The Subject-semiosis. Philosophical Foundations

3/1/2015 The Subject. Charles Sanders Peirce: The Subject as Semiosis by Andy Blunden 2005/6

http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/semiosis.htm 1/15

TheSubject.PhilosophicalFoundations.AndyBlunden2005/6

Charles Sanders Peirce: The Subjectas Semiosis

Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced purse, 1839-1914) is a truly enigmatic

figure. Born in Cambridge Massachusetts, his father was an astronomer and

well-off. Peirce followed his father into natural science and developed his love

for logic at a very young age. He was a true eccentric and a manic depressive.

Ironically for the founder of semiotics, he was a lousy communicator and

readily made enemies, with the result that he never succeeded in gaining an

academic post and died in poverty.

Peirce coined neologisms like others made paragraphs. He left 80,000 pages

of manuscript behind him, most of which had not been published during his

lifetime, and many remain unpublished to this day. Insofar as he was known at

all, he was known as a scientist and he did make original contributions in

natural science. It was only after World War Two that his work became widely

known and he is now remembered as a philosopher. However, he is not one of

those philosophers who really belong to a later time when at last the spirit of

the times catches up with them. His two friends, William James and John

Dewey, both remained in close communication with him, materially supported

him and repeatedly and in the strongest terms affirmed their debt to Peirce.

And James and Dewey were both communicators par excellence; Dewey was

an active social reformer and political player whose influence has undoubtedly

contributed to shaping the modern world. In the history of philosophy and in

particular in the shaping of the concept of the Subject, Peirce stands higher

than both. Peirce is the originator of both Pragmatism and Semiotics.

Peirces works are near to impenetrable, but I am fortunate in that a

magnificent little book, Peirces Approach to the Self. A Semiotic

Perspective on Human Subjectivity by the Peirce scholar, Vincent Colapietro

(1989), goes straight to the question of Peirces view of subjectivity and I rely

largely on Colapietro in order to summarise Peirces views on the subject. The

matters of substance which I intend to draw from Peirce, will of course be

reliant upon my own reading of Peirce.



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 give-

and-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



ubiquitous, of which a self-conscious human being is just a node. Rather than

seeing thought as something in the person, a person is in thought; but Peirce

does not deny or even minimise the importance of the inner life of the mind or

regard consciousness as an epiphenomenon of semiosis.

The Subject is a species of semiosis, but semiosis is a process which is going

on in inorganic nature as well, even though semiosis is self-evidently a

category which is pre-eminently suited to representing culture and human life.

Peirce has conceived semiosis as a category of logic, so, like mathematical

relations, it is seen as having a reality in the external world in no way

dependent on the activity of mind. Semiosis is going on everywhere and

thought is merely a species of semiosis. Rather than, for example, seeing an

idea like genetic code as a kind of anthropomorphism, we could see code,

like sign, as first of all a category of objective, natural activity.

Rather than seeing communication as the transmission of thoughts from

one mind to another, thought is itself essentially a kind of dialogue, inherent

in the very idea of sign-activity. All those who contributed to the notion of

subject up to this point, even Hegel, still oblige us to place communication at a

level resting on an underlying level of being, but for Peirce communication is

inherent in mind itself.

When, in The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to

Man, Engels says: men in the making arrived at the point where they had

something to say to each other. Necessity created the organ [of speech] this

encapsulated an underlying prejudice which Marx and Engels shared with all

their predecessors: communication pre-supposed some representation to be

communicated. By making a category of communication, semiosis, the basic

category or substance of his universe, of cause and effect, of being itself, Peirce

gives us an approach to subjectivity which is even better suited to dealing with

problems of the modern world, in which communication is so fundamental to

our very existence. Subjectivity is sign activity.

Further, because Peirces understanding of semiosis arose from his efforts to

understand the process of scientific enquiry, the idea of a sign, a clue or

anomaly which calls for further investigation, is very fruitful as a way of

understanding development in the world. Signs are things which develop, take

on more and more meaning through their own activity. Altogether it is a very

dynamic representation of reality.



