Charles Sanders Peirce began writing on semiotics, which he also called semeiotics, meaning the philosophical study of signs, in the 1860s, around the time that he devised his system of three categories. During the 20th century, the term "semiotics" was adopted to cover all tendencies of sign researches, including Ferdinand de Saussure's semiology, which began in linguistics as a completely separate tradition. Peirce adopted the term semiosis (or semeiosis) and defined it to mean an "action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this trirelative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs." This specific type of triadic relation is fundamental to Peirce's understanding of logic as formal semiotic. By "logic" he meant philosophical logic. He eventually divided (philosophical) logic, or formal semiotics, into (1) speculative grammar, or stechiology on the elements of semiosis (sign, object, interpretant), how signs can signify and, in relation to that, what kinds of signs, objects, and interpretants there are, how signs combine, and how some signs embody or incorporate others; (2) logical critic, or logic proper, on the modes of inference; and (3) speculative rhetoric, or methodeutic, the philosophical theory of inquiry, including his form of pragmatism. His speculative grammar, or stechiology, is this article's subject. Peirce conceives of and discusses things like representations, interpretations, and assertions broadly and in terms of philosophical logic, rather than in terms of psychology, linguistics, or social studies. He places philosophy at a level of generality between mathematics and the special sciences of nature and mind, such that it draws principles from mathematics and supplies principles to special sciences. On the one hand, his semiotic theory does not resort to special experiences or special experiments in order to settle its questions. On the other hand, he draws continually on examples from common experience, and his semiotics is not contained in a mathematical or deductive system and does not proceed chiefly by drawing necessary conclusions about purely hypothetical objects or cases. As philosophical logic, it is about the drawing of conclusions deductive, inductive, or hypothetically explanatory. Peirce's semiotics, in its classifications, its critical analysis of kinds of inference, and its theory of inquiry, is philosophical logic studied in terms of signs and their triadic relations as positive phenomena in general. Peirce's semiotic theory is different from Saussure's conceptualization in the sense that it rejects his dualist view of the Cartesian self. He believed that semiotics is a unifying and synthesizing discipline. More importantly, he included the element of "interpretant" into the fundamental understanding of the sign.
Semiotic elements
Here is Peirce's definition of the triadic sign relation that formed the core of his definition of logic:
Namely, a sign is something, A, which brings something, B, its interpretant sign determined or created by it, into the same sort of correspondence with something, C, its object, as that in which itself stands to C. (Peirce 1902, NEM 4, 20–21). This definition, together with Peirce's definitions of correspondence and determination, is sufficient to derive all of the statements that are necessarily true for all sign relations. Yet, there is much more to the theory of signs than simply proving universal theorems about generic sign relations. There is also the task of classifying the various species and subspecies of sign relations. As a practical matter, of course, familiarity with the full range of concrete examples is indispensable to theory and application both. In Peirce's theory of signs, a sign is something that stands in a well-defined kind of relation to two other things, its object and its interpretant sign. Although Peirce's definition of a sign is independent of psychological subject matter and his theory of signs covers more ground than linguistics alone, it is nevertheless the case that many of the more familiar examples and illustrations of sign relations will naturally be drawn from linguistics and psychology, along with our ordinary experience of their subject matters. For example, one way to approach the concept of an interpretant is to think of a psycholinguistic process. In this context, an interpretant can be understood as a sign's effect on the mind, or on anything that acts like a mind, what Peirce calls a quasi-mind. An interpretant is a process of interpretation, one of the types of activity that falls under the heading of semiosis. One usually says that a sign stands for an object to an agent, an interpreter. In the upshot, however, it is the sign's effect on the agent that is paramount. This effect is what Peirce called the interpretant sign, or the interpretant for short. An interpretant in its barest form is a sign's meaning, implication, or ramification, and especial interest attaches to the types of semiosis that proceed from obscure signs to relatively clear interpretants. In logic and mathematics the most clarified and most succinct signs for an object are called canonical forms or normal forms. The interpretant, in Peirce's conceptualization, is not the user of the sign but the "proper significate effect" or that mental concept produced by both the sign and by the user's experience of the object. Peirce argued that logic is the formal study of signs in the broadest sense, not only signs that are artificial, linguistic, or symbolic, but also signs that are semblances or are indexical such as reactions. Peirce held that "all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs", along with their representational and inferential relations. He argued that, since all thought takes time, all thought is in signs:
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