SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

Z4 I Foundations of Peircean Semiotics Peirce's Concept of Semiotic Mediation I 25
transmission of this further determination is registered in the resulting characterition
taken more generally as the essential feature of the highest metaphysical category,
which Peirce calls "Thirdness." The chapter concludes with an analysis of
Peirce's notion of "medium of communication," which occupied his late thinking
and which ironically implies a devaluation of the semiotic properties of expressive
vehicles for the sake of a commitment to truth-functional epistemology.
In its most basic sense, the notion of mediation can be defined as any process
in which two elements are brought into articulation by means of or through the
intervention of some third element that serves as the vehicle or medium of communication.
In billiards, for example, the action of the cue is capable of knocking
the black eight ball into the corner pocket thanks to the white cue ball, which
carries or transmits the directional impetus of the cue to the eight ball (CP 1.532;
cf. Wild 1947:218). This simple account of mediation in which the cue ball mediates
between the cue and the eight ball is, to use Peirce's term, "degenerate"
for four reasons. First, in this case the process of mediation can be easily reduced
to two independent dyadic moments, cue and cue ball, cue ball and eight ball.
Second, the eight ball responds to the cue ball without taking into account or
forming any representation of the initial impetus from the cue. Third, there is no
dimension of relationship among the three elements involved other than that of
dyadic physical connection, what Peirce calls "iconicity." And fourth, nothing of
a general nature is transmitted in this sequence of stimulus-reactions that would
be equivalent to the noetic quality conveyed when a speaker delivers words to a
listener who understands thereby the speaker's meaning. These four observations
suggest that the billiards model is only an example of degenerate rather than
genuine mediation: the three elements are reducible without residue to independent
dyads; there is no interpretation or representation by the resultant moment
of the earlier moment; no symbolic or conventional relations exist among the
elements; and no thought, idea, or meaning is embodied and transmitted in the
process.
In order to understand how a genuine example of sign mediation would differ
from the degenerate billiards example, we need to introduce Peirce's definition
of the sign and the sign relation, since the sign is the most perfect example
of "mediation" conceived of as a generalized category. In doing this we are operating
in a fashion similar to Peirce's own style of argumentation, for he completes
his deduction of his three fundamental ontological categories, "Firstness"
or qualitative possibility, "Secondness" or existent otherness, and "Thirdness"
or general regularity, by first generating a model of then necessary components
of the sign relation. One of the clearest of Peirce's many attempts to define the
sign relation is as follows:
By a Sign I mean anything whatever, real or fictile, which is capable of a sensible
form, is applicable to something other than itself, that is already known,
and that is capable of being so interpreted in another sign which I call its Interprétant
as to communicate something that may not have been previously
known about its Object. There is thus a triadic relation between any Sign, an
Object, and an Interprétant. (MS 654.7, 1910)
The sign relation, thus, necessarily involves three elements bound together in a
semiotic moment. The sign itself considered as the sensible vehicle or expressive
form, what Peirce often labels the "representamen," can be either an external
object functioning as a means of communication or an internal, mental representation
conveying meaning from one act of cognition to the next. Second, the
object of the sign is that which the expressive form stands for, reproduces, or
presents "in its true light" (MS 599.28, 1902). And, third, the interprétant is a
resulting mental or behavioral effect produced by the object's influence on the
sign vehicle in some interpreter or interpreting representation. In more modern
vocabulary, the interprétant constitutes the "meaning" or "significance" of the
sign, while the object constitutes the "referent" or "denotation" of the sign.
Since these three elements can, in themselves, belong to various orders of reality,
such as single objects, general classes, fictions, mental representations, physical
impulses, human actions, or natural laws, what constitutes the sign relation is the
particular way in which this triad is bound together. Peirce expresses this unique
semiotic bond as a relationship in which the object or denoted entity "deter
mines," specifies, or influences the sign vehicle or representamen to further de
termine the interprétant so that this interprétant comes to represent the origina
object in the same respect as the representamen does:
A Sign, or Representamen, is a First which stands in such a genuine triadic
relation to a Second, called its Object, as to be capable of determining a Third,
called its Interprétant, to assume the same triadic relation to its object in which
it stands itself to the same Object. (CP 2.274, c.1902) -
In insisting that the representamen and the interprétant are both signs representing
the same object, although to different degrees of specificity, and that the object
of the sign determines not just that first sign but, mediately, a second
interpreting sign, Peirce implies two things about the sign relation. First, the sign
relation is constituted by the interlocking of a vector of representation pointing
from the sign and interprétant toward the object and a vector of determination
pointing from the object toward both sign and interprétant. Second, one semiotic
moment in which the sign elements are in a genuine triadic relation requires an
infinite series of similar moments; in other words, the sign relation is a process.
I take up these two issues in turn.
Determination and representation are the opposed vectors in any sign relation.
Determination, for Peirce, is the causal process in which qualities of one
element are specified, transferred, or predicated by the action of another element.
This process of adding to the determination of an element is equivalent to an
increase in the "depth" or intension of a term (CP 2.428,1893); and the semiotic