WhatisaSign?

The basic schema of semiosis is the triadic relation:

A sign ... is something which stands to somebody for something in some

respect or capacity. The Object could be a person who forms a sign (in respect

to something they want for example) which is interpreted by someone else, the

Interpretant; or the Sign could be some quality or event which is generated by

some condition or event (the Object) and is interpreted by or simply affects

someone or something else (an Interpretant). The Interpretant could be a

person listening to a piece of music or reading a book (the Sign) expressing

someones thought, or it could be a crop affected by a cold spell, a sign of the

onset of winter; the Interpretant is the proper significate effect or outcome of

the sign. Both Object and Interpretant are themselves Signs, but signs act only

in a certain respect, and do not exhaust the being of their instantiation; for

example a sign may be the shape or perhaps the motion of the Object, or

whatever, not the whole object. Signs do not occupy a separate reality from

Objects or Interpretants, but all are interchangeable forms of reality

distinguished only by their momentary role in some semiotic relation.

This triadic process opens the door to an understanding of the development

of signs in a way which is radically different from Saussures diadic model of

signifier and signified. Saussures approach splits the world into two separate

realms, one of which is the world of signifiers, the other a world of things.

These signifiers bear only an arbitrary relationship to what is signified, so what

results is a self-contained world of signs. Focussing upon the diachronic

relations among signs, Saussure constructs a static structuralism, detached

from the world it signifies and its own process of development. by contrast,

Peirces triadic process avoids this kind of dualism. Sign, Interpretant and

Object are all signs, and there is nothing arbitrary about their relationship to

one another. Every new relationship between two signs posits a mediating

sign. Semiosis thus leads to the continual accretion of meaning by signs.



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.



Two things here are all-important to assure oneself of and to

remember. The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual.

His thoughts are what he is saying to himself, that is, is saying to

that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When

one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and

all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of

language. The second thing to remember is that the mans circle of

society (however widely or narrowly this phrase may be

understood), is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects

of higher rank than the person of an individual organism. (5.421)

The critical self represents the habits a person has acquired, while the

spontaneous self is throwing up challenges to the critical self, but it is the

critical self which is the ultimate interpretant of the semiotic development of

mind.

Categoriesofsign

Peirce categorises signs according to three trichotomies. The first

trichotomy concerns what kind of thing the sign is, with qualisign, sinisignand legisign, corresponding more or less, to Hegels basic categorisation ofNotions: particular, individual and universal. The second trichotomy is icon,

symbol and index, categorising signs according manner of the connection

between the sign and the object: by resemblance, by convention or by an actual

connection with the object. The third trichotomy is rheme, dicent and

argument, categorising signs according to the manner of the connection

between the sign and the interpretant, by supposing, by exhibiting or by

arguing.

For the purposes of our current study we are particularly interested in how a

person or group of people, how a subject in fact, can be a sign, and how the

different categories of sign that Peirce defines shed light on subject-formation.

So while it is self-evident that the scope of the notion of sign in Peirce is utterly

universal, what concerns us here is how a person (or group of people, social

movement, institution, etc.) can be a sign of this or that category.

Let us take each trichotomy in turn.



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 contractwhich 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) andcame to mean a table of contents for a book, and by 1600 was a wooden



pointer, the hand of a clock or sundial, in short, a pointer.

Icon derives from the Greek eikon, likeness, image or portrait, etc., inEnglish dates from the 1570s and meant a picture of something, especially an

animal, or a portrait, as well as a solid monumental figure and a realistic

representation of something in writing.

In the specialised meaning that Peirce gave to these different types of sign in

the late 19th century, he was tolerably faithful to these original usages.

Firstly, there are likenesses, or icons; which serve to convey ideasof the things they represent simply by imitating them.

