Search Results - Semeiotic

The Peirce scholar and editor Max H. Fisch^[1] claimed in 1978^[2] that "Semeiotic" was Peirce's own preferred rendering of Locke’s Σημιωτική. That spelling has been used by some Peirce scholars to distinguish Peirce's semiotic from others, especially from those more in the "dyadic" Saussurian tradition (signifier, signified), formerly called "Semiology", with its foundation in linguistics and its emphasis on language and symbol. Peircean semiotic is triadic (sign, object, interpretant), and is conceived of as philosophical logic studied in terms of signs that are not always linguistic or artificial, and sign processes, modes of inference, and the inquiry process in general, with emphases not only on symbols but also on signs that are semblances (icons) and signs that are signs by being factually connected (indices) to their objects.

Short aims not only to distinguish Peircean semiotic from Saussure's semiology but, furthermore, to separate it from much of current semiotics. Short's 2007 preface begins "Peirce’s theory of signs, or semeiotic, misunderstood by so many, has gotten in amongst the wrong crowd. It has been taken up by an interdisciplinary army of ‘semioticians’ whose views and aims are antithetical to Peirce’s own, and meanwhile it has been shunned by those philosophers who are working in Peirce’s own spirit on the very problems to which his semeiotic was addressed." Short means philosophers in the analytic tradition. Short continues, "Those problems are two to construct a naturalistic but nonreductive account of the human mind, and to explain and defend the claim that the sciences are objective in their mode of inquiry and in fact yield knowledge of an independently existing reality."

Deely, in his paper cited above, responds that Peirce wrote in 1908 of hoping for his semiotics to have "future explorers" — by whom, says Deely, Peirce couldn't have meant the pioneers of philosophy's analytic school who already surrounded Peirce. Deely adds that they could hardly be today's analytic philosophers, to whom he ascribes tendencies against philosophical realism and toward a reduction of sign action to animals' purposive behaviors (he may be accusing Short himself of that reduction), whereas Peirce was a Scholastic realist and moreover saw (a) logic as (formal) semiotics, (b) semiosis as sign action (the irreducibly tri-relative influence from object through sign to interpretant sign), and (c) semiotics (logic) as proving pragmaticism, "not the reverse". Deely "With Fisch, in originally creating the myth that Peirce preferred 'Semeiotic', the claim for the preference was innocuous. But as Short takes up and extends the myth, the motivation ... [is] aimed ... from the start to cut Peirce off from those very 'future explorers' who take up the doctrine of signs centered on semeiosis as Peirce understood it to be the action of signs, not the behavior of animals when using signs."