Semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce began writing on semiotics, which he also called semeiotics, meaning the philosophical study of signs, in the 1860s, around the time that he devised his system of three categories. During the 20th century, the term "semiotics" was adopted to cover all tendencies of sign researches, including Ferdinand de Saussure's semiology, which began in linguistics as a completely separate tradition.
Peirce adopted the term semiosis (or semeiosis) and defined it to mean an "action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this trirelative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs." This specific type of triadic relation is fundamental to Peirce's understanding of logic as formal semiotic. By "logic" he meant philosophical logic. He eventually divided (philosophical) logic, or formal semiotics, into (1) speculative grammar, or stechiology on the elements of semiosis (sign, object, interpretant), how signs can signify and, in relation to that, what kinds of signs, objects, and interpretants there are, how signs combine, and how some signs embody or incorporate others; (2) logical critic, or logic proper, on the modes of inference; and (3) speculative rhetoric, or methodeutic, the philosophical theory of inquiry, including his form of pragmatism.
His speculative grammar, or stechiology, is this article's subject.
Peirce conceives of and discusses things like representations, interpretations, and assertions broadly and in terms of philosophical logic, rather than in terms of psychology, linguistics, or social studies. He places philosophy at a level of generality between mathematics and the special sciences of nature and mind, such that it draws principles from mathematics and supplies principles to special sciences. On the one hand, his semiotic theory does not resort to special experiences or special experiments in order to settle its questions. On the other hand, he draws continually on examples from common experience, and his semiotics is not contained in a mathematical or deductive system and does not proceed chiefly by drawing necessary conclusions about purely hypothetical objects or cases. As philosophical logic, it is about the drawing of conclusions deductive, inductive, or hypothetically explanatory. Peirce's semiotics, in its classifications, its critical analysis of kinds of inference, and its theory of inquiry, is philosophical logic studied in terms of signs and their triadic relations as positive phenomena in general.
Peirce's semiotic theory is different from Saussure's conceptualization in the sense that it rejects his dualist view of the Cartesian self. He believed that semiotics is a unifying and synthesizing discipline. More importantly, he included the element of "interpretant" into the fundamental understanding of the sign.
Here is Peirce's definition of the triadic sign relation that formed the core of his definition of logic:
This definition, together with Peirce's definitions of correspondence and determination, is sufficient to derive all of the statements that are necessarily true for all sign relations. Yet, there is much more to the theory of signs than simply proving universal theorems about generic sign relations. There is also the task of classifying the various species and subspecies of sign relations. As a practical matter, of course, familiarity with the full range of concrete examples is indispensable to theory and application both.
In Peirce's theory of signs, a sign is something that stands in a well-defined kind of relation to two other things, its object and its interpretant sign. Although Peirce's definition of a sign is independent of psychological subject matter and his theory of signs covers more ground than linguistics alone, it is nevertheless the case that many of the more familiar examples and illustrations of sign relations will naturally be drawn from linguistics and psychology, along with our ordinary experience of their subject matters.
For example, one way to approach the concept of an interpretant is to think of a psycholinguistic process. In this context, an interpretant can be understood as a sign's effect on the mind, or on anything that acts like a mind, what Peirce calls a quasi-mind. An interpretant is a process of interpretation, one of the types of activity that falls under the heading of semiosis. One usually says that a sign stands for an object to an agent, an interpreter. In the upshot, however, it is the sign's effect on the agent that is paramount. This effect is what Peirce called the interpretant sign, or the interpretant for short. An interpretant in its barest form is a sign's meaning, implication, or ramification, and especial interest attaches to the types of semiosis that proceed from obscure signs to relatively clear interpretants. In logic and mathematics the most clarified and most succinct signs for an object are called canonical forms or normal forms. The interpretant, in Peirce's conceptualization, is not the user of the sign but the "proper significate effect" or that mental concept produced by both the sign and by the user's experience of the object.
