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For Peirce, as already noted above (p. 18), the word “sign” has two acceptations: sign-action and sign-object. He calls the ¤rst semiosis, the second representamen. Semiosis is the action of the sign, the sign in action, that is to say: in process. For there to be a semiosis, an event A (the sign-object or representamen: e.g., the order given by an of¤cer to his troops) must produce a second event B (the interpretant : the signi¤ed result of the sign-object or representamen) as a means of producing a third event C (the object as such: here, the execution by the soldiers of the order given by the of¤cer—the execution or object being for the of¤cer the cause of the sign-object or representamen (encoding) and for the soldiers its effect (decoding) (cf. 5.473). The representamen is an “object serving to represent something to the mind” (Century Dictionary, 1887). Peirce borrowed the idea of the representamen as sign-object from Hamilton, to whom Peirce refers in the Century Dictionary . Hamilton wrote: The Leibnitio-Wol¤ans [ . . . ] distinguished three acts in the process of representative cognition: 1° the act of representing a (mediate) object to the mind; 2° the representation, or, more properly speaking, representamen, itself as an (immediate or vicarious) object exhibited to the mind; 3° the act by which the mind is conscious immediately of the representative object, and, through it, mediately of the remote object represented. (Reid 1863: 877 note) Peirce himself explicitly makes the distinction in the context of representation where ‘sign’ is given as a synonym of ‘representation’ de¤ned as ‘semiosis’ and opposed to ‘representamen’. “I con¤ne the word representation to the opera- - 4 Sign semiosis and representamen tion of a sign or its relation to the object for the interpreter of the representation . The concrete subject that represents I call a sign or representamen” (1.540). The sign, the concrete subject of the representation, or representamen, is the sign-object which must not be confused with the common idea of the sign de-¤ned as “anything which conveys any de¤nite notion of an object in any way” (1.540). This latter de¤nition refers to semiosis, which is the object of semiotic analysis. By virtue of this, the sign-action or semiosis is the point of departure of the analysis and the sign-object or representamen “whatever that analysis applies to” (1.540), i.e., the repertory of representamens. Consequently, the representamen of the semiosis is, like the latter, triadic: it comprises the sign-representamen , the object-representamen, and the interpretant-representamen. A Representamen can be considered from three formal points of view, namely,¤rst, as the substance of the representation, or the Vehicle of the Meaning, which is common to the three representamens of the triad, second, as the quasiagent in the representation,that is as the Natural Object, and third as the quasi-patient in the representation, or that modi¤cation in the representation makes its Intelligence , and this may be called the Interpretant. Thus, in looking at a map, the map itself is the Vehicle, the country represented is the Natural Object, and the idea excited in the mind is the Interpretant. (Ms 717) And, in fact, Peirce always de¤nes the sign-object, the object, and the interpretant as representamens. A Sign, or Representamen, is a First which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, as “to be capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the same triadic relation to its Object in which it stands to itself to the same Object.” (2.274) A REPRESENTAMEN is a subject of a triadic relation to a Second, called its OBJECT, FOR a Third, called its INTERPRETANT, this triadic relation being such that the REPRESENTAMEN determines its interpretant to stand in the same triadic relation to the same object for some interpretant. (1.541) These two passages describe the process of sign-action or semiosis, set off by the presentation of the sign-object or representamen. “Representamens are of three kinds, icons (or likenesses), indices, and symbols (or general signs)” (“Logic (Exact)” in Baldwin’s Dictionary, 1902). Thus “an Icon is a Representamen whose Representative Quality is a Firstness of it as a First. That is, a quality that it has qua thing renders it ¤t to be a representamen” (2.276). A representamen, or sign, is anything which stands at once in...

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