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 semiotic 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 representamen 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 subcategory 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 associations 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 particular 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 animals 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 introduction 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. To illustrate the point, we can turn to a recent debate in China about the origin of watermelon in the country. One side of the debate is of the opinion that watermelon was imported from the West into China in the third century BCE, hence its name “西瓜” (melon of the West). The evidence supporting this view comes from a finding made in 1973 on a Han dynasty archaeological site in Mawangdui, Changsha where some undigested watermelon seeds were found in the stomach of a well-preserved female corpse that could be dated back to the year 163 BCE. The other side of the debate holds that watermelon is of native origin and the plant was first recorded by Shennong (Father of Agriculture) some four thousand years ago as “稀瓜” (rare melon), which had the same pronuncia- tion as its current name “西瓜.” The supporting evidence for the second view was some “primitive” watermelon seeds that were found on a Neolithic archaeological site in a village called Shuitianfan in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province in 1959. What is semiotically interesting about the debate is that no matter you are for or against the “importation theory,” both sides use watermelon seeds to infer the existence of the plant at a certain point of time. The reason for this is rather simple: seeds are part of a watermelon and can therefore serve as an indexical sign of the latter. Another quick example of the same kind is the Empire State Building in New York, which, being a noticeable part of the city, serves as one of its important land- marks and indexical signs. The ubiquitous presence of indexical signs indicates that both humans and other animals have the intellectual ability to deduce B from A and, not surprisingly, this ability has been put to good use for communication purposes, giving rise to so- called icons or iconic signs. To be more specific, if someone wishes to mention to 170 Ersu Ding another person an object or a state of things that is not directly accessible at the time of speaking, he/she is then motivated to produce something similar to a part of the intended object or state of things either in sound, or in shape, or in color so that his/ her listener could make a proper deduction thereupon. What we see here is a process of “iconification” of index essential to the emergence and evolution of any human language and knowing this process can certainly help us avoid many of the confusions that have occurred in sign classification. Huang Huaxin and Chen Zongming, for example, have placed traffic signs into the category of index and the following is what they say on that subject:

We can manufacture a sign of a certain shape to give it a referential function. For example, we can make traffic signs as indexes on the roads or shop signs as indexes on the streets … When we make an artifact of a particular shape to represent something and put it in a certain relationship of causality or contiguity, the sign will acquire a referential function, turning it into a man-made indexical sign. (Huang and Chen 2004: 89)

Although Huang and Chen have noticed the unique nature of traffic signs, calling them “man-made indexical signs,” it makes one wonder why these signs are placed in the general category of index under discussion. Take for example the most common road sign with a picture of arrow on it. In a purely natural environment, a direction-leading indexical sign would be an object moving in a certain direction or someone’s eyes looking into a particular direction. Since those real indexical signs are not available on the road or street, traffic regulators have to resort to their imitations, hence road signs like in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Road sign as icon. Rethinking the Peircean trichotomy 171

In other words, the drawing in the lower half of Figure 3 is only a pictorial icon of an original indexical sign and its function is to remind its viewer of a real arrow moving in a certain direction. For that reason, it belongs to the category of icon rather than index. Our next example is a sound-induced icon. Those Chinese who are now in their fifties and above may still remember the “3-5 Desk Clock” shown in the middle of Figure 4.

Figure 4: 3–5 Desk Clock.

Back in the shortage economy of the 1970s, commodity items like watches and clocks were in great demand in China; thus being in possession of a “3-5 Desk Clock” was considered an admirable achievement for an ordinary family. This particular brand of desk clock is known for its elegant design, its unfailing punctuality, and its beautifully crisp “Dang-Dang” sound announcing the pas- sing of every hour of the day. Even when the clock was placed out of sight, guests of the family could still tell its presence in the house by the sound that came out of the inner bedroom. Here, the unique sound of the clock served as an indexical sign of the whole device. We can further imagine that one day the owner of a “3-5 Desk Clock” had to send it to a shop for repair and his three- year-old son, noticing the absence of the clock, wanted to know where it had gone. Not having the special noun for the clock in his vocabulary yet, the son would probably ask his parents by saying: “Where is ‘Dang-Dang?’” and his parents would have no problem understanding what was meant by this onoma- topoeia. Technically speaking, the real sound made by the clock is an indexical sign of the whole device and the “Dang-Dang” uttered by the kid is only an imitation or “iconification” of the indexical sign. This imaginary example may sound childish to some, but is actually very important because a great many scholars understand the concept of iconicity 172 Ersu Ding only in its narrow pictorial sense. The fact of the matter is that iconicity can be manifested in a variety of ways. The following is what professor Zhao Yiheng has to say on the issue:

