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rationis. Being as first known by the human mind, ens primum cognitum, Aquinas
tells us, transcends this distinction, and so cannot be identified with either term
of it, even though ens reale maintains its ontological priority in the experiential
discovery that there is more to the being of the objective world than can be
reduced to our experience of or interests in it. The “external world” is not
discovered as external; it is discovered as a dimension within objects irreducible

to our experience of them. The “problem of the external world” such as we find
it in Berkeley, Hume and the moderns after them, including Kant, is not really a
critical problem so much as it is a quasi-error rooted in the failure to recognize

further the difference between objects and signs. On the one hand, things
are themselves, whereas objects represent themselves. On the other hand, signs
represent always something other than themselves, something which they
themselves are not; and they do so respecting some third element or factor with
respect to which the representation takes place. It matters not whether the signs
in question be based on the psychological states of the organism, cathectic and
cognitive, or on aspects of objects founding interobjective relations. In every
case, the elements comprising the sign are three, and the being of the sign as
such transcends the three elements by uniting them according to three
respective roles, namely, the role of sign-vehicle (the element of otherrepresentation),
the role of object signified (the other than the sign vehicle
represented), and the role of interpretant, the term to or