Recall that Peirce thought signs signify their objects not through all their features, but in virtue of some particular feature. By , for reasons related to his work on phenomenology, Peirce thought the central features of sign-vehicles could be divided into three broad areas, and consequently, that signs could be classified accordingly.
This division depends upon whether sign-vehicles signify in virtue of qualities, existential facts, or conventions and laws. Further, signs with these sign-vehicles are classified as qualisigns , sinsigns , and legisigns respectively.
Examples of signs whose sign-vehicle relies upon a quality are difficult to imagine, but a particularly clear example, used by David Savan, is this:. There are many elements to the colored chip as a sign, but it is only its color that matters to its ability to signify. Any sign whose sign-vehicle relies, as with this example, on simple abstracted qualities is called a qualisign.
An example of a sign whose sign-vehicle uses existential facts is smoke as a sign for fire; the causal relation between the fire and smoke allows the smoke to act as a signifier. Other cases are the molehill example used earlier, and temperature as a sign for a fever.
Any sign whose sign-vehicle relies upon existential connections with its object is named, by Peirce, a sinsign. And finally, the third kind of sign is one whose crucial signifying element is primarily due to convention, habit or law. Typical examples would be traffic lights as sign of priority, and the signifying capability of words; these sign-vehicles signify in virtue of the conventions surrounding their use. Peirce calls signs whose sign-vehicles function in this way legisigns. Just as Peirce thought signs could be classified according to whether their sign-vehicles function in virtue of qualities, existential facts, or conventions and laws, he thought signs were similarly classifiable according to how their object functioned in signification.
That is to say, the nature of the object constrains the nature of the sign in terms of what successful signification requires. Again, Peirce thought the nature of these constraints fell into three broad classes: qualitative, existential or physical, and conventional and law-like.
Further, if the constraints of successful signification require that the sign reflect qualitative features of the object, then the sign is an icon. If the constraints of successful signification require that the sign utilize some existential or physical connection between it and its object, then the sign is an index.
And finally, if successful signification of the object requires that the sign utilize some convention, habit, or social rule or law that connects it with its object, then the sign is a symbol. This is a trichotomy with which we are already familiar from the early account, and indeed, the examples of icons, indices, and symbols are largely the same as before: icons are portraits and paintings, indices are natural and causal signs, symbols are words and so on.
There are, however, additional instances, for example, icons include diagrams used in geometrical reasoning, indices include pointing fingers and proper names, and symbols including broad speech acts like assertion and judgment, all of which suggests a considerable broadening of this trichotomy. It is well worth noting, though, that by Peirce was aware that it would be hard, if not impossible, to find any pure instances of icons and indices.
Rather, he began to suspect that icons and indices were always partly symbolic or conventional. To try to capture this, Peirce experimented with some additional terminology and types of icon and index. These he called the hypo-icon see CP2.
As with the sign-vehicle and the object, Peirce thought we could classify signs in terms of their relation with their interpretant. Again, he identifies three categories according to which feature of the relationship with its object a sign uses in generating an interpretant. Further, as with the classification of the sign in terms of the sign-vehicle and the object, Peirce identifies qualities, existential facts, or conventional features as the basis for classifying the sign in terms of its interpretant.
If the sign determines an interpretant by focusing our understanding of the sign upon the qualitative features it employs in signifying its object, then the sign is classified as a rheme.
Whenever we understand a sign in terms of qualities it suggests its object may have, we generate an interpretant that qualifies its sign as a rheme. If, on the other hand, a sign determines an interpretant by focusing our understanding of the sign upon the existential features it employs in signifying an object, then the sign is a dicent.
And finally, if a sign determines an interpretant by focusing our understanding on some conventional or law-like features employed in signifying the object, then the sign is a delome , or as Peirce most frequently, but confusingly, calls them, arguments. Further, just as we can think of a rheme as an unsaturated predicate, and a dicent as a proposition, we can think of the delome as an argument or rule of inference. Our ability to understand a sign in terms of its place in some pattern of reasoning and system of signs enables us to derive information from it by deductive reasoning or make conjectures about it by inductive and abductive reasoning.