Peirce argued that logic is the formal study of signs in the broadest sense, not only signs that are artificial, linguistic, or symbolic, but also signs that are semblances or are indexical such as reactions. Peirce held that "all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs", along with their representational and inferential relations. He argued that, since all thought takes time, all thought is in signs:
Signhood is a way of being in relation, not a way of being in itself. Anything is a sign—not as itself, but in some relation to another. The role of sign is constituted as one role among three: object, sign, and interpretant sign. It is an irreducible triadic relation; the roles are distinct even when the things that fill them are not. The roles are but three: a sign of an object leads to interpretants, which, as signs, lead to further interpretants. In various relations, the same thing may be sign or semiotic object. The question of what a sign is depends on the concept of a sign relation, which depends on the concept of a triadic relation. This, in turn, depends on the concept of a relation itself. Peirce depended on mathematical ideas about the reducibility of relations—dyadic, triadic, tetradic, and so forth. According to Peirce's Reduction Thesis, (a) triads are necessary because genuinely triadic relations cannot be completely analyzed in terms of monadic and dyadic predicates, and (b) triads are sufficient because there are no genuinely tetradic or larger polyadic relations—all higher-arity n-adic relations can be analyzed in terms of triadic and lower-arity relations and are reducible to them. Peirce and others, notably Robert W. Burch (1991) and Joachim Hereth Correia and Reinhard Pöschel (2006), have offered proofs of the Reduction Thesis. According to Peirce, a genuinely monadic predicate characteristically expresses quality. A genuinely dyadic predicate—reaction or resistance. A genuinely triadic predicate—representation or mediation. Thus Peirce's theory of relations underpins his philosophical theory of three basic categories (see below).
Extension × intension = information. Two traditional approaches to sign relation, necessary though insufficient, are the way of extension (a sign's objects, also called breadth, denotation, or application) and the way of intension (the objects' characteristics, qualities, attributes referenced by the sign, also called depth, comprehension, significance, or connotation). Peirce adds a third, the way of information, including change of information, in order to integrate the other two approaches into a unified whole. For example, because of the equation above, if a term's total amount of information stays the same, then the more that the term 'intends' or signifies about objects, the fewer are the objects to which the term 'extends' or applies. A proposition's comprehension consists in its implications.
Determination. A sign depends on its object in such a way as to represent its object—the object enables and, in a sense, determines the sign. A physically causal sense of this stands out especially when a sign consists in an indicative reaction. The interpretant depends likewise on both the sign and the object—the object determines the sign to determine the interpretant. But this determination is not a succession of dyadic events, like a row of toppling dominoes; sign determination is triadic. For example, an interpretant does not merely represent something which represented an object; instead an interpretant represents something as a sign representing an object. It is an informational kind of determination, a rendering of something more determinately representative. Peirce used the word "determine" not in strictly deterministic sense, but in a sense of "specializes", bestimmt, involving variation in measure, like an influence. Peirce came to define sign, object, and interpretant by their (triadic) mode of determination, not by the idea of representation, since that is part of what is being defined. The object determines the sign to determine another sign—the interpretant—to be related to the object as the sign is related to the object, hence the interpretant, fulfilling its function as sign of the object, determines a further interpretant sign. The process is logically structured to perpetuate itself, and is definitive of sign, object, and interpretant in general. In semiosis, every sign is an interpretant in a chain stretching both fore and aft. The relation of informational or logical determination which constrains object, sign, and interpretant is more general than the special cases of causal or physical determination. In general terms, any information about one of the items in the sign relation tells you something about the others, although the actual amount of this information may be nil in some species of sign relations.
Peirce held that there are exactly three basic semiotic elements, the sign, object, and interpretant, as outlined above and fleshed out here in a bit more detail:
Some of the understanding needed by the mind depends on familiarity with the object. In order to know what a given sign denotes, the mind needs some experience of that sign's object collaterally to that sign or sign system, and in this context Peirce speaks of collateral experience, collateral observation, collateral acquaintance, all in much the same terms.
