1. Speculative Grammar

The mention of Speculative Grammar is not fortuitous. As one of the first modern philosophers to return to the Schoolmen for insight and inspiration, Peirce acquainted himself particularly deeply with the writings of Duns Scotus and even dubbed himself a ‘Scotistic realist.’ From the Grammatica Speculativa commonly misattributed to Duns Scotus (actually written by Thomas of Erfurt) in the editions of Peirce’s time, Peirce took over the name for the most important of the three subdivisions of Logic within his architectonic of sciences, namely Speculative Grammar, Critic (or Critical Logic), and Methodeutic (or Speculative Rhetoric). The first is defined by Peirce as ‘the general theory of the nature and meanings of signs, whether they be icons, indices, or symbols’; the second ‘classifies arguments and determines the validity and degree of force of each kind’; the third ‘studies the methods that ought to be pursued in the investigation, in the exposition, and in the application of truth’ (1.191).

Without exploring the question whether Peirce’s notion of logic is coextensive with semeiotic or subsumed by it (Fisch 1978:51-3), it is clear that he conceived logic as a study of ‘the general necessary laws of signs’ (2.93). Consequently, his conception of sign in all its ramifications is intimately connected with Speculative Grammar in the first instance, as the primary and most fundamental of his three divisions of logic. In fact, one of Peirce’s many definitions of a sign—‘something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity’ (2.228)—contains the three elements (i.e. in some respect for something to somebody) on which the tripartition of logic hinges (Feibleman 1970:88). Speculative Grammar, having a particularly broad scope, can be seen as Peirce’s version of a theory of assertion (cf. Brock 1975), with which semeiotic has an intimate connection, since Peirce conceived of thought as being assertory in nature while consisting of signs. It is important to keep in mind Peirce’s adherence to Plato’s position ‘that thinking always proceeds in the form of a dialogue—a dialogue between different phases of the ego —so that, being dialogical, it is essentially composed of signs, as its matter’ (4.6). Speculative Grammar is not just an inquiry into ‘the general conditions to which thought or signs of any kind must conform in order to assert anything’ (2.206); it appears to be intended to encompass, furthermore, theories of propositional truth, meaning, and cognition (Brock 1975:128; cf. 2.206).

The relation between signs and cognition is a particularly crucial one, for Peirce clearly intends his semeiotic to be a theory of cognition. By the latter phrase (equivalent in most senses to epistemology) Peirce means the very same Speculative Grammar, ‘or analysis of the nature of assertion’ (3.432), which aims at explaining the ‘possibility of knowledge.’ The circle is now complete: semeiotic, speculative grammar, cognition, assertion. Strictly speaking, it is not complete unless assertion is understood to imply meaning, since meaning inheres in semeiotic. But assertion, for Peirce, does involve meaning: the phrase ‘to assert anything’ is clearly used by him as equivalent to the phrase ‘to mean anything’ (Brock 1975:129). Speculative Grammar, which is the same as pure grammar, says Peirce in another connection, is called upon to investigate what must be true of the signs used by ‘every scientific intelligence in order that they may embody any meaning’ (2.229).

The relation of meaning, and through it of cognition, to semeiotic and assertion transpires from the central role of the proposition. Signs, according to Peirce, are inherently linked to the proposition: ‘no sign of a thing or kind of thing—the ideas of signs to which concepts belong—can arise except in a proposition’ (4.583). Since to assert and to mean are equivalent, signs divorced from the context of propositionalizing and asserting are ipso facto not cognitively meaningful (Brock 1975:129-30).

2. The Categories

Logic studies signs, and it does so in three ways: in respect of the general conditions whereby they have meaning, in respect of the conditions of their truth, and in respect of the conditions whereby their meaning is transferred to other signs (NE 4:331). Speculative Grammar is thus a member of a triad, one of many such triads that permeate the entirety of Peirce’s thought. More than that, triads are said to be reflective of the structure of phenomena and of ideas about them. In fact, Peirce admits that his Formal Logic is a ‘Kantian step of transferring the conceptions of logic to metaphysics’ (loc. cit.). The tripartition of logic is not just a classificatory convenience, but in the very nature of the sign relation itself. And the study of logic, including modes of inference (also fundamentally three, about which more below, section 4), seemed to Peirce inevitably to abut in three recurrent ideas, corresponding in form to the sign relation, wherein ‘the Sign, in general is the third member of a triad; first a thing as a thing; second a thing as reacting with another thing; and third a thing as representing another to a third’ (loc. cit.). In their most general and purest form these three ideas are called categories by Peirce, and he proposes to call their study Phenomenology or Phaneroscopy (also Ideoscopy), the latter two names being of Peirce’s own invention. The categories themselves Peirce called by new names, too: Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness—in order to distinguish his conception from that of predecessors (such as Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel). What is subsumed by each of these categories is called a First, a Second, and a Third, respectively.

Peirce defines the categories as follows (8.328):

Firstness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else.

Secondness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, with respect to a second but regardless of any third.

Thirdness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, in bringing a second and third into relation to each other.

Recognizing the excessive generality and vagueness of these terms, Peirce repeatedly refashions and amplifies his definitions of them, as in these extended examples:

Firstness may be defined as . . . the mode in which anything would be for itself, irrespective of anything else, so that it would not make any difference though nothing else existed, or ever had existed, or could exist. Now this mode of being can only be apprehended as a mode of feeling. For there is no other mode of being which we can conceive as having no relation to the possibility of anything else. In the second place, the First must be without parts. For a part of an object is something other than the object itself. Remembering these points, you will perceive that any color, say magenta, has and is a positive mode of feeling, irrespective of every other. Because, firstness is all that it is, for itself, irrespective of anything else, when viewed from without (and therefore no longer in the original fullness of firstness) the firstnesses are all the different possible sense-qualities, embracing endless varieties of which all we can feel are but minute fragments. Each of these is just as simple as any other. It is impossible for a seǹse-quality to be otherwise than absolutely simple. It is only complex to the eye of comparison, not in itself. (NE 4:332)

A Secondness may be defined as a modification of the being of one subject, which modification is ipso facto a mode of being of quite a distinct subject, or, more accurately, secondness is that in each of two absolutely severed and remote subjects which pairs it with the other, not for my mind nor for, or by, any mediating subject or circumstance whatsoever, but in those two subjects alone; so that it would be just the same if nothing else existed, or ever had existed, or could exist. You see that this Secondness in each subject must be secondary to the inward Firstness of that subject and does not supersede that firstness in the least. For were it to do so, the two subjects would, insofar, become one. Now it is precisely their twoness all the time that is most essential to their secondness. But though the secondness is secondary to the firstness, it constitutes no limitation upon the firstness. The two subjects are in no degree one; nor does the secondness belong to them taken together. There are two Secondnesses, one for each subject; but these are only aspects of one Pairedness which belongs to one subject in one way and to the other in another way. But this pairedness is nothing different from the secondness. It is not mediated or brought about; and consequently it is not of a comprehensible nature, but is absolutely blind. The aspect of it present to each subject has no possible rationale. In their essence, the two subjects are not paired; for in its essence anything is what it is, while its secondness is that of it which is another. The secondness, therefore, is an accidental circumstance. It is that a blind reaction takes place between the two subjects. It is that which we experience when our will meets with resistance, or when something obtrudes itself upon sense. Imagine a magenta color to feel itself and nothing else. Now while it slumbers in its magenta-ness let it suddenly be metamorphosed into pea green. Its experience at the moment of transformation will be secondness. (NE 4:332-3)

The idea of Thirdness is more readily understood. It is a modification of the being of one subject which is the mode of a second so far as it is a modification of a third. It might be called an inherent reason. That dormitive power of opium by virtue of which the patient sleeps is more than a mere word. It denotes, however indistinctly, some reason or regularity by virtue of which the opium acts so. Every law, or general rule, expresses a thirdness; because it induces one fact to cause another. Now such a proposition as, Enoch is a man, expresses a firstness. There is no reason for it; such is Enoch’s nature,—that is all. On the other hand the result that Enoch dies like other men, as result or effect, expresses a Secondness. The necessity of the conclusion is just the brute force of this Secondness. In Deduction, then, Firstness by the operation of Thirdness brings forth Secondness. Next consider an Induction. The people born in the last census-year may be considered as a sample of Americans. That these objects should be Americans has no reason except that that was the condition of my taking them into consideration. There is Firstness. Now the Census tells me that about half those people were males. And that this was a necessary result is almost guaranteed by the number of persons included in the sample. There, then, I assume to be Secondness. Hence we infer the reason to be that there is some virtue, or occult regularity, operating to make one half of all American births male. There is Thirdness. Thus, Firstness and Secondness following have risen to Thirdness. (NE 4:333)

Firstness is the categorial rubric under which are entered the common characteristics of freshness, life, freedom, immediacy, feeling, quality, vivacity, and independence (1.302-3, 1.337, 1.357,6.32); of being or being-in-itself (1.356, 1.329); and of mere potentiality (1.328). The idea of a character or quality best summarizes these in the abstract. Although an indefinite aggregate of individual things may resemble one another through a common trait or quality, and may be contrasted with all individuals devoid of this same trait or quality, the trait or quality can be abstracted from the things which have it or lack it, i.e. be isolated and considered in itself apart from the individual things which share or fail to share in it. No matter how disparate and haphazard a collection of entities may be, there will always be some abstractable quality, even if it is nothing more than a peculiar flavor of oddity or strangeness. A quality thus abstracted can be regarded in itself, as an undifferentiated unity. The name Firstness appears to have suggested itself to Peirce partly with this consideration in mind.

An important dimension of Peirce’s first category goes beyond quality while encompassing it. The here and now character of a concrete quality (for instance, the color or hardness of an object actually being examined by a mineralogist) is not an instance of Firstness. Rather, Firstness is the possibility that some quality may be abstracted or isolated, which would then render it fit to be considered as a unity without parts or elements, without explanatory antecedents or causal consequents. It is the independence of Firstness that allows Peirce to associate it most closely with ideas of freedom, spontaneity, and originality.

Once the spatio-temporal locus of anything under consideration is invoked, however, factors such as effort, resistance, and force come into play, which necessitate dependence, such as is not to be found in Firstness. Secondness, says Peirce, ‘is the experience of effort, prescinded from the idea of a purpose’ (H 25). Since ‘generally speaking genuine secondness consists in one thing acting upon another,—brute action’ (H 26), the main idea of Secondness is that of opposition and raw existence, set off from other ideas by the very same opposition and by contrast. Whatever exists either acts to exert some force on something else external to it; or it is the patient, as it were, of the force exerted upon it by things external to itself. Accordingly, there can be said to be two types of Secondness, active and passive. Secondness confronts us whether we wish it or not; it is a datum, a singular this, which Peirce occasionally refers to as a haecceity. The hard facts of experience, such as are meant when one speaks of experience teaching us this or that, are examples of Secondness. Similarly, mere contiguity, as in pointing to an object, or mere proximity between objects, without any description or classification accompanying the act or state, manifest Secondness. Dyadic relations are frequently adduced by Peirce as involving the idea of Secondness. Most prominent among Seconds are varieties of limits, boundaries, or termini, wherein something confronts its negation. The category of Secondness is found in action, resistance, facticity, dependence, relation, compulsion, effect, reality, and result (1.337, 1.356, 1.358).

Secondness is inadequate, however, to cover the mental element, the status of two things when they are combined or mediated by some third thing. The crucial role of the binding element is stressed by Peirce in a whole variety of ways; one of the most direct is as follows:

Three ideas are basic: those of something, other, and third, or middle. For suppose anything, and there is at once the idea of something. But this something cannot have any distinct property, unless it be opposed to something else. Nor can this opposition exist without the opposites are connected through some medium.

In this mathematical proposition (for such it is shown to be) you have all logic and all metaphysics in a nut-shell. (MS 915:1)

Thirdness is the word Peirce uses corresponding to the Kantian and Hegelian synthesis. This category inheres in mediation, synthesis, living, continuity, process, moderation, learning, memory, inference, representation, intelligence, intelligibility, generality, infinity, diffusion, growth, and conduct (1.337, 1.340, 1.356, 1.359, 1.361, 1.362, 1.366, 6.32). Three ways of classifying this category might be particularly apposite.

First, mediation: any two things connected by some third thing. A node, meeting point, or intersection of three lines exemplify Thirdness. In Peirce’s scheme, the middle term of a syllogism is a Third. So is a sign, in that it mediates between the object it stands for and the interpretant to which it represents the object. Peirce habitually speaks of Thirds as entities connecting two others.

