Tone Token Type • Discussion 1 • http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2024/02/17/tone-token-type-discussion-1/ All, Daniel Everett shared an interesting remark about Peirce's Tone-Token-Type distinctions on Facebook. Re: FB | Daniel Everett • https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid02owMh25tTQnyznx7cgc… DE: ❝People who believe that Peirce's terms firstness, secondness, and thirdness are complicated might have overlooked the fact that they almost certainly already use two of the three terms via Peirce's other terms type (thirdness) and token (secondness). What is missing is only Peirce's other term tone, which refers to firstness. ❝These distinctions are crucial. Take linguistic fieldwork. When the fieldworker first hears something or sees something but has no idea about it other than it is “strange” or unexpected, that is a tone/firstness. When the linguist proposes the phones of a language, the list are tokens/secondnesses. When the linguist proposes phonemes, those are types/thirdnesses. (And underlying form would be a thirdness/type and the surface form a secondness/token.)❞ I added the following remarks. The way Peirce shades the matter of signs along the lines of a Tone‑Token‑Type spectrum is a topic of recurring discussion. There's a selection of Peirce quotes and a few comments from me on the following page. Tone, Token, Type • https://oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey/Tone,_Token,_Type Re: C.S. Peirce • Note 1 • https://oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey/Tone,_Token,_Type#Note_1 CSP: ❝For a “possible” Sign I have no better designation than a Tone, though I am considering replacing this by “Mark”.❞ I've seen some readers be confused by Peirce's sometime alternative of Mark for Tone, thinking he meant something like a scratch‑mark on paper, but he is using Mark in the sense of Character(istic), Distinctive Feature, or Quality. I don’t know whether he had it in mind but that particular use was also common among 19th Century mathematicians in the early years of the subject known as the Representation Theory of Groups. Regards, Jon cc: https://www.academia.edu/community/V9q1KN cc: https://mathstodon.xyz/@Inquiry/111949053496497411