Peirce's Chemistry of Concepts

According to Roman Jakobson, Charles S. Peirce was a forerun- ner of structuralism. Jakobson credited Peirce with the idea of the priority of form over matter and of the whole over its parts; fur- ther, for Jakobson Peirce developed a theory of oppositive rela- tions. The aim of this paper is to show that this view is misleading. It will be shown that Peirce’s logic of relatives, his doctrine of the composition of relative concepts (rhemata) and his conception of continuous predicate or relation of representation are by no means reducible to the standard structuralist approach.