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Peirce’s theory of signs is by description mostly concerned with translation. No sign can be understood without being interpreted. That is why I shall mainly deal here with Peirce’s terminology and its translation or interpretation. It will not be a question of languages proper, but of conceptual expressions of the signs used by Peirce to convey his ideas, although we cannot do that without also touching upon the question of the languages used: English, French, Italian, etcetera. It is a fact that Peirce tried out many neologisms to express his thought right until the end of his life. To give an instance, in a letter of 1911, he wonders whether logon (the Greek word l1gon) would not be a better word than “sign,” or even “representamen” to convey what he means by “sign.” Nobody was ever more concerned than he was by what he calls the ethics of terminology. [ . . . ] our ¤rst rule [ . . . ] will certainly be that every technical term of philosophy ought to be used in that sense in which it ¤rst became a technical term of philosophy. (Peirce 1979: C053) If we want to understand Peirce, we have to be as careful as he was when we translate him. As I have just said, the problem of translation is not a question of using one word instead of another one; it is to ask the pragmatic question Peirce was the¤rst to raise: What does this word do? If both words do the same thing, one word is enough; but if one word induces two (or more) trends of actions or rather, in - 5 Sign the concept and its use the present case, mental actions, the differences ought to be expressed by different words. I shall start with common mistranslations in present-day theories of signs. Everybody knows that Peirce de¤nes a sign as a triad made of three indecomposable elements: a representamen, an object, and an interpretant. For Saussure, a sign is an indissoluble pair or couple composed of a signi¤er and a signi¤ed. Can we translate Peirce’s de¤nition into Saussure’s? There is at least one point in common in both de¤nitions: a sign is an indecomposable or indissoluble unit. But which element is which? Is the representamen a signi¤er? Let us concede this translation. Now which, of the “object” and the “interpretant,” is the signi¤ed? I should not dare to answer the question. Some semioticians do, and translate “interpretant” by “signi¤ed,” and manage to ¤nd something to translate “object” into Saussurean terminology—“referent”—which makes Saussure’s sign a mariage à trois. My opinion is that the two theories are untranslatable into one another, because their underlying philosophies and logics are incompatible. Saussure’s are dualistic, Peirce’s dialectic. Another question may help us to be more cautious. How are we going to translate “sign” into their respective terminologies, since they both use the same word? Let us be more precise: when does a sign stop being a sign in Saussure’s semiology and in Peirce’s semiotics or rather semeiotic? Saussure’s sign is linguistic ; Peirce’s sign can be linguistic too, but it is not linguistic as such. A sign can be three things: a qualisign, a sinsign, or a legisign—and the linguistic sign is only one type of legisign. Another difference should be stressed here. Saussure’s de¤nition is formalistic ; Peirce’s is formalistic too, if one considers what Peirce calls the “sign-object ,” but it is also a process which he calls the “sign-action” or semiosis. The three formalistic elements of a sign-object become functions in a signaction . And I agree that it is not always easy to be sure of which sign (sign-object or sign-action) Peirce speaks. That is why I prefer to use the word “representamen ” for the sign-object, and the word “semiosis” for the sign-action—and leave “sign” as a technical term to Saussure’s semiology. A third argument can be used to show how far both theories are from one another. I already used this argument implicitly when I said that Peirce’s sign can be a qualisign, a sinsign, or a legisign. Peirce’s theory of signs rests on a phenomenology or, to use Peirce’s term, a phaneroscopy, the categories of which are ordinal. There are three phaneroscopical categories: 1, 2, and 3, which are not cardinal but ordinal numbers. That is to say that 3 does not...

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