Charles Saunders Peirce

I'm reading selections from Peirce from Peirce on Signs. Chapel Hill: UNC, 1991.

Peirce is the lesser known progeniture of semiotics. His sign is different than Saussure's. In one of many attempted definitions, he calls it "Anything which determines something else" and notes that

"A sign is either an icon, an index, or a symbol. An icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders it significant, even though its object had no existence; such as a lead-pencil streak as representing a gemetrical line. An index is a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if therew were no interpretant. Such , for instance, is a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not. A symbol is a sign which would lose the character which renders it a sign if there were no interpretant. SUch is the utterance of speech which signifies what it does only by virtue of its being understood to have that signification" (239-240).

So we're not dealing with Saussure's arbitrary sign. Elsewhere Peirce discusses the

"material quality" of signs, and posits that a sign must "have some real connection with the thing it signifies so taht when the object is present or is so as the sign signifies it to be, the sign shall so signify it and otherwise not. What I mean is best understood by illustration. A weathercock is a sign of the direction of the wind. It would not be so unless the wind made it turn round. There is to be such a physical connection betwen every sign and its object. Take a painted portrait. . . (141).

Peirce could not get further from Saussure on this, and those of us who entered semiotics and linguistics reading the Course may be tempted to dismiss Peirce out of hand. He's distinct from Husserl here as well. Husserl's The Origins of Geometry explicitly distinguishes between kinds of the signification of what Peirce might call indice and symbol, treating them as simply two different things.

The discussion, as usual, seems unsimple.

If we have no unmediated access to an Other -- or to Kantian noumena or what we might like to call or posit as a "real world" -- then what we're talking about when we talk about referent, then Peirce's "the thing it signifies" (not the Saussurian signified, but something more like the referent) remains ultimately semiotic, is sign itself -- an idea not at all foreign to Peirce.

Now, it would seem to make sense that when we speak of a sign for an idea or a sign for a signifier or a sign for a referent, we are in every case talking about a sign for a sign, and thus a sign for a sign for a sign. So Peirce's resemblances are resemblances between signs and perhaps sign systems.

These, I would observe, should resemble more in syntax of relations between signs and in the structure of semantic associations than in the semantic relations themselves or the semantic relations between systems.