Second, rule: any principle, function, or law which translates or transforms one thing into another is a Third. Any activity to which thought and understanding are essential exemplifies Thirdness. Action and change which are uniform, regular, and amenable to description in terms of general laws exhibit Thirdness. One of Peirce’s favorite and important examples of Thirdness is habit (about which more below); so are reasoning, language, and inquiry.

Third, growth: laws themselves change and develop in accordance with higher-order or supervening laws. With respect to human conduct, such changes are subject to criticism and self-control. For Peirce, evolution is bound up with a whole hierarchy of laws, lower levels subsumed by higher levels, thus making changes within the hierarchy conform to the pattern imposed by superordinate laws. The orderly changes involved in growth are subject to a leading principle which applies the categories to themselves. Using active and passive forms as classifiers, Seconds divide into two varieties, the active member subdividing once again; and Thirds go through a process of fission in a similar manner. The beginnings of this process can be represented by Figure 1 (Savan 1976:8).

FIGURE 1. Thirdness Divided

The categories are not individual things but general aspects of everything that presents itself for perception or cognition—in short, everything that can be known. The hierarchical structure of the interrelationships between the categories is a direct reflection of their definitions. Thirds are more complicated than Seconds, which are more complicated than Firsts. The compounding of categories reveals some instances to be fuller or purer than others, and Peirce calls the less complete or impure combinations degenerate, using the word in its mathematical (unpejorative) sense (3.359). Thus the passive member of a pair of Seconds is a degenerate case of Secondness. The third member in a triplet of Thirds is a complete or genuine Third, while the first and second members are degenerate in different degrees; and so on.

Applying the so-called ‘rhematic’ form of presentation which Peirce himself favored, the basic structure of the categories is as in Figure 2 (Esposito 1980:163).

3. Signs and Semeiosis

‘The essential function of a sign is to render inefficient relations efficient,—not to set them into action, but to establish a habit or general rule whereby they will act on occasion’ (H 31). In this formulation of 1904, the role of the categories in Peirce’s semeiotic is not made explicit, but it is clear from the context that his entire system of signs is pervaded by the categories. The prime example of Thirdness, adduced by Peirce himself, is that of a sign: ‘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 of a sign’ (H 31). It is not enough to say that the categories play an important role in Peirce’s semeiotic: they are absolutely vital to it. All of its definitions, subdivisions, and workings are governed by applications of the theory of categories.

FIGURE 2

The first such application comes with the most basic classification of signs, a trichotomy embodying the three ways in which signs may be divided, i.e. according to: (1) ‘their modes of being as Entia, in themselves’ (L 67:35), that is to say ‘their own material nature’(H 32); (2) their relations to their objects; and (3) ‘the mode of their appeal to their interpretants’ (L 67:35).

A. Signs in themselves

A sign considered in itself is the ground on which the object it stands for is interpreted by the sign into which the original sign is translated or transformed. A ground is the particular respect in which the sign represents its object; not all respects are equally relevant (2.228). The ground is not the same as the sign-vehicle, since the latter may have many characteristics, most of which will be irrelevant to its specific functioning as a sign. Thus a road sign directing travellers to a specific location may be made of a certain kind of material, may be this or that color or shape, but the only thing essential to its functioning will be the place name and an arrow or mileage indicator (if these are mentioned).

The trichotomous divisions dictated by the theory of categories leads Peirce to a trichotomy of grounds, i.e. of signs considered as they are in themselves. These he calls qualisigns, sinsigns, and legisigns. A qualisign is variously defined by Peirce as ‘an indefinite possibility’ (L 67:36), ‘a quality which is a Sign’ (2.244), and ‘a sign . . . of the nature of an appearance’ (H 32). What is important is the quality as such: a qualisign signifies through its abstractable quality only, without any supervening fact or connection. The red light that signals motorists to stop is not a qualisign because it is encompassed by a rule of traffic safety that is dependent on convention. But a swatch of red cloth used to identify the color of curtains made from it is completely direct in its signification: it is the color alone that is relevant. Wherever a quality is a sign that is to be imitated, replicated, copied, mimicked, or otherwise reproduced, we have the action of a qualisign.

Although what comes to mind first in discussing quality may be simple sensory qualities such as color, sound, or odor, fidelity to Peirce’s ideas requires a much broader concept. Any character which can be abstracted as a Firstness and regarded as a unity is suitable for inclusion under Peirce’s definition of a qualisign. Abstracted from its individual occurrence and shared by more than one individual, a quality or complexus of qualities comes to be designated by adjectives which refer to such composite objects as geographical landscapes (‘Mediterranean,’ ‘Alpine,’ ‘Tropical’) or human personalities (‘Churchillian,’ ‘Chaplinesque’).

Qualisigns are indispensable ingredients of any and all communicative acts. Only this species of sign is capable of communicating the peculiar character of a taste, odor, or sound. Even words, apart from their cognitive meanings, may have affective nuances conveyed by their sounds alone. Every sign must convey some information about the quality of its object; to that extent, therefore, every sign must involve a qualisign.

A Second corresponding to a qualisign as a First is the sinsign, a name fashioned by Peirce on the model of simul, seme1, singular, simplex, etc., and defined as ‘an actual existent thing or event which is a sign’ (2.245). This species of sign is by definition connected to direct experience. Essential to a sinsign’s status is its singularity as an encountered thing or occurrence, that which makes it a sign. A clue which establishes the particularity of some object or event is a sinsign. A signal, such as a sound, color, shape, or odor, which elicits a particular response in a particular context is a sinsign—so long as there is a direct dependence on the circumstances of its occurrence. The red stop signal ceases to have the meaning that it does if it is just a red light hanging from a porch window or is set up anywhere but on a roadway. Words that are utilized in a ritualized or performative context (such as that of oath-taking, contracts, marriages, promising, apologizing, etc.) are sinsigns, since it is the concrete circumstances in which they occur that make them the kind of sign that they are.

Owing to the determinative character of the categories, every sinsign (as a Second) must comprise a qualisign (i.e., a First) as part of its structure. The relationship is, of course, ranked: without a First there can be no Second (or Third).

The Third in the particular case of signs considered in themselves is a legisign—’a law that is a Sign’ (2.246). A sign does not become a legisign just because it has some general or law-like character. Only if it is the law that gives the sign its character as a sign does the law become a sign. The most important system of legisigns is language, and each of the constituent elements of a natural language are legisigns. Any particular instantiation of one or an aggregate of these elements is, according to Peirce, a replica of a legisign—i.e., a Second, or sinsign, whose characteristics and the method of its interpretation apart from the circumstances of its occurrence are defined by a covering legisign. The distinction between a legisign and its replica is also known as the Type-Token distinction (Savan 1976:13). Legisigns are, of course, not limited to natural language. Regularities of behavior such as customs or conventions generally are legisigns, as are patterns of physical phenomena like the regular association with rain of air pressure, wind, and cloud formation; or the symptoms regularly manifesting themselves as signs of an illness or syndrome.

Qualisigns, sinsigns, and legisigns thus make up the first triad of sign types. While each member of the triad is treated by Peirce as separate from the other two, it is important to stress the limited nature of their separateness and, what is more, to emphasize their inherent connectedness both structurally and empirically. It follows from Peirce’s view that only qualities can be qualisigns (cf. Savan 1976:14). In order to be able to regard qualities as signs, they must be abstracted as possibilities from their actual occurrences bounded by space and time. Moreover, the two other constituents of sign structure, object and interpretant, must in the case of qualities remain virtual, potential, or possible (something which Peirce consistently recognized). To the extent that qualisigns are distinct from sinsigns, they are a non-occurrent sign.

The same sort of dependency condition defines the relation between sinsigns and legisigns. Sinsigns always occur, to some degree, as replicas of legisigns; qualisigns cannot be manifested apart from their occurrence in sinsigns. Therefore, semeiosis turns out to be multiaspectual. The trichotomy of grounds on which a sign is a sign presents a graded continuum in which the boundaries distinguishing its members are ontologically precise but empirically approximate.

B. Signs, objects, and their relation

Peirce’s concept of sign encompasses three terms: sign, object, and interpretant. These are determined by the three categories in such a way as to render sign a First, object a Second, and interpretant a Third. Since the object of a sign is its Second, the relation between them is a Secondness. In conformity with the distinction made earlier between active and passive forms of Secondness, objects will differ depending on whether sign action is directed outward or is confined within the sign itself. Accordingly, two types of objects are distinguished by Peirce, active or dynamic objects, and passive or immediate objects. Each of these two types is further subdivided by the trichotomy of categories, as is the relation between sign and dynamic object. Altogether these subdivisions yield three new trichotomies.

Peirce defines the object of a sign as ‘that with which [the sign] presupposes an acquaintance in order to convey some further information concerning it’ (2.231). ‘The Object as cognized in the Sign and therefore an Idea’ (NE 3:843 = 8.183) is called the Immediate Object, whereas ‘the Object as it is regardless of any particular aspect of it, the Object in such relations as unlimited and final study would show it to be’ (loc. cit.) is called the Dynamical Object. The two types of objects correspond to two ways in which the world is regarded semeiotically. ‘The immediate object is the world, or some part of it, as the sign represents it to be, while the dynamic object is the world—or the relevant portion of it—that will actually determine the success or failure of any given interpretant of the sign’ (Short 1981:214).

If the real is that towards which representation tends, then the immediate and dynamic objects can be regarded as beginning and end points along a semeiotic continuum defined by their relative independence of being represented in the sign. Peirce puts this in terms of experiential knowledge of the world needed in order that signs be interpreted:

We must distinguish between the Immediate Object,—i.e. the Object as represented in the sign,—and the Real (no, because perhaps the Object is altogether fictive, I must choose a different term, therefore), say rather the Dynamical Object, which, from the nature of things, the Sign cannot express, which it can only indicate and leave the interpreter to find out by collateral experience. (8.314)

By ‘collateral experience’ or ‘collateral observation’ Peirce means ‘previous acquaintance with what the sign denotes’ (NE 3:841). The dynamic object is (generally) a real thing; it is the object of the sign ‘in itself’ (8.333), ‘the really efficient but not immediately present Object’ (8.343), ‘the Object as it is regardless of any particular aspect of it, the Object in such relations as unlimited and final study would show it to be’ (NE 3:842). The immediate object of a sign is the dynamic object as the sign presents and expresses it: there is a distinction between the two, but no difference except insofar as the sign either misrepresents or does not fully represent its object.

‘A sign is something by knowing which we know something more’ (H 31-2). Semeiosis thus involves the addition of information to a body of preexistent knowledge. The information specifically conveyed by a given sign must, on Peirce’s view, presuppose prior and independent information, which the sign extends. ‘Collateral experience’ is another designation for information obtained through the action of prior and independent signs. Within a loose but familiar understanding of ‘information,’ knowledge presupposed in interpreting sign action can be identified with the context of the sign (Savan 1976:16). It is Peirce’s position that ‘no sign can be understood . . . unless the interpreter has “collateral acquaintance” with every Object of it’ (NE 3:843).

All signs have dynamic objects, even though not all dynamic objects are semeiotically true or valid, and do not answer to the immediate object (some signs represent their objects falsely). A weather vane still points on a windless day, though there be no wind direction signified; ‘unicorn’ has no real referent. But each such sign signifies something and comports instructions within its signification as to whether its immediate object is real or not (Short 1981:217). The reality towards which such a sign points is the dynamic object independent of the sign itself. In the case of the weather vane, it is the velocity of the circumambient air; in the case of ‘unicorn’—the world insofar as it may or may not be specified as including animals of this description. Collateral observation of such dynamic objects leads to the conclusion that ‘there is nothing in them that answers to the immediate object of the sign’ (Short 1981:217). As with qualisigns and iconic signs generally, there is a tendency for immediate and dynamic object to blend as an embodied possibility; such is the nature of the objects of mimicked sounds and colors in animal communication, as well as the context-bound objects of such purely relational linguistic units as conjunctions and prepositions.

There are (as expected) three kinds of dynamic objects. First, the object may be a quality; Peirce calls this species of object a Possible (H 83), and the sign corresponding to it an Abstractive. The name Possible is more apposite than Quality because Peirce wishes to include among Firsts not just simple sensory qualities but abstract mathematical objects and complex physical notions (such as mass) as well.

Included among the second sort of dynamic object are occurrences, existent entities, and facts having to do with entities and events bounded by space and time. For signs of these objects Peirce proposes the name Concretives (H 84); and objects themselves fall under the class of Existents (H 82). Concretive signs are exemplified by linguistic expressions such as substantives designating occurrences and events, by mechanical devices such as barometers, by bodily symptoms of certain illnesses, fossil signs of past sociological realia, etc.

