ix Let's be frank. Peirce's writing is terse and convoluted, without much wit or grace. "I am not naturally a writer," he says, "but as far from being so as any man." "One of the most extreme and lamentable of my incapacities is my incapacity for linguistic expression"

p.7 "...It has never been in my power to study anything... except as a study of semeiotic"

p.14 Semeiotic... its results establish criteria for inquiry, argument, and truth, essential for any investigation

p.14 Semeiotic, as a branch of philosophy... serves to establish leading principles for any other science which is concerned with signs in some capacity.

p.16 As noted, Peirce sees semeiotic as supplying leading principles to sciences such as general and social psychology and linguistics; it also serves to establish criteria by which such investigations can derive good results from the employment of signs and shows, in general, the formal character of signs as such.

p.19 Something becomes a sign not because of any inherent feature it has but because it acquires the formal characteristics that any sign must have, namely, that it correlate with an object and that it produce an interpretant in a process in which the three are irreducibly connected.

p.23-24 Determination of the sign should be distinguished from sign production. The production of a sign is the causal result of the interaction between a dynamic object and the sign medium of some sign-interpreting agency. The dynamic object, ceteris paribus, will offer the same modus of constraint despite different signs produced by the interaction with the medium... Any interpretant of the sign is guided by the determination which the dynamic object imparts to the sign... determination guides the representation of the object. Determination provides the form... the hook, so to speak, upon which the sign can hang its representation of the dynamic object

p.58 By diagrammatic reasoning, I mean reasoning which constructs a diagram according to a precept expressed in general terms, performs experiments upon this diagram, notes their results, assures itself that similar experiments performed upon any diagram constructed according to the same precept would have the same results, and expresses this in general terms.