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The Subject. Charles Sanders Peirce: The Subject as Semiosis by Andy Blunden 2005/6
TheSubject.PhilosophicalFoundations.AndyBlunden2005/6
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According to Colapietro:
[Peirce]s refusal to eliminate the acting subject along with the
Cartesian cogito is one of the important respects in which Peirces
semiotic vision is superior to the anti-humanist orientation of
Saussures structuralist and poststructuralist offspring. For these
offspring, the decentering of the subject amounts to nothing less
than the liquidation of the agent; for Peirce, the repudiation of the
Cartesian starting point means the recovery of flesh-and-blood
actors who are continuously defining themselves through their giveand-take relationships with both the natural world and each other.
[Colapietro, Introduction]
The key concept in Peirces philosophy is sign and sign-activity (semiosis).
But the meaning of sign for Peirce is extraordinarily general, coming close to
being a substance; the sign is the basic relation by means of which Peirce
understands reality, though he is clear that the being of a sign transcends any
and all of its instantiations, that the being of anything is not exhausted in its
being a sign, and in fact, in order for anything to be a sign, it must also be
something other than a sign.
Peirce takes the basic idea of a sign and generalises it. A footprint is a sign
for example, of the passage of an animal across soft ground, a social movement
is the sign of a particular kind of injustice, a word is a sign, as is a library, and
a person is a sign.
Peirce begins with a notion which we associate with communication, and in
that sense sign is significantly different from image or concept, which we
associate with representation rather than communication. He then generalises
the idea so that it becomes a category which incorporates causality, system,
concept, ... Semiotics (the study of semiosis) thus constitutes an approach to
the understanding of the human condition and the universe in general. Peirce
is easily able to render representation in semiotic terms; the converse
operation which confronts other writers, of rendering communication in terms
of representation, is far less successful.
Semiosis means sign-activity and for Peirce the Subject is semiosis, but
then, so is everything else. Peirce therefore falls under that class of thinkers,
externalists, who see the subject as being in mind, rather than the mind being
in the subject. Mind (i.e. semiosis) is something which is essentially
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WhatisaSign?
The basic schema of semiosis is the triadic relation:
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Peirces original aim was to use logic to understand the process of enquiry.
A process of enquiry is always initiated by some sign; there is then an initial
interpretant the first thought or initial reaction to some unexpected stress
or irritation; the initial reaction could be some outward action, or in the case
of a human being, it could be a thought experiment. Further interpretants
lead to some general pattern of coping with the stress, which becomes a habit,
which according to Peirce is the ultimate interpretant. By the time an
organisms efforts to control its activity in response to some stress has become
fixed as a habit, then an irreversible, material change has been made in the
organism. In this way, Peirce has outlined a process of development of a sign
which encompasses all kinds of learning processes the mind is a sign
developing according to the laws of inference.
In defence of his view of the mind as semiosis, and against the idea of mind
as something existing as a condition or substance within the body of an
individual, Peirce makes the point that surely the human mind could not be
poorer than a word; in order to exist, just like mind, a word must take on some
physical form, but it can exist in innumerable such bodies, passing from one to
another; likewise, when I communicate my thought and my sentiments to a
friend ... do I not live in his brain as well as in my own most literally?
Peirce sees the capacity to carry out thought experiments directed at
further control of ones actions, as the distinctively rational mode of semiosis.
But he defines mind in terms of its outward manifestations rather than its
inward, private appearance. He is able to derive the inwardness and autonomy
of mind by the fact that people are able to subject the outward manifestations
of mind to control and criticism. For Peirce, the essence of intelligence is this
ability to subject its actions to self-control and self-criticism. Thus the ultimate
in the development of mind is the formation of habits in which a person
deliberately modifies their own semiosis, making in fact a thoroughly material
change in their own body by the application of thought. In this, Peirce follows
in the fine tradition of Aristotle and Kant, who also saw peoples acquisition of
the habits necessary for an ethical life as the central problem of social life.
