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