The third and final class of dynamic objects encompasses laws, habits, continua, and whatever is expressible in a universal proposition; Peirce calls these Necessitants, and the signs corresponding to them Collectives. Examples of collectives are to be found among linguistic signs of tendencies, propensities, and dispositions to act regularly in certain ways. Despite the name, Peirce does not consider this species of dynamic object as being correlated with signs of individual collections, each the totality of the individuals collected. Since he conceives necessitants to be expressed by the subjunctive conditional (‘what would be if. . .’), and therefore as laws which cannot be exhausted by the sum of their occurrences, this sort of sign is always something more than the sum of its replicas. Mankind is a necessitant in virtue of being more than any one man or woman, more than the collective total of all human beings that have lived in the past, are living in the present, or will live in the future.

Dynamic objects are Seconds that act on signs in such a way that the latter react or resist the action of the former. There is an externality inherent in this aspect of semeiosis, since what is at stake here is reference and referents (in the sense of Frege, Russell, and Quine), as distinct from the way in which the object is represented internally, in the sign itself. Peirce’s very broad conception of sign, object, and their relation identifies the latter as the immediate object of a sign, i.e., that in the sign which corresponds to the action of the dynamic object. The trichotomy of immediate objects makes reference, in the same way as dynamic objects, to possibles, existents, and necessitants. If the immediate object is a possible, its sign is a Descriptive. If the immediate object is an existent, its sign is a Designative. And if it is a necessitant, its sign is a Copulant.

There is a connection between Peirce’s concept of immediate object and his theory of perception, involving a human percipient-interpreter and, therefore, mental representation. Where the sign is addressed to a human interpreter, the immediate object is the dynamic object as it is initially perceived. Peirce calls this the percipuum, i.e., the immediate object of a sign whose interpretant is mental. This is the element that is immediately present on any specific occasion of interpretation by the mind apperceiving the sign—apart from any critical appraisal or reflection or judgement. The locus of critical interpretation is the interpretant, whereas the object of the sign (both immediate and dynamic) function as prior conditions of signification and as a context establishing part of the conditions whereby interpretation can proceed.

The context of Peirce’s notion of immediate object can be better grasped by rehearsing an example which he himself cites (cf. Savan 1976:21-2):

Two men are standing on the seashore looking out to sea. One of them says to the other, “That vessel there carries no freight at all, but only passengers.” Now, if the other, himself, sees no vessel, the first information he derives from the remark has for its Object the part of the sea that he does see, and informs him that a person with sharper eyes than his, or more trained in looking for such things, can see a vessel there; and then, that vessel having been thus introduced to his acquaintance, he is prepared to receive the information about it that it carries passengers exclusively. But the sentence as a whole has, for the person supposed, no other Object than that with which it finds him already acquainted. (2.232)

Assuming a true report on the part of the speaker, the dynamic object of his remark is the ship, but the immediate object differs for the two interlocutors. Peirce focusses on the recipient of the information; for him the immediate object is the part of the sea with which he has prior acquaintance and now perceives. The linguistic information serves as the basis for a grounded relation between the immediate object and the dynamic object—the ship.

Peirce’s notion of immediate object excludes conceiving it as a collection of sense data, no matter how complex, since he regards sensory qualities to be abstractions from the very outset, ‘prescinded’ from the perceptual object by the action of intellection and inference. In the example cited, the immediate object is that portion of the water and that aspect of the actual situation with which the percipient subject is factually acquainted. The entire situation, together with its constituent parts, is governed here (as elsewhere) by the gradience of the categories (Savan 1976:22). The hic et nunc nature of the situation as a whole comes under the compass of Secondness. In line with the hierarchical determinacy of the categories, Secondness includes all the colors, sounds, and odors of the sea, as well as the state of the water (calm or turbulent); all these qualities are Firsts and instances of Firstness. A more generalized knowledge of the sea, finally, involves Thirdness: an acquaintance with general patterns, uniformities, continuities, and tendencies. The potential typology of immediate objects in this example, then, encompasses a blend of possibles, existents, and necessitants associated with designative, descriptive, and copulant signs, respectively.

Sign and object having been considered in themselves, it is now their relation that needs illumination. This relation must be of a sort that any further signs, which interpret or translate the original sign, may come to stand for the same object as the original. Peirce recognized a trichotomy of mutable relations between sign and object which he termed icon, index, and symbol. This is the most well-known of Peirce’s trichotomies, and the one he himself most frequently used. When the relation between sign and object is one of likeness, resemblance, or similarity it is an iconic relation. A sign is an icon if it resembles its object, and if the quality or character grounding the resemblance inheres in the sign irrespective of the actual existence or non-existence of its object. The relation between sign and object is indexical when it is defined by a spatio-temporal (factual or existential) contiguity between them. A sign is an index if both its constituents do now exist or did exist in the past, and the sign is related to its object through the dynamic action of the latter on the former. The relation obtaining between sign and object is symbolic when it depends on a convention or a habit (acquired or inborn). A sign is a symbol if both its constituents are laws (necessitants or Thirds), and are related to each other by a law or general rule. To summarize: the relation between sign and object may be one of iconic resemblance (such as a portrait and the person portrayed), of indexical contiguity and dynamic interaction (smoke and fire), or of symbolic law (a habit, such as an item of language).

Peirce’s own words delineating and exemplifying the trichotomy of relations between sign and object are particularly useful in grasping not only their individual purport but their hierarchical interconnectedness as well:

An icon is a representamen [= sign] of what it represents and for the mind that interprets it as such, by virtue of its being an immediate image, that is to say by virtue of characters which belong to it in itself as a sensible object, and which it would possess just the same were there no object in nature that it resembled, and though it never were interpreted as a sign. It is of the nature of an appearance, and as such, strictly speaking, exists only in consciousness, although for convenience in ordinary parlance and when extreme precision is not called for, we extend the term icon to the outward objects which excite in consciousness the image itself. A geometrical diagram is a good example of an icon. A pure icon can convey no positive or factual information; for it affords no assurance that there is any such thing in nature. But it is of the utmost value for enabling its interpreter to study what would be the character of such an object in case any such did exist. Geometry sufficiently illustrates that. (4.447)

Of signs there are two different degenerate forms. But though I give them this disparaging name, they are of the greatest utility, and serve purposes that genuine signs could not. The more degenerate of the two forms (as I look upon it) is the icon. This is defined as a sign of which the character that fits it to become a sign of the sort that it is, is simply inherent in it as a quality of it. For example, a geometrical figure drawn on paper may be an icon of a triangle or other geometrical form. If one meets a man whose language one does not know and resorts to imitative sounds and gestures, these approach the character of an icon. The reason that they are not pure icons is that the purpose of them is emphasized. A pure icon is independent of any purpose. It serves as a sign solely and simply by exhibiting the quality it serves to signify. The relation to its object is a degenerate relation. It asserts nothing. If it conveys information, it is only in the sense in which the object that it is used to represent may be said to convey information. An icon can only be a fragment of a completer sign. (NE 4:241-2)

Of a completely opposite nature is the kind of representamen [= sign] termed an index. This is a real thing or fact which is a sign of its object by virtue of being connected with it as a matter of fact and also by forcibly intruding upon the mind, quite regardless of its being interpreted as a sign. It may simply serve to identify its object and assure us of its existence and presence. But very often the nature of the factual connection of the index with its object is such as to excite in consciousness an image of some features of the object, and in that way affords evidence from which positive assurance as to truth of fact may be drawn. A photograph, for example, not only excites an image, has an appearance, but, owing to its optical connexion with the object, is evidence that that appearance corresponds to a reality. (4.447)

The other form of degenerate sign is to be termed an index. It is defined as a sign which is fit to serve as such by virtue of being in a real reaction with its object. For example, a weather-cock is such a sign. It is fit to be taken as an index of the wind for the reason that it is physically connected with the wind. A weather-cock conveys information; but this it does because in facing the very quarter from which the wind blows, it resembles the wind in this respect, and thus has an icon connected with it. In this respect, it is not a pure index. A pure index simply forces attention to the object with which it reacts and puts the interpreter into mediate reaction with that object, but conveys no information. As an example, take an exclamation “Oh!” The letters attached to a geometrical figure are another case. Absolutely unexceptionable examples of degenerate forms must not be expected. All that is possible is to give examples which tend sufficiently in towards those forms to make the mean suggest what is meant. It is remarkable that while neither a pure icon nor a pure index can assert anything, an index which forces something to be an icon, as a weather-cock does, or which forces us to regard it as an icon, as the legend under a portrait does, does make an assertion, and forms a proposition. (NE 4:242)

A Symbol is a law, or regularity of the indefinite future. Its Interpretant must be of the same description; and so must be also the complete immediate Object, or meaning. But a law necessarily governs, or is “embodied in” individuals, and prescribes some of their qualities. Consequently, a constituent of a Symbol may be an Index, and a constituent may be an Icon. . . . Thus, while the complete object of a symbol, that is to say, its meaning, is of the nature of a law, it must denote an individual, and must signify a character. (2.293)

A symbol is a representamen [= sign] whose special significance or fitness to represent just what it does represent lies in nothing but the very fact of there being a habit, disposition, or other effective general rule that it will be so interpreted. (4.447)

An icon has such being as belongs to past experience. It exists only as an image in the mind. An index has the being of present experience. The being of a symbol consists in the real fact that something surely will be experienced if certain conditions be satisfied. Namely, it will influence the thought and conduct of its interpreter. (4.447)

The value of an icon consists in its exhibiting the features of a state of things regarded as if it were purely imaginary. The value of an index is that it assures us of positive fact. The value of a symbol is that it serves to make thought and conduct rational and enables us to predict the future. (4.448)

The symbol, by the very definition of it, has an interpretant in view. Its very meaning is intended. Indeed, a purpose is precisely the interpretant of a symbol. (NE 4:244)

A symbol is essentially a purpose, that is to say, is a representation that seeks to make itself definite, or seeks to produce an interpretant more definite than itself. For its whole signification consists in its determining an interpretant; so that it is from its interpretant that it derives the actuality of its signification. (NE 4:261)

Peirce summarizes his trichotomy of the relations between sign and object in Figure 3 (NE 4:243).

Since the various semeiotic trichotomies are structurally inter-connected in semeiosis, signs considered in themselves and in their relation to objects form synthetic combinations. Thus any qualisign is an icon, although the converse does not hold. Icons can be sinsigns and legisigns as well as qualisigns. Strictly speaking, iconic qualisigns are only a possibility. Actually existing or occurring qualities, if they are signs, are sinsigns, and Peirce terms such iconic sinsigns hypoicons (2.276), which he subdivides into a triad reflecting the ‘mode of Firstness of which they partake’ (2.277):

Those which partake of simple qualities, or First Firstnesses, are images; those which represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams; those which represent the representative character of a representamen [= sign] by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors. (2.277)

FIGURE 3

At the core of the notion of iconic signs is similarity or resemblance, and Peirce recognizes the impossibility of giving a formal account or analysis of resemblance. Indeed, he explicitly categorizes statements of the form x resembles y as hypotheses, and thereby subsumes resemblance under Thirdness, i.e., as subject to a rational rule—itself subject to change and emendation in the light of further evidence rationally evaluated.

Sinsigns and legisigns encompass qualities, and if they resemble their objects owing to some quality of the sign, sinsigns and legisigns fall under the class of icons. Examples of iconic sinsigns are color chips or swatches as signs of colors of paint or cloth, animal signaling behavior (courtship, nest building, combat among birds, etc.), and an individual instance of a geometrical figure or diagram (2.255).

Indexical sinsigns, on the other hand, direct attention to their objects or isolate them instead of exhibiting them the way iconic signs do. A spontaneous cry, to use Peirce’s example (2.256), draws our attention to its source by affecting our instinctual or conditioned reflexes. A weathercock (2.257) points out the direction of the wind; in so doing, of course, this sign necessarily involves an icon of the wind’s direction, and in this case it is the actual direction of the wind rather than a mere possibility. Here we see the inclusion relations obtaining between the sign types and defining thereby the hierarchical nature of sign complexes.

The blending of several sign types within a sign complexus as a whole is a cardinal feature of semeiosis. Since every sinsign, for instance, involves the action of external forces upon it (Secondness), regardless of any specific interpretation, every sinsign is therefore an index. Since every sign must have a qualitative aspect, there is nothing to prevent sinsigns from functioning as icons. Indexical sinsigns are best fitted to establish the existence of their objects; inevitably, however, their mode of semeiosis will include an icon. The condensation track in a cloud chamber is an index of the existence of certain subatomic particles, but it is also an icon of the direction of their movement, not to speak of a whole set of physical characteristics (cf. Savan 1976:25).

