The Subject-Semiosis. Philosophical Foundations

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The Subject. Charles Sanders Peirce: The Subject as Semiosis by Andy Blunden 2005/6
TheSubject.PhilosophicalFoundations.AndyBlunden2005/6
Charles Sanders Peirce: The Subject

as 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lifetime, and many remain unpublished to this day.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.
http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/semiosis.htm
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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, sinisign
and legisign, corresponding more or less, to Hegels basic categorisation of
Notions: 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.
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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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pointer, the hand of a clock or sundial, in short, a pointer.

Icon derives from the Greek eikon, likeness, image or portrait, etc., in
English 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 ideas
of the things they represent simply by imitating them.
Secondly, there are indications, or indices; which show
something 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 become
associated with their meanings by usage. Such are most words, and
phrases, and speeches, and books, and libraries. [What is a
Sign?, Peirce 1894]
and:
The likeness [i.e., icon] has no dynamical connection with the
object 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 an
organic pair. But the interpreting mind has nothing to do with this
connection, except remarking it, after it is established. The symbol
is connected with its object by virtue of the idea of the symbol-using
mind, without which no such connection would exist. [What is a
Sign?, Peirce 1894]
In his Collected Papers we find the following further explanations:
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A pure icon can convey no positive or factual information; for it

affords 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 by
virtue of being connected with it as a matter of fact and by also
forcibly introducing upon the mind, quite regardless of it being
interpreted as a sign.
A photograph, for example, not only excites an image, has an
appearance, but, owing to its optical connection with the object, is
evidence that that appearance corresponds to a reality.
A symbol is a representamen whose special significance or fitness
to represent just what it does represent lies in nothing but the very
fact of there being a habit, disposition, or other effective general
rule that it will be so interpreted.
Each writing of the three-letters man is a replica of the symbol
man. ...
[A symbol] consists in the really working general rule that [a
replica of it] seen by a person who knows [the symbol] will effect his
conduct and thoughts according to a rule. Thus the mode of being of
the symbol is different from that of the icon and from that of the
index. An icon has such being as belongs to past experience. It
exists only as an image in the mind. An index has the being of
present experience. The being of a symbol consists in the real fact
that something surely will be experienced if certain conditions are
satisfied. Namely, it will influence the thought and conduct of its
interpreter. [Collected Papers of CS Peirce, 4.447]
The value of an icon consists in its exhibiting the features of a state
of things regarded as if it were purely imaginary. The value of an
index is that it assures us of positive fact. The value of a symbol is
that it serves to make thought and conduct rational and enables us
to predict the future. ... the most perfect of signs are those in which
the iconic, indicative, and symbolic characters are blended as
equally as possible. [Collected Papers of CS Peirce, 4.448]
Looking at how we get to know about something, let us have in mind some
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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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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
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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 of
something (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 Spirit
on 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
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defective vocal language of the Chinese! He also touches on representation and

symbols 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 event
may happen, and happen suddenly, but it does not thereby instantly enter into
subjectivity. Peirces third trichotomy brings out the degrees of reality, so to
speak, through which subject may pass, from pure fiction or unmediated event
to being accepted and understood as a reality.
A rheme is how a thing could be, without asserting that it is. Before we can
recognise that something is we have to be able to imagine it, and for that it will
be necessary to draw on fiction, speculation, story-telling and imagination
generally. The person who is able to pretend, to act out a role, even though it is
not yet real, makes the first step in making something real. The rheme could
be in the symbolic register, an argument that things could be such-and-such a
way, or a writer of fiction and other works of the imagination; it could be an
icon, as a person who performs the subject, perhaps as an actor or performer
of some kind or simply as an exemplar ahead of their time. A rheme cannot be
an index.
An index can be a dicent though; a dicent is evidence that the subject
actually exists, the person who actually dies of bird flu, the child who is
actually kidnapped on the way to school or the neighbour who is actually
found to have been secretly in league with Osama bin Laden. But this hard
evidence is not enough, for things can be accidents or anomalies, isolated
events without meaning or significance. Before an isolated event, or even
many 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 be
understood in some way as a law, as a necessity. The argument of course
cannot 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 how
something could be; the dicent is interpreting and has the effect of
demonstrating that, however surprising and inexplicable as it might be, the
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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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Charles Sanders Peirce: The Subject

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

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

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

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

A pure icon can convey no positive or factual information; for it

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

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

defective vocal language of the Chinese! He also touches on representation and

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

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