So, whenever we come to understand a sign as focusing our attention upon some conventional feature of its relationship with object, that is, enabling us to understand the sign as part of a rule governed system of knowledge and signs etc.
Peirce believed that the three elements, and the respective classifications they imposed upon signs, could be combined to give a complete list of sign types. That is, since a sign has a sign-vehicle it can be classified as either a qualisign, a sinsign, or legisign. Additionally, since that sign has an object it can be classified as either an icon, an index, or a symbol. And finally, since that sign will also determine an interpretant it can be classified as either a rheme, a dicent, or a delome.
Each sign is then classifiable as some combination of each of its three elements, that is, as either one of the three types of sign-vehicle, plus one of the three types of object, plus one of the three types of interpretant. Initially, this seems to yield twenty-seven possible classificatory combinations, but, because of certain of Peirce's phenomenological theories, there are restrictions on how we can combine the different elements that mean there are, in fact, only ten types of sign.
For more on the relation between Peirce's phenomenological categories, and his sign typology, see Lizska and Savan The rules for the permissible combinations are actually quite simple so long as we bear two things in mind. First, types of each element are classifiable as either a quality, an existential fact, or a convention.
That is, across the three elements of a sign, there are three types deriving from qualities the qualisign, the icon, and the rheme , three deriving from existential facts, the sinsign, the index, and the dicent , and three deriving from conventions the legisign, the symbol, and the delome.
Second, the classification of the interpretant depends upon the classification of the object, which in turn depends upon the classification of the sign-vehicle. The rules that determine permissible classifications, then, are that if an element is classified as a quality, then its dependent element may only be a classified as a quality. If an element is classified as an existential fact, then its dependent element may be classified as either an existential fact, or a quality. And if an element is classified as a convention, then its dependent element may be classified as either a convention, an existential fact, or a quality.
This leaves us with ten permissible combinations between a sign-vehicle, object and interpretant, and so ten possible kinds of signs. They look something like this:. These ten types of sign are simply called after the combination of their elements: an ordinary proposition is a dicentic-symbolic-legisign , a spontaneous cry a rhematic-indexical-sinsign , and so on.
Despite its apparent completeness and complexity, however, Peirce was soon to begin rethinking his account of signs and over the final years of his life, he introduced further complexities and nuances. During the last part of his life the majority of Peirce's philosophical output concerned semiotic, and he developed his account of signs far beyond the theory.
There seem to be two reasons for this. First, Peirce was geographically and intellectually isolated and his main outlet was correspondence with the English woman, Lady Victoria Welby. Welby wrote on various philosophical topics and shared Peirce's interests in signs and meaning. This seems to have given Peirce a willing and sympathetic audience for his developing ideas on signs.
The second reason seems to have been his growing appreciation of the connections between the semiotic process and the process of inquiry. Peirce always thought of his philosophy in a systematic and architectonic way.
However, around , an application for funding to the Carnegie Institute saw him express more clearly the connections between different aspects of his philosophy. The application failed, but Peirce had returned to thinking about the place of sign theory in his broader philosophy. In particular, he came to see sign theory more clearly as part of the logic of scientific discovery, that is, as central to his account of inquiry.
We shall not review Peirce's account of inquiry here, but as an end directed process leading from doubt-prone to doubt-proof beliefs, Peirce began to see a similar end-directedness running through the semiotic process.
This kind of thinking lead Peirce to reassess his account of signs and sign structure: the connection between the process of inquiry and sign chains led Peirce to notice subtleties and nuances that had previously been transparent to him. In particular, it led him to see chains of signs as tending towards a definite but idealized end rather than progressing ad infinitum. Since at the idealized end of inquiry we have a complete understanding of some object, there need be no further interpretant of that object; our understanding cannot be developed any further.
See Ransdell and Short and for more on the connections between Peirce's later account and the end-directed process of inquiry. Indeed, Short represents the fullest and best developed account of 'telic' interpretations of Peirce's semiotic to date.
The first effect of Peirce's greater appreciation of the parallels between inquiry and his sign theory is a distinction between the object of the sign as it we understand at some given point in the semiotic process, and the object of the sign as it stands at the end of that process.
