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All content in this area was uploaded by Oseni Taiwo Afisi on Jul 23, 2020
Content may be subject to copyright.
t r e n d s i n s e m a n t i c s a n d p r a g m a t i c s
CHAPTER 22
THE CONCEPT OF SEMIOTICS
IN CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE’S
PRAGMATISM
OSENI AFISI, PhD
INTRODUCTION
Language is an indispensable tool in human thought process. Every human be-
ing has the natural ability to think. However, the thinking process requires that
the thinking agent performs the act within the conne(s) of the environment
with which its language evolves. Mental representation possesses a linguistic struc-
ture. The human thoughts process take place within a mental language. It thus implies
that language is crucial to human cognitive abilities. Essentially, there is no thought
without language.
While one can glorify the instrumentality of language on thought, there are some
downsides that can be distilled from such assertion. One of such is the tendency for
one to think only within the cultural worldview of one’s language. The problem with
this resonates with the idea of limiting one’s outlook to life within the connes of
one’s cultural worldview. An individual who fails to explore and share others’ worl-
dview, for example, would only be able to communicate her ideas within the limit of
her language of thought.
The other problem with language of thought is that it is relativistic. It allows the
progenitors of the thought process to express individual dierences in all manner of
things. It does not encourage uniformity of thought. As such, it can lead to crisis of
thought.
While it can be established that language is essential to expressing our thought
processes, it evolves only within the environment for which it develops for social pur-
poses. The term ‘social’ implies an inter-personal communication among people. Lan-
guage is meaningless when it is private. When a language is private it refers to “what
only the speaker can know — to his immediate private sensations …” (Wigenstein
1953: 243). Such a private language would be neither genuinely a language nor in any
true way meaningful. An uerance truly is linguistic only if it bears that kind of re-
lationship to understanding that establishes the possibility of judging the correctness
of its use, “so the use of a word stands in need of a justication which everybody un-
derstands” (Wigenstein 1953: 261). Language is something which must be shared by
both the speaker and the listener. A genuine and meaningful language entails an ob-
jective/subjective distinction with respect to what is communicated and how it is re-
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ceived. The objective/subjective distinction embraces the fact that there is no language
outside the context of the other speakers of the same language (Pinto 1999:80).
From the foregoing, one can view that the discussion of language embraces a social
dimension to the meaning of language. This perceived social character of language
denotes that the linguistic meaning of words by agreement by all members of a com-
munity would provide the basis upon which words make meaning. In other words,
meaningful language is identied with how it is understood and accepted by public
standards. Language is identied with how words can connote the same meaning to
all members of the linguistic community.
There are three essential elements of the social character of language as enumer-
ated by Karl Popper in his Objective Knowledge. Popper considered language as «the
indispensable medium of critical discussion» (Popper 1972: 136). Popper catego-
rized the world into three aspects within which human cognition permeates. First,
[there is] the world of physical objects or of physical states; secondly, the world of
states of consciousness, or mental states, or perhaps of behavioural dispositions to act;
and thirdly, the world of objective contents of thought, especially of scientic and po-
etic thoughts and of works of art.
Language as communication” belongs to Popper’s World 1 of events (in its physi-
cal transmission between speakers). World 2 is our practical or private mental activity
(in the processing of speech – input and output). World 3 possesses “language as in-
formation” where ideas are rationally considered.
Although the social character of language is crucial to communication, it can be
taken for granted that verbal communication is basically what language is. This is not
the case. Language can be verbal or nonverbal. Sign language is a nonverbal commu-
nication approach to language that uses the visual-manual modality to convey mean-
ing. Sign language possesses its own semantic structure and epistemic underpinnings.
While major theoretical discussions have been made on sign language by various lin-
guistic scholars, such as Wendy Sandler and Diane Lillo-Martin, Sign Language and
Linguistic Universals (2006), of great importance to this discussion is the philosophical
contribution made by Charles Sanders Peirce with his Semiotics or The Sign Theory.
C. S. Peirce (1839-1914) is the founder of pragmatism. Pragmatism is a philosophi-
cal tradition which developed in the United States of America around 1870. Pragma-
tism is the view that theories, ideologies or propositions must practical eects on so-
ciety. A pragmatic theory or proposition is true if it suitably works, and its meaning is
be found in its practical relevance.
