Charles S. Peirce's Philosophy of Signs: Essays in Comparative Semiotics

10 -Semeiotic and Semiotics

Did Morris read Peirce? The question I am asking is not meant to be a criticism of Morris. It only implies that I take Peirce as my point of departure and will judge Morris with reference to his ¤delity to Peirce, if he read Peirce. Morris’s tripartition: syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics, is undeniably Peircean. The separations between these three classes are not. Pragmatics is continuistic . PEIRCE’S PRAGMATICS According to Peirce, the three relations of any sign to its possible object are respectively iconic, indexical, and symbolic. We shall ¤rst examine that which is apparently the easiest to understand: the index, of which the index ¤nger of the hand is the type: The index asserts nothing; it only says “There!” It takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and forcibly directs them to a particular object, and there it stops. Demonstrative and relative pronouns are nearly pure indices, because they denote - 10 Semeiotic and Semiotics peirce and morris Peirce’s account of signs is embedded in the metaphysics of his categories [ . . . ] and in the metaphysics of his view of mind. These are not secure bases for a scienti¤c semiotics. But Peirce himself, in his rejection of the older Cartesian mentalism [ . . . ] has at least indicated a possible direction of advance towards a more adequate account of sign phenomena . —Morris (1971: 340) The present treatment [by Morris] follows Peirce’s emphasis upon behavior rather than his more mentalistic formulations . —Morris (1971: 339) things without describing them; so are the letters on a geometrical diagram, and the subscript numbers which in algebra distinguish one value from another without saying what those values are. (3.361) Indices need symbols to say something, although symbols which are generals , are in themselves empty: Without [symbols] there would be no generality in the statements, for they are the only general signs; and generality is essential to reasoning. [ . . . ] But [symbols ] alone do not state what is the subject of discourse; and this can, in fact, not be described in general terms; it can only be indicated. The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description. Whence the need of pronouns and indices, and the more complicated the subject the greater need of them. (3.363) Although logicians are content with these two relations to the object, Peirce goes further in his analysis, showing that by themselves these two relations are insuf¤cient for reasoning. In order to reason, we need a third type of relation, which appears in the form of logical diagrams and sensorial images (mostly visual ). These diagrams and images Peirce calls icons: With these two kinds of signs alone (symbols and indices) any proposition can be expressed; but it cannot be reasoned upon, for reasoning consists in the observation that where certain relations subsist certain others are found, and it accordingly requires the exhibition of the relations reasoned within an icon. (3.363) MORRIS’S PRAGMATICS Morris’s paradigm of knowledge and experience is, according to him, reductionist : the only knowable and experienceable objects are spatio-temporal. Morris states his position explicitly: the semiotics developed in Signs, Language and Behavior (Morris 1971: 75–398) does not take Peirce as its point of departure. It is based on the quite behavioristic theories of George H. Mead (1863–1931). (I have not found one single reference to Peirce in the complete works of Mead.) Later, says Morris, he studied more seriously “Peirce, Ogden and Richards, Russell and Carnap, and still later, Tolman and Hull” (Morris 1971: 445). Tolman and Hull are behaviorists; Russell and Carnap can be classi¤ed as logical empiricists with an atomistic tendency. Peirce, Ogden, and Richards remain. Morris was convinced that he was faithful to Peirce. When Dewey accused him of misrepresenting Peirce’s thought, in particular by substituting the interpreter for the interpretant, Morris obstinately insisted that he was faithful to Peirce—quoting, notably, 5.470–493, in which Peirce discusses the logical interpretant . In actual fact, Morris’s reading of Peirce is behavioristic. Semeiotic and Semiotics 115 MORRIS’S SEMIOTICS Semiosis [Semiosis] is a ¤ve-term relation: v, w, x, y, z, in which v sets up in w the disposition to react in a certain kind of x, to a certain kind of object y (not then acting as a stimulus) under certain conditions z: v = signs w = interpreters x = interpretants (not necessarily with a “subjective” connotation) y = meanings z...