"Representamen" (properly with the "a" long and stressed: /rɛprɪzɛnˈteɪmən/) was adopted (not coined) by Peirce as his blanket technical term for any and every sign or sign-like thing covered by his theory. It is a question of whether the theoretically defined "representamen" covers only the cases covered by the popular word "sign." The word "representamen" is there in case a divergence should emerge. Peirce's example was this: Sign action always involves a mind. If a sunflower, by doing nothing more than turning toward the sun, were thereby to become fully able to reproduce a sunflower turning in just the same way toward the sun, then the first sunflower's turning would be a representamen of the sun yet not a sign of the sun. Peirce eventually stopped using the word "representamen."
Peirce made various classifications of his semiotic elements, especially of the sign and the interpretant. Of particular concern in understanding the sign-object-interpretant triad is this: In relation to a sign, its object and its interpretant are either immediate (present in the sign) or mediate.
The immediate object is, from the viewpoint of a theorist, really a kind of sign of the dynamic object; but phenomenologically it is the object until there is reason to go beyond it, and somebody analyzing (critically but not theoretically) a given semiosis will consider the immediate object to be the object until there is reason to do otherwise.
Peirce preferred phrases like dynamic object over real object since the object might be fictive—Hamlet, for instance, to whom one grants a fictive reality, a reality within the universe of discourse of the play Hamlet.
It is initially tempting to regard immediate, dynamic, and final interpretants as forming a temporal succession in an actual process of semiosis, especially since their conceptions refer to beginning, midstages, and end of a semiotic process. But instead their distinctions from each other are modal or categorial. The immediate interpretant is a quality of impression which a sign is fitted to produce, a special potentiality. The dynamic interpretant is an actuality. The final interpretant is a kind of norm or necessity unaffected by actual trends of opinion or interpretation. One does not actually obtain a final interpretant per se; instead one may successfully coincide with it. Peirce, a fallibilist, holds that one has no guarantees that one has done so, but only compelling reasons, sometimes very compelling, to think so and, in practical matters, must sometimes act with complete confidence of having done so. (Peirce said that it is often better in practical matters to rely on instinct, sentiment, and tradition, than on theoretical inquiry.) In any case, insofar as truth is the final interpretant of a pursuit of truth, one believes, in effect, that one coincides with a final interpretant of some question about what is true, whenever and to whatever extent that one believes that one reaches a truth.
Peirce proposes several typologies and definitions of the signs. At least 76 definitions of what a sign is have been collected throughout Peirce's work. Some canonical typologies can nonetheless be observed, one crucial one being the distinction between "icons", "indices" and "symbols" (CP 2.228, CP 2.229 and CP 5.473). The icon-index-symbol typology is chronologically the first but structurally the second of three that fit together as a trio of three-valued parameters in regular scheme of nine kinds of sign. (The three "parameters" (not Peirce's term) are not independent of one another, and the result is a system of ten classes of sign, which are shown further down in this article.)
Peirce's three basic phenomenological categories come into central play in these classifications. The 1-2-3 numerations used further below in the exposition of sign classes represents Peirce's associations of sign classes with the categories. The categories are as follows:
*Note: An interpretant is an interpretation (human or otherwise) in the sense of the product of an interpretive process.
The three sign typologies depend respectively on (I) the sign itself, (II) how the sign stands for its denoted object, and (III) how the signs stands for its object to its interpretant. Each of the three typologies is a three-way division, a trichotomy, via Peirce's three phenomenological categories.
Every sign falls under one class or another within (I) and within (II) and within (III). Thus each of the three typologies is a three-valued parameter for every sign. The three parameters are not independent of each other; many co-classifications are not found. The result is not 27 but instead ten classes of signs fully specified at this level of analysis.
In later years, Peirce attempted a finer level of analysis, defining sign classes in terms of relations not just to sign, object, and interpretant, but to sign, immediate object, dynamic object, immediate interpretant, dynamic interpretant, and final or normal interpretant. He aimed at 10 trichotomies of signs, with the above three trichotomies interspersed among them, and issuing in 66 classes of signs. He did not bring that system into a finished form. In any case, in that system, icon, index, and symbol were classed by category of how they stood for the dynamic object, while rheme, dicisign, and argument were classed by the category of how they stood to the final or normal interpretant.
