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In order to recover the faculties supported by one's favorite categories and to maintain the proper use of their organizational schemes, it is incumbent on the part of the wary, conscientious, and duly circumspect schemer to recognize in every case how each part of the contention is implicated in the action of the other.  In this connection, a triumvirate of closely related aspects of sign relations comes to the fore:

In order to recover the faculties supported by one's favorite categories and to maintain the proper use of their organizational schemes, it is incumbent on the part of the wary, conscientious, and duly circumspect schemer to recognize in every case how each part of the contention is implicated in the action of the other.  In this connection, a triumvirate of closely related aspects of sign relations comes to the fore:

1. There is an aspect of "futurity", marking the openness of signs to interpretation and the extensibility of sign relations in multitudes of novel but meaningful ways.  This dimension of regard is staked out in anticipation of the possibility that perfectly fitting but previously unsuspected interpretants can be discovered within or added to any given sign relation, whether passed or present.

# There is an aspect of ''futurity'', marking the openness of signs to interpretation and the extensibility of sign relations in multitudes of novel but meaningful ways.  This dimension of regard is staked out in anticipation of the possibility that perfectly fitting but previously unsuspected interpretants can be discovered within or added to any given sign relation, whether passed or present.

# There is a feature that C.S. Peirce called ''tuity'', acknowledging the aspect of ''thouness'' or the prospect of a second person POV that is brought into play whenever one self addresses another.  Along with the perspective of a genuine other, this recognizes all the referrals and deferrals that an interpretive agent can make to a past, present, or potential self.

2. There is a factor that contemporary theorists call "alterity", noting the quality of radical and reciprocal otherness that is involved in the dialogue of one self with another.  Besides its invocation of the wholly other, this term subsumes all the ways that one being can be alien and unknown to itself, and it even suggests the host of alterations, errors, deviations, distortions, and transmutations that accompany all acts of record keeping and interpretation.

All of these dimensions of concern focus on the circumstance that signs, especially written or recorded signs, moderate a complexly integrated sort of relationship between self and other, or between ''first person'' and ''second person'' POVs, in such a way that they render the paired categories of each scheme inextricably involved in one another.

 

There are well-known dangers of paradox, but not so well acknowledged risks of distortion, that arise in the interrogation of any reflection.  Although its outward signs are obvious, the source of the difficulty is remarkably difficult to trace.  Perhaps it can be approached as follows.  Without trying to say what consciousness is, I can still speak sensibly of its contents, and talk of their structures in relation to each other.  These contents, whether percepts or concepts or whatever, are all signs.  And so I can study the effects of reflection in the medium of its texts and develop a model of reflection as a process that evolves these texts.

 

There are well known dangers of paradox, but not so well acknowledged risks of distortion, that arise in the interrogation of any reflection.  Although its outward signs are obvious, the source of the difficulty is remarkably difficult to trace.  Perhaps it can be approached as follows.  Without trying to say what consciousness is, I can still speak sensibly of its contents, and talk of their structures in relation to each other.  These contents, whether percepts or concepts or whatever, are all signs.  And so I can study the effects of reflection in the medium of its texts and develop a model of reflection as a process that evolves these texts.

What generally happens when one tries to model reflective consciousness and to formalize the reflective discourses that signify its public life?  In reaching for the available languages of logic and set theory, one is likely to use them as reductively as possible on the first attempt, and thus to state the relation of anything to awareness directly in terms of membership, in sum, by means of a globally overarching dyadic relation.  What does this picture of reflection pretend about the relation of the world to the mind, or conversely, the relation of awareness to anything?  Although it confuses the relation of "content" to "consciousness" with the relation of "object" to "concept", this degree of play in the imagery is a forgivable, occasionally useful, and a probably inescapable analogy.  In any case, it does not amount to the most serious distortion in the picture as a whole.

What generally happens when one tries to model reflective consciousness and to formalize the reflective discourses that signify its public life?  In reaching for the available languages of logic and set theory, one is likely to use them as reductively as possible on the first attempt, and thus to state the relation of anything to awareness directly in terms of membership, in sum, by means of a globally overarching dyadic relation.  What does this picture of reflection pretend about the relation of the world to the mind, or conversely, the relation of awareness to anything?  Although it confuses the relation of "content" to "consciousness" with the relation of "object" to "concept", this degree of play in the imagery is a forgivable, occasionally useful, and a probably inescapable analogy.  In any case, it does not amount to the most serious distortion in the picture as a whole.