Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Antecedents and Alternatives
- 2 The Development of Peirce's Semeiotic
- 3 Phaneroscopy
- 4 A Preface to Final Causation
- 5 Final Causation
- 6 Significance
- 7 Objects and Interpretants
- 8 A Taxonomy of Signs
- 9 More Taxa
- 10 How Symbols Grow
- 11 Semeiosis and the Mental
- 12 The Structure of Objectivity
- Bibliography
- Name Index
- Subject Index
7 - Objects and Interpretants
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Antecedents and Alternatives
- 2 The Development of Peirce's Semeiotic
- 3 Phaneroscopy
- 4 A Preface to Final Causation
- 5 Final Causation
- 6 Significance
- 7 Objects and Interpretants
- 8 A Taxonomy of Signs
- 9 More Taxa
- 10 How Symbols Grow
- 11 Semeiosis and the Mental
- 12 The Structure of Objectivity
- Bibliography
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Summary
In the 1900s, Peirce introduced several divisions of object and interpretant. That was in an article, notebooks, letters, drafts of letters, and uncompleted manuscripts. He was groping his way and never came to a definite, clearly articulated conclusion. Much of this effort was directed toward providing principles for a sign taxonomy, developed in those same years.
We can see in that taxonomy (chapters 8 and 9) that he needed two quite different trichotomies of interpretant. One, following from the teleological structure of semeiosis, pertains to each sign: the immediate interpretant is a potentiality in which consists the sign's interpretability; the dynamic interpretant is any interpretant actually formed (from zero to many); and the final interpretant is another potentiality, the ideal interpretant of that sign for the interpretative purpose. The other trichotomy is an application of Peirce's phaneroscopy and distinguishes among signs: an emotional interpretant is a feeling or 1st; an energetic interpretant is an action or 2nd; and a logical interpretant is a 3rd, being a thought or other general sign or a habit formed or modified. An immediate interpretant may be either emotional, energetic, or logical, and so also dynamic and final interpretants may be of any category, actually or potentially. A sign's final interpretant, for example, is that potential feeling or potential action or potential thought, habit-change, and so on, that would best satisfy the purpose of interpreting that sign.
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- Peirce's Theory of Signs , pp. 178 - 206Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007