Indexical sinsigns are always specific cases rather than general types. Indexical legisigns, however, are never singular individuals but are types or laws, whose existence is to be inferred from their replicas or instantiations, susceptible of individual action and reaction. Expressions of different types of emotion such as pain, joy, anger, or fear are indexical legisigns so long as they conform to a common pattern of exhibiting them. Each individual expressive act contains attributes that are singularly tied to specific times and places, and so the indexes involved are also sinsigns (Savan 1976:27).

A type of index which is especially relevant to a discussion of semeiosis in language is the pronoun, particularly the demonstrative kind. Peirce regards words like ‘this,’ ‘that,’ ‘here,’ and ‘now’ as indexes, although they fit the definition of an index only in an attenuated sense (‘a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object’; 2.248). Words of this sort are characterized by a number of properties, however, which legitimate their categorization as indexes. Thus each individual occurrence of a demonstrative pronoun delineates a specific context of that occurrence, and its object contracts a relation to the sign because of some property of the context which is unique to that context. Peirce clarifies his conception in the following passage:

An index represents an object by virtue of its connection with it. It makes no difference whether the connection is natural, or artificial, or merely mental. There is, however, an important distinction between two classes of indices. Namely, some merely stand for things or individual quasi-things with which the interpreting mind is already acquainted, while others may be used to ascertain facts. Of the former class, which may be termed designations, personal, demonstrative, and relative pronouns, proper names, the letters attached to a geometrical figure, and the ordinary letters of algebra are examples. They act to force the attention of the thing intended. Designations are absolutely indispensable both to communication and to thought. No assertion has any meaning unless there is some designation to show whether the universe of reality or what universe of fiction is referred to. (8.368, fn. 23)

The relation between sign and object in the species of sign Peirce calls index is one of existent fact, independent of whether the fact is known, recognized, or interpreted; ‘an index is a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant’ (2.304). Herein lies the crucial difference between icons and indices, on one hand, and symbols, on the other. A number of further passages (NE 4:235-63) make it emphatically clear that there are no symbols without interpretation (cf. the earlier quotations):

There is an infallible criterion for distinguishing between an index and an icon. Namely, although an index, like any other sign, only functions as a sign when it is interpreted, yet though it never happened to be interpreted, it remains equally fitted to be the very sign that would be if interpreted. A symbol, on the other hand, that should not be interpreted, would either not be a sign at all, or would only be a sign in an utterly different way. (NE 4:256)

A symbol is distinguished as a sign which becomes such by virtue of determining its interpretant. (NE 4:260)

A symbol is something which has the power of reproducing itself, and that essentially, since it is constituted a symbol only by the interpretation. (NE 4:260)

Now it is of the essential nature of a symbol that it determines an interpretant, which is itself a symbol. A symbol, therefore, produces an endless series of interpretants. (NE 4:261)

A symbol is a sign which is related to its object by virtue of a law, rule, or habit. Sign and object in symbolic relations are, moreover, themselves laws or habits, making all symbols legisigns (but not vice versa; cf. Savan 1976:29, Short 1982). Accordingly, all words are also legisigns, although the indexical relation predominates over the symbolic in deictic words such as pronouns. The symbolic aspect of words is dominant in concepts, propositions, and arguments; in fact, when Peirce speaks of symbols, it is generally with such linguistic items in mind.

The conventionality of legisigns comes to the fore in examples drawn from human language, but Peirce also explicitly provides in his semeiotic for natural legisigns; as when he defines a symbol to be ‘a Sign which is constituted a sign merely or mainly by the fact that it is used and understood as such, whether the habit is natural or conventional’ (2.307). Replicas of natural legisigns occur, for instance, in animal display, as when the bright colors of male birds’ plummage attracts their female counterparts (Short 1982). Natural legisigns of this sort differ from conventional ones in the degree to which instinct—the evolutively accrued disposition to use and to interpret such signs—has rigidified into fixed roles and patterns. The conventional legisigns of human language demand of its users that they be able to alternate habitually and with ease between the roles of sign-producer and sign-interpreter. In certain cases of animals, the line dividing the dichotomy cannot be crossed: the male bird produces the display, the female reacts (on occasion) in the appropriate manner.

C. Interpretants

The legisign (or type) subsumes an expansible set of replicas (or tokens); although no finite collection of replicas can exhaust the set, the legisign exists in virtue of the individual occurrences and properties of its replicas. In the case of a legisign of natural language, like the English word man, its object is mankind, even though individual replicas of the word refer indexically as signs to individual human beings (cf. Savan 1976:29). Since the word man is a collective sign and its object a necessitant (as we saw earlier), a question arises concerning the manner or mode of relating the collective legisign man with the general class of humans.

Peirce answers this crucial question by appeal to the most important part of his semeiotic, the theory of the interpretant, upon which many other parts of his philosophy depend, none more so than his pragmaticism. The word man must be interpreted—have an interpretant—in order to be the sign of its object. Any word, for that matter any symbol, is constituted a sign by being related to its object via its interpretant.

Peirce’s conception of the interpretant (a term he coined) is complex and variegated, its content shifting with the context in which Peirce speaks of it. The most frequent ingredient in defining interpretant is ‘the proper significate outcome of a sign’ (5.473) or its ‘proper significate effects’ (5.475). At other points, he talks of interpretants as the ‘cognition produced in the mind’ (1.372), ‘the idea to which [the sign] gives rise’ (1.339); and more schematically:

That determination of which the immediate cause, or determinant, is the Sign, and of which the mediate cause is the Object may be termed the Interpretant. (6.347)

Implicit in this definition is Peirce’s insistence that signification is a triadic relation, in which the interpretant is the third relatum (sign being the first, object the second) and hence a Third. The role of the interpretant is, in fact, indispensable to what a sign is and to the nature of its action:

A sign therefore is an object which is in relation to its object on the one hand and to an interpretant on the other in such a way as to bring the interpretant into a relation to the object corresponding to its own relation to the object. I might say ‘similar to its own’ for a correspondence consists in a similarity; but perhaps correspondence is narrower. (H 32)

Peirce held that essential to all semeiosis is the triadic production of interpretants (not necessarily of signs; cf. Short 1981:206-7; Fisch 1978:41, fn. 6). He makes the crucial distinction between dyadic (dynamic) action and triadic (intelligent) action, without at all restricting intelligence or semeiosis to the human variety (5.472-472). Dyadic action is exemplified by all process in which one effect follows upon another in a purely additive way, as in the example of the action of temperature on the mercury in a thermometer (Fitzgerald 1964:73). If each rise in degree is considered an effect, it is clear that each increment is produced independent of its predecessor and its successor. Triadic production, on the other hand, involves the production of one thing as a means to another, which is to say that (for Peirce) all triadic action is teleological, particularly semeiosis. The definitions of interpretant adduced above (cf. also 2.274) all hinge on the proper understanding of triadic relations, which underlie semeiosis.

A triadic relation is a relation with three terms, for example: A gives B to C; B is between A and C; A prefers B to C. Some triadic relations can be reduced to combinations of dyadic relations, for example: A moved from B to C could be reduced to A left B and A arrived at C (Savan 1976:31). According to Peirce, however, a genuine triadic relation is not susceptible of reduction without remainder to a conjunction of dyadic relations. All relations involving mind, cognition, and intelligence are genuinely triadic relations, for on Peirce’s view all such relations are ultimately semeiotic, as all thought is in signs, and the sign relation (sign-object-interpretant) is the epitomically genuine triadic relation.

Interpretants are thus the key ingredient of thought as a semeiotic process; but they are not by any means limited to the context of mental representation. Feelings and actions can also be identified with interpretants.

Peirce’s conception of sign, moreover, being extremely broad in several respects, renders the interpretant an inalienable factor of semeiosis regardless of the presence of any (human) interpreter. Each sign has the potentiality of being interpreted as such, even though it may not initially be recognized as a sign. A sign’s potential interpretant need not, finally, be an entity limited to formation in the human mind, although the intellectualistic thrust of Peirce’s semeiotic is unmistakable. The response of animals to what are commonly understood as signs is an example of non-human interpretation (cf. Short 1981:201); Peirce even encompasses the ‘habit-taking’ of plants, not to speak of non-living objects like water in a river bed (5.492). For Peirce, indeed, human mind is a special case of semeiosis, rather than semeiosis being a special instance of mind (Short 1981:203).

Despite this very broad framework, Peirce’s own thinking about semeiotic (as reflected in his writings) is concentrated on signs in the narrow sense, i.e., on signs whose interpretant is itself a sign, in short—mental signs. The difficulty of successfully promulgating a semeiotic that goes beyond consciousness was acknowledged by Peirce in a letter to Lady Welby of 1908:

I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former. My insertion of ‘upon a person’ is a sop to Cerberus, because I despair of making my own broader conception understood. (H 80-1)

To summarize, three conditions must be met in order for something to be an interpretant in the narrow sense of sign. It must be an effect in the mind of the interpreter. It must be the result of triadic sign production, i.e., it must have been produced with a purpose, by a sign. Finally, it must bear the same relation to the object as does the sign itself (cf. Fitzgerald 1964:75). In a more generalized sense, all signs are interpretants of some other sign, and any sign is constituted an interpretant ‘if (1) it instantiates a general habit (or rule) of transforming an antecedent sign into a consequent sign, and (2) signifies its object through some antecedent sign of that object’ (Savan 1976:36).

The most salient points concerning Peirce’s notion of interpretant, to be kept in mind before approaching his classification of interpretants, are the following (cf. Savan 1976:32-6):

1. The triad of constituents making up the sign—sign, object, and interpretant—are defined circularly, with reference to each other, so that each is defined only in terms of the other two. This is not a vicious circularity; quite the contrary, the mutual ontological dependency of the three constituents on each other is a reflection of the structure of semeiosis.

2. Every interpretant is at least potentially a sign, and stands in the same relation to its object as does the sign of which it is the interpretant. In terms of the medieval semeiotic formula aliquid stat pro aliquo, the interpretant is substitutable for a sign with a shared object.

3. Every sign is at least potentially an interpretant of some other sign, to which it is related through their shared object. In terms of antecedent and consequent, every sign is at least potentially the interpretant of an antecedent sign, and is interpreted by some consequent sign, which stands to the first as its interpretant.

4. Sign and interpretant are distinguished from each other by the fact that the interpretant is determined by the sign, whereas the converse does not usually hold true. Peirce uses the word ‘determined’ to mean something like ‘delimited,’ glossing it (at NE 3:839) by ‘specialized’ and German bestimmt.

5. The interpretant stands for its object in three ways. First, it stands for its antecedent sign, and thereby also for the object of its antecedent sign. The latter, however, itself stands for its object via yet another antecedent sign, and so on, in a potentially infinite series. Resorting to a modern terminology that postdates Peirce, the interpretant signifies its object; and this object can be termed the signified object (Savan 1976:33). Accordingly, man is the interpretant of homme: the English word stands for its signified object by standing for the antecedent sign in French that is its equivalent (cf. 1.553). The potential circle of antecedent signs could be expanded by adducing further equivalents in other languages, all of which would share the same object.

Second, the interpretant signifies its dynamic object by making a direct reference to the actually existing circumstances, or context, of the sign. In Peirce’s scheme, any actually occurring sign bears an indexical relation to its dynamic object, and knowledge of this relation cannot be derived from the sign itself, but rather through collateral experience or information (as mentioned earlier above).

The interpretant affirms the identity of the signified object and the dynamic object, representing them to be one and the same.

The threefold relation of the interpretant to its object, which encompasses the significative, the referential (dynamic), and the identifying functions, is to be found in Peirce’s original definition of interpretant (going back to his 1867 paper, “On a New List of Categories”): ‘a mediating representation which represents the relate to be a representation of the same correlate which this mediating representation itself represents’ (1.553).

6. Every interpretant is at the same time at least potentially a sign to some further interpretant which shares its object. There is thus no first or last interpretant; each interpretant of an object has a predecessor and a successor, both of which are also interpretants. Peirce’s conception of semeiosis accounts in this way for the obvious overlap and interrelatedness of meaning and of the entities constituting it. Any given interpretant, isolated for the purposes of analysis, actually has its semeiotic locus in a multidimensional continuum of signs, objects, and interpretants.

