Peirce's Theory of Semiotic Inquiry

The Series: Semiotics, Communication and Cognition, Volume 14, Paul Cobley & Kalevi Kull (eds.), 2014

The paper deals with the problem of Peirce’s theory of signs, placing it within the context of modern semiotics (comparing it with Saussurean semiology, in particular), and considers Peirce’s semiotics from the point of view of his theory of categories (phaneroscopy) and in the terms of his classification of signs. The article emphasizes the complicated system of Peirce’s late, “mature”, semeiotic and his theory (classification) of Interpretant.

On his own admission Peirce's priority in his work in semiotics concerned the identification of all possible signs, and it is clearly for this reason that of the two typologies announced in the letter to Lady Welby of 23 December 1908—one yielding twenty-eight classes and the other sixty-six— it was the latter that he found the more interesting, to the complete neglect of the former. And yet contributing to the originality of this particular typology is the fact that after 1906 Peirce appears no longer to employ his phaneroscopic categories as the criteria for establishing the various subdivisions in his classifications, preferring instead three modally organized universes, and, in the period from 1907 on, a growing appeal to the requirement of collateral observation of the object in definitions of the sign—both these factors being associated with a greater understanding of the nature of the dynamic object, particularly in the period 1908-1909. The paper thus seeks to demonstrate the potential for semiotic analysis of Peirce's neglected 28-class classification system by showing its originality within the fifteen or more typologies he developed between 1866 and 1908. This, it is to be hoped, will compensate for Peirce's neglect by showing how an examination of the evolving typologies sheds light on the development of his conception of signs and on the shift in the theoretical framework which underwrote it.

Charles Sanders Peirce in His Own Words, 2014

But Peirce also made important discoveries within the fields of chemistry, optics, geodesy, astronomy, metrology, and psychology (as maybe the first American experimental psychologist (Cadwallader 1979)). Furthermore, Peirce is largely appreciated for his contributions to modern logic (Putnam 1982: 290-301) and the methodology of science as well as different branches of philosophy (Fisch 1986: 422-448). Peirce was a systematic philosopher (Murphey 1993; Anderson 1995a)-or an architectonic thinker, like Aristotle, Kant or Hegeland in a draft to the book "A Guess at the Riddle" (c. 1898) he wrote the following: Thus, in brief, my philosophy may be described as the attempt of a physicist to make such conjecture as to the constitution of the universe as the methods of science may permit, with the aid of all that has been done by previous philosophers. (CP 1.7). Peirce was trained in the chemical laboratory and was saturated with the spirits of the physical sciences (CP 1.3), but, inspired by the pre-Socratic philosophers, he also tried to understand the universe at large (CP 4.375), and he considered it to be permeated with signs and processes of signification (CP 5.448, note 1; CP 4.551). Hence, Peirce defended a pan-semiotic view of the universe; to him, the universe was a great argument, simply and solely (CP 5.119), and thereby intelligible or reasonable (CP 1.615; Potter 1997: 202; Sørensen, Thellefsen & Brier 2012: 106-117). The universe can be known by man; and man can only think and communicate by signs (CP 5.251), himself, in fact, being a sign (CP 7.583; Singer 1984: 53-73). Therefore, Peirce saw the urgent need for developing a thoroughgoing theory of signs, a semiotic, and in a letter from 1908 to the English philosopher of language, Lady Victory Welby (1837-1912), he looked back on his intellectual preoccupation and stressed how:. .. it has never been in my power to study anything,

PNA, 2008

In this paper, I discuss the role of diagrammatic thinking within the larger context of cognitive activity as framed by Peirce's semiotic theory of and its underpinning realistic ontology. After a short overview of Kant's scepticism in its historical context, I examine Peirce's attempt to rescue perception as a way to reconceptualize the Kantian " manifold of senses ". I argue that Peirce's redemption of perception led him to a series of problems that are as fundamental as those that Kant encountered. I contend that the understanding of the difficulties of Peirce's epistemol-ogy allows us to better grasp the limits and possibilities of diagrammatic thinking. En este artículo se discute el papel que desempeña el concepto de pen-samiento diagramático en el contexto de la actividad cognitiva, tal y como es concebida dentro del marco de la teoría semiótica de Peirce y su subyacente ontología realista. Luego de presentar una visión general del escepticismo kantiano en su contexto histórico, se examina el esfuer-zo de Peirce por rescatar la percepción, esfuerzo que lo lleva a indagar de manera innovadora el " multiespacio de los sentidos " del que habla-ba Kant. Se mantiene que este esfuerzo lleva a Peirce a una serie de problemas que son tan fundamentales como los que Kant encontró en su propio itinerario epistemológico. Se sostiene que la comprensión de las dificultades intrínsecas a la epistemología de Peirce nos permite cernir mejor los límites y posibilidades de su pensamiento diagramático.

Peirce’s system of sixty-six classes as represented in the Signtree visual model is considered in order to show the strong relation between experience and cognition in semiotics. In this Signtree model we find twenty-four different classes of sinsign, in which we can observe signs of experience, and thirty-six classes of legisign, in which we find general types or laws. Sinsigns and legisigns are predominant in the system of 66 classes and they are closely related. Ordinary experiences are used to illustrate the relations and dependencies among these classes and show how a set of experiences may lead to a certain set of cognitions. They also point out one way to use the Signtree to conduct a semiotic analysis.

Both Peirce and Husserl suggested that a community of scholars were needed to bring to fruition the work that they had initiated, and both (initially) termed their approach phenomenology, defining it in almost identical terms. The fact that Peirce imposed more constraints on the free variation in imagination, which is one of the principal operations of phenomenology, serves to suggest that Peircean phenomenology may be concerned with a limited domain of experience. Taking on the task both thinkers imposed on their scions, we suggest that what the late Peirce calls mediation is identical to what the Brentano tradition terms intentionality, and that Peirce's notion of categories may help in arriving at a deeper understanding of the field of consciousness, in relation to experienced reality. Since we are interested in making semiotics into an empirical, including experimental, science, we suggest that the " naturalization " of both phenomenol-ogies is fundamental for the future of semiotics. This is why we also envisage the manner in which phenomenology may be translated into theories of evolution and child development.

Filozofia i Nauka, 2022

Cognition is meant as the process of acquiring knowledge from the world. This process is supposed to happen within agents, which build such knowledge with the purpose to use it to determine their actions on the world. Following Peircean ideas, we postulate that such knowledge is encoded by means of signs. According to Peirce, signs are anything that can be used to represent anything else. Also, for Peirce, to represent means to be able to generate another sign, called the interpretant of the original sign, which still holds the same power of interpretability, I.e, its power to be transformed into a new sign, holding this same power. This happens through a process called semiosis, the process by which a sign is transformed into an interpretant. This whole process is performed with the aim of subsidizing the agent in deciding its behavior. So, even though the semiosis process has the power to continue infinitely, it usually stops whenever the generated interpretant brings enough infor...

The 2021 Summit of the International Society for the Study of Information, 2022

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