Cover Page i Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs Page ii Advances in Semiotics Thomas A. Sebeok, General Editor Page iii Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs ESSAYS IN COMPARATIVE SEMIOTICS Gérard Deledalle Indiana University Press BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS Page iv This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404­3797 USA HTTP://WWW.INDIANA.EDU/~IUPRESS Telephone orders 800­842­6796 Fax orders 812­855­7931 Orders by e­mail [email protected] © 2000 by Gérard Deledalle All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48­1984. MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Library of Congress Cataloging­in­Publication Data Deledalle, Gérard. Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy of signs : essays in comparative semiotics / Gérard Deledalle. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0­253­33736­4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839–1914. 2. Semiotics. I. Title: Charles Sanders Peirce’s philosophy of signs. II. Title. B945.P44 D434 2000 121′.68—dc21 00­024320 1 2 3 4 5 05 04 03 02 01 00 Page v this page intentionally left blank Page vi Contents INTRODUCTION Peirce Compared: Directions for Use vii Part One Semeiotic as Philosophy 1 1. Peirce's New Philosophical Paradigms 3 2. Peirce's Philosophy of Semeiotic 14 3. Peirce's First Pragmatic Papers (1877–1878): THE FRENCH VERSION AND THE PARIS COMMUNE 23 Part Two Semeiotic as Semiotics 35 4. Sign: Semiosis and Representamen 37 5. Sign: The Concept and Its Use 54 Part Three Comparative Semiotics 65 6. Semiotics and Logic: A Reply to Jerzy Pelc 67 7. Semeiotic and Greek Logic: Pierce and Philodemus 78 Semeiotic and Significs: Peirce and Lady Welby 87 9. Semeiotic and Semiology: Peirce and Saussure 100 10. Semeiotic and Semiotics: Peirce and Morris 114 11. Semeiotic and Linguistics: Peirce and Jakobson 120 12. Semeiotic and Communication—Peirce and McLuhan: MEDIA BETWEEN BALNIBARBI AND PLATO'S CAVE 127 13. Semeiotic and Epistemology: Peirce, Frege, and Wittgenstein 137 Part Four Comparative Metaphysics 145 14. Gnoseology—Perceiving and Knowing: 147 15. Ontology—Transcendentals of or without Being: PEIRCE VERSUS ARISTOTLE AND THOMAS AQUINAS 155 16. Cosmology—Chaos and Chance within Order and Continuity: PEIRCE BETWEEN PLATO AND DARWIN 162 17. Theology—The Reality of God: PEIRCE'S TRIUNE GOD AND THE CHURCH'S TRINITY 181 Conclusion—Peirce: A LATERAL VIEW 181 BIBLIOGRAPHY 191 INDEX 197 Page vii INTRODUCTION Peirce Compared: Directions for Use Although the present book is a collection of essays written over fifty years, either in French or in English, according to circumstances, my way of approaching Peirce has always followed the same line which allows me to call them Essays in Comparative Semiotics. As to the title, Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs, I am not responsible for the fact that Peirce’s theory of signs is philosophical, rather than “ethnological” like that of Claude Lévy­Strauss, or “linguistic” like that of Roman Jakobson. That is why not only philosophy in general, including ideology, but metaphysics in particular, play a part in Peirce’s semiotics, and consequently in my book. In spite of the fact that my papers were written to introduce Peirce to a French public, and perhaps thanks to it, my book has a unity of method which explains itself. First, writing for French readers, I could not refer them to English or American authors whom they were not supposed to know. I could resort only to French authors or French translations of English­speaking authors, dealing with the same semiotic subject matter. Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, their approach was so different that I could stress only the differences and not the resemblances. That is why my “comparative’’ method is differential. Peirce stands alone of his kind. Second, I had to compare Peirce, not only to French authors or foreign authors translated into French, but to himself both chronologically and contextually. As a reader of Peirce myself, I wanted to be fair and read Peirce’s writings chronologically. One cannot reject an argument, developed, let us say in 1906, by quoting a text from 1867 or 1877–1878. Between 1867, when Peirce proposed his new list of categories, or 1877–1878 when he proposed his “pragmatic maxim,” and 1904–1911 when he was corresponding with Lady Welby, he changed his mind. The new logic of relatives which he invented around 1875 led him to abandon the Western “dualistic” way of thinking as promoted from Aristotle to Kant, for a “triadic” and “anti­inductive” way of reasoning which experimental method and