Peirce's Theory of Signs

by T. L. Short

In this book, T. L. Short corrects widespread misconceptions of Peirce's theory of signs and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary analytic philosophy of language, mind and science. Peirce's theory of mind, naturalistic but nonreductive, bears on debates of Fodor and Millikan, among others. His theory of inquiry avoids foundationalism and subjectivism, while his account of reference anticipated views of Kripke and Putnam. Peirce's realism falls between 'internal' and 'metaphysical' realism and is more satisfactory than either. His pragmatism is not verificationism; rather, it identifies meaning with potential growth of knowledge. Short distinguishes Peirce's mature theory of signs from his better-known but paradoxical early theory. He develops the mature theory systematically on the basis of Peirce's phenomenological categories and concept of final causation. The latter is distinguished from recent and similar views, such as Brandon's, and is shown to be grounded in forms of explanation adopted in modern science.

Genres: Philosophy, Semiotics, Theory, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published February 12, 2007

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I first heard of semiotics years ago, I couldn't really grasp what it meant or why it would be useful. I stumbled back onto it recently and realized it was the solution to a major problem I've been puzzling over, and got eagerly sucked into a complex literature I wasn't equipped to understand. Much of the problem came from the fact that there seemed to be no complete consensus on how the rules of semiotics actually worked and thus where and how they could apply to things like biochemistry were fraught with unspoken definitional conflicts between factions. On the other side of things, John Deely was writing about the philosophical implications of Peircean semiotics and how they solved all these problems, but didn't bother spelling most of those solutions out. All of those issues seem to be traceable to the fact that Peirce never wrote a coherent and accessible account of his ideas, and no one else did it for him, so if his semiotics did hold the answers to modern philosophy, those answers were locked away in a dense and contradictory body of correspondence, and thus ignored until people gradually rediscovered their potential.

So this book is Short's attempt to do what Peirce himself perhaps ought to have done in the early 1900s, alongside a partial treatment of what Short's version of Peirce would have to say about the convesations that have taken place since. He doesn't ignore the contradictions in Peirce's writing, but he does try to overcome them by filtering out some of his mistakes and taking positions on his waffling. The result isn't quite what I'd call an accessible introduction – it still spends way too much time talking about the process of filtering, and finds the taxonomy of signs far more important than it could ever convince me it is. Still, it doesn't presume prior knowledge and it's plenty clear enough in its line of reasoning to convey most of the important ideas. As a writer, Short is certainly not brilliant, but he does a better job than many of the philosophers I've read lately. The book is relatively readable if you're prepared to climb some most academic-writing obstacles.

I was a bit disappointed it didn't spend more time on biosemiotics, which gets dismissed with a few short sentences on logic I found less convincing than most of Short's other personal (rather than Peircean) opinions. Importantly, he dives deep into the question of teleology and the necessity of "final causation" to allow semiotics to apply to all the things it purports to explain. He clarifies some reasoning from Larry Wright's book and brings the conversation forward, introducing ideas about "anisotropic" processes in nature like entropy as a broader model that final causation by natural selection can fit into. I'd like to read more about this; it feels convincing enough but it still feels like one of those things that works so well it can't be true, because someone else would have come up with it already?

Peirce's solution to the solipsism question was less clear to me. His "phaneroscopy" receives a lot less attention than the rest of his semiotics, and it dips into philosophical conversations about qualia and primary/secondary qualities etc that I feel less equipped to judge. Short's explanation is not especially clear or convincing, so I came away prepared to tentatively accept the logic here but not entirely satisfied. It seems to match my intuition about the role animal perception serves in this system, as a kind of trigger that only response to certain kinds of external stimuli, without making any assumptions at all about the nature or reliability of those stimuli. But that might be me filling in ambiguity with my own assumptions that don't apply.

On the other hand, philosophy of science gets a lot more treatment than I was expecting. Philosophers of science never talk about Peirce, and the people applying semiotics to science I've been reading never talk about philosophy of science, so I hadn't appreciated how much Peirce himself was motivated by exactly this intersection. Short acknowledges Peirce's sentiments (he was a committed realist and would have been called a scientismist today) but gives his ideas some independence as he brings them to bear on the much-changed discourse since Peirce's day. He clarifies the question of incommensurability and holism substantially. Unfortunately, he takes the common tack and trash-talks relativism the entire time he is laying out his/Peirce's explicitly relativist philosophy. Because if anything is clear after this book, it's that Peircean semiotics IS a framework of relativist epistemology. Short constantly states that meaning is relative to interpretation, enabled by interface with pragmatic outcomes in service of final-cause goals, with objective truth defined only as a hypothetical independent convergence – i.e, not absolute. Truths within systems are ephemeral, while the productivity of systems of practice is primary. The fact that Peirce and Short don't like certain widely assumed (but unfounded) implications of "relativism" seems to give them no way to avoid the fact that they are rigorously articulating and defending it.

I do wish he had spent some time discussing how semiotics applies to moral philosophy, something that seems like a very productive line of inquiry but which I haven't been able to find a single paper about. He mentions it several times, but only to say that he doesn't have time to go into it.