Charles Sanders Peirce · Philosophy
Peirce’s semiotics - his general theory of signs - built on the triadic relation of sign, object, and interpretant, and his famous classification of signs into icons (which resemble), indices (which connect), and symbols (which signify by convention), with meaning understood as an endless process of one sign giving rise to another.
Peirce spent his life building not only a logic and a pragmatism but a vast general theory of signs he called semiotic - the science of how anything can stand for anything else. Its founding idea is that a sign never involves just two things. The older picture, and the one the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure would later make famous, is dyadic: a sign is a pairing of a signifier with a signified, a word with a concept. Peirce insisted that signification is irreducibly triadic. A sign (which he also called a representamen) stands for an object, but only by giving rise, in a mind, to a further sign - an interpretant, the understanding or thought the sign produces. Sign, object, interpretant: take away any one and there is no signification at all. A word means its object only by generating an interpreting thought; that is what it is to mean.
Peirce’s most widely used discovery is his classification of signs by how they stand for their objects. There are, he argued, three fundamental modes. An icon signifies by resemblance: it refers to its object by virtue of characters it has in its own right, so that it would represent the object even if the object did not exist. A portrait, a diagram, a map, an onomatopoeic word are icons - they are like what they mean. An index signifies by a real, physical connection to its object: it points because it is actually affected by, or contiguous with, the thing. Smoke is an index of fire, a weathervane of the wind, a pointing finger or the word ‘this’ of whatever it directs attention to. A symbol signifies neither by likeness nor by connection but purely by convention, rule, or habit: it stands for its object because a community has agreed, or grown accustomed, to take it so. Most words are symbols - there is nothing doglike about the sound ‘dog.’ This trichotomy has become basic vocabulary across linguistics, art, and media theory.
The third term, the interpretant, is Peirce’s most original contribution, and it has a remarkable consequence. The interpretant of a sign is the effect the sign has on a mind - the further thought or sign it produces. But that interpretant is itself a sign, which in turn has its own interpretant, and so on. To understand a sign is to translate it into another sign (a definition, an image, an action-disposition), which can itself be interpreted further. Meaning, therefore, is not a thing but a process: an ongoing chain of interpretation Peirce’s successors named unlimited semiosis. There is no first sign born from nothing and no final interpretant that ends all interpretation; signs beget signs. This is why Peirce could make the startling claim that even a person’s thoughts are signs, and that the self is, in a sense, a sign among signs - for to think at all is to spin one interpretant out of another, in the same endless web by which anything comes to mean anything.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Peirce founded semiotics on a triadic relation - sign (representamen), object, and interpretant - and classified signs as icon (by resemblance), index (by real connection), and symbol (by convention), with meaning as an ongoing process in which each sign generates another. Explain the triad and the th…
Leads to Immanuel Kant.
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