semeiotic

Connected with Peirce's insistence on the ubiquity of mind in the cosmos is the importance he attached to what he called “semeiotic,” the theory of signs in the most general sense.

Nobody Knows Nothing 2009

W.at Peircean meant by “semeiotic” is almost totally different what has come to be called “semiotics,” and which hails not so much from Peirce as from Saussure and Charles W. Morris.

Nobody Knows Nothing 2009

Peirce's Hegelianism, which he increasingly professed as he approached his most mature philosophy, is more difficult to understand than his Kantianism, partly because it is everywhere intimately tied to his entire late theory of signs (semeiotic) and sign use (semeiosis), as well as to his evolutionism and to his rather puzzling doctrine of mind.

Nobody Knows Nothing 2009

First, some twenty-five years ago in the former Soviet Union interest in Peirce and Karl Popper had led logicians and computer scientists like Victor Finn and Dmitri Pospelov to try to find ways in which computer programs could generate Peircean hypotheses (Popperian “conjectures”) in semeiotic contexts (non-numerical or qualitative contexts).

Nobody Knows Nothing 2009

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was the founder of American pragmatism (later called by Peirce “pragmaticism” in order to differentiate his views from others being labelled “pragmatism”), a theorist of logic, language, communication, and the general theory of signs (which was often called by Peirce “semeiotic”), an extraordinarily prolific mathematical logician and general mathematician, and a developer of an evolutionary, psycho-physically monistic metaphysical system.

Nobody Knows Nothing 2009

Peircean semeiotic derives ultimately from the theory of signs of Duns Scotus and its later development by John of St. Thomas

Nobody Knows Nothing 2009

Thus, in his later writings, he divided semeiotic into speculative grammar, logical critic, and speculative rhetoric (also called “methodeutic”).

Nobody Knows Nothing 2009

These have noted that there are extensive affiliations between Peirce's discussions of the communicational and dialogical aspects of semeiotic, on the one hand, and the many and varied “game-theoretical” approaches to logic that have been for some time of interest to Finnish philosophers (as well as many others), on the other hand.

Nobody Knows Nothing 2009

Peirce's settled opinion was that logic in the broadest sense is to be equated with semeiotic (the general theory of signs), and that logic in a much narrower sense (which he typically called “logical critic”) is one of three major divisions or parts of semeiotic.

Nobody Knows Nothing 2009

Peirce's tripartite division of semeiotic is not to be confused with Charles W. Morris's division: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics (although there may be some commonalities in the two trichotomies).

Nobody Knows Nothing 2009