evolutive sciences first practiced. That is why I sometimes, when necessary, give the date of my quotations from Peirce. To be fair, one has also to read an author in context. The vocabulary of a philosopher is not the same as that of a mathematician or a biologist. When a philosopher is also a mathematical logician and pragmatist, as was the case with Peirce, one has to specify the public to which a given text (already dated) is addressed. For instance, Peirce uses the concept of “degenerate” when he wants to Page viii be understood by mathematicians or logicians. When he addresses philosophers, he uses other concepts, such as the three phenomenological or rather phaneroscopical categories. In the first instance, he would say that a “proposition” is a degenerate case of “argument” (‘‘argument,” in Peirce’s sense, i.e., any ordered system). In the other instance, he would say that a Third is “vague and empty,” a mere “structure” and that a Second is a single, singular, and unique replica of a Third, the best example being the relation between “type” and “token.” But it would be nonsense to speak here in terms of “degeneracy,” because, as a First, the type is not a “genuine” category, but an “accretive” sign. Let us give another more simple and general case. In a paper published in the Times Literary Supplement on August 23, 1985, Jonathan Cohen insists on what he thinks to be a contradiction in what he calls Peircean “anti­realism”: The Peircean anti­realist “assumes that scientific method […] is sufficient to guarantee the convergence” between scientific consensus and truth, because “he takes such convergence to be an a priori philosophical truth.” “So though the Peircean is a fallibilist in relation to science itself, he is an infallibilist in relation to methodology” (Cohen 1985: 929). Jonathan Cohen is mistaken here because his conception of truth is out of context. “Inquiry” has nothing to do with “truth” and certainly not with “an a priori philosophical truth.” According to Peirce, “inquiry” can give birth only to “warranted assertibility,” to use the expression coined by John Dewey and quoted by Cohen. The same mistake was made by the analytic philosophers when they were orthodox and by the renegades of the next generation, whether they were “realists” or “neo­pragmatists.” Of course, the reader may be tempted to unify Peirce’s thought and may be successful, provided the two conditions of chronology and contextualization are respected. For instance, chronologically and contextually, a concept may have been dealt with by Peirce at one period and in one context. For example, consider the concept of “object” in his correspondence with Lady Welby between 1904 and 1911, and in the context of semiotics. The distinction between the concept of immediate object and the concept of dynamic object applies only to the idea of “semiosis.” The immediate object (Oi) is the name of the object within a given semiosis, the dynamic object (Od) is the name of the same object without the same semiosis. In other words, dynamic object (Od) and immediate object (Oi) can be separated only analytically. The object is existentially one and the same, only, like a coin, with a reverse (Od) and an obverse (Oi). While the nature of Oi is easy to define because it is psychologically apprehended, the nature of Od cannot be with certainty semiotically described. Is it an “essence” or the totality of immediate objects solidified in a transparent ideal object produced by all the interpretants as habits in a given social group for a given individual of this group? Generalization is thus in this case and other similar cases, according to Peirce’s own ethics of terminology, to be limited to their respective proper time and context. But when one wants to systematize a concept which Peirce discussed several times at different periods and in different contexts, it is more risky, because two Page ix cases have to be distinguished: the meaning of the concept may be either changed or enlarged. When the object of the concept is changed, things are relatively easy. It is the case of the new conception of inference we mentioned earlier. The “anti­inductive” attitude that Peirce adopted at the turn of the century rested on the fact that no theory of change could prove that singular, concrete facts by themselves give birth to “universals” or rather “generals” to use Peirce’s term. The abductive process that Peirce advanced instead was that facts can only suggest hypotheses which have to be experimentally tested. In consequence, if this is acknowledged, facts and ideas cannot be thought as opposed as Mill’s empiricism is opposed to Descartes’s idealism.