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