Peirce notes that all deliberations that really and sincerely agitate our
breasts always assume a dialogic form! These serious thoughts Peirce sees as
having the form of a dialogue between a critical self, on the one hand, and a
spontaneous or innovative self.
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Qualisign,sinisignandlegisign
The first trichotomy depends on how the sign relates to its object. Peirce
uses the term Qualisign for the quality of a thing but I think Hegels
dialectical conception of the Particular captures this idea better. Peirce says
that a qualisign must be embodied in some sinisign, and a Sinisign is a thing,
or Individual, which in its turn will include many different qualisigns. Peirces
conception of the relation of Quality and Thing is formal as compared to
Hegels dialectical conception. A Legisign is a universal or category of thing,
which may therefore include many Individuals or sinisigns. Peirce is here
accepting the formal-logical conception of universals unbounded categories of
elements collected in a set through sharing a common attribute. This was,
during his lifetime at least, the universally accepted conception in natural
science. There is no need therefore repeat what we said in the chapter on
Hegel (Ch. 6) about how subjectivity exists in the world through the
collaborative activity of human individuals in particular forms of activity
organised around a shared understanding of universals.
Symbol,IconandIndex
Peirces Semiotics second trichotomy categorising signs into icon (or
likeness), index and symbol is however immensely fruitful in the
understanding of subjectivity.
Symbol is derived from the Greek symbola, tablets bearing a contract
which was broken in two, each party keeping one half, later a documents
attesting to rights held under a treaty between two cities in which each
guaranteed citizens of the other the rights they had in their own city, etc.; later
it came to mean tokens and signs, symptoms and omens of all kinds, including
the meaning symbol had in the 15th century English, a formal statement of
belief, a summary of a religious belief of a church or sect, a confession of faith,
and by about 1600 had come to mean a formula, motto, maxim, summary or
synopsis, as well as something like its modern meaning, or something that
stands for something else by vague suggestion or convention rather than
likeness.
Index on the other hand originally meant the index finger (1400) and
came to mean a table of contents for a book, and by 1600 was a wooden
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moral panic, some epidemic or other threat to our health, some political
scandal, local swindle or threat to national security, some bold new plan or
scientific discovery or technical innovation, some heroic deed or worthwhile
project the kind of idea that can change the social landscape and change the
nature of subjectivity everywhere.
First of all, we get to know about a thing and accept its reality through the
symbolic register, when an eminent scientist or other expert or teacher
someone with a position in or certificate from an appropriate scientific
institute where the socially determined practices of the relevant branch of
science (or theology or whatever) are regulated and socially guaranteed
verifies the truth and nature of the thing. The question is not whether
something happened or exists, but what it is. We are not ourselves experts (if
we are, and we participate in the relevant regulated practices, discourses and
institutions, then the relationship is somewhat different) so we only know the
symbolic truth of a fact by the testimony of a person or group of people who
act as symbol for the fact. This is the process, for example, whereby various
talking heads appear on the television screen and present the fact to us as
verified in the symbolic register, when we learn something in school, or read it
in a textbook. We dont ourselves ask to see the images from the endoscope, or
the completed survey forms, computer print-outs or the relevant papers in
peer-reviewed scientific journals, but a certain recognisable type of person is
able to represent the thing to us as a Symbol.
I hasten to add, that there is nothing of cultural relativism or scepticism in
this idea. The scientific practices necessary to verify a fact are socially
regulated and verified for the general community by certain kinds of images,
words, certificates, practices, discourses, hierarchies, regulations, laws, etc.,
etc., and it is through this specific network of relations which I call the
symbolic register that this kind of knowledge is made available outside the
institutions which constitute the symbolic register and is put into general
circulation.
I mentioned that the semiotic activity within the relevant expert discourse
or professional institute is somewhat different. It is in fact this context which
Peirce had in mind when he devised the concept of semiosis, and in such a
context, the categories of sign must be taken just as defined by Peirce.
What is of interest in a study of the subject is how knowledge, established
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TableofContents|Works
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