ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on education seen from Charles S. Peirce's phenomenological categories of Thirdness, Secondness and Firstness. It distinguishes between pure Firstness, Firstness in Secondness, and Firstness in Thirdness and argues that phenomena of pure Firstnesses are not appropriate methods of learning and educating. Phenomena of Firstness embodied in phenomena of Thirdness or Secondness are relevant to education insofar as they are concerned with qualities embodied in signs, iconic signs, abductive reasoning, learning from error and learning from musement, daydreaming, imagination and creativity. Firstness in Thirdness can be found in the three Firstnesses of Peirce's trichotomies of signs, qualisigns, that is, signs consisting of a mere quality, iconic signs and abductive arguments. The semiotic potential of icons is not restricted to recreating objects in the form of a picture. The three subtypes of icons include images, diagrams and metaphors.
