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.
"[1] This specific type of triadic relation is fundamental to Peirce's understanding of logic as formal semiotic.
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.
As a practical matter, of course, familiarity with the full range of concrete examples is indispensable to theory and application both.
It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there.
Consistently adhere to that unwarrantable denial, and you will be driven to some form of idealistic nominalism akin to Fichte's.
Peirce and others, notably Robert W. Burch (1991) and Joachim Hereth Correia and Reinhard Pöschel (2006), have offered proofs of the Reduction Thesis.
A physically causal sense of this stands out especially when a sign consists in an indicative reaction.
The process is logically structured to perpetuate itself, and is definitive of sign, object, and interpretant in general.
[22] "Representamen" (properly with the "a" long and stressed: /rɛprɪzɛnˈteɪmən/) was adopted (not coined) by Peirce as his blanket technical term for any and every sign or sign-like thing covered by his theory.
"[24] Peirce made various classifications of his semiotic elements, especially of the sign and the interpretant.
[20] It is initially tempting to regard immediate, dynamic, and final interpretants as forming a temporal succession in an actual process of semiosis, especially since their conceptions refer to beginning, midstages, and end of a semiotic process.
The immediate interpretant is a quality of impression which a sign is fitted to produce, a special potentiality.
(Peirce said that it is often better in practical matters to rely on instinct, sentiment, and tradition, than on theoretical inquiry.
The icon-index-symbol typology is chronologically the first but structurally the second of three that fit together as a trio of three-valued parameters in regular scheme of nine kinds of sign.
(The three "parameters" (not Peirce's term) are not independent of one another, and the result is a system of ten classes of sign, which are shown further down in this article.)
In any case, in that system, icon, index, and symbol were classed by category of how they stood for the dynamic object, while rheme, dicisign, and argument were classed by the category of how they stood to the final or normal interpretant.
[37] These conceptions are specific to Peirce's theory of signs and are not exactly equivalent to general uses of the notions of "icon", "index", "symbol", "tone", "token", "type", "term" (or "rheme"), "proposition" (or "dicisign"), "argument".
[39] This is the typology of the sign as distinguished by phenomenological category of its way of denoting the object (set forth in 1867 and many times in later years).
This typology emphasizes the different ways in which the sign refers to its object—the icon by a quality of its own, the index by real connection to its object, and the symbol by a habit or rule for its interpretant.
"Representamen" was his blanket technical term for any and every sign or signlike thing covered by his theory.
[48] Peirce soon reserved "sign" to its broadest sense, for index, icon, and symbol alike.
for the rheme-dicisign-argument typology, but retains the word "rheme" for the predicate (p. 530) in his system of Existential Graphs.
[36] The slanting and vertical lines show the options for co-classification of a given sign (and appear in MS 339, August 7, 1904, viewable here at the Lyris Peirce Archive[54]).
*Note: As noted above, in "On a New List of Categories" (1867) Peirce gave the unqualified word "sign" as an alternate expression for "index", and gave "general sign" as an alternate expression for "symbol."
My insertion of "upon a person" is a sop to Cerberus, because I despair of making my own broader conception understood.Now logical terms are of three grand classes.
The first embraces those whose logical form involves only the conception of quality, and which therefore represent a thing simply as "a —."