7. The interpretant is at least potentially in a mediating relation between an antecedent and a consequent sign, which is to say that it provides a means of comparing and relating members of these two potentially infinite classes of signs. Peirce considers mediation to be tantamount to a general rule, which he variously calls a leading principle, guiding principle, rule of inference, or rule of illative transformation (cf. Savan 1976:33). This general rule is itself a legisign. An interpretant thus mediates, on the one hand, between its antecedent sign and their common object by providing further and more determinate signs of that object; and, on the other, by providing the means whereby an antecedent sign can be translated or transformed into its consequent interpretant.

8. A particular species of interpretant, called the ultimate logical interpretant (about which more below, section 4), is a habit. Although the other kinds of interpretant (energetic, emotional, and verbal logical interpretants) are not habits, some of them may be formed in accordance with and as determined by habit.

It follows from the status of ultimate logical interpretants as habits that they may also be legisigns. Qualisigns and sinsigns lack the generality of pattern, law, and continuity that Peirce reserves for Thirds, of which habits are a paramount example. Although habits are embodied in individual occurrences, their essential definiens is an ability to span a whole series of individual occurrences: occurrences, insists Peirce, are Seconds and ‘exist,’ while habits are ‘real.’ Similarly, legisigns find their embodiment (‘exist’) in concrete sign situations, i.e., in sinsigns that subsume a qualisign.

D. Classes of interpretants

Peirce’s theory of the interpretant comprehends a sixfold classification of interpretants: more precisely, two trichotomies—immediate/dynamic/ final and emotional/energetic/logical—which intersect, yielding nine types (Short MS). The class of logical interpretants, furthermore, is subject to qualification by the distinction between ultimate and non-ultimate interpretants, affecting immediate logical, dynamic logical, and final logical interpretants. The total number of types is thus twelve. This is the picture that can be reconstructed, at any rate, from Peirce’s mature writings of ca. 1904 to 1909 (but with clearly traceable roots in his papers of the 1860s and 1870s).

The first trichotomy of interpretants contains the types Peirce labels emotional energetic, and logical. Several quotations aid in showing their content from different but complementary angles:

A sign mediates between the interpretant sign and its object. Taking sign in its broadest sense, its interpretant is not necessarily a sign. Any concept is a sign, of course. . . . But we may take a sign in so broad a sense that the interpretant of it is not a thought, but an action or experience, or we may even so enlarge the meaning of sign that its interpretant is a mere quality of feeling. (H 31)

A Sign has an Object and an Interpretant, the latter being that which the Sign produces in the Quasi-mind that is the Interpreter by determining the latter to a feeling, to an exertion, or to a Sign, which determination is the Interpretant. (4.536)

The first proper significate effect of a sign is the feeling produced by it. There is almost always a feeling which we come to interpret as evidence that we comprehend the proper effect of the sign, although the foundation of truth in this is frequently very slight. This ‘emotional interpretant,’ as I call it, may amount to much more than that feeling of recognition; and in some cases, it is the only proper significate effect that the sign produces. Thus, the performance of a piece of concerted music is a sign. It conveys, and is intended to convey, the composer’s musical ideas; but these usually consist merely in a series of feelings. If a sign produces any further proper significate effect, it will do so through the mediation of the emotional interpretant, and such further effect will always involve an effort. I call it the energetic interpretant. The effort may be a muscular one, as it is in the case of the command to ground arms; but it is much more usually an exertion upon the Inner World, a mental effort. It never can be the meaning of an intellectual concept, since it is a single act, [while] such a concept is of a general nature. But what further kind of effect can there be? (5.475)

In advance of ascertaining the nature of this effect, it will be convenient to adopt a designation for it, and I will call it the logical interpretant, without as yet determining whether this term shall extend to anything beside the meaning of a general concept, though certainly closely related to that, or not. Shall we say that this effect may be a thought, that is to say, a mental sign? No doubt, it may be so; only, if this sign be of an intellectual kind—as it would have to be—it must itself have a logical interpretant; so that it cannot be the ultimate logical interpretant of the concept. (5.476)

The emotional interpretant, which Peirce describes as’a mere quality of feeling,’ is the qualitative effect of that sign. Since every semeiotic effect of a sign has at least a qualitative aspect, and must include a qualisign which bears an iconic relationship to its object, any sign which has an actual interpretant must have at least an emotional interpretant. As with all of the Peircean trichotomies, there is a hierarchical dependency between the three types determined by the three categories. Accordingly, sinsigns may have energetic interpretants as well as emotional interpretants, and legisigns may have all three types, but qualisigns may only have emotional interpretants. In Peirce’s example of ‘a piece of concerted music,’ the immediate interpretant is the quality of the sounds that are repeated with every performance, while the feelings aroused thereby in the audience are the musical signs’ emotional interpretant.

Words and propositions also have emotional interpretants, if nothing more than the feeling of familiarity or unfamiliarity, whether such words or propositions have any emotive (affective) value or not. A word in one’s native language (let alone a foreign one) whose meaning is grasped in but the most inchoate manner may still partake of what Peirce regards as the ‘first and lowest grade of clearness’ (Savan 1976:43).

The Second, in relation to which the emotional interpretant is a First, is the energetic interpretant. This is the mode of interpretation of a sign involving an act in which some energy is expended. The energetic interpretant may engage the external world and thereby be defined by muscular exertion; or it may consist in the energy associated with the inner world of images, with their manipulation and exploration (characteristic of the dialogic process of thought). For Peirce, the energetic interpretant is applicable to the workings of the mind because he conceives of imagination and intellection as involving the same sort of resistance to manipulation as physical objects that act upon us or resist our action upon them. The self-identity of fancies, images, and thoughts may differ in degree of intensity from that of physical objects in the outer world, but Peirce insists that the experimental aspect or aspect of play associated with such ingredients of cogitation are semeiotically of a kind. His avowed source in regarding thought and reasoning to proceed by means of observation and experiment is mathematical and scientific theory formation (cf. 3.560).

Some examples of energetic interpretants are the grounding of arms by soldiers in response to a command; the fulfillment of promises, as well as the (guilty) acts which ensue from failing to keep a promise; mourning, celebration, prayers, thanksgiving, all sorts of rituals and ceremonies (Savan 1976:44). These are the effects of the signs which stand to them as semeiotic causes. Peirce holds that all legisigns have—via their replicas which are sinsigns—an action of the imagination or a muscular effort as their energetic interpretants.

The true purport of this position is revealed by considering the hierarchically supervening semeiotic entity of interpretation, the logical interpretant. Peirce groups all thoughts, concepts, and elements of the understanding actually produced by a sign under this rubric that is a Third. To carry on the cogitative process in the broad sense is to make inferences, conceive the consequences of certain premisses, and be guided in the direction one’s thoughts take by some general rule. In Peirce’s words, ‘thought is a thread of melody running through the succession of our sensations’ (5.395). To think, to conceive, and to understand is made up of more than just one single event or occurrence, although the whole process is unitary. Continuing with Peirce’s musical metaphor, while a single tone is complete unto itself at any given time, and regardless of the whole of which it may be a part, a melody’consists in an orderliness in the succession of sounds which strike the ear at different times; and to perceive it there must be some continuity of consciousness which makes the events of a lapse of time present to us’ (5.395).

The logical interpretant, then, is a general rule, and is of the nature of a conjecture or hypothesis (as will become clearer below). The rule is not a verbal expression, but rather a habit of action which has a verbal analogue or correspondent. There is an illative or inferential form to the verbal correspondent of a habit which states that ‘if certain actions are performed upon objects answering to a certain description, results of a general kind will be observable’ (Savan 1976:45). The actions can (as we have seen) be of a muscular sort, or be the effort attendant upon cogitation. In either case, they are semeiotic instantiations of a rule; such semeiotic effects also react with the rule, inducing possible modifications of the rule, shaping future results, and enabling rational conduct based on reasonable predictability to proceed. The sets of actions which fulfill the rule are energetic interpretants that replicate logical interpretants. The overarching patterns of habit are future-directed, being potentially repeatable without end, whereas emotional and energetic interpretants are necessarily bounded by time, being past-and present-oriented, respectively.

The shifts in meaning that accompany changes in the relation between speaker and referent in the case of words such as uncle, father, or Mr. President are generally characteristic of signs, variously named dependent on their relations to their various interpretants. When the sign’s frame of reference is its emotional interpretant, Peirce suggests the term Sympathetic; when the frame is its energetic interpretant, the term Percussive; and in the context of the logical interpretant, the term Usual (8.370; cf. Savan 1976:45). Examined in the light of these semeiotic distinctions, qualisigns, as Firsts, can only be sympathetic; sinsigns, as Seconds, can be sympathetic or percussive; and only legisigns, as Thirds, can be usual.

The first of Peirce’s trichotomy of interpretants makes broad reference to qualities, actions, and thoughts. Peirce makes it clear, however, that there are Firstnesses of Firstness, of Secondness, and of Thirdness (1.530-534). So that when he writes that ‘the Immediate Interpretant consists in the Quality of the Impression that a sign is fit to produce’ (8.315), meaning ‘this quality is a quality of the “impression” that would interpret the sign’ (Short MS: 14), then the immediate interpretant is a Firstness of an emotional interpretant, an energetic interpretant, or a logical interpretant.

The immediate interpretant is the first type in the second of Peirce’s two trichotomies of interpretants, the second and third types being the dynamic and the final interpretant. In his own words:

My Immediate Interpretant is implied in the fact that each Sign must have its peculiar Interpretability before it gets any Interpreter. My Dynamical Interpretant is that which is experienced in each act of Interpretation and is different in each from that of any other; and the Final Interpretant is the one Interpretative result to which every Interpreter is destined to come if the Sign is sufficiently considered. The Immediate Interpretant is an abstraction, consisting in a Possibility. The Dynamical Interpretant is a single actual event. The Final Interpretant is that toward which the actual tends. (H 111)

The Dynamical Interpretant is whatever interpretation any mind actually makes of a sign. This interpretant derives its character from the Dyadic category, the category of Action. This has two aspects, the Active and the Passive, which are not merely opposite aspects but make relative contrasts between different influences of this Category as More Active and More Passive. . . . When an imagination, a day-dream fires a young man’s ambition or any other active passion, that is a more Active variety of his Dynamical Interpretation of the dream. When a novelty excites his surprise,—and the scepticism that goes along with surprise,—this is a more Passive variety of Dynamical Interpretant. I am not speaking of the feelings of passion or of surprise as qualities. For those qualities are no part of the dynamic Interpretants. (8.315)

The Final Interpretant does not consist in the way in which any mind does act but in the way in which every mind would act. That is, it consists in a truth which might be expressed in a conditional proposition of this type: ‘If so and so were to happen to any mind this sign would determine that mind to such and such conduct.’ By ‘conduct’ I mean action under an intention of self-control. No event that occurs to any mind, no action of any mind can constitute the truth of that conditional proposition. The Immediate Interpretant consists in the Quality of the Impression that a sign is fit to produce, not [in] any actual reaction. Thus the Immediate and Final Interpretants seem to me absolutely distinct from the Dynamical Interpretant and from each other. (8.315)

The dynamic interpretant is the actual semeiotic effect of a sign; the final interpretant is the effect that the sign would produce if it were allowed the time and the circumstances fully and finally to satisfy the conditions imposed upon it by the norm governing it; and the immediate interpretant is the effect of the sign as the sign itself presents it, without engaging the world of ‘collateral observation,’ defined by Peirce as ‘previous acquaintance with what the sign denotes’ (NE 3:841). The immediate interpretant requires an acquaintance with the system of signs; the final interpretant requires at least some amount of collateral experience. The semeiotic system of which a given sign is a member determines its interpretability (= immediate interpretant). Indeed, this type of semeiotic effect is tantamount to ‘the interpretant as it is revealed in the right understanding of the Sign itself, and is ordinarily called the meaning of the sign’ (4.536); again, ‘it is all that is explicit in the sign itself apart from its context and circumstances of utterance’ (5.473). The explicit content of the sign is ‘so much of the effect of a Sign as would enable a person to say whether or not the Sign was applicable to anything concerning which that person had sufficient acquaintance’ (H 110). The aspect of critical reflection or analysis of the sign’s effect is absent from the immediate interpretant, although it is implied teleologically by the nature of semeiosis; in Peirce’s words, the immediate interpretant is ‘the total unanalyzed effect that the Sign is calculated to produce, or naturally might be expected to produce; and I have been accustomed to identify this with the effect the sign first produces or may produce upon a mind, without any reflection upon it’ (H 110).

