Peirce and signs

Peirce and signs January 5, 2007

Menand offers a useful summary of Peirce’s views on signs, in a way that highlights both similarities and differences with Derrida.

Peirce taught a notion of differance : “The meaning of a representation,” he wrote, “can be nothing but a representation. In fact, it is nothing but the representation itself conceived as stripped of irrelevant clothing. But this clothing can never be completely stripped off; it is only changed for something more diaphanous. So there is an infinite regression here. Finally, the interprtant [ie, the mediating representation] is nothing but another representation to which the torch of truth is handed along; and as representation, it has its interpretant again. Lo, another infinite series.”

In short, it’s representations all the way down. Why?


First, because, Peirce said, human knowledge “swims . . . in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy.” But, second, because (Menand’s summary) “there are no prerepresentational objects out there. Things are themselves signs: their being signs is a condition of their being things at all. You can call this notion counterintuitive, because that is exactly what it is: it is part of Peirce’s attack on the idea that we can know something intuitively – that is, without the mediation of representations. For Peirce, knowing was inseparable from what he called semiosis, the making of signs, and of the making of signs there is no end.” Look up the meaning of a word in a dictionary, and you find more words, which you can look up in the same dictionary; you can do this forever and never get out of the dictionary. Lo, another infinite series.

But, Menand adds, this is not merely a property of language; “the universe is like that.” The meaning of anything is a representation that can only be explained in terms of other representations, and so on.

This seems to be the baldest form of differance . So, where’s the difference from Derrida’s difference? For starters, Peirce challenged Dewey’s “intellectual licentiousness,” by which he meant Dewey’s claim that truth is