Peircean semeiotics—Peirce's own term, in contrast to the discipline of "semiotics" that is usually spelled without the second "e"—has generated a substantial secondary literature, much of it designed to clarify Peirce's obscure, unsystematic, and continuously developing ideas about signs articulated over a forty-year career, but some of it in the attempt to illuminate other disciplines or fields of inquiry (e.g., one of the most recent being the provocative Cinema and Semiotic: Peirce and Film Aesthetics, Narration, and Representation, by Johannes Ehrat, published by the University of Toronto Press in 2005). T. L. Short's comprehensive discussion advances the conversation, or at least attempts to do so, in at least the following ways:

• •   Short presents a historical interpretation of the development of Peirce's semeiotics, at the heart of which is the argument that Peirce sufficiently recognized his 1868–1869 doctrine of thought-signs to be flawed and that his mature pragmatic theory of signs emerged after almost forty years of specific efforts to remedy the flaws of the earlier theory. More specifically, whereas the earlier theory was right in avoiding the reigning forms of (Cartesian and other) foundationalism bequeathed by the early modern period, Peirce had at that time neither figured out how interpretation could then avoid an infinite regress (since every interpretant depended on previous thought-signs), nor found a way to present a noncircular account of the notion of significance (since all signification depended on preceding signs). Short...