SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

iz I Foundations of Peircean Semiotics Peirce Divested for Nonintimates I JJ,
Se unreflective prejudice of language speakers—a person is, after all, "an animal
at has command of some syntactical language" (MS 659:10)—who assume
at language, or more accurately, their language is essential for thinking. 6
For
Peirce, some "form of expression" is necessary for rational thought, but articulate
or written language need not be elevated to this position of priority:
It might be supposed that although such a study cannot draw any principles
from the study of languages, that linguistics might still afford valuable suggestions
to it. Upon trial, I have not found it to be so. Languages have never furnished
me with a single new idea; they have at most only afforded examples
of truths I had already ascertained by a priori reasoning. (MS 693:190-92)
Though human languages can well illustrate semiotic principles discovered
by other means (primarily, for Peirce, logical analysis by means of his Existential
Graphs), they must be treated with healthy suspicion. Precisely because language
is "man's instinctive vehicle of thought" (MS 654:4), reasoning has a tendency
to become "trammelled by the usages of speech" (MS 654:3). Even logicians
have fallen victim to the "pernicious idleness of consulting ordinary language"
(MS 559):
I do not, for my part, regard the usages of language as forming a satisfactory
basis for logical doctrine. Logic, for me, is the study of the essential conditions
to which signs must conform in order to function as such. How the constitution
of the human mind may compel men to think is not the question; and the
appeal to language appears to me to be no better than an unsatisfactory
method of ascertaining psychological facts that are of no relevancy to logic.
(NEM 4:245)
(part of the danger involved in a logician's taking language as a guide is that there
ys a tendency to confuse the proposition itself with particular "lingual expressions"
(NEM 4:248) of it. A logical proposition is a legisign, not a replica of a
sign. It is the same proposition whether it "happens to have a replica in writing,
in oral speech, or in silent thought" (NEM 4:248), or whether "one selfsame
thought may be carried upon the vehicle of English, German, Greek, or Gaelic"
(MS 298:7), that is, whatever the form of instances of its expression. And it is
also the same proposition regardless of the particular purposive function
tended or accomplished by its instantiation: "One and the same proposition may
be affirmed, denied, judged, doubted, inwardly inquired into, put as a question,
wished, asked for, effectively commanded, taught, or merely expressed, and does
not thereby become a different proposition" (NEM 4:248). Furthermore, the
symbols constituting language are logically defective in that they are involved in
what we would today call "conversational pragmatics." As Peirce notes, "As little
as possible is spoken, as much as possible is left to implication, imagination and
belief" (NEM 3:140).
in
Abstracted from both expressive form and purposive function, a proposition
is a complex symbol which represents to its interprétant that the qualities or characteristics
signified in the predicate portion pertain to existing objects, the same
objects denoted in the subject portion. These two components of a proposition
can be classified as icons and indices: the predicate is an "image" and the subject
is a "label," and when joined together in a full proposition these parts convey
real information about the world, namely, that these qualities "iconized" apply
truly to the objects indexed: "But the particular proposition asserts that, with
sufficient means, in that universe would be found an object to which the subject
term would be applicable, and to which further examination would provide that
the image called up by the predicate was also applicable" (CP 2.369).
This should seem completely impossible! Having claimed in unequivocal language
that a proposition is a symbolic legisign, that is, an abstract type distinct
from its various modes of formal realization and contextual functioning, which
represents its general object only on the basis of being interpreted to do so, Peirce
then insists that a proposition must carry information about the world, that it is
subject to being judged true or false. The path out of this perplexity lies in
Peirce's observation that, although signs are related to their objects in diverse
ways—by formal resemblance (icons), by contextual contiguity (indices), and by
conventional attribution (symbols)—these same signs can determine their interprétants
to represent them as being related to their objects as other than they are
in fact related. We know that words and propositions are both symbols (and thus
legisigns); but they differ radically in how they specify their interprétants to represent
the relation with their respective objects: a single term (a common noun,
for example) determines its interprétant to represent it as being merely an icon
of its object (book or is black reter to any possible thing that has the qualities
expressed by the sign), while a proposition, the book is black, determines its
interprétant to represent it as being merely an index of its object. Now this is not
to deny that the interprétant still represents both a term and a proposition to be
conventionally related to their objects; the claim being made is that, in addition
to this level of representation, interprétants have the power to apprehend semiotic"
grounds as being other than they are. And, of course, Peirce invented a set of
technical terms for these distinctions: a "jjasme" is a sign which is apprehended
to be an icon; a "djccnt" or "dicisign" is a sign which is apprehended to be an
index; and an "argument" is a sign which is apprehended to be a symbol.
Cases in which a sign's actual relation to its object is identical with that
relation as apprehended by the interprétant are easy to grasp but rather uninteresting.
A weathervane is an index of its object, the wind, because it is in direct
physical connection with it; a weathervane grasped semiotically as a dicent conveys
the information it does only because it is apprehended to be in this relation
of causal connection. For a farmer to interpret a weathervane as being merely