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Rethinking the Peircean Trichotomy of Icon, Index, and Symbol

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Rethinking the Peircean Trichotomy of Icon, Index, and Symbol Semiotica 2016; 213: 165–175 Ersu Ding* Rethinking the Peircean trichotomy of icon, index, and symbol DOI 10.1515/sem-2015-0134 Abstract: Classification of signs into various kinds is a vital enterprise in semio- tic research. As early as over a century ago, the American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce laid down a solid foundation for this work by proposing his famous trichotomy of signs. Later scholars have been mostly applying Peirce’s theory to their own semiotic studies rather than challenging the inadequacies that exist therein, thus giving rise to a great number of confusions or even contradictions. The present article modifies Peirce’s theory from the perspective of sign emergence and evolution and emphasizes the importance of understanding sign transformations. Keywords: classification of signs, Peircean trichotomy, index, icon, symbol, sign emergence and evolution When scholars discuss the issue of sign classification, they tend to think of the American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, who is widely known for his trichotomous division of signs. For whatever reasons, Peirce takes a particular fancy to “3” and applies the number to many of the things he investigates. As can be seen in Figure 1, he breaks the entity of a sign into three essential elements (representamen, object, and interpretant) as opposed to two (signifier and signified), which is the case with Ferdinand de Saussure (1989: 67). The word “sign” at the top of Figure 1 ought to be interpreted in its narrow sense, referring to the form, vehicle or what Peirce himself calls the representa- men of a sign entity. The American then further analyses each of these elements into its own triple subcategories, resulting in his rather complicated if not cumbersome “three trichotomies.” To begin with, Peirce classifies a sign vehicle as qualisign, sinsign,orlegisign in accordance with its distinctive formal feature. The first subcategory under the *Corresponding author: Ersu Ding, Department of English, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, E-mail: [email protected] 166 Ersu Ding Figure 1: Peirce’s trichotomous division of signs. node of representamen includes positive material qualities that might be interpreted as meaningful; the second subcategory under the same node relates to the formal manifestation of a sign in a discursive context; the third subcate- gory under this node reveals underlying structures that govern various occur- rences of a sign. Peirce also analyses the interpretant of a sign into three subcategories: rheme, dicisign, and argument. Rheme, in the manner of qualisign, is a mere possibility to stand for an object and is therefore not related to truth; dicisign is an actual proposition that can be true or false but does not provide sufficient evidence; only argument, which is grounded in rules, is able to reveal truth about its object. Finally, Peirce divides signs into three subcategories in accordance with the different relationships between the object and its representamen: the first is the diagrammatic sign or icon, which exhibits a similarity or analogy to the subject of discourse; the second is the index, which like a pronoun demonstrative or relative, forces the attention to the particular object intended without describing it; the third is the general name or description which signifies its object by means of an associa- tions of ideas or habitual connection between the name and the character signified. (Peirce in Hoopes 1991: 181) Elsewhere, Peirce uses the term symbol for a sign whose interpretation depends on the habitual association of the name with its object. To summarize Peirce’s three trichotomies of signs discussed above, we can borrow a relevant diagram (Figure 2) made by Professor Michael Hoffmann (2001). As was mentioned earlier, Peirce’s system of sign classification is on the whole rather cumbersome and for that reason has been largely ignored by Rethinking the Peircean trichotomy 167 Figure 2: Peirce’s three trichotomies. semiotic scholars who are not Peirce specialists. The only exception to this state of limbo is his last trichotomy, which contains some very good insights and has had a huge influence on subsequent efforts at classifying signs. In fact, when scholars engage in sign classification today, they mostly adopt Peirce’s theore- tical framework of dividing signs into three categories of icon, index, and symbol. Two recent examples of this are Introduction to Semiotics (2004) by Huang Huaxin and Chen Zongming and Semiotics: Principles and Problems (2011) by Zhao Yiheng where the authors not only follow the Peircean trichotomous approach but also stick to his original sequence of discussing icon before index. What needs to be pointed out is that Peirce’s theorization on sign types is far from definitive and, in particular, he has made only limited contributions to our