Iconicity is not necessarily pictorial; it can be related to any of our senses. The rhythm of The Trout by Franz Schubert is imitative of the leaping of fish; the musical notes of Rimsky Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee are similar to the humming of bees. Iconicity can also be expressed through taste and smell: for example, perfumes may imitate the aromas of flowers and “vegetarian chicken” (made of bean curd) is made to taste like real chicken. Non-pictorial icons are of course harder to capture than pictorial ones. For instance, it is rather difficult to ascertain the iconic signs in the above mentioned musical pieces without their titles. (Zhao 2011: 78–79)

Professor Zhao goes on to discuss what Peirce calls the “diagrammatic signs” in the same book. This subcategory of iconic signs exhibit not a figural similarity but a structural correspondence between the representamen and its object as in a mathematic or chemical reaction formula, hence the term “isomorphism.” There is another difference between an index and an icon: the former results from its user’s cognition of the relationship between things and events in his/her external environment or internal state of mind while the latter is a speaker’s appropriation of such a result for the purpose of influencing another person’s thoughts and feelings. Put more explicitly, indexical signs are “unintended” whereas iconic signs are “intended.” Once again, it should be noted that humans are not the only species that know how to turn indexical signs into iconic ones. If we watch Animal World and National Geographic, we sometimes see small animals feign death when they are about to be caught by their predators. As most carnivores are disin- terested in corpses, pretending death gives small creatures an additional oppor- tunity to escape. Here, an iconic sign – the imitation of death – is created for the specific purpose of deception and shows that other animals are also capable of producing icons for the purpose of communication be it mostly through their own bodies and to a much lesser degree than humans. The only signs exclusive to humans belong to Peirce’s third category: symbols. The interpretation of this group of signs does not rely on the temporal contiguity between two events or part-and-whole relationship between two things; nor is it dependent on the similarity that exist between the representamen and its object; rather, it is based on the habitual associations between forms and meanings of signs prescribed by a linguistic community. As far as the evolutionary order is concerned, symbols represent the highest stage of sign development. In the beginning, humans, just like other animals, tried to make connections between things and events in their living environment, turning Rethinking the Peircean trichotomy 173 natural phenomena into indexical signs of one another. For example, they could attribute a particular sound to a specific kind of birds because the former is produced by the latter, giving rise to an indexical sign. Later on, when a need arose for a person to mention a bird of that kind which was absent from the scene, he/she could imitate its warbling so that his/her conversation partner could make a deduction through this iconic sign. However, an icon always loses its ability to evoke a similar image over time because repeated deductions from a certain representamen to a similar object make the association between them “automatic,” turning the iconic sign into a symbol whose interpretation is rule- governed rather than similarity-based. Nearly all Chinese characters have gone through this process of “symbolification.” Take for example the word “休” in Figure 5.

Figure 5: 休（rest）.

When it was first created, the representamen ( ) of the character looks like a person leaning against a tree to take a break from his labor in the field, hence an iconic sign for “rest,” but after many years of repeated use, the graph “休” no longer evokes in the mind of the modern user a picture of a person resting under a tree. One can certainly “re-iconify” the character as we are doing now, but this is done only for the purpose of teaching or research, which is not part of the natural process of language use. From this we learn another important semiotic lesson: the same sign can be interpreted in different ways by different people or even by the same person. To someone who knows Chinese well, “休” is a symbol whose interpretation depends on the linguistic habit of the Chinese language community; to a beginning non-native learner of Chinese who resorts to the 174 Ersu Ding visual similarity between “ ” and “a person resting under a tree” to help him/ her arrive at the meaning of the graph, “休” is an iconic sign; to an etymologist who not only knows Chinese very well but also studies its history, “休” is a symbol and an icon at the same time. Likewise, an object can be interpreted as either an indexical or iconic sign depending on the different circumstances. For example, if a photo is used to identify a similar-looking suspect in a crime investigation, what we have in action is an iconic sign, but if the same picture is seen as the end product of a specific kind of camera of a particular historical period, then we are using it as indexical sign of a certain type of mechanical or electronic device. This shows that classification of signs cannot be separated from how they are interpreted. In another context, Peirce attaches great importance to the factor of interpretation in sign identification and this is made very clear in his classic definition of the sign:

A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen. (CP 2.228)

Here “somebody” obviously refers to the interpreter of a sign and “interpretant” is the result of his/her interpretive action. Such being the case, whether a sign is an index, icon or symbol depends as much on how it is interpreted in a particular situation. “Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign” (CP 2.308). We can legitimately expand this Peircean dictum by saying “nothing is an index, icon, or symbol unless it is interpreted as such.” Indeed, for a mentally handicapped child, a dark cloud cannot be an indexical sign of rain; nor can a layman to music see Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee as an iconic sign of the humming of bees; and to a person who does not understand English, Peirce’s sentence “Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign” can only be constituted by noises rather than symbols. All of these point to the fact that the identity of a sign depends very much on how it is interpreted by the user.

References

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