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.

A bare beginning -- on Locke

Human Understanding. Book III, Chapter ii. "Of the Signification of Words." Section 1. Page Numbers below are from Adams, Hazard. Ed. Critical Theory Since Plato. Revised. NYC: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

Locke underlies much if not most later thought in English, including the basis of the systemic assumptions of a mutually sensible reality, common sense and so forth that give us William James, Richard Rorty, truths that we hold to be self-evident, and an emphasis on so-called constative value in speech. But Locke recognizes the nuance and limits of his ideas better than many of his followers. Specifically, while he decides that people share some commonality of thought by having similar sensing equipment, and he casts his doubts of universality more on words than on thoughts themselves, he does not assume that matters of language can or should or had might as well be dispensed with while examining thought.

He does get into some pretty messes, like anyone, I suppose, who attempts to describe human understanding. The above dichotomy between words and ideas creates a hierarchy in which words describe thoughts, but thoughts do not (always) describe words. The thoughts and words, by virtue of being non-identical, are also discrete. Also, he ignores the shifts in the meaning of words based on syntax and system, so he can assume that people thinking to themselves can have perfect understanding of the words they use.

[A logical progression here would be to check in with Paul de Man's response to Locke in one of the essay collections]


"Words are sensible signs necessary for communication" (254).
Sect 2 "Words are the sensible signs of his ideas who uses them"

". . . when [man] represents to himself other men's ideas by some of his own, if he consent to give them the same names that other men do, it is stilll to his own ideas; to ideas that he has, and not to ideas that he has not.
Sect. 3. This is so nessarry in the use of language, that in this respect the knowling thd the ignorant, the leaned and the unlearned, use the words they speak (with an y meaning) all alike. They, in every man's mouth, stand for the ideas he has, and whic hhe would express by them. A child having taken notice of nothing in themetal he hears called gold, but the bright shining hellow color, he applies the word gold only to khis known idea of that colous, and nothing else; and therfore calls the same colour in a peackck's tail, gold. Another, that hath better observed, adds to shining yellow great weight; and hten the sound gold, when he uses it, stands for a complex idea of a shinging yellow, and a very weighty substance" (255).

He goes on at some length, reporting that men unreasonably take words to refer to other men's ideas and to referents.

There's more here.