The former he calls the immediate object , and the later he calls the dynamic object. Hookway , The dynamic object is, in some senses, the object that generates a chain of signs. The aim of a sign chain is to arrive at a full understanding of an object and so assimilate that object into the system of signs. Indeed, Hookway's description shows an acute awareness of the connection between the dynamic object and the process of inquiry in Peirce's later sign theory.
An example, from Liszka , 23 , captures Peirce's idea quite clearly: taking a petroleum tank half full with fuel, a variety of signs for this half-full state are available. Perhaps there is a fuel gauge attached to the tank, or perhaps the tank makes a distinctive sound when we strike it and so on. But, despite these various signs, the object underlying them all is the actual level of fuel in the petroleum tank; this is the dynamic object. The immediate object, then, is not some additional object distinct from the dynamic object but is merely some informationally incomplete facsimile of the dynamic object generated at some interim stage in a chain of signs.
Returning to the petroleum tank example, when we strike the tank, the tone that it emits which functions as the sign-vehicle represents to us that the tank is not full but it does not tell us the precise level of fuel. The immediate object, then, is a less-than-full-tank. Clearly, the immediate and dynamic objects of a sign are intimately linked and Peirce consistently describes and introduces the two together. See, CP 4. However, the connection between the two is most clear when we consider the connections between sign chains and inquiry.
The dynamic object is, as we have suggested, the goal and end point that drives the semiotic process, and the immediate object is our grasp of that object at any point in that process. Ransdell, for instance, says:. Put this way, it is clear how Peirce's growing concern to capture the parallels between semiosis and the process of inquiry leads him to identify two objects for the sign. Just as with the object s of the sign, the parallels between semiotic and inquiry result in a similar division of interpretants.
As a chain of signs moves towards a final end there are different interpretants playing different but important roles. Peirce identifies three different ways in which we grasp the way a sign stands for an object. He calls these three types of interpretant, the immediate interpretant , the dynamic interpretant and the final interpretant and describes them like this.
We shall examine each of these in turn, but to get a clearer understanding of the three interpretants it is helpful to look, very briefly, at Peirce's three grades of clarity, or understanding since Peirce took these to inform his division of interpretants. Combining his pragmatic maxim with notions of clarity from Descartes and Leibniz, Peirce identifies three grades of understanding. The first grade of clarity is to have an unreflective grasp of some concept in everyday experience.
The second grade of clarity is to have, or be capable of providing, a general definition of that concept. The third grade of clarity, though, comes from Peirce's famous statement of the pragmatic maxim:. A full understanding of some concept, then, involves familiarity with it in day-to-day encounters, the ability to offer some general definition of it, and knowing what effects to expect from holding that concept to be true.
Although these grades of clarity are part of Peirce's pragmatism, his greater understanding of the interconnectedness of his thought led him to realize that they were also crucial to his work on semiotic. In particular, he saw the three grades of clarity or understanding as reflected in his notion of the interpretant and of course felt that the interpretant also had three grades or divisions.
Peirce himself says:. Here, then, Peirce identifies the first grade of clarity with the dynamic interpretant, the second grade with the immediate interpretant, and the third grade with the final interpretant.
As its identification with the second grade of clarity suggests, the immediate interpretant is a general definitional understanding of the relationship between the sign and dynamic object.
The immediate interpretant, then, is something like recognition of the syntax of the sign and the more general features of its meaning. Also instructive is David Savan's description of the immediate interpretant as the:. In terms of an example where ordinary sentences are the signs, the immediate interpretant will involve something like our recognition of grammatical categories, syntactic structures and conventional rules of use. We know it is a question, we know it concerns doing harm to some person, a male, and so on.
These things are part of the immediate interpretant of the sign. The second type of interpretant that any sign must have is the dynamic interpretant.
The dynamic interpretant, then, is the understanding we reach, or which the sign determines, at any particular semiotic stage. To continue with linguistic examples, we know that the dynamic interpretant is the actual interpretation we make, or understanding we reach, in the first instance of interpretation. There is also an interesting connection between the dynamic interpretant and the immediate object.
