More on Signs...Margith Strand/January 8, 2011:)

Triadic signs

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) proposed a different theory. Unlike Saussure who approached the conceptual question from a study of linguistics and phonology, Peirce was a somewhat Kantian philosopher who distinguished "sign" from "word" as only a particular kind of sign, and characterized the sign as the means to understanding. He covered not only artificial, linguistic, and symbolic signs, but all semblances, for example kindred sensible qualities, and all indicators, for example mechanical reactions, and counted, as symbols, all terms, propositions, and arguments even apart from their expression in particular languages. He held that "all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs".[3] The setting of Peirce's study of signs is philosophical logic, which he defined as formal semiotic,[4] and characterized as a normative field following esthetics and ethics, as more basic than metaphysics[5], and as the art of devising methods of research[6]. He argued that, since all thought takes time, all thought is in signs,[7] that all thought has the form of inference (even when not conscious and deliberate),[7] and that, as inference, "logic is rooted in the social principle", since inference depends on a standpoint that, in a sense, is unlimited.[8] The result is a theory not of language in particular, but rather of the production of meaning, and it rejects the idea of a static relationship between a sign and that which it represents, its object. Peirce believed that signs are meaningful through recursive relationships that arise in sets of three.

Material to be used on Dissertation/Distance Education for Margith Strand/Fielding

Reference: Wikipedia {Meaning of Signs: Semiotic Analysis}