The categories would provide that immediate interpretants be subdivisible into a trichotomy, and Peirce does in fact offer a rather tentative description of what the latter might look like (cf. Savan 1976:40-42). The Firstness of an immediate interpretant is a qualitative possibility, much like the lowest grade of clarity or inchoate ratiocination attendant upon the automatic understanding and use of words—a feeling of familiarity, absence of hesitancy, or what Peirce calls ‘a subjective feeling of mastery’ (5.389). For example, a qualisign such as a note in a piece of music can take only the most rudimentary form of immediate interpretant: ‘a quality which is a sign is able to convey to its interpretant nothing more than a qualitative resemblance to the interpreted sign’ (Savan 1976:41). Resemblance of a qualisign to its object is (as was pointed out earlier) of the nature of a hypothesis; the same relationship obtains between a qualisign and its immediate interpretant. Indeed, Peirce calls signs considered with reference to their immediate interpretants Hypothetic (8.369).

The Secondness of an immediate interpretant has to do with the significant information transmitted by the sign as it pertains to some occurrence or existent entity. This second variety of immediate interpretant serves to make explicit the interpretability of the sign as designating an occurrence, or as predicable of some subject—without identifying the subject or providing a rule whereby the subject can be selected. For example, an arrow used as a signpost on a roadway has an immediate interpretant—the direction in which the head points, without regard to the specific location of the signpost. Even though the arrow is a sinsign, indexically related to its object, nothing but the directionality of the head is semeiotically relevant to its interpretant. This sort of sign, where the external circumstances of its signification have no bearing on its immediate interpretant, is called Categorical by Peirce (8.369).

The category of Thirdness, as it applies to the trichotomous structure of this immediate interpretant, is engaged when the sign communicates information about a universal set of instances—in other words, when the immediate interpretant is a law or rule. Peirce exemplifies this aspect by propositions such as ‘Burnt child shuns fire’ (5.473) or ‘Stones fall’ which are universalistic in purport, and proposes that a sign considered in relation to its law-like immediate interpretant be termed a Relative (8.369). A legisign may be either hypothetic, relative, or categorical, but a qualisign can only be a hypothetic and a sinsign either hypothetic or categorical (Savan 1976:42).

Moving now to the dynamic interpretant, recall that Peirce characterizes each such interpretant as different from every other (H 111). To the extent that a dynamic interpretant is an actualization of the possibility represented by a hierarchically correspondent immediate interpretant, it is still the case that possibilities are invariably vague, and that each actualization of a given possibility renders the latter definite in a different way (Short MS:8).

In the same way that the immediate interpretant is the Firstness of each of the other three types of interpretant (emotional, energetic, logical), the dynamic interpretant is a Second (‘every actual interpretation is dyadic’—8.315). However, every such interpretant is one of three kinds: the occurrence of a feeling (emotional interpretant), of an action (energetic interpretant), or of a new thought or a new habit or action (logical interpretant) (cf. Short MS: 15).

Dynamic interpretants are formed on the basis of increasing collateral experience; they cumulatively actualize the corresponding immediate interpretant, including in this process the correction of errors that might have been made and detected in previous interpretants, as well as the addition of new information to what was deposited in these earlier interpretants.

Each sign only has one immediate interpretant, but any finite number of dynamic interpretants, beginning with zero. Peirce’s theory of interpretants argues that semeiosis is teleological, that interpretation is shaped by a normative goal toward which it tends at all times. Dynamic interpretants, being finite bounded events, bring semeiosis to a terminus. A simple additive sequence of actions without cumulation into a pattern of habit remains, according to Peirce, at the level of dead Secondness. It is powerless to register the significance of a sign, or to be the sign of some object by signifying yet another sign of the same object. For this reason, Peirce concludes, there must be principles, norms, and laws that guide the interpretation of signs beyond the endless mechanical repetition of identical patterns of behavior.

The full semeiotic effect of a sign, under the condition that its purposed or intended goal is achieved in the indefinite future, is what Peirce means by the Final (or Normal) Interpretant (cf. Savan 1976:49). This type of interpretant is a Third, a standard embodied in the interpretation a sign would receive under ideal conditions. While certain kinds of signs are capable of having a number of dynamic interpretants, Peirce can be interpreted as maintaining that the final (otherwise called ‘Destinate’ or ‘Intended’) interpretant is unique for each sign—like the immediate interpretant (cf. Short 1981:214). The final interpretant, again in common with the immediate interpretant, does not need to be actualized; from this standpoint, as Thirds and Firsts, respectively, these types of interpretant differ from the dynamic interpretant, in that the latter necessarily represents an actualization of the immediate interpretant of the sign in question. The final interpretant is what the dynamic interpretant would turn out to be when ‘sufficiently considered.’

To summarize and consolidate the account of the second trichotomy of interpretants so far:

First, the idea of an immediate interpretant presupposes that of a ground of interpretation: the significance of a sign is its immediate interpretant and this is its grounded interpretability, which the sign possesses regardless of whether it is actually interpreted. Second, the idea of a final interpretant presupposes that of a goal of interpretation. For, apart from such a goal, ‘consideration’ of a sign would not lead the interpreter to any ‘destined’ conclusion: regardless of the amount of consideration made, any conclusion would remain just as good. But if each sign has a unique final interpretant, then each is the sign that it is in relation not only to a ground but also to a goal of interpretation. It is clear, then, that Peirce conceived of semeiosis as a teleological process and of signs as being what their potential role in semeiosis makes them to be. (Short 1981:214)

The teleological nature of semeiosis entails the Peircean position that sign interpretation is a self-corrective process (cf. Short MS:22). What this means is that at some point in the process the interpretant, or the sign as interpreted in a given interpretant, can be tested. This point is reached when there is an interpretant that is related to the dynamic object of a sign, not via yet another interpretant, but in a more direct manner. The test and demonstration of the directness of this relation comes with the establishment of general laws—logical interpretants—that inhere in habits of action and of expectation. These habits are subject to continuous testing and revision in the light of experience, with the ultimate result that would accurately mirror the generality of laws. For Peirce, ‘the real and living logical conclusion is that habit; the verbal formulation merely expresses it’ (5.491). This is, in capsule form, a statement of Peirce’s pragmaticism (about which more will be said below).

The importance of purpose and intentionality in semeiosis is stressed in the conception of final interpretant because this type of interpretant is defined as ‘the full semeiotic effect of a sign if its purpose or intention were to be achieved’ (Savan 1976:49). The purpose that a sign may fulfill furnishes Peirce with an opportunity to expand his trichotomous classification to final interpretants (8.372; cf. Savan 1976:49-50, Lieb 1953:52). The first of the three types of purpose is the standard or norm by which qualities are evaluated. With respect to ends toward which signs tend, this type of sign is called Gratific by Peirce, reflecting his notion of one end as a qualitative ideal admirable in itself (something akin to Greek kalos). It is an aesthetic interpretant, in that this first type of purpose has as its goal the production of qualities of feeling which are admirable in some degree, correlative with signs of intrinsically admirable qualities. An illustration to which Peirce himself recurs is the musical sign. It is gratific because it is a sign whose qualitative final interpretant ‘is a quality of intrinsic admirableness’ (Savan 1976:50). From the standpoint of semeiosis, music is a sign whose emotional interpretant is the occurrence of specific qualities of feeling; but it is the goal or purpose of the sign to bring the composition to life, to invest its emotional interpretants with a living power. There is, however, a norm or law which acts as a standard of excellence in shaping the listener’s response—that is to say, in directing the creation of emotional interpretants and evaluating their degree of success in meeting criteria of aesthetic goodness.

The second type of sign with respect to final interpretants is what Peirce terms Practical, by which he means a sign whose purpose is the direction of conduct, and whose final interpretants are therefore ethical. Examples of a practical sign are commands, some kinds of promises, ceremonies, etc.; and the signals and releasers of some types of animal behavior (Savan 1976:50).

The third type of sign in this trichotomy ‘according to the Purpose of the Eventual [= Final] Interpretant’ is meant to produce ‘self-control’ (8.372), and the following quotation from Peirce is helpful in understanding why he chose to call it Pragmatistic:

Every man exercises more or less control over himself by means of modifying his own habits; and the way in which he goes to work to bring this effect about in those cases in which circumstances will not permit him to practice reiterations of the desired kind of conduct in the outer world shows that he is well-acquainted with the important principle that reiterations in the inner world—fancied reiterations—if well-intensified by direct effort, produce habits, just as do reiterations in the outer world; and these habits will have power to influence actual behaviour in the outer world; especially, if each reiteration be accompanied by a peculiar strong effort that is usually likened to issuing a command to one’s future self. (5.487)

In the hierarchy of signs relative to their final interpretants, the highest or ultimate purpose is reached in the dominance of critical control over habits and beliefs. The leading principles of logic are just such critical norms by which the validity of inferences made on the basis of semeiotic relations is evaluated. Peirce regards deliberate self-criticism to be the outstanding feature of interpretants whose signs are pragmatistic:

The habit conjoined with the motive and the conditions has the action for its energetic interpretant; but action cannot be a logical interpretant, because it lacks generality. The concept which is a logical interpretant is only imperfectly so. It somewhat partakes of the nature of a verbal definition, and is as inferior to the habit, and much in the same way, as a verbal definition is inferior to the real definition. The deliberately formed, self-analyzing habit—self-analyzing because formed by the aid of analysis of the exercises that nourished it—is the living definition, the veritable and final logical interpretant. Consequently, the most perfect account of a concept that words can convey will consist in a description of the habit which that concept is calculated to produce. (5.491)

A further trichotomy of signs involves the relation of the sign to its final interpretant: corresponding to the traditional triad of term, proposition, and argument, Peirce proposes the names Rheme (alternatively Seme), Dicent (or Dicisign or Pheme), and Argument (or Delome). The differences between these types are glossed briefly (at 8.373): ‘As to the Nature of the Influence of the Sign: Semes, like a simple sign; Phemes, with antecedent and consequent; Delome, with antecedent, consequent, and principle of sequence.’ Somewhat more fully, they are defined by Peirce as follows:

A Rheme is a Sign which, for its Interpretant, is a Sign of qualitative Possibility, that is, is understood as representing such and such a kind of possible Object. Any Rheme, perhaps, will afford some information; but it is not interpreted as doing so. (2.250)

A Dicent Sign is a Sign, which, for its Interpretant, is a Sign of actual existence. It cannot, therefore, be an Icon, which affords no ground for an interpretation of it as referring to actual existence. A Dicisign necessarily involves, as a part of it, a Rheme, to describe the fact which it is interpreted as indicating. But this is a peculiar kind of Rheme; and while it is essential to the Dicisign, it by no means constitutes it. (2.251)

An Argument is a Sign which, for its Interpretant, is a Sign of law. Or we may say that a Rheme is a sign which is understood to represent its object in its characters merely; that a Dicisign is a sign which is understood to represent its object in respect to actual existence; and that an Argument is a Sign which is understood to represent its Object in its character as a Sign. (2.252)

A rheme is any sign that is not true nor false, like almost any single word except ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ which are almost peculiar to modern languages. . . . A dicent is not an assertion, but is a sign capable of being asserted. . . . Holding, then, that a Dicent does not assert, I naturally hold that an Argument need not be actually submitted or urged. I therefore define an argument as a sign which is interpreted in its signified interpretant not as a Sign of the interpretant (the conclusion) [for that would be to urge or submit it] but as if it were a Sign of the Interpretant or perhaps as if it were a Sign of the state of the universe to which it refers, in which the premisses are taken for granted. I define a dicent as a sign represented in its signified interpretant as if it were in a Real Relation to its Object. (Or as being so, if it is asserted.) A rheme is defined as a sign which is represented in its signified interpretant as if it were a character or mark (or as being so). (H 34)

Peirce holds that while terms, propositions, and arguments are traditionally said to differ by degrees of complexity, the distinction that separates them from one another ‘is by no means a difference of complexity, and does not so much consist in structure as in the services they are severally intended to perform’ (4.572). The structural differences between semes, phemes, and delomes pertain to the ‘services they are severally intended to perform’ rather than to the signs themselves; in other words, the focal point of this trichotomy is the influence the sign exerts on its final interpretant (Short 1982).

