SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

io I Foundations of Peircean Semiotics
OBJECT 1 .
SYMBOL 3
OBJECT 2
SYMBOL L
INTERPRETANT 3
Figure I.I. The sign relation
INTERPRETANT 1
' SYMBOL 2
• INTERPRETANT 2
g-H entities; they are dimensions of semiotic functioning. (Much confusion can be
avoided if Peirce's notion of the object is not conflated with the Saussurean no-
.Ation of the "signified" concept or "meaning." In Peirce's model the object is~
î what the sign is about and the meaning is the "significative effect of a sign" [CP
I 5.473] embodied in the interprétant.)
The key point is that every symbol necessarily involves "two infinite series,
' j the one back toward the object, the other forward toward the interprétant" (MS
599:38). Not only is there no ultimate object which could be represented in some
symbol and not itself a representation, but there is no ultimate interprétant.
Peirce clearly recognizes the almost incredible ramification of this theory: symbols
are essentially alive. Not in the sense of having breath and locomotion but
in the sense of having an evolving, growing, developing nature:
Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly
from icons, or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons and
symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the
symbol-parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is
by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol
can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo. A symbol, once in being, spreads
among the peoples. In use and in experience, its meaning grows. Such words
as force, law, wealth, marriage, bear for us very different meanings from those
they bore to our barbarous ancestors. (CP 2.30z)
Peirce feels that this potential for growth or self-development in symbols is the
central way in which reality and representation resemble each other, since both
natural laws and logical conventions govern, respectively, the actions of objects
and the course of ideas in reasoning, in essentially the same triadic manner.
Symbols appear to be wonderful entities indeed. But there is something extremely
puzzling about Peirce's concept of symbol. A symbol, by definition, exists
as a sign only because of the interprétant, which imputes a conventional rela-
Peirce Divested for Nonintimates I 11
tionship between sign and object. But, for Peirce, the object, through the medium
of the sign, determines
the interprétant. How can a symbol determine, that is,
specify, an interpreting sign at the same time that it presupposes this same interprétant?
Peirce himself was very conscious of this seeming paradox:
A Symbol differs from both of these types of sign [icon and index] inasmuch j
as it represents its object solely by virtue of being represented to represent it by j
the interprétant which it determines. But how can this be, it will be asked. How 4
can a thing become a sign of an object to an interprétant sign which itself
determines by virtue of the recognition of that, its own creation? (MS 599:43)
The solution to this paradox, like the solution to so many apparent paradoxes,
is that the vector of determination operates at a lower logical level than
the vector of representation: the interprétant represents the sign-object relation
as capable of determining the interprétant that it in fact does. Peirce's own illustration
is clear: a particular form of logical argumentation is a complex sign
which represents the truth; but only when an interpreting mind acknowledges
that argumentation as a sign of the truth, does it indeed function as a sign of
that truth. An argument that, for its interpreters, fails to represent the truth is
not a sign at all.
Language and Logic
Peirce rejects the assumption that the "law of thought" (MS 693:184) was
stipulated by the grammatical or syntactical properties of European or "Aryan"
languages, especially Greek and Latin (NEM 4:171). The subject (what Peirce
prefers to call the "object") of a sentence need not be coded by the nominative
case but appears in some languages, Gaelic for instance, in an oblique case; many
"non-Aryan" languages display a marked paucity of "common nouns" (NEM
3/2:843) and use, rather, expanded verbal formulations in the predicate. And,
most strikingly, the copula is, enshrined by Western logicians as an essential component
of the categorical proposition, did not even appear normatively in Latin
until the late Middle Ages. Yet people speaking languages without common
nouns or copulas presumably "had probably not spoken in earlier times entirely
without thinking" (MS 693:186).
Peirce attempts to replace these logocentric assumptions with an alternative
approach to the relationship between thinking and expression that shows how
different languages can be compared in terms of more fundamental semiotic
functions which language shares with other sign systems: "The study of languages
ought to be based upon a study of the necessary conditions to which signs
must conform in order to fulfill their function as signs" (MS 693:188). This
foundational science, termed by Peirce "speculative semeiotic," should not adopt