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  • Peirce’s Theory of Signs
  • Robert Lane
T. L. Short. Peirce’s Theory of Signs. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xvii + 374. Cloth, $68.00.

Charles Peirce’s simple definition of a sign as something that stands for something to something belies the depth and complexity of his foundational work in semiotics, or as he sometimes wrote, “semeiotic.” T. L. Short’s Peirce’s Theory of Signs is a dense book, and at points difficult. But only the shallowest work on this difficult subject could fail to challenge the reader, and Short’s book is anything but shallow. It is, in fact, a major achievement, a singularly important work on Peirce’s theory of signs and one of the most important works ever to be published on Peirce.

The first three chapters set the stage for Short’s eventual explanation of Peirce’s teleological conception of signs. The first reviews historical antecedents of, and alternatives to, Peirce’s approach, while the second considers changes in his views from the 1860s through the 1900s—changes that, on Short’s account, enabled Peirce’s mature theory to avoid devastating problems. Chapter three is a remarkably clear introduction to Peirce’s phenomenological analysis of his three universal categories, around which his taxonomy of signs is organized.

Chapters four, five, and six are the philosophical core of the book. Here Short painstakingly explains the notions of final causation and purpose and the semeiotic conceptions derived from them. On Short’s reading of Peirce, significance is interpretability grounded in a logically prior relation between that which is a sign (X) and the object (O) that X signifies. Something (R) interprets X as a sign of O iff: R is, or is an aspect of, a response to X for some purpose (P); R is based on a relation between O and X (or between things of O’s type and things of X’s type); and O’s obtaining bears positively on the appropriateness of R, given P. One of Short’s vivid illustrations is the clawing of a log by a bear in response to a scent associated with the presence of grubs. There is a prior relation between that scent and the presence of grubs, and the clawing is a response to that scent for a specific purpose, viz., the uncovering of grubs to be eaten. The possible presence of grubs in the log makes the bear’s clawing an appropriate response to that scent, given that purpose. The clawing thus interprets the scent as a sign of grubs. As this illustrates, Short believes that the “key terms” of semeiotic “must span the human and the nonhuman”; the term ‘sign’ “is justified, if at all, by the power of the system of semeiotic to illuminate a wide variety of phenomena” (151), not just human cognition (which is continuous with but not reducible to animal behavior).

This brief description does not do justice to Short’s meticulous analysis, which sometimes requires him to go beyond the letter of Peirce’s own work in order eventually to engage in “systematic reconstruction of Peirce’s mature semeiotic” (ibid.). Short’s goal is not simply an historically accurate account of Peirce’s thought, but a fully developed theory of signs that is consonant with Peirce’s mature view.

Chapters seven, eight, and nine provide a systematic exploration of the various trichotomic distinctions that characterize Peirce’s theory, culminating in a detailed examination [End Page 650] of Peirce’s taxonomy of signs. As Short acknowledges, this is not an exhaustive account (208), but what is lacking in comprehensiveness is made up for in depth and rigor. This is difficult and highly technical material, and Short’s treatment is masterful. Especially intriguing are his brief but piquant explorations of a Peircean semeiotical approach to music, moral judgments, and emotions.

The book’s final three chapters apply Peirce’s views to issues within contemporary philosophy of language, mind, and science. Short argues that Peirce’s “analysis enables us to make better sense of theory change than Putnam and others have made” (264), that Peirce’s naturalistic, non-reductive theory of mind provides a successful explanation...

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