Another way of putting this action of sign on interpretant is to place the emphasis on the mode of appeal of the sign rather than on what is signified. The manner of appeal or influence is brought out in yet another set of definitions:

By a Seme, I shall mean anything which serves for any purpose as a substitute for an object of which it is, in some sense, a representative or Sign. The logical Term, which is a class-name, is a Seme. By a Pheme I mean a Sign which is equivalent to grammatical sentence, whether it be Interrogative, Imperative, or Assertory. In any case, such a Sign is intended to have some sort of compulsive effect on the Interpreter of it. As the third member of the triplet, I sometimes use the word Delome (pronounced deeloam, from [Greek] déloma), though Argument would answer well enough. It is a Sign which has the Form of tending to act upon the Interpreter through his own self-control, representing a process of change in thoughts or signs, as if to induce this change in the Interpreter. (4.538)

A rheme is a sign whose final interpretant represents it to be ‘some quality which might be embodied in a possibly existing object’ (Savan 1976:51); a qualisign must be a rheme, since its final interpretant can only represent it as the presence of a sign of quality whose instantiation depends on some possible occurrence or entity. An indexical sinsign may be a rheme; for example, the laughter that is indexically related to its object, but interpreted as signifying the quality of happiness itself, as in the phrase happy laughter (Savan 1976:51). Indexical legisigns which are rhemes can be found in the use of demonstratives like here and now. This use illustrates the point that some rhemes compel attention (Short 1982). They serve this end, but in such a way as to emphasize the possibility of something, even if the object of attention is an actuality. The final interpretant of a rhematic sign interprets the sign as presenting qualities or possibilities, predicable of some individual.

A dicent is a sign which is interpreted by its final interpretant ‘as proposing some information about an existent’ (Savan 1976:51). It signifies existence or fact by imposing itself upon the interpreter, by means of its own compulsive character (Short 1982). A dicent is capable of being true or false:

A weathercock is an example of a dicent indexical sinsign. It is interpreted as a sign of the wind and it informs the interpreter of the direction in which the wind is blowing. A portrait painting with the names of subject and artist is interpreted as a sign of both subject and painter, informing the interpreter of the qualities of both. The song of a nightingale is a dicent indexical sinsign if it is interpreted as providing information concerning the song of the individual bird. If it is interpreted as providing information concerning the species it is a legisign. (Savan 1976:52)

An argument, for Peirce, is not the process or mechanism by which valid conclusions are regularly derived from stipulated premisses. Instead, argument or delome is a sign which is interpreted by its final interpretant as a law, rule, or principle. Only symbolic legisigns qualify as arguments; sinsigns and qualisigns by themselves are incapable of being interpreted as arguments. In the case of a syllogism, arguments in the Peircean sense result only when the interpreter himself can determine that a valid conclusion follows from the premisses with which he is supplied: ‘the peculiar syntax or other remarks by which we know an argument to be one signify only through the appeal they make to the interpreter to go through a process of inference himself’ (Short 1982:301).

E. Assurance of interpretation

Semeiosis in the fullest sense necessarily involves genuine triadic relations, says Peirce, and his favorite example of that kind of relation is that of giving: ‘A gives B to C.’ The sign classes and types discussed above all hinge, however, on relations which are either monadic or dyadic. Signs classified according to each of their three major constituents considered in themselves (sign, object, interpretant) are monadic. The three semeiotic relations—sign to dynamic object, sign to dynamic interpretant, and sign to final interpretant—are all dyadic. But Peirce’s unwavering position on semeiotic relations is that no combination of monads and/or dyads is capable of constituting a genuine triadic relation. At the same time, it is only the genuine triadic relation obtaining between sign, object, and interpretant that enables signs to offer assurance to the interpretant that the object for which it stands is simultaneously identical with the object of the sign the interpretant interprets (Savan 1976:53).

The act of giving suits Peirce as an example of triadicity because it necessarily comports the recognition of a law or principle whereby the right or authority of possession is transferred from one subject to another—over and above the simple physical movement of the item given. Without the accompanying intentionality (on both sides) the physical movement would be devoid of meaning (cf. Savan 1976:42). There would be two dyadic relations—between the donor and the object, on one hand, and the recipient and the object, on the other—but no mediation, hence no notion of giving.

In the same way, if the relation between object and sign is dyadic, and the sign is dyadically related to its interpretant, the interpretant’s status as a sign of the same object as the original sign could just as well be fortuitous. Indeed, the interpretant could easily turn out to be a sign of a different object, as is often the case when one hears an unfamiliar or partly familiar language and attempts to guess at the meaning of the utterances; the chances of being wrong might be just as great as those of being right.

Peirce assumes for semeiosis that the chances of guessing right are significantly greater than guessing wrong in the long run, and he attributes human progress to man’s inherent ability to frame correct hypotheses. As far as the semeiotic relation is concerned, this capacity for making correct inferences, in scientific endeavors as in ordinary life, must rest, argues Peirce, on the Assurance of the Utterance (using Utterance as synonymous with Sign; Savan 1976:53).

There are three types of assurance, dictated by the categories. First, the interpretant may be assured of its connection with sign and object by instinct. By using this word Peirce intends certain fundamental natural capacities that transcend particularities of species, geographic locus, and accumulated experience; ones that allow knowledge and communication to proceed:

Nature is a far vaster and less clearly arranged repertory of facts than a census report; and if men had not come to it with special aptitudes for guessing right, it may well be doubted whether in the ten or twenty thousand years that they may have existed their greatest mind would have attained the amount of knowledge which is actually possessed by the lowest idiot. But, in point of fact, not man merely, but all animals derive by inheritance (presumably by natural selection) two classes of ideas which adapt them to their environment. In the first place, they all have from birth some notions, however crude and concrete, of force, matter, space, and time; and, in the next place, they have some notion of what sort of objects their fellow-beings are, and how they will act on given occasions. . . . Man has thus far not attained to any knowledge that is not in a wide sense either mechanical or anthropological in its nature, and it may be reasonably presumed that he never will. (2.753)

Side by side, then, with the well established proposition that all knowledge is based on experience, and that science is only advanced by the experimental verifications of theories, we have to place this other equally important truth, that all human knowledge, up to the highest flights of science, is but the development of our inborn animal instincts. (2.754)

Assurance by instinct for Peirce means a ‘qualitative affinity, a subconscious linkage of Firstness, which enables the interpretant to interpret the sign as evidence of the character of its object correctly’ (Savan 1976:55). The quality of the object has the capacity to arouse a sympathetic response in the interpretant of the sign, and a responsive reciprocity is established between sign and interpretant. When children learn to use and understand speech sounds, for instance, there must be the assurance furnished by self-control. The correctness of sign interpretation is assured when one is able to control and modify one’s feelings, actions, and thoughts through that interpretation.

The second type of assurance in Peirce’s final trichotomy is the assurance of experience. The characteristics of the object ascribed to it by its sign must pass the test of experience; otherwise the interpretant cannot be assured that such an object really exists. The process of semeiotic mediation of sign, object, and interpretant being virtually without termination, there must be some collateral information or experience, argues Peirce, that verifies the fact that sign and interpretant stand for the same object. What allows the identification of a common object to occur is ‘an insistent environment common to all three terms’ (Savan 1976:55) of the semeiotic triad. The most important feature of experience insofar as assuring an interpretant is concerned is its hard, brute, insistent nature, which prevents it from being manipulated and distorted by whim, caprice, and fancy. Action, thought, and communication all depend on taking the givenness and autonomy of facts into account. The interpretant is assured of its existence by a ‘collision with an obdurate object’ (Savan 1976:55).

The third and last type of assurance is that of Form. There must be a unity of form that assures the interpretants of signs when the latter are laws and necessitants. This type of assurance affects judgements of the most mundane kind—for instance, regarding the color, weight, hardness, etc. of ordinary objects:

Although Peirce is most interested in assurance of form as it is found in scientific reasoning, humble and everyday examples abound. To say of any object—an apple, for example—that it is red implies an elementary law, the law, namely, that under standard conditions of vision, lighting, etc., the apple would in the future look red. Even to say that the apple looks red now, says Peirce, is to imply the law that it would continue in the immediate future to look red. . . . We reason that the apple is red, and if it is red then it will look red at various times in the future. We thus infer the formal conclusion that the apple looks red at such and such times, and the conclusion is verified by observation. Assurance by form thus enters into the interpretants of the most ordinary everyday signs, because these signs, their objects, and their interpretants are laws. (Savan 1976:57).

Although Peirce himself proposes no names for the three types of sign that assure their interpretants by instinct, experience, and form, they can be called (following the suggestion in Savan 1976:57), respectively, Presentiments, Empirical Signs, and Formal Signs.

F. Summary of sign types

The several semeiotic trichotomies discussed above can be summarized (cf. Lieb 1953:51-5) utilizing the principle of triadic division which Peirce employed in conformity with the categories. The three types Peirce himself explored most thoroughly and their categorial varieties are shown in Figure 4 (adapted from Anttila 1977a:227).

The combination of varieties of sign are restricted by the hierarchical nature of the categories. In Peirce’s words, ‘it is evident that a Possible can determine nothing but a Possible, it is equally so that a Necessitant can be determined by nothing but a Necessitant’ (H 84). Given these restrictions, the three trichotomies above provide for 10 (rather than 27) classes of sign combinations:

1. Qualisigns

2. Iconic sinsigns

3. Iconic legisigns

4. Vestiges, or Rhematic Indexical Sinsigns

5. Proper names, or Rhematic Indexical Legisigns

6. Rhematic Symbols

7. Dicent sinsigns (as a portrait with a legend)

8. Dicent Indexical Legisigns

9. Propositions, or Dicent symbols

10. Arguments(H 35-6)

FIGURE 4

Ten additional trichotomous divisions result upon the recognition that a sign has two objects (dynamic and immediate) and three basic interpretants (immediate, dynamic, final). Peirce first divides signs according to (1) their own nature, (2) the nature of their immediate objects, then according to their relation to (3) their dynamic objects, (4) their final, (5) dynamic, and (6) their immediate interpretants (H 32-5). Each of these divisions is a triad; in each of the last three cases, the triadic subdivision into sign types is conjugate with the tripartition of the respective interpretant into emotional, energetic, and logical subtypes (Short MS: 13). The expansion into ten trichotomies (‘the ten respects according to which the chief divisions of signs are determined’) is described by Peirce as follows:

1st, According to the Mode of Apprehension of the Sign itself,

2nd, According to the Mode of Presentation of the Immediate Object,

3rd, According to the Mode of Being of the Dynamical Object,

4th, According to the Relation of the Sign to its Dynamical Object,

5th, According to the Mode of Presentation of the Immediate Interpretant,

6th, According to the Mode of Being of the Dynamical Interpretant,

7th, According to the Relation of the Sign to the Dynamical Interpretant,

8th, According to the Nature of the Normal [= Final] Interpretant,

9th, According to the Relation of the Sign to the Normal Interpretant,

10th, According to the Triadic Relation of the Sign to its Dynamical Object and to its Normal Interpretant.

(H .344)

Translated into the terms utilized in the discussion above, the ten trichotomies appear in catalogue as follows (cf. Lieb 1953:52):

4. Pragmaticism, Habit, Abduction

Peirce was the founder of pragmatism; he was also the inventor of the name for the doctrine that was popularly associated from its beginnings with William James and others, rather than with its originator (cf. 5.412, 5.414). Finding his conception of pragmatism (‘a method of ascertaining the meanings, not of all ideas, but only of what I call “intellectual concepts,” that is to say, of those upon the structure of which, arguments concerning objective fact may hinge’; 5.467) to have been distorted by those who took it up, Peirce came to call his more strictly defined doctrine ‘pragmaticism,’ a name he deemed ‘ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers’ (5.414).

The connection between pragmaticism and semeiotic is fundamental. Peirce’s pragmaticism is a theory of meaning that is intimately dependent on his sign theory, itself a theory of cognition (cf. Fitzgerald 1964). For Peirce, ‘the problem of what the “meaning” of an intellectual concept is can only be solved by the study of the interpretants, or proper significate effects, of signs’ (5.475). But the study of interpretants necessarily comports the investigation of ‘habits’:

I do not deny that a concept, or general mental sign, may be a logical interpretant; only, it cannot be the ultimate logical interpretant, precisely because, being a sign, it has itself a logical interpretant. It partakes somewhat of the nature of a verbal definition, and is very inferior to the living definition that grows up in the habit. Consequently, the most perfect account that we can give of a concept will consist in a description of the habit that it will produce. (NE 3:493-4)

Peirce’s notion of habit, central to both his pragmaticism and his semeiotic, has a much broader purport that is commonly associated with the word. For him,

It denotes such a specialization, original or acquired, of the nature of a man, or an animal, or a vine, or a crystallizable chemical substance, or anything else, that he or it will behave, or always tend to behave, in a way describable in general terms upon every occasion (or upon a considerable proportion of the occasions) that may present itself of a generally describable character. (5.538)

The role of habit in semeiosis is brought out by Peirce’s understanding of sign interpretation as ‘an essentially teleological, hence, self-corrective process’ (Short MS:22). This means that interpretants can be put to the test; more precisely, that logical interpretants which purport to embody and to represent general laws of nature are testable in their hypostasis as habits of expectation or habits of action. This is what Peirce intended in saying, therefore, that ‘the real and living logical conclusion is that habit; the verbal formulation merely expresses it’ (5.491).