As the understanding we actually reach at any particular point in the sign chain, the dynamic interpretant represents an incomplete understanding, or interpretation, of the dynamic object.
More important, though, is that the immediate object of some sign in a sign chain consists of the actual interpretations made previously, that is, it consists of the dynamic interpretants from earlier stages in the sign chain. The dynamic interpretant then, is the actual interpretation or understanding we make at some point in the semiotic process, and also constitutes, along with previous dynamic interpretants, the immediate object, or partial understanding we have of the dynamic object at any particular point in the semiotic process.
The final interpretant, then, seems to be what our understanding of the dynamic object would be at the end of inquiry, that is, if we had a reached a true understanding of the dynamic object. Peirce's notion of inquiry is clearly central here.
As Hookway points out, we might best define the final interpretant as the understanding:. As an example, consider again the kinds of utterance that we have already looked at. Just as the dynamic interpretant has clear connections with other elements of Peirce's semiotic, so too does the final interpretant.
As should be clear, from the connections that emerge from the notion of inquiry, the final interpretant interacts strongly with the dynamic object. The final interpretant, then, is important to our understanding of the dynamic object in a couple of ways. First, it is the point where our grasp of the dynamic object would be complete and, according to Ransdell , — , is where the immediate object and the dynamic object coincide. This represents the full assimilation or integration of the dynamic object into our system of signs.
Second, the final interpretant functions as an exemplar or normative standard by which we can judge our actual interpretative responses to the sign. This identification of the six elements of a sign is the clearest and least controversial part of Peirce's final sign theories. Most of what we know about Peirce's final account is gleaned from letters, partially worked out manuscripts and other miscellaneous items. Consequently, there is much to the final account that is still unclear, unsatisfactory, incomplete, and controversial.
In this final section, we shall look at two of the most interesting issues surrounding the final account: Peirce's projected Final Classification of sixty-six signs; and what appears to be his identification of additional interpretants. Just as the Early and Interim Accounts include a corresponding classification of sign types, Peirce's final account holds similar typological ambitions.
Peirce states explicitly that there are sixty-six classes of sign in his final typology. See EP2. Strictly speaking, the six elements that we have detailed yield only twenty eight sign types, but we are interested in Peirce's very final typology.
He believes that we can obtain these sixty-six classes, rather in the manner of the typology, by identifying ten elements of signs and signification, each of which has three qualifying classes, and then working out their permissible combinations.
These ten elements include the six sign elements identified above, plus four other elements that focus on the relation between signs, objects and interpretants. The ten elements and their respective sign types, taken from Peirce's letters to Lady Welby EP2 — , then, are as follows:.
The reason that Peirce believes these ten elements will yield sixty-six classes is clear enough, the same combinatorial considerations given for the interim typology outlined above in 3. However, the precise manner and order in which these elements interact will determine what the sixty-six classes of signs will look like in the final typology. Unfortunately, these ten divisions and their classes represent a baffling array of under-explained terminology, and there is little to indicate precisely how we should set about the task of combining them.
Even though we may be confident on the number of signs in the final typology, other details are sketchy and underdeveloped, and there still exists no fully satisfactory account of the sixty-six classes.
Houser , There is, of course, good work on the final typology see Burks and Weiss , Sanders , Savan , Jappy , Muller , and Farias and Queiroz for the best of this work , but ultimately, it is not clear that any account will overcome the problems posed by the incomplete and cursory nature of the final account. Indeed, it is not clear that Peirce himself was fully at ease with his final typology and how its elements should hang together.
As he himself said:. As is common with all of Peirce's work in philosophy, various changes in terminology and subtleties with accompanying neologisms occur from one piece of work to the next.
His work on interpretants is no different. Fitzgerald , 78 claims that since emotional, energetic and logical interpretants are actual effects, they must be seen as three sub-types of the dynamic interpretant. This is because dynamic interpretants are described by Peirce as the effect actually produced on the mind.
Short , , and thinks that each of the immediate, dynamic and final interpretants may be further sub-divided into emotional, energetic and logical. There are simple textual reasons that count against Fitzgerald's claims. For instance, Peirce describes the dynamic interpretant as deriving its character from action CP8.
