SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

8 I Foundations ofPeircean Semiotics
Peirce Divested for Nonintimates I 9
stances is a "legisign" (from the Latin word for "law") or a "type." The context-specific
pronunciation of a word is a "replica," that is, a special kind of
sinsign, namely, one which corresponds to a "type." It is important to see the
peculiarity of linguistic utterances. Speakers and hearers cannot communicate
with each other without producing physical events or sinsigns, yet these instances
would have no meaning were it not for the system of conventional understanding
operating at the type level. (Of course, in everyday conversation speakers often
[assume that the token utterance is directly linked to the contextually realized
^linguistic meaning.)
hjjsgisign is a law that is a Sign. This law is usually established by men. Every
/ conventional sign is a legisign. It is not a single object, but a general type
which, it has been agreed, shall be significant. Every legisign signifies through
an instance of its application, which may be termed a Replica of it. Thus, the
word "the" will usually occur from fifteen to twenty^ive times on a page. It
is in all these occurrences one and the same word, the same legisign. Each single
instance of it is a Replica. The Replica is a Sinsjgn. Thus, every Legisign
requires Sinsigns. But these are not ordinary Sinsigns, such as are peculiar occurrences
that are regarded as significant. Nor would the Replica be significant
if it were not for the law which renders it so. (CP 2.2.46)
Despite these precise terminological distinctions it is easy to confuse a sinsign
and a replica (which is a special kind of sinsign). Compare a footprint made in
the sand and an utterance of the word book. Both are actually occurring events,
both have the potential for functioning semiotically, and both are subject to regular
repetition with similar significance. What, then, is the important difference?
(It is not, by the way, that the footprint would retain the character it has even if
no one interpreted it as a sign. This is very true, but has to do with its being an
index rather than a symbol.) It is that the footprint is an actual phenomenon
which, in certain contexts, can be used as a sign, whereas the utterance of a word
could not possibly be interpreted as the sign that it is without the interpreter's
recognition of its corresponding type: a footprint is possibly
of a word is necessarily
a sign; an utterance
a sign. One interesting implication of this is that, while
not all singular phenomena (what Peirce labels Seconds because they are essentially
dyadic or reactive in character) are signs, all general phenomena—laws,
habits, associations, evolutionary tendencies, abstractions, rules, logical arguments,
and conceptions—are fundamentally semiotic entities.
A word, or any symbol, is thus a conventional sign in two interlocking
senses. First, the semiotic identity of a given spoken or written instance of language
is governed by a rule for recognizing each occurrence as a replica of a
linguistic type, rather than as merely incoherent babble or meaningless scribbling.
This rule of recognition gives users of a sign system the ability to evaluate various
occurring phenomena to determine which are to be classified as proper signs. Of
course, there needs to be a certain degree of flexibility built into this rule, how-
ever, since each replica of a word will be in some respects different—speakers
talk with different pitches, accents, intonation patterns, and writers never produce
exactly the same shape of handwritten letters. Second, the significance of a
symbol is interprétable only because of the prior collective agreement or "habit-j
ual acquaintance" (CP 2.329) specifying the sign-object linkage. This imputed!
ground relating sign and object is provided by a general habit, rule, or disposition \
embodied in the interprétant. Thus, our ability to utter a linguistic sign on a
particular occasion in order to communicate a meaning about some object to
someone (or to oneself) presupposes the conventional rule associating sign and
object. But note that, in the case of symbols, the sign and object cannot be singular
things but must always be general, whether a general sign or legisign or a
general object.
An important implication of this intersection of symbols and legisigns is that
all symbols are legisigns but not all legisigns are symbols. In other words, all signs
which represent their objects solely because they are interpreted to do so must
also have the character of governing replicas in actual instances of communication.
This is easily understood: a sign which is such because of a conventional
ground must itself be of a general rather than a singular character and must also
represent a general idea rather than a singular object. But there can be legisigns—
signs which function only by governing replicas of themselves—which are not
purely conventional. How is this possible? Consider the second-person singular
personal pronoun you. This clearly is a legisign, since speakers of English recognize
the same word in all the various contextual instances of saying you, but this
legisign represents its object by virtue of a less-than-symbolic ground: you refers
to whomever the speaker is addressing, an object which by this rule must be
co-present in every successfully referring act of uttering a replica of you. There
is a built-in indexical dimension in the meaning of you, a fact which can be
quickly tested. Open a dictionary to the word you and ask: what is the object
represented by this general sign? The answer is: that depends on whom the
speaker is talking to when uttering a replica of the word. As Peirce observes,
these indexical legisigns "do not possess the generality of purely conventional
signs" (MS 748).
If all symbols are general signs, which signify their general objects by virtue
of a general interprétant, it must be the case that all three components must be •
equally symbolic: the object of a symbol is a symbol and the interprétant of a 1
symbol is a symbol. And if this is so, then there is no such thing as an isolated i
symbol. As Figure 1.1 illustrates, Symbol 1 has Symbol 2 for its interprétant, and
this Interprétant 1 must in turn function as a symbol for its Interprétant 2, and
so on infinitely. A similar expansion is found in the opposite direction: Object 1
of Symbol 1 is a symbol, so that it also stands for some general Object 2 by virtue
of being represented to do so by its Interprétant 3 (which is identical with Symbol
1!). Thus, sign, object, and interprétant are not three distinct kinds of semiotic
y
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