Abstract
Peirce’s theory of signs is not easy to grasp and there are a number of reasons for that. The most important is that it is unfinished. For nearly 40 years, Peirce actively worked on his system of logic he regarded to be the same as semeiotic. In these four decades, Peirce produced dozens of different definitions for the term “sign” and its fundamental aspects (which he called respects, probably meaning that they were always respective to one another, as in CP 8.343). The simple ones are quite similar because they involve only the three basic aspects and their correlation. So we can say without fear of mistake that a sign is anything that represents its object as to produce an effect, which is its interpretant.
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- 1.
This led Peirce to an interesting semeiotic version of the quantum uncertainty principle: “But as soon as a man is fully impressed with the fact that absolute exactitude never can be known, he naturally asks whether there are any facts to show that hard discrete exactitude really exists. That suggestion lifts the edge of that curtain and he begins to see the clear daylight shining in from behind it” (CP 1.172). He would have regarded as pointless the search for fundamental quantum particles and would have instead exhorted physicists to search for the logical causational principles governing reality.
- 2.
Sebeok (2001), for instance, says that “semiosis presupposes life”.
- 3.
My frame of interpretation is similar to Ivo Ibri’s definition of connaturality of mind and matter. See Chapter “The continuity of life: on Peirce’s objective idealism.”
- 4.
See Chapter “The life of symbols and other legisigns: More than a mere metaphor.” by Winfried Nöth for an explanation of the life of symbols.
- 5.
Jakob von Uexkull used this same line of argument to create his concept of Umwelt, which is basically a generalization of the Kantian system to all living beings: “No matter what kind of quality it may be, all perceptual signs have always the form of a command or impulse. If I claim that the sky is blue, I am doing so because the perceptual signs projected by myself give the command to the farthest level: Be blue! The sensations of the mind become, during the construction of our worlds, the qualities of the objects, or, as we can put it in other words, the subjective qualities are building up the objective world. If we, instead of sensation or subjective quality, say perceptual sign, we can also say: the perceptual signs of our attention become the perceptual cues (properties) of the world.” (Uexkull 1973/l928). Peirce would regard this as an unattainable nominalistic view of perception.
- 6.
Peirce himself fell into this sort of nominalism in his early writings, as he himself admits in CP 5.453 and later on, in CP 5.457, correcting his own mistake, he explicitly declares that “we must dismiss the idea that the occult state of things (be it a relation among atoms or something else), which constitutes the reality of diamond’s hardness can possibly consist in anything but in the truth of a general conditional proposition.”
- 7.
See the quote from CP 1.383 that illustrates Vincent Colapietro’s Chapter “The ineffable, the individual, and the intelligible:Peircean reflections on the innate ingenuity of the human animal.”
- 8.
See Robert Lane’s Chapter “Peircean semiotic indeterminacy and its relevance for Biosemiotics.” for an excellent treatment of vagueness and indeterminacy in Peirce’s philosophy.
- 9.
See CP 1.383, as well as Vincent Colapietro’s explanation about this synthesis in Chapter “The ineffable, the individual, and the intelligible:Peircean reflections on the innate ingenuity of the human animal.”
- 10.
CP 4.538–9: “Of course, I must be understood as talking not psychology, but the logic of mental operations. Subsequent Interpretants furnish new Semes of Universes resulting from various adjunctions to the Perceptual Universe. They are, however, all of them, Interpretants of Percepts. Finally, and in particular, we get a Seme of that highest of all Universes which is regarded as the Object of every true Proposition, and which, if we name it [at] all, we call by the somewhat misleading title of ‘The Truth.’”
- 11.
“The tendency to obey laws has always been and always will be growing. We look back toward a point in the infinitely distant past when there was no law but mere indeterminacy; we look forward to a point in the infinitely distant future when there will be no indeterminacy or chance but a complete reign of law. But at any assignable date in the past, however early, there was already some tendency toward uniformity; and at any assignable date in the future there will be some slight aberrancy from law. Moreover, all things have a tendency to take habits. For atoms and their parts, molecules and groups of molecules, and in short every conceivable real object, there is a greater probability of acting as on a former like occasion than otherwise. This tendency itself constitutes a regularity, and is continually on the increase. In looking back into the past we are looking toward periods when it was a less and less decided tendency. But its own essential nature is to grow. It is a generalizing tendency; it causes actions in the future to follow some generalization of past actions; and this tendency is itself something capable of similar generalizations; and thus, it is self-generative. We have therefore only to suppose the smallest spoor of it in the past, and that germ would have been bound to develop into a mighty and over-ruling principle, until it supersedes itself by strengthening habits into absolute laws regulating the action of all things in every respect in the indefinite future” (CP 1.408).