understanding of the mutual transformations between different kinds of signs. Our situation is made worse by the fact later scholars tend to overlook the emphasis on interpretation that is latent in Peirce’s semiotic theory. To rectify this problem, we need a new approach which takes into consideration the illuminating process of sign emergence and evolution. In terms of the evolutionary order, the use of indexes preceded other types of signs and played an important role in the lives of pre-literate people. It is not hard to imagine that our illiterate ancestors were able to predict rain if they saw a heavy concentration of dark cloud above their heads; nor is it ridiculous to expect them to be able to tell the gender of a woman who had two big breasts above her belly. In the former situation, the dark cloud serves as an indexical sign of rain whereas big breasts function as one for womanhood in the latter. The use of indexical signs is not, of course, the monopoly of the 168 Ersu Ding human race and occurs quite frequently in other animals, high and low. Corpse-eating vultures, for example, are able to tell whether a mammal is already dead by its lack of movement; wild tigers can also know the presence of other animals in the vicinity through theirparticularsmells.Oneinteresting experiment in this area was conducted by a former Soviet scientist I. P. Pavlov who,foranextendedperiodoftime,wouldringabelleachtimeadogwasfed. Gradually, his dog-subjects learned to associate food with the sound of his bell, which is proved by a measurable fact that even when a bell sound was not accompanied by food, his dogs still salivated. In other words, this parti- cular bell sound was treated by his dogs as an indexical sign for food. What these instances tell us is that Cassirer’s famous definition of man as an animal symbolicum (Cassirer 1956: 44) is not sufficiently accurate because other ani- mals also have the ability to use “symbols,” by which Cassirer means “signs.” Nevertheless, this definition confirms the importance of indexical signs that are common to animals of all kinds, including human beings. Even long after humans have developed spoken and written languages, indexical signs con- tinue to play an indispensable part in their lives as is evidenced by the following “little dramas” presented by Thomas Sebeok in his short introduc- tion to semiotics (Sebeok 2001: 25): – A radiologist spots a silhouette on a chest X-ray photograph of a patient and diagnoses lung cancer. – A meteorologist notes a rise in barometric pressure and delivers the next day’s forecast taking that change into account. – An anthropologist observes a complex of ceremonial exchanges practiced among members of a tribe; she draws analytical insights into the polity, economy, and social organization of the people she is studying. In other words, indexical signs and human languages co-exist in literate human societies, ancient or modern. Whatever circumstance they are in, indexical signs are born out of their users’ interpretations or judgments of the relationship between things or events. If event A frequently occurs prior to event B, one could interpret the former as an indexical sign of the latter as in the case of dark cloud leading to rain. One could also perform his/her deduction inversely in which case B becomes an indexical sign of A. For example, because fire often precedes smoke in time, if one sees smoke in a certain place, he/she could conclude from this that there was a fire in the same location earlier. Many semioticians view such a relationship as one of cause and effect, which is not exactly the case because a dark cloud does not always lead to rain and smoke is not necessarily caused by a preceding fire. An extreme example of the arbitrariness of indexicality comes from the dynastic Rethinking the Peircean trichotomy 169 histories of ancient China where, even though the emperor held supreme power, his courtiers could still exert some moral influence over him through a semiotic theory of “telepathy between humans and nature” (天人感应). According to such a theory, if an emperor misconducts himself, he would lose the Mandate of Heaven, resulting in huge and frequent natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and droughts (Fairbank and Goldman 2006: 48). For us moderns, there is no testable causal connection between the moral conduct of a person and the natural phenomena that transpire afterwards, but that did not prevent ancient Chinese scholars from interpreting the latter as indexical signs of the former. The story proves once again that indexical signs are the results of making arbitrary connections between things and events by sign users and not all connections are equally convincing in terms of general acceptability. If two events can be pulled together through their temporal contiguity as shown above, then two objects, two things, two entities, two situations, two geographical locations, etc., can also be connected through their being part of each other, giving rise to a different set of indexical signs otherwise known as metonymies.
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