Secondly, there are indications, or indices; which showsomething about things, on account of their being physically

connected with them. Such is a guidepost, which points down the

road to be taken, or a relative pronoun, which is placed just after

the name of the thing intended to be denoted, or a vocative

exclamation, as Hi! there, which acts upon the nerves of the

person addressed and forces his attention.

Thirdly, there are symbols, or general signs, which have becomeassociated with their meanings by usage. Such are most words, and

phrases, and speeches, and books, and libraries. [What is aSign?, Peirce 1894]

and:

The likeness [i.e., icon] has no dynamical connection with theobject it represents; it simply happens that its qualities resemble

those of that object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind for

which it is a likeness. But it really stands unconnected with them.

The index is physically connected with its object; they make anorganic pair. But the interpreting mind has nothing to do with this

connection, except remarking it, after it is established. The symbolis connected with its object by virtue of the idea of the symbol-using

mind, without which no such connection would exist. [What is aSign?, Peirce 1894]

In his Collected Papers we find the following further explanations:



A pure icon can convey no positive or factual information; for itaffords no assurance that there is any such thing in nature.

... an index ... is a real thing or fact which is a sign of its object byvirtue of being connected with it as a matter of fact and by alsoforcibly introducing upon the mind, quite regardless of it beinginterpreted as a sign.

A photograph, for example, not only excites an image, has anappearance, but, owing to its optical connection with the object, isevidence that that appearance corresponds to a reality.

A symbol is a representamen whose special significance or fitnessto represent just what it does represent lies in nothing but the veryfact of there being a habit, disposition, or other effective generalrule that it will be so interpreted.

Each writing of the three-letters man is a replica of the symbolman. ...

[A symbol] consists in the really working general rule that [areplica of it] seen by a person who knows [the symbol] will effect hisconduct and thoughts according to a rule. Thus the mode of being ofthe symbol is different from that of the icon and from that of theindex. An icon has such being as belongs to past experience. Itexists only as an image in the mind. An index has the being ofpresent experience. The being of a symbol consists in the real factthat something surely will be experienced if certain conditions aresatisfied. Namely, it will influence the thought and conduct of itsinterpreter. [Collected Papers of CS Peirce, 4.447]

The value of an icon consists in its exhibiting the features of a stateof things regarded as if it were purely imaginary. The value of anindex is that it assures us of positive fact. The value of a symbol isthat it serves to make thought and conduct rational and enables usto predict the future. ... the most perfect of signs are those in whichthe iconic, indicative, and symbolic characters are blended asequally as possible. [Collected Papers of CS Peirce, 4.448]

Looking at how we get to know about something, let us have in mind some



moral panic, some epidemic or other threat to our health, some politicalscandal, local swindle or threat to national security, some bold new plan orscientific discovery or technical innovation, some heroic deed or worthwhileproject the kind of idea that can change the social landscape and change thenature of subjectivity everywhere.

First of all, we get to know about a thing and accept its reality through thesymbolic register, when an eminent scientist or other expert or teacher someone with a position in or certificate from an appropriate scientificinstitute where the socially determined practices of the relevant branch ofscience (or theology or whatever) are regulated and socially guaranteed verifies the truth and nature of the thing. The question is not whethersomething happened or exists, but what it is. We are not ourselves experts (ifwe are, and we participate in the relevant regulated practices, discourses andinstitutions, then the relationship is somewhat different) so we only know thesymbolic truth of a fact by the testimony of a person or group of people whoact as symbol for the fact. This is the process, for example, whereby varioustalking heads appear on the television screen and present the fact to us asverified in the symbolic register, when we learn something in school, or read itin a textbook. We dont ourselves ask to see the images from the endoscope, orthe completed survey forms, computer print-outs or the relevant papers inpeer-reviewed scientific journals, but a certain recognisable type of person isable to represent the thing to us as a Symbol.

