Abstract

Peirce’s analyses of the concept of information begin in the period from 1865 to 1869 and continue until the last years of his life. In fact, the successive phases that the scholars distinguish about Peirce’s approaches to information, roughly match Fisch’s periodization of Peirce’s philosophical development. In the first phase his approach is restricted to the proposition and the terms that knock it into shape; the forms of inference prevail. In the second phase the concept of information is enriched with the development of Peirce’s semiotic theory and his typology of signs. By last, his concept of information receives a more decidedly metaphysical stamp. In this paper we will just expose Peirce’s conception of information during the first of these phases, foregrounding his papers Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension (W2 [1867]: 70-86) and Questions on Reality (W2 [1868]: 162-87). Here, individuals explore and actualize possibilities in thought, once they articulate their experience through a social system of signs. That’s why, in inferring, “we ought to say that we are in thought, and not that thoughts are in us” (EP 1 [1868]: 42).