Peirce’s pragmaticism rests in part on differentiating between final and ultimate logical interpretants (Short MS, 1981). The final logical interpretant is the true interpretation of a sign; the ultimate logical interpretant is the meaning of any logical interpretant, irrespective of its truth or falsity (Short MS:22). Every logical interpretant—whether it be immediate, dynamic, or final—must have its ultimate form. Verbal logical interpretants are penultimate to an interpretation of them that are habits, ultimate logical interpretants. Given the teleological essence of semeiosis, every genuine interpretant must be testable; furthermore, only habits and, through them, the verbal logical interpretants they interpret are testable and self-correctable.

The difference between meaningfulness and meaninglessness, on this view, comes down to the distinction between verbal formulas that have ultimate interpretants—i.e., are testable—and those that do not (Short MS:23). The mere translation or conversion of one verbal formula into another does not constitute testability. Final logical interpretants could not come into being without ultimate logical interpretants: final interpretation depends crucially on the testing of habits. At the same time, final and ultimate interpretants cannot be collapsed:

Final logical interpretants need not be ultimate, though they must be interpretable by ultimate interpretants. To suppose that every final logical interpretant must be ultimate is to suppose that the aim of theory is practice. Instead, the point of pragmatism is that practice is the test of theory even when theory is sought for its own sake. The final logical interpretant sought in disinterested inquiry would be enjoyed in its verbal form. For it is in that form that it represents reality to us. But to be final, it would have to be capable of surviving testing in its ultimate form. (Short MS:23)

Peirce’s own reasoning in identifying habit and ‘habit-change’ with the ultimate logical interpretant is instructive for an understanding of the semeiotic grounding of pragmaticism:

In advance of ascertaining the nature of this [significate] effect, it will be convenient to adopt a designation for it, and I will call it the logical interpretant, without as yet determining whether this term shall extend to anything beside the meaning of a general concept, though certainly closely related to that, or not. Shall we say that this effect may be a thought, that is to say, a mental sign? No doubt, it may be so; only, if this sign be of an intellectual kind—as it would have to be—it must itself have a logical interpretant; so that it cannot be the ultimate logical interpretant of the concept. It can be proved that the only mental effect that can be so produced and that is not a sign but is of a general application is a habit-change; meaning by a habit-change a modification of a person’s tendencies toward action, resulting from previous experience or from previous exertions of his will or acts, or from a complexus of both kinds of cause. (5.476)

I ask myself, since we have already seen that the logical interpretant is general in its possibilities of reference (i.e., refers or is related to whatever there may be of a certain description), what categories of mental facts there be that are of general reference. I can find only these four: conceptions, desires (including hopes, fears, etc.), expectations, and habits. I trust I have made no important omission. Now it is no explanation of the nature of the logical interpretant (which, we already know, is a concept) to say that it is a concept. This objection applies also to desire and expectation, as explanations of the same interpretant; since neither of these is general otherwise than through connection with a concept. Besides, as to desire, it would be easy to show (were it worth the space), that the logical interpretant is an effect of the energetic interpretant, in the sense in which the latter is the effect of the emotional interpretant. Desire, however, is cause, not effect, of effort. As to expectation, it is excluded by the fact that it is not conditional. For that which might be mistaken for a conditional expectation is nothing but a judgment that, under certain conditions, there would be an expectation: there is no conditionality in the expectation itself, such as there is in the logical interpretant after it is actually produced. Therefore, there remains only habit, as the essence of the logical interpretant. (5.486)

Peirce conceives of habits as Thirds, and it is their status as generals that allows them to be called ‘the essence of the logical interpretant.’ Habits are tendencies to act in this or that manner under specifiable conditions; they are thus at one remove from the realm of the here and now, or Secondness. Habits govern—in the manner of leading principles—activities, which are Seconds, within the class of existent individuals, and this regulative relation has built into it the attainment of some goal.

Habits are, in Peirce’s scheme, also the products of experimentation, much in the manner of scientific inquiry, though this form of testing need not be muscular: habits can be developed merely by the repeated exercise of thought, which Peirce calls ‘reiterations in the inner world. . . likened to issuing a command to one’s future self’ (5.487). Indeed, Peirce restricts his brand of pragmatism to intellectual concepts, that is to say to meaning as intellectual purport (5.402, n. 3). This restriction stems in part from the fact that only intellectual signs have interpretants that are Thirds (Fitzgerald 1964:147). Another reason for it is Peirce’s colligation of pragmaticism with his theory of inquiry, specifically his doctrine of abduction, or inferences that are based on signs allowing conclusions to be drawn from them.

The process of thought underlying all inquiry in which an explanatory hypothesis is formed—such is the content of abduction (also called retroduction or hypothesis by Peirce, and occasionally confused with induction by his interpreters). In terms of syllogism, abduction states that something is the case and is, therefore, the only fallible mode of reasoning as compared to the other two modes, deduction and induction, given the premisses. Peirce describes all three modes as follows:

Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea; for induction does nothing but determine a value, and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of a pure hypothesis.

Deduction proves that something must be; Induction shows that something actually is operative; Abduction merely suggests that something may be.

Its only justification is that from its suggestion deduction can draw a prediction which can be tested by induction, and that, if we are ever to learn anything or to understand phenomena at all, it must be by abduction that this is to be brought about.

No reason whatsoever can be given for it, as far as I can discover; and it needs no reason, since it merely offers suggestions. (5.171)

Abduction and interpretation are inextricably bound up with one another, which is to say that the formation of interpretants proceeds by series of abductive inferences whose character is affected by repeated testing and experimentation. Peirce himself explains pragmaticism as a theory of meaning that is tantamount to the logic of abduction:

If you carefully consider the questions of pragmatism you will see that it is nothing else than the question of the logic of abduction. That is, pragmatism proposes a certain maxim which, if sound, must render needless any further rule as to the admissibility of hypotheses to rank as hypotheses, that is to say, as explanations of phenomena held as hopeful suggestions; and, furthermore, this is all that the maxim of pragmatism really pretends to do, at least so far as it is confined to logic, and is not understood as a proposition in psychology. For the maxim of pragmatism is that a conception can have no logical effect or import differing from that of a second conception except so far as, taken in connection with other conceptions and intentions, it might conceivably modify our practical conduct differently from that second conception. . . . Thus, the maxim of pragmatism, if true, fully covers the entire logic of abduction. . . . if pragmatism is the doctrine that every conception is a conception of conceivable practical effects, it makes conception reach far beyond the practical. It allows any flight of the imagination, provided this imagination ultimately alights upon a possible practical effect; and thus many hypotheses may seem at first glance to be excluded by the pragmatical maxim that are not really so excluded. (5.196)

The role of semeiotic in pragmaticism includes inference as a leading principle: the circle consisting of sign, interpretant, and habit is held together by the pragmatic maxim and the logic of abduction (cf. 8.191).

All that remains to be fitted into this conception is the perceptual component, which Peirce does by relating abduction and perception in a systematically grounded way:

Abductive inference shades into perceptual judgment without any sharp line of demarcation between them; or, in other words, our first premisses, the perceptual judgments, are to be regarded as an extreme case of abductive inferences, from which they differ in being absolutely beyond criticism. The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight, although of extremely fallible insight. It is true that the different elements of the hypothesis were in our minds before; but it is the idea of putting together what we had never before dreamed of putting together which flashes the new suggestion before our contemplation. (5.181)

The comparison between the formation of explanatory hypotheses and perception is effected through the systematic tangency of abduction and what Peirce refers to consistently as the ‘perceptual judgment’ (cf. Reilly 1970:46-55): this is a mental proposition connected with the sense experience of the person forming the judgment—or as Peirce puts it, ‘a judgment asserting in propositional form what a character of a percept directly present to the mind is’ (5.54). Pragmatic meaning originates in the perceptual judgment, and Peirce adduces the Aristotelian dictum Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu (5.181) to ground his position. This act of mind working on the data supplied by the senses is the premiss behind all critical thinking and mental control, although ‘it itself is not subject to control or criticism, since there is no meaning beyond it which could serve as a norm of criticism’ (Reilly 1970:46-7).

The meaning units predicated of the perceived objects are general, and this fact connects abduction with perceptual judgments: both contain general elements. Moreover, the two are systematically similar in that both are beyond the control of reason and criticism in the first instance. Perceptual judgments are ‘forced upon [our] acquaintance, and that by a process which [we are] utterly unable to control and consequently [are] unable to criticize’ (5.157). Abductive inferences or explanatory hypotheses are, in origin, products of the imagination, flashes of insight not subject to the influence of the critical faculty or reason and chosen for further testing and examination by an instinct independent of deliberate control.

Ultimately, however, the two part company with respect to their subjection to the control of the rational faculty. Abduction, born of instinct and imagination, comes under the compass of reason, since it undergoes testing as to its validity. Perceptual judgments, on the other hand, escape the corrective influence of criticism: ‘we cannot form the least conception of what it would be to deny the perceptual judgment’ (5.186).

Both are interpretative, in that they each abstract or represent only some part of the knowable features of objects without exhausting their meaning. On Peirce’s view, however, perceptual judgments, though indubitable at the moment of formation, may come to be doubted subsequently—on the basis of later, conflicting perceptual judgments. They are thus indubitable in one sense but eminently fallible nonetheless. Abduction, on the other hand, is fallible and subject to error by definition, since it asserts that something may be the case—tentatively and subject to revision.

The process of interpretation, of furnishing successions of interpretants that are increasingly refined in reflecting the purport of the signs and objects to which they are connected, is grounded in experience: ‘every general element of every hypothesis, however wild or sophisticated it may be [is] given somewhere in perception, . . . every general form of putting concepts together is, in its elements, given in perception’ (5.186). In terms of abductive reasoning this entails, for Peirce, the position that the abductive conclusion is necessarily suggestible by its premisses (5.189). But the interpretation abduction furnishes is eminently fallible nonetheless, since it only goes so far as to assert that the conclusion drawn is a systematic possibility contained in the premisses on which it is based.

Pragmaticism, or the pragmatic maxim of meaning, pertains fundamentally to this point by limiting the admissibility of hypotheses; in fact, ‘a hypothesis may be judged admissible if it is in accord with the pragmatic maxim’ (Reilly 1970:54). Interpretants arising as abductive inferences are verifiable. Pragmaticism imposes a limit on the free play of imagination whenever the goal is interpretation of phenomena. Peirce’s own focus in this enterprise is scientific inquiry, but the purport of his conception clearly extends its scope to embrace all activity that involves interpretation.

5. Conclusion

It can now be seen that Peirce’s philosophical enterprise is a thoroughly semeiotic one. His pragmaticism is a theory of meaning and converges with his semeiotic, which is a theory of cognition. To study meaning is to study signs; to study the consequences of the pragmatic maxim is to study interpretants.

Moreover, for Peirce, ‘all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language’ (5.421). One of Peirce’s greatest achievements is his extension of the concept of sign to language. Since linguistic units are all legisigns, of which symbols are the most prominent class, the semeiotic study of language and its structure comports the thorough investigation of the way in which symbols—which hierarchically include icons and indexes—fulfill their function, a process to be interpreted as a matter of law or habit. At the heart of semeiosis is the teleology of function encompassed in the formula ‘a sign is not a sign unless it translates itself into another sign in which it is more fully developed’ (5.594). The process of translation is tantamount to interpretation, to rendering successively more determinate the epitomical vagueness that inheres in the very ontology of a symbol (NE 4:261).

Apologizing to his reader for being unable to answer all questions arising from his conception, Peirce excuses himself by admitting: ‘I am, as far as I know, a pioneer, or rather a backwoodsman, in the work of clearing and opening up what I call semiotic, . . . and I find the field too vast, the labor too great, for a first-comer. I am accordingly, obliged to confine myself to the most important questions’ (5.488). His keen insight into language and its structure notwithstanding, Peirce the scientist and philosopher devoted himself to the foundations of his larger subject while expressing admiration for ‘the vast and splendidly developed science of linguistics’ (1.271). Indeed, from the very beginnings of his semeiotic to its most mature culmination after close to fifty years of study, Peirce steadfastly adhered to a conception of signs that identified them essentially with ‘the same general structure as words’ (6.338). Peirce’s theory of signs, therefore, is intended as a conscious adumbration of a theory of grammar.