Search Results - Semiotic elements and classes of signs (Peirce)

Logician, mathematician, philosopher, and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) began writing on semeiotic, semiotics, or the theory of sign relations in the 1860s, around the time that he devised his system of three categories. He eventually defined semiosis as an "action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs" (Houser 1998, 411). This specific type of triadic relation is fundamental to Peirce's understanding of "logic as formal semiotic".

Peirce notably conceives of and discusses things like representations, interpretations, and assertions broadly and in terms of philosophical logic (which he called simply "logic"), rather than in terms of psychology, social studies, and special classes of phenomena. His semiotic is connected with his mathematics of logic. At the same time, he draws on examples familiar in experience. His semiotic is not contained in a mathematical or deductive formalism, and is about certain general aspects of positive phenomena. Peirce's semiotic, in its classifications, its critical analysis of kinds of inference, and its theory of inquiry, is philosophical^[1] logic studied in terms of signs and sign processes as positive phenomena in general.

Here is Peirce's definition of the triadic sign relation that formed the core of his definition of logic.