I hasten to add, that there is nothing of cultural relativism or scepticism inthis idea. The scientific practices necessary to verify a fact are sociallyregulated 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 thesymbolic register that this kind of knowledge is made available outside theinstitutions which constitute the symbolic register and is put into generalcirculation.

I mentioned that the semiotic activity within the relevant expert discourseor professional institute is somewhat different. It is in fact this context whichPeirce had in mind when he devised the concept of semiosis, and in such acontext, 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



within an expert discourse, forms the subjectivity of its representatives and

that of others outside that discourse and their relation to one another in

collaborative activity. These relations and activity in the general community

are not subject to the strictures governing processes within the institutions

generating expert knowledge, and nor should they be. The idea that decisions

requiring expert knowledge should be made in the general community by

means of the normal political processes applying in the general community, is

as absurd and dangerous as the idea that the truth of things should be

established within a scientific institution by the kind of cultural and political

processes which operate in the general community.

But of course, the testimony of experts and official wisdom generally is

never enough to either convince people of a fact or generate a real social

response to a situation which is posed. Something more is always needed. Any

number of warnings of global warming or flu epidemics make no impact,

however many experts testify to their reality.

There is nothing like a human face; nothing testifies to the reality of

something so well as a human face. The person who suffers from a disease, the

victim of a crime or a natural disaster, especially if they look sympathetic, if

they look just like one of us.

We are talking about an icon, a person who represents something by

resembling it; it may be that the icon got to be an icon by virtue of having

actually suffered the disease or experienced the disaster, but the point of the

icon is that they represent the idea, the disease, the moral panic, the danger,

the heroic project or whatever, by resemblance, or more generally by their

form, which includes their biography, personality, moral character and so

forth, as well as their image.

The icon is the role model, the personification of the project, Rosa Parkes or

Nelson Mandela, the martyr or heroine, the Stakhonovite (model worker), the

star patient or prototypical case, but also, the newly released paedophile who

becomes the focus for a vigilante campaign, Osama bin Laden.

The mutual validation of the icon by the symbol and vice versa is important.

The eminent doctor must verify that Lady Di suffered from bulimia and

Princess Di needs to affirm her suffering as well. Then millions of young

women recognise that they are just like Princess Di. As Fichte said, a subject

can get to know themselves as a subject only by finding in the outer world



another like themselves. It is one thing to read about a flood or a war or a

strange new disease, but when you see someone, just like yourself, whose

suffering you also recognise as your own, then you know this thing in a new

way, as a reality for you.

But so long as it is just icons and symbols it is still not real. It is only when

people actually recognise themselves in the icon and agree with the

explanation provided in the symbolic register, the definition given to the

condition, the idea, the form of suffering or aspiration for the future, when

people actually put up their hand and say, in numbers, Me too! that you have

something genuine and real. This is the index.

The index is the social movement that rallies around an idea and is

summoned up by the actions of a hero, the victims of the epidemic or moral

panic who all carry the symptoms of the prototypical star patient, the rank and

file who put their lives on the line to follow in the footsteps of a martyr, or

simply vote for the program represented by an iconic election candidate.

The most powerful signs are those who combine icon, index and symbol

the philosopher-revolutionary who is not only the iconic hero of the

movement, but is also its foremost theorist, the doctor who has become a

world expert in a disease they themselves suffer from.

This trichotomy discovered by Peirce correctly identifies, I believe, precisely

the three elements required to give a flesh-and-blood reality to subjectivity. A

person knows themself by knowing another like themself (an icon or role

model), and by participating as a part of a movement, institution or group

realising their identity (as an index), and by knowing that their subjectivity is

validated as true (through a symbol). Being an icon or a symbol or an index ofsomething (an ideal, a practice, a project or nation, etc.) are the various ways

in which a person may relate to an idea and how they represent it as a subject,

as well as how they relate to it in their relation to other people.

