Over the course of Selection 1 Peirce introduces the ideas he needs to answer stubborn questions about the validity of scientific inference. Briefly put, the v...alidity of scientific inference depends on the ability of symbols to express “superfluous comprehension”, the measure of which Peirce calls “information”. Selection 2 sharpens our picture of symbols as “general representations”, contrasting them with two species of representation whose characters fall short of genuine symbols.