Peirce’s pragmatism is best illustrated in his best-known works entitled “The Fixa-
tion of Belief” where Peirce established the thesis that the scientic method is superi-
or to other methods in dealing with issues of doubt and in “How to Make Our Ideas
Clear” where Peirce defended the notion that logic makes our ideas clear and distinct
from confused concepts.
To understand Peirce’s philosophy in relation to making our ideas clear and how to
properly x our belief system, Peirce advocated the scientic method. Peirce himself
worked as a scientist for 32 years with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey.
So, Peirce considered topics of philosophy and logic as philosophy of science in them-
selves (Misak 2006: 1). When Peirce defended as a clear and distinct conception with
its end as set for its practical consequences, what was essential to him was a meaning-
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ful conception with some sort of experiential “cash value,” capable of being related to
some sort of empirical observations under speciable conditions (Misak 2006: 2) .It is
in view of this position that Peirce recoined the terminology of his pragmatic philos-
ophy to become “pragmaticism” in order to distinguish his maxim from the pragma-
tism of William James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859–1952) who were the notable
contemporary American pragmatists with Peirce.
While Peirce’s pragmatism is important in its ramications, his discussion on the
sign theory is essential to his work on logic, which he considered as the medium for
the process of scientic discovery, and even as one possible means for ‘proving’ his
pragmatism (Atkin 2013: assessed on 19th February 2020). Peirce called this sign theo-
ry “semiotics”, and he believed it is a theory of thought and action.
Peirce’s semiosis is tripartite. It is a combination of representations, objects and in-
terpretations. Its main representation is a sign. The process of semiosis is triadic. The
triadic process of semiosis in Peirce stipulates that;
…a sign is something, A, which brings something, B, its interpretant
sign determined or created by it, into the same sort of correspon-
dence with something, C, its object as that in which itself stands for
C. (Peirce, 1991:20).
This indicates that a sign is something that stands in a structured kind of relation to
two other things, which are the object and its interpreter. These are three basic semiot-
ic elements of semiosis; are the sign, object and interpretant. However, Peirce regard-
ed the sign as basic to cosmological understanding as the universe is permeated with
signs.
PEIRCE ON SEMIOTICS
Peirce regarded semiotics as the philosophical study of signs. Peirce sees meaning as a
precursor to sign. Meaning is nonexistent if there is no sign pointing to another sign.
Meaning generates signs from signs, in long teleological chains distributed over time
in a certain direction (semiosis). To Peirce ‘the woof and warp of all thought is sym-
bols’, that ‘every thought and action is a sign’ (Lorino 2014)
Peirce’s Semiotic or Sign Theory denotes a kind of representation, reference and
meaning. Peirce’s semiotic consists of three inter-related constituents of communica-
tion: a sign, an object, and an interpretant. Semiotic, in Peirce, is a triadic model which
describes the relationship between the sign/representamen (that which represents some-
thing else), the object (that which it stands for or represents) and the interpretant (the
possible meaning or the sense made of the representamen) (Chandler, 2002: 27. In his
own denition of a sign, Peirce states that:
I dene a sign as anything which is so determined by something
else, called its Object, and so determines an eect upon a person,
which eect I call its interpretant, that the later is thereby mediately
determined by the former. (Peirce 1902, 478)
The sign is the signier. It is a wrien word, an uerance, smoke as a sign for re etc.
The object is whatever is signied. It is the object to which the wrien or uered word
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aaches, or the re signied by the smoke. The interpretant, is the understanding that
we have of the sign/object; relation. For Peirce, the interpretant is central to the content
of the sign. A sign signies only in being interpreted. The meaning of a sign is mani-
fest in the interpretation that it generates in sign users (Atkin 2013).
THE TRIADIC PROCESS OF SEMIOSIS
As earlier mentioned, Peirce’s sign theory or semiosis involves a process of triadic re-
lationship between a sign or representamen (a rst), an object (a second) and an inter-
pretant (a third).
