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ranks as the chief founder of modern Semiotics. On the basis of the foundations of Semiotics which he laid, the further development of Semiotics as the science of
signs has taken place. In the meantime it has become a basic science of central importance, following the realization that behind logic and linguistics there is still
another foundation. This foundation is the sign qua sign, without which no representation or communication in any form whatever is possible.
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1. Semiotic elements
Peirce held that there are exactly three basic semiotic elements, the sign or representamen, object, and intepretant, as outlined above and fleshed out here
in a bit more detail: a.
The Sign or Representamen: the form which the sign takes not
necessarily material.
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Represents, in the broadest possible sense of represents. It is something interpretable as saying something about
something. It is not necessarily symbolic, linguistic, or artificial. b.
An Interpretant: not an interpreter but rather the sense made of the
sign. An interpretant or interpretant sign is the signs more or less clarified meaning or ramification, a kind of form or idea of the
difference which the signs being true or undeceptive would make. The interpretant is a sign a of the object and b of the interpretants
predecessor the interpreted sign as being a sign of the same object. The interpretant is an interpretation in the sense of a product of an
interpretive process or a content in which an interpretive relation
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Die Welt Als Zeichen, Classics of Semotics, New York: Plenum Press, 1987, p. 1
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Daniel Chandler, Semiotic: the Basic, New York: Routledge, 2002, p.32
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culminates, though this product or content may itself be an act, a state of agitation, a conduct, etc.
c.
An object: to which the sign refers.
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An object or semiotic object is a subject matter of a sign and an interpretant. It can be anything
discussable or thinkable, a thing, event, relationship, quality, law, argument, etc., and can even be fictional, for instance Hamlet. All of
those are special or partial objects. The object most accurately is the universe of discourse to which the partial or special object belongs. For
instance, a perturbation of Plutos orbit is a sign about Pluto but ultimately not only about Pluto.
Thus: A sign … [in the form of a 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 sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the
representamen. Pierce 1931 – 58, 2.228.
Sign Interpretant
Object
2. Classes of Sign
