Essay: A Guess at the Riddle

Overview
"A Guess at the Riddle" (drafted in the late 1880s and circulated by 1891) advances a unifying proposal about the structure of reality, experience, and thought. Peirce contends that a single triadic pattern underlies logic, phenomenology, natural science, and metaphysics. He names its modes Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, and argues that the universe itself evolves so that law and meaning emerge from chance through the formation of habits. The essay weaves together a theory of categories, a semiotic, an account of reasoning, and a cosmology that replaces strict mechanism with an evolutionary growth of order.

The Three Categories
Firstness is the mode of pure possibility and quality, the immediate suchness of feeling before reaction or interpretation, like the redness of red or a tone’s sheer character. Secondness is brute fact and struggle, the encounter of this with that, resistance and event, the shock of otherness. Thirdness is mediation, law, generality, habit, and interpretation: what connects firsts and seconds into intelligible continuity. Peirce claims these irreducible categories recur everywhere: in mathematics (monads, dyads, triads), in grammar (subject, predicate, copula), in relations (quality, reaction, relation proper), and in the very texture of experience. Their ubiquity suggests a deep formal truth about how anything can appear, interact, and come under a rule.

Signs and Reasoning
Because thought occurs in signs, the categories manifest in semiosis. A sign (representamen) stands to an object for an interpretant, constituting a triadic relation irreducible to dyads. Peirce distinguishes icons that resemble, indices that are physically or causally connected, and symbols that operate by learned habit or law. Reasoning likewise divides threefold: abduction advances plausible hypotheses, deduction explicates their consequences, and induction tests them against experience. Thirdness governs the growth of knowledge by stabilizing habits of inference, while abduction injects novelty in sympathy with Firstness’s spontaneity, and induction confronts the recalcitrance of Secondness.

Cosmology: Tychism, Synechism, Agapism
Peirce’s metaphysical guess is that the cosmos began in pure spontaneity, a condition of unregulated Firstness he calls tychism or objective chance. Through collisions and resistances, Secondness arises; gradually, habits crystallize, and regularities become laws, the reign of Thirdness. This habit-taking is not imposed by a fixed mechanism but grows through synechism, the principle of continuity that fuses mind and nature, and through agapism, evolution by creative love or sympathetic tendency. Love here names a generalizing affinity by which diverse particulars come to participate in shared habits and meanings. Peirce contrasts this with anancasm, evolution by necessity, and treats Darwinian struggle as a partial case within a broader, habit-forming cosmos. Matter itself is likened to effete mind: laws are habits, and generality is a real feature of being.

Realism, Pragmatism, and Fallibilism
The guess supports a robust realism about generals against nominalism: laws, meanings, and kinds are not mere names but operative realities. A pragmatic orientation supplies the test of the guess’s merit: it should clarify the conceivable effects and practices of inquiry, unifying scattered domains with economical hypotheses. Because inquiry is semiotic and the world contains chance, knowledge is fallible yet corrigible; the convergence of investigation is secured by the growing dominance of Thirdness, not by infallible foundations.

Upshot
The essay proposes a single pattern, Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness, through which to read experience, signs, reasoning, and the cosmos. Its evolutionary narrative of chance, resistance, and habit-taking aims to explain the rise of law and meaning, grounding science, logic, and ethics in a continuous, mind-involving world where the growth of concrete reasonableness is both a cosmic tendency and a human vocation.