SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

40 I Foundations of Peircean Semiotics
It is the intentional character of "throwing at," of "giving to," that constitutes
these acts as examples of genuine Thirdness; the linkage of two dyads creates
something that has reality only by virtue of the "bringing together" or mediation
of component elements.
A few years after writing the passage just cited, Peirce took a further step in
his generalization of Thirdness by combining his earlier insights into the nature
of symbolic representation and his new discoveries about triadic relations. Put
simply, Peirce claimed that Thirdness is that which brings together or mediates
Firstness and Secondness. In 1902 the claim was that mediation is a modification
of Firstness and Secondness by Thirdness (CP 2.92), and in 1903 again Thirdness
is defined as the "mediation between Secondness and Firstness" (CP 5.121).
And finally in 1904 Peirce stated explicitly: "A Third is something which brings
a First into relation to a Second" (SS 31) and then glossed the sign relation in
identical language:
In its genuine form, Thirdness is the triadic relation existing between a sign,
its object, and the interpreting thought, itself a sign, considered as constituting
the mode of being a sign. A sign mediates between the interprétant sign and
its object. ... A Third is something which brings a First into relation to a Second.
A sign is a sort of Third. (SS 31, 1904)
It would seem from this that Peirce is stressing the middle position of the sign
vehicle or representamen rather than the function of mediate representation as
exemplified in the work of the interprétant, which, as we have seen, characterized
his earlier position. 8
Throughout the first decade of the century Peirce consistently
held two doctrines about Thirdness and signs: first, this function of
"bringing together" is grounded on a rational, intellectual, and law-like regularity
that provides the common feature of natural as well as cognitive processes;
and second, the sign itself is the middle, medium, means, or mediation that links
object and interprétant in a communication system (SS 32, 1904).
Sign as Medium of Communication
Having established the third category in terms of bridging, bringing together,
and coming between two other elements, Peirce extended this doctrine still further
in his writing between 1902 and 1912 by focusing on the notion of communication
as an essential feature of all semiosis. The endless series of signs stretching
toward the object, on the one hand, and toward the interprétant, on the
other, forms a unified continuum because throughout this process the "torch of
truth" is passed on. That is, knowledge gained through the study of external and
internal signs is not something which is later available for communication or
transmission within the scientific community; rather, truth and communication
in Peirce's view are completely isomorphic because the inferential character of
Peirce's Concept of Semiotic Mediation I 41
argumentation is always dialogic—not between two different people who are "in
communication" but between two different moments of the same mind in which
the unity of the semiotic continuum is realized. 9
Now, in any process of communication
there must be a medium, means, or vehicle through which the message
is conveyed from one cognition to the next, and it is precisely the quality of signs
as "mediating thirds" that enables Peirce to claim that a sign is a species of a
"medium of communication" between two minds that are thereby brought to be
one mind (MS 339, 1906; MS 498). 10
As he notes, a third or tertium is, etymologically
at least, a middle or medium,
and anything that functions in this capacity
is properly a sign. 11
In the act of throwing a stone, for example, there is
a genuine dyadic relation between the person who throws and the stone thrown,
but there is also a triadic relation involved when the air, the medium through
which the stone is thrown, is taken into account (MS 12.5—6, 1912). Though
scarcely noticeable, the friction of the air exerts an influence on the stone's motion
and thus on the character of the triad as a whole. Like the air in this example,
a sign functions as the medium of communication and serves to transmit
some form that it embodies:
For the purposes of this inquiry a Sign may be defined as a Medium for the
communication of a Form. It is not logically necessary that anything possessing
consciousness, that is, feeling of the peculiar common quality of all our feeling
should be concerned. But it is necessary that there should be two, if not three,
quasi-minds, meaning things capable of varied determination as to forms of
the kind communicated. As a medium, the Sign is essentially in a triadic relation,
to its Object which determines it, and to its Interprétant which it determines.
. . . That which is communicated from the Object through the Sign to
the Interprétant is a form; that is to say, it is nothing like an existent, but is a
power, is the fact that something would happen under certain conditions. This
Form is really embodied in the object, meaning that the conditional relarion
which constitutes the form is true of the form as it is in the Object. In the Sign
it is embodied only in a representative sense, meaning that whether by virtue
of some real modification of the Sign, or otherwise, the Sign becomes endowed
with the power of communicating it to an interprétant. (MS 793.1-3, c. 1905)
In this passage Peirce is clearly interpreting his new notion of medium of communication
in terms of his earlier theory of semiotic determination and representation,
but here the stress is on the function of "mediate determination" rather
than of "mediate representation." The role of the sign is to mediately determine
or influence the interprétant by functioning to "deflect the emanation from the
object upon the interpreting mind" (MS 634.24, 1909; cf. NEM 3.839, 841,
1905).
In focusing on the sign's function as a medium of communication, Peirce is
returning to an earlier concern, manifested in the earliest manuscripts from the
18 60s, with the necessity of a level of expression for the modification of con-