have two different ontogenies, which are
coordinated together in the dance of sexual reproduction. Families,
communities and societies of multicellular organisms represent a new
level of organization, a third-order unity, defined by the co-ontogenies of
its members.
Figure 4. The termite life cycle

Insect societies demonstrate such a third-order unity most strikingly. In

termites (figure 4), the immature nymphs may develop into workers,
soldiers or reproductives. The reproductives develop wings and a
proportion takes flight and leaves the nest to found a new colony. After a
successful colonising and mating flight, the reproductives lose their wings
and turn into kings and queens. Initially only a few eggs are laid and
brought up by the queen herself. As the number of individuals in the
colony grows, the more workers are available to help the young queen to
care for the brood. Workers build the nest and galleries, they fetch food,
care for the young and feed reproductives and soldiers. Soldiers defend
their colony from intruders by the use of powerful jaws and/or by ejecting
a white sticky repellent from an opening on their head. Soldiers cannot
feed themselves; they have to be fed by workers. The reproductive and
non-reproductive ontogenies are closely coordinated for the continued life
of the society.

6. THREE KINDS OF RELATION

I have described single, dual and triple facts and how they express
monadic, dyadic and triadic relations respectively. There are a number of
different schools of how to classify living things. Each school shows a
preference for a particular kind of relation.

Firstly, I would like to draw attention to a preference for monadic

relations in classification. I call this classification by difference, or by
strangeness: ‘Look at X!’ For example, consider the classification of
gorillas, chimpanzees and humans. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, in his
Manual of Natural History of 1779, placed us in a separate order,
Bimana, an arrangement that was followed by Georges Cuvier. Richard
Owen, the great adversary of Charles Darwin in Victorian scientific
circles, elevated us to a separate subclass, the Archencephala (Owen,
1858). For Blumenbach, it was our opposable thumbs that set us apart;
for Owen, our enlarged brains.

This taste for the monad has influenced the classification of other groups,
for example, the whales and the birds. Carolus Linnaeus, the father of
modern taxonomy, placed birds as one of five divisions of animals. The
whales he isolate in a separate order of mammals, the Mutica. (He was
unaware that they could sing.)

A preference for dyadic relations led naturalists to say that humans are
more perfect than chimpanzees or gorillas. Indeed, the whole of creation
was arranged into a ladder of perfection, from the lowliest amoebae to the
most elevated humans – white, European males, of course. This language
of higher and lower still persists, for example, in the distinction between
lower vertebrates (fish, reptiles and amphibians) and higher vertebrates
(birds and mammals).

If we look at Ernst Haeckel’s famous evolutionary tree (1866; see figure

5), we see a different image to the ladder of perfection. The trunk of the
tree defines the axis of progress from the monera and the amoebae to
humans. The labels at the side of the tree shows the grades of perfection,
through which animals have passed. But the relations are not simply
those of perfection; they are ancestor/descendant relations: ‘X is the
ancestor of Y.’

Monadic relations were broken down and replaced by dyadic relations of

ancestry to provide evidence for evolution. Darwin (1859: 184)
suggested that whales might be descended from a group of bears, after
increasingly adventurous forays for food at the water’s edge. (Today, a
group of hoofed mammals, the mesonychids, are the favoured candidate.)
The discovery of Archaeopteryx broke the isolation of the birds, showing
their affinity with the reptiles, in particular the dinosaurs. And what more
striking argument could there be for the link between humans and
chimpanzees than the picture in Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animals (1872) of an infant chimpanzee lying on its back and
throwing a tantrum in the most human-like manner?

Figure 5. Haeckel’s evolutionary tree

One thing you will notice about Haeckel’s tree is that it has side branches.
We do not have a straight chain of descent from amoebae to humans.
Lying hidden here in Haeckel’s iconography are triadic relations. It fell
to German entomologist Willi Hennig to clarify them. He proposed
classification through sister group relationships: ‘X is more closely
related to Y than either is to Z.’ X and Y are said in this case to be sister
groups (Hennig, 1966: 139). So, crocodiles are more closely related to
birds than they are to other reptiles. A dyadic relation – reptiles are
ancestral to birds – is replaced by a triadic relation. Similarly:

1. ‘Hoofed animals are ancestral to whales’ is transformed into

‘Mesonychids are more closely related to whales than they are to
other hoofed animals.’
2. ‘Great apes are ancestral to humans’ is transformed into
‘Chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than to other
great apes.’

This is the substance of the revolution in thought that Hennig brought

about.

Hennig himself still used evolutionary language to justify the triadic

relation. An ancestral species was thought to split into daughter species,
each the ancestor of a particular sister group. ‘Evolution in this sense
(transformation) is also connected with speciation: if a species
(reproductive community) is split into two mutually isolated communities
of reproduction ... there is always a change (transformation) of at least
one character of the ancestral species in at least one of the daughter
species’ (Hennig, 1966: 88). If X and Y are sisters, with respect to Z,
then X and Y share a common ancestor that is more recent than either
shares with Z.

As Hennig’s ideas were being digested by students of classification, Gary

Nelson and Norman Platnick, at the American Museum of Natural
History, came to realise that they had no need of Hennig’s evolutionary
ontology (Nelson and Platnick, 1981). The necessity of triadic relations
to classification was implicit in the logic of branching diagrams itself.
They dispensed with ideas of perfection and ancestry and pared the
science of classification down to the following relations:

1. Monadic: ‘X exists’
2. Dyadic: ‘X is related to Y’
3. Triadic: ‘X is more closely related to Y than either is to Z’
The monadic and dyadic relations listed hardly qualify as the basis of
classification. Any two organisms can be related in some way. Only
when we introduce a third do we have a classification. Classifications of
more than three organisms are to be composed of a number of triadic
relations. Nelson and Platnick’s cladogram isolates this triadic aspect of
a classification: for an example, see figure 6.

