SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

zz I Foundations of Peircean Semiotics
is not thereby incapacitated for being real, that is, for holding its characters independently
of thoughts of individual minds about its possession of them" (MS
296). This example is extremely important in that it shows how action deriving
from social norms or cultural conventions can share Peircean reality—and thus
openness to semiotic understanding—with the objects of physical laws and logical
reasoning.
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Peirce's Concept of
Semiotic Mediation
All my notions are too narrow. Instead of Sign," ought I not to say Medium}
—Charles Sanders Peirce (MS 339, 1906)
The Fundamental Model of Semiotic Mediation
ONE OF THE most significant contributions to semiotic theory made by Peirce
is his conception of scientific epistemology as the study of the logic of signs. 1
For
Peirce, human cognition, including sensory perception, emotive feeling, as well
as inferential reasoning, involves "internal signs" linked, on the one hand, to each
other in an endless series of states of mental "dialogue" and, on the other hand,
to external reality represented as objects interacting in ways similar to the interactions
among constituents of sign relations. In every mental act some feature of
reality, defined as that which is as it is apart from any and all thought about it,
is brought into connection with a chain of mental representations that has the
unique power of interpreting reality in ways other than it is in itself. But since
reality's objects possess the qualities or characteristics they do independently of
human representation, the pattern of scientific representation is always "determined"
or caused by natural regularities; resulting cognitions are true to the degree
that the relations inhering among mental signs match the relations inhering
among external signs. There is, to be sure, a world in itself and a world as represented,
but Peirce's fundamental insight is that these two realms are brought
into articulation by the mediating role of signs.
This chapter explores Peirce's theory of the semiotic mediation of thought
and reality as it developed in the course of his persistent yet constantly shifting
reflection on the nature of signs. Where possible the argument keeps close to
Peirce's own words as found in his voluminous published writings and in the
massive manuscript collection now available to scholars. After describing the essential
features of the sign relation, the discussion examines the reciprocal vectors
of determination and representation which constitute all moments of semiosis. A
distinction between chains of semiosis and levels of semiosis then leads to a detailed
consideration of Peirce's early views on the mediating function of thought
in signs. A subtle shift in Peirce's point of view after his incorporation of the
logic of relations is seen to have important implications for the theory of media-
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