(Hegel deals with index, icon and symbol in the section of Subjective Spiriton Representation under the headings of Recollection, Imagination and

Memory. Hegel here examines the progression of abstraction from the

sensuous image of a thing, to a picture of it to a sign up to a symbol. He also

considers the development of forms of representation of language from vocal

to alphabetic, in which he considers the Chinese use of hieroglyphs as a

stunting of the development of writing resulting from what he saw as a



defective vocal language of the Chinese! He also touches on representation andsymbols in his Aesthetics, but given the stage of development of art in his time,it is not surprising that he was not able to go very far.)

Rheme,DicentandArgument

A subject (or sign) does not come instantly into the world; a thing or eventmay happen, and happen suddenly, but it does not thereby instantly enter intosubjectivity. Peirces third trichotomy brings out the degrees of reality, so tospeak, through which subject may pass, from pure fiction or unmediated eventto being accepted and understood as a reality.

A rheme is how a thing could be, without asserting that it is. Before we canrecognise that something is we have to be able to imagine it, and for that it willbe necessary to draw on fiction, speculation, story-telling and imaginationgenerally. The person who is able to pretend, to act out a role, even though it isnot yet real, makes the first step in making something real. The rheme couldbe in the symbolic register, an argument that things could be such-and-such away, or a writer of fiction and other works of the imagination; it could be anicon, as a person who performs the subject, perhaps as an actor or performerof some kind or simply as an exemplar ahead of their time. A rheme cannot bean index.

An index can be a dicent though; a dicent is evidence that the subjectactually exists, the person who actually dies of bird flu, the child who isactually kidnapped on the way to school or the neighbour who is actuallyfound to have been secretly in league with Osama bin Laden. But this hardevidence is not enough, for things can be accidents or anomalies, isolatedevents without meaning or significance. Before an isolated event, or evenmany such isolated events, make an avalanche, an epidemic or an invasion,there has to be an argument as to why something must be so, it must beunderstood in some way as a law, as a necessity. The argument of coursecannot stand on its own, and cannot constitute a subject until there is a sign,some evidence, that it exists.

The rheme is interpreted and has the effect of demonstrating howsomething could be; the dicent is interpreting and has the effect ofdemonstrating that, however surprising and inexplicable as it might be, the



thing exists; the argument is interpreted as establishing that it must be so,

even if it has never been seen and is unimaginable. The artist makes the

rheme, the theorist makes the argument and the observer makes the dicent.

Peirce has provided us with a range of concepts which lend themselves to an

understanding of subjectivity building on the insights of those thinkers we

have considered in earlier chapters. For Peirce himself, these concepts of

semiotics lead to a pragmatic conception of the formation of subjects.

According to Peirce the essential function of thought is the resolution of that

irritation which is caused by doubt or hesitancy, and in the production of

belief, which in turn, involves the establishment in us of a rule of action, or, for

short, a habit The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit, and

different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which

they give rise. [How to Make our Ideas Clear, 1878] The truth of our

inward nature then is finally the efficacy of the actions to which it leads. The

use of our imagination to subject what we do in the outer world to criticism

and control, is possible because our inner world is made up of a dialogue

whose terms are instantiated in the outer material world in which we live

before they are embodied in signs in the inner world of our consciousness,

subsequently to be turned to the fashioning and control of our actions in the

outer world. Peirces semiotics is inseparable from his pragmatism. His

concept of sign activity is well adapted to the understanding of forms of

thought, and yet provides a rich means of understanding collaborative activity.

In summary, for Peirce:

The subject is a kind of semiosis (sign activity);

People are in mind (semiosis), not mind in people;

subjectivity is marked by the ability to emulate the outer

world in an inner world of thought, the use of this ability to

subject actions to self-control, and ultimately the capacity of

the subject to change itself by the deliberate formation of new

habits;

from a semiotic point of view, the distinction between the

individual and the group is relative not absolute; thinking

resembles an internal dialogue;

agency, mind and identity are decentred without depriving

the individual of agency, knowledge and identity.



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The Subject-semiosis. Philosophical Foundations