Figure 6. The cladogram of birds

The cladogram summarises the distribution of feathers in the different

dinosaur groups (Padian, 2000). Sinosauropteryx has fibrous feathers,
which form a thick, relatively short and dense covering of the entire body.
True feathers, which have a central shaft, two vanes, and barbs, attach
only to the forelimbs and tail. They are found in the oviraptor
Caudipteryx, the coelurosaur Protarcheopteryx as well as Archaeopteryx
and living birds. Feathers that confer the power of flight are restricted to
Archaeopteryx and living birds, where they occur in the same pattern. In
each, slightly different feathers (the primaries) attach to the hand from
those (the secondaries) that attach to the forelimb (Perrins in Burn, 1980:
169).

Nelson and Platnick’s conclusions would come as no surprise to Peirce.

In A Guess at the Riddle, written c. 1890, he adopts the branching
metaphor of a network of roads to explain how all multiple facts may be
reduced to triple facts. Any number of termini may be connected by
roads with a fork – triadic relations – but only two termini may be
connected by roads without a fork – dyadic relations.
Figure 7. Peirce’s diagram of roads

‘See the figure [figure 7], where I have drawn the termini as self-
returning roads, in order to introduce nothing beyond the road itself.
Thus, the three essential elements of a network of roads are road about a
terminus, roadway-connection and branching; and in like manner, the
three fundamental categories of fact are, fact about an object, fact about
two objects (relation), fact about several objects (synthetic fact)’ (Peirce
in Hoopes, 1991: 182-3). Peirce’s fundamental categories are equivalent
to the three founding relations of classification (Wood, 1996, 2002),
namely features, similarities and homologies. Features are firsts; they
exist in one species considered alone. Similarities are seconds; they
relate one species to another. Homologies are thirds; they show that two
species are more closely related to one another than they are to a third.
The third species reveals the thirdness of the sister species; it provides the
context within which the other two find their relationship.

G H
A

B
Root
C
D
F E

Figure 8. Peirce’s diagram as an unrooted tree, with labelled termini.

Peirce’s diagram of roads is equivalent to an unrooted tree. If we provide

a root (Figure 8), we can identify the termini with those of a cladogram of
vertebrates (Figure 9). Peirce discovered the triadic logic of cladistics
almost a hundred years before Nelson and Platnick!
 !----------------- A snakes and lizards
!-------! !---- B crocodiles
! !------------!
! !---- C birds
------!
! !----------------- D platypus, echidna
!-------!
! !---- E kangaroos
! !-----!
! ! !---- F koalas
!------!
! !---- G whales
!-----!
!---- H humans

Figure 9. A classification of vertebrates with the same topology as

Peirce’s diagram of roads.

7. THREE STAGES OF CLASSIFICATION

In Wood (1996), I describe three stages of classification: fundamental,
derivative and general. The fundamental stage of classification involves
the collection of representative specimens of the species to be studied. In
the derivative stage, characters are conceptualised and the character states
for particular species recorded. The general stage is the generation of a
classification as the most economical summary of the data and the
discovery of the defining characters of taxa.

Each stage of classification involves a different kind of pattern. A

fundamental pattern consists of the observed features of all
morphological variants of a given species, which are at this stage not yet
conceptualised. A derivative pattern is a pattern of similarity shared by a
number of species. A general pattern describes the pattern of homologies
inherited by organisms. Sharing is meaning in the derivative context, and
congruence, the nested hierarchical relationship between patterns of
similarity, is meaning in the general context.

Character concepts begin life in the fundamental stage as features

identified in single species. The derivative stage of character
conceptualisation is the clash between firsts. Character concepts are
tested against specimens of different species, and if found not to be
applicable are modified or abandoned. The general stage is the clash
between seconds. Similarities that are not congruent with the most
economical pattern are meaningless. They are homoplasies not
homologies, confusing rather than revealing thirdness in the study group.
Each stage of classification involves the discovery of a particular kind of
sign. In the context of a given stage, features, similarities and
homologies are signs, in the sense of Peirce, with particular objects and
interpretants. In the fundamental stage (figure 10), the sign is that a
particular object specimen has a distinctive feature, for example
‘Sinosauropteryx has fibrous feathers.’ The interpretant is ‘… as opposed
to true feathers’, which brings in the whole web of anatomical
comparisons that embeds the study. The interpretant creates a character,
a relation of exclusion: ‘feathers fibrous or true.’

Figure 10. The fundamental stage of classification.

In the derivative stage (figure 11), different specimens are brought into
relation. Hence the features of the oviraptor Caudipteryx and living birds
signify that the two are similar in an object ‘having true feathers’. The
interpretant here is the whole data matrix, which described the
distribution of similarities across the whole study group. This character
matrix forms the basis of the cladistic analysis of relationships, often
performed with the aid of computerised algorithms.

Figure 11. The derivative stage of classification.

In the general stage (figure 12), the analysis of the data matrix reveals
that certain similarities function as homologies at some level of
generality. In other words, these similarities identify sister groups
relationships and define taxa within the classification.

Figure 12. The general stage of classification.

The presence of feathers, whether fibrous or true, defines the

Coelurosauria, which includes living birds. Archaeopteryx is similar to
living birds in having flying feathers, but cladistic analysis also reveals
that ‘flying feathers’ is a homology, identifying Archaeopteryx as the
sister group of living birds.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Basil Hiley for his comments on an early exposition of Peirce’s
ideas. Louis Gidney and Adam Parker Rhodes gave useful feedback to
my talk at ANPA 26.

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