The semiotics of Peirce

Abstract

Semiotics is one of the most interesting parts of the philosophy of Ch.S. Peirce and has been the object of a recent Peirce revival. J. Dewey, Ch. Morris and W. James found a point of departure in the philosophy of Peirce, though he never accepted pragmatism as a good term to describe his philosophy; instead he adopted a new term, pragmaticism. The author of the article maintains that semiotics is also the most stable theme in Peirce, exhibiting few changes and variations in its main theses. Following Peirce’s thought, semiotics is constituted as a general semiotic, open to a vast field ofapplications. But a correction must be made to Peirce’s semiotics: though Peirce conceived it as a global theory of reality, it is neither a theory of knowledge nor a theory of reality, but proves useful as a theory of communication and of culture.