- 12.
“(…) although Abductive and Inductive reasoning are distinctly not reducible to Deductive reasoning, nor either to the other, nor Deductive reasoning to either, yet the rationale of Abduction and of Induction must itself be Deductive. All my reflections and self-criticisms have only served to strengthen me in this opinion. But if this be so, to state wherein the validity of mathematical reasoning consists is to state the ultimate ground on which any reasoning must rest.” (Peirce in Turrisi, 1997, p. 276–277)
- 13.
As David Bohm (2000) puts it.
- 14.
I owe this example to Daniel Meyers (University of San Diego).
- 15.
For a better understanding of Peirce’s semeiotic theory of causation, see Chapter “Semeiotic causation and the breath of life” by Hulswit and myself.
- 16.
See Chapter “Instinct and abduction in the Peircean informational perspective: contributions to biosemiotics.” by Quilici and Silveira for a relation between collateral experience, information and instinct.
- 17.
The semeiotic information could be identified with Fisher’s information, which is dependent on an amplitude of probabilities. In Frieden and Romanini (2008), we show that this amplitude might express the resultant of a community of interpretants and is the effect of measurements made (and registered as signs) about a parameter (the dynamic object).
- 18.
- 19.
Peirce identified 10 aspects of the sign, but did not ruled out the possibility of more (CP 8.343: “… I do not say that these divisions are enough…”). In fact, I found out the need for at least one more: the relation among sign, dynamic object and dynamic interpretant, which is important to logically differentiate between assertions (what is effectively said, as a question, order, doubt etc) and propositions (the informed relation between subjects and predicates, which is the intellectual pattern expressed by a Dicisign). Assertions are dynamic utterances dependent of contextual and emotional accidents, while propositions are general conditionals expressing universality.
- 20.
As Peirce explains, “the immediate object of thought in a true judgment is the reality” (CP 8.16).
- 21.
CP 6. 25: “The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. But before this can be accepted it must show itself capable of explaining the tri-dimensionality of space, the laws of motion, and the general characteristics of the universe, with mathematical clearness and precision; for no less should be demanded of every philosophy.”.See Ivo Ibri’s Chapter “The continuity of life: on Peirce’s objective idealism.” of this volume for a full exposition of this doctrine.
- 22.
In fact, Peirce puts both gravitation and acceleration under the general law of causation, as Peirce explains in CP 1.270 and CP 6.68.
- 23.
CP 2.170: “If I may be allowed to use the word ‘habit,’ without any implication as to the time or manner in which it took birth, so as to be equivalent to the corrected phrase ‘habit or disposition,’ that is, as some general principle working in a man’s nature to determine how he will act, then an instinct, in the proper sense of the word, is an inherited habit, or in more accurate language, an inherited disposition. But since it is difficult to make sure whether a habit is inherited or is due to infantile training and tradition, I shall ask leave to employ the word ‘instinct’ to cover both cases.”
- 24.
For an excellent treatment of Peirce’s concept of habit, see Chapter “Peircean habits, broken symmetries, and biosemiotics.” by Eliseo Fernandez.
- 25.
“When the universe of discourse relates to a common experience, but this experience is of something imaginary, as when we discuss the world of Shakespeare’s creation in the play of Hamlet, we find individual distinction existing so far as the work of imagination has carried it, while beyond that point there is vagueness and generality” (CP 4.172).
- 26.
In fact, Peirce says that “Genesis is production from ideas. It may be difficult to understand how this is true in the biological world, though there is proof enough that it is so” (EP2:127).
- 27.
Brent (1993) was one of the first Peirce scholars to point out the similarity of views between them.
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Romanini, V. (2014). Semeiosis as a Living Process. In: Romanini, V., Fernández, E. (eds) Peirce and Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7732-3_12
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