This seems to make the two inconsistent. See Liszka , 21 for more on the problems with Fitzgerald's claim. Moreover, this inconsistency seems to suggest a problem for Short's view since his account also suggests that the dynamic interpretant should include the logical interpretant as a subdivision Short , Short sites CP8.
Short takes this as suggesting that the two should be treated as different and distinct trichotomies. Short , How far the textual evidence on the matter will prove decisive is unclear, especially given the fragmentary nature of Peirce's final work on signs. First, Peirce is notorious for experimenting with terminology, especially when trying to pin down his own ideas, or describe the same phenomenon from different angles. And finally, there is little provision in Peirce's projected sixty-six classes of signs for the kind of additional classifications imposed by further subdivisions of the interpretant.
For more on this discussion see, Liszka and , Fitzgerald , Lalor , Short , , and All references to Semiotics and Significs take the form SS followed by page numbers. Peirce, Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Sanders: logic pragmatism semiotics: medieval types and tokens.
Basic Sign Structure 1. Peirce's Early Account: —8. The Interim Account: 3. The Final Account: —10 4. Basic Sign Structure In one of his many definitions of a sign, Peirce writes: I define a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the later is thereby mediately determined by the former. EP2, What we see here is Peirce's basic claim that signs consist of three inter-related parts: a sign, an object, and an interpretant.
The objects of the understanding, considered as representations, are symbols, that is, signs which are at least potentially general.
But the rules of logic hold good of any symbols, of those which are written or spoken as well as those which are thought.
They have no immediate application to likeness [icons] or indices, because no arguments can be constructed of these alone, but do apply to all symbols. Examples of signs whose sign-vehicle relies upon a quality are difficult to imagine, but a particularly clear example, used by David Savan, is this: […] I use a color chip to identify the color of some paint I want to buy.
The color chip is perhaps made of cardboard, rectangular, resting on a wooden table etc. But it is only the color of the chip that is essential to it as a sign of the color of the paint.
Savan , 20 There are many elements to the colored chip as a sign, but it is only its color that matters to its ability to signify. For more on the relation between Peirce's phenomenological categories, and his sign typology, see Lizska and Savan The rules for the permissible combinations are actually quite simple so long as we bear two things in mind.
The Final Account: —10 During the last part of his life the majority of Peirce's philosophical output concerned semiotic, and he developed his account of signs far beyond the theory. Ransdell, for instance, says: [T]he immediate object is the object as it appears at any point in the inquiry or semiotic process. The [dynamic] object, however, is the object as it really is. These must be distinguished, first, because the immediate object may involve some erroneous interpretation and thus be to that extent falsely representative of the object as it really is, and, second, because it may fail to include something that is true of the real object.
In other words, the immediate object is simply what we at any time suppose the real object to be. Ransdell , Put this way, it is clear how Peirce's growing concern to capture the parallels between semiosis and the process of inquiry leads him to identify two objects for the sign.
The [Dynamic] Interpretant is whatever interpretation any mind actually makes of a sign. The third grade of clarity, though, comes from Peirce's famous statement of the pragmatic maxim: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
W3, A full understanding of some concept, then, involves familiarity with it in day-to-day encounters, the ability to offer some general definition of it, and knowing what effects to expect from holding that concept to be true. The first was such Familiarity as gave a person familiarity with a sign and readiness in using it or interpreting it.
In his consciousness he seemed to himself to be quite at home with the Sign. The third was Pragmatistic Analysis [and is] identified with the Final Interpretant. Also instructive is David Savan's description of the immediate interpretant as the: explicit content of the sign which would enable a person to say whether or not the sign was applicable to anything concerning which that person had sufficient acquaintance. It is the total unanalyzed impression which the sign might be expected to produce, prior to any critical reflection upon it.
Savan , As Hookway points out, we might best define the final interpretant as the understanding: which would be reached if a process of enriching the interpretant through scientific enquiry were to proceed indefinitely. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google.
Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Simon Grovi. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. Eudeba II. En se publicaron los siguientes dos 2.
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