A sign (representamen) means, in the broadest possible sense “represents”. It is
something interpretable as saying something about a thing. The sign or representam-
en is a thing that represents another thing: its object. The representamen is ‘a rst’,
and it is considered a pure potentiality. Before it is interpreted, the object is what the
sign represents. The sign can only represent the object; it cannot furnish acquaintance
with it. The sign can express something about the object, providing that it is an ob-
ject with which the interpreter is already familiar from experience (Everaert-Desmedt
2011: 18). The sign does make it clear that the interpreter is able to express what the
dening object in such a way that will not reduce the quality of the object.
As the representamen, the sign is rstness. It is a conception of being that is inde-
pendent of anything else. Representamen is the general essence of being, for example,
of a “whiteness”, as Plato talked about the essence of beauty in the world of forms. For
the rstness, there is only one essence. Firstness is a conception of being in its whole-
ness or completeness, with no boundaries or parts, and no cause or eect. While rst-
ness is representamen, it gives meaning to the object. Although the object represents
the sign, the sign is its mode of being.
The object is a fundamental tool of operation between the sign and an interpretant.
It can be anything discussable or thinkable, a thing, event, relationship and argument.
Objects are basically represented in the sign. It is the object which determines the sign.
In the foundational categories of semiosis, the object is secondness. Secondness
is the mode of being that is in relation to something else. This is the category that in-
cludes the individual, experience, fact, existence, and action-reaction. Secondness op-
erates within discontinuous time, where the dimension of past time enters in: a certain
event occurred at a certain moment, before some other event, which was its conse-
quence. Secondness corresponds to practical experience.
An interpretant (interpretant sign) is the sign’s more or less claried meaning or
ramication, a kind of form or idea of the dierence which the sign’s being true or un-
deceptive. The interpretant is a sign of the object and of the interpretant’s predecessor
(the interpreted sign) as being a sign of the same object. The interpretant is an inter-
pretation in the sense of a product of an interpretive process or a content in which an
interpretive relation culminates, though this product or content may itself be an act, a
state of agitation, a conduct etc. This is what we mean by saying that the sign stands
for the object to the interpretant.
An interpretant is thirdness. Thirdness can be seen as the mediator through which
a rst and a second are brought into relation. Thirdness belongs to the domain of rules
and laws; however, a law can only be manifested through the occurrences of its ap-
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plication, that is, by secondness; and these occurrences themselves actualize qualities,
and therefore, rstness. Thirdness is the category of thought, language, representa-
tion, and the process of semiosis; it makes social communication possible. Thirdness
corresponds to intellectual experience.
CONCLUSION
The importance of Peirce’s semiosis or the sign theory is the meaning that signs ex-
trapolate in the interpretation it stimulates in those using it. Peirce avers that “a sign
… addressed somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign,
or perhaps a more developed sign” (Peirce, 1902:15). Peirce’s critical discussions on se-
miotics upon language relates to his aempt to make signs an analysis of the meaning
of words. The philosophical issues in how an interpretant is the sense that we make
out of the sign, concerning how the representamen in Peirce’s theory is the form the
sign takes, which is not necessarily a material or concrete object, or more specic ques-
tions concerning private-public language, social character of language, verbal or non-
verbal language, are not merely linguistic puzzles. There are metaphysical, epistemo-
logical, ethical and more importantly pragmatic concerns that give meaning to these
issues. Indeed what makes these questions philosophical has everything to do with
how they are not seen as merely linguistic puzzles, but as having practical relevance
to the way we see language.
REFERENCES
Atkin, Albert (2013), “Peirce’s eory of Signs”, e Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer
Edition), Edward N. Zalta(ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/
peirce-semiotics/, retrieved 19th February, 2020.
Chandler, Daniel. (2002). Semiotics: e Basics. London: Heinemann.
Everaert-Desmedt, Nicole (2011) Peirce’s Semiotics, in Louis Herbert (dir), Signo (0nline) Rimousli,
Quebec.
Misak, Cheryl, (2006), e Cambridge Companion to Peirce, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lorino, Philippe (2014), “Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)”. e Oxford Handbook of Process
Philosophy and Organization Studies Edited by Jenny Helin, Tor Hernes, Daniel Hjorth, and
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Peirce, Charles. (1902). e Basis of Pragmatism, Harvard: Harvard University press
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