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How shall we break down the universe into basic types of things? Peirce has an idiosyncratic way of thinking about this problem and coming up with his division, revolving around the steps and presuppositions involved in predicating something.
the latter port of this part is about his notion of “prescision” that holds between the various categories. It’s about distinguishability, and of course there are different grades of this, because there are some concepts that are distinguishable in terms of their meaning (“de dicto”) but not in terms of what they actually refer to (“de re”). The terms “Clark Kent” and “Superman” have different meanings, which in Peirce’s terms means they can be discriminated. But they metaphysically refer to one and the same thing, which means they cannot be dissociated.
Prescision is in between these, and importantly, it’s asymmetric, unlike those other two terms. Color can be prescinded from blue, but blue can’t be prescinded from color, because to think “blue,” you have to think that it’s a color (reflecting the fact that blue really is a color). But there are many colors, so the term “color” (or the metaphysical thing, color) doesn’t imply blue (or the concept “blue”) in particular. Just to complete the first analogy, the being that is Superman can be prescinded from the designation Clark Kent because Clark Kent is a disguise, a persona, of that being, but Clark Kent can’t be prescinded from that being; someone else taking on that persona (dressing like him, taking his job) wouldn’t be Clark Kent at all, but an imposter or replacement. (I leave open the philosophical question as to whether Superman is that being’s true self or whether like Clark Kent, Superman is another persona.)
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