These conceptions are specific to Peirce's theory of signs and are not exactly equivalent to general uses of the notions of "icon", "index", "symbol", "tone", "token", "type", "term" (or "rheme"), "proposition" (or "pheme"), "argument".
Also called tone, token, type; and also called potisign, actisign, famisign.
This is the typology of the sign as distinguished by sign's own phenomenological category (set forth in 1903, 1904, etc.).
A replica (also called instance) of a legisign is a sign, often an actual individual one (a sinsign), which embodies that legisign. A replica is a sign for the associated legisign, and therefore is also a sign for the legisign's object. All legisigns need sinsigns as replicas, for expression. Some but not all legisigns are symbols. All symbols are legisigns. Different words with the same meaning are symbols which are replicas of that symbol which consists in their meaning but doesn't prescribe qualities of its replicas. The replica of a rhematic symbol, for instance, calls up a mental image which image, owing to the habits and dispositions of such mind, often produce a general concept. Here, the replica is interpreted as a sign of the object, which is then considered an instance of that concept.
This is the typology of the sign as distinguished by phenomenological category of its way of denoting the object (set forth in 1867 and many times in later years). This typology emphasizes the different ways in which the sign refers to its object—the icon by a quality of its own, the index by real connection to its object, and the symbol by a habit or rule for its interpretant. The modes may be compounded, for instance, in a sign that displays a forking line iconically for a fork in the road and stands indicatively near a fork in the road.
* Note: In "On a New List of Categories" (1867) Peirce gave the unqualified term "sign" as an alternate expression for "index", and gave "general sign" as an alternate expression for "symbol". "Representamen" was his blanket technical term for any and every sign or signlike thing covered by his theory. Peirce soon reserved "sign" to its broadest sense, for index, icon, and symbol alike. He also eventually decided that the symbol is not the only sign which can be called a "general sign" in some sense, and that indices and icons can be generals, generalities, too. The general sign, as such, the generality as a sign, he eventually called, at various times, the "legisign" (1903, 1904), the "type" (1906, 1908), and the "famisign" (1908).
This is the typology of the sign as distinguished by the phenomenological category which the sign's interpretant attributes to the sign's way of denoting the object (set forth in 1902, 1903, etc.):
*Note: In his "Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism" (The Monist, v. XVI, no. 4, Oct. 1906), Peirce uses the words "seme", "pheme", and "delome" (pp. 506, 507, etc.) for the rheme-dicisign-argument typology, but retains the word "rheme" for the predicate (p. 530) in his system of Existential Graphs. Also note that Peirce once offered "seme" as an alternate expression for "index" in 1903.
The three typologies, labeled "I.", "II.", and "III.", are shown together in the table below. As parameters, they are not independent of one another. As previously said, many co-classifications are not found. The slanting and vertical lines show the options for co-classification of a given sign (and appear in MS 339, August 7, 1904, viewable here at the Lyris Peirce Archive). The result is ten classes of sign.
Words in parentheses in the table are alternate names for the same kinds of signs.
*Note: As noted above, in "On a New List of Categories" (1867) Peirce gave the unqualified word "sign" as an alternate expression for "index", and gave "general sign" as an alternate expression for "symbol." Peirce soon reserved "sign" to its broadest sense, for index, icon, and symbol alike, and eventually decided that symbols are not the only signs which can be called "general signs" in some sense. See note at end of section "II. Icon, index, symbol" for details.A term (in the conventional sense) is not just any rheme; it is a kind of rhematic symbol. Likewise a proposition (in the conventional sense) is not just any dicisign, it is a kind of dicent symbol.
In the study of photography and film studies Peirce's work is widely cited. He has also been influential in the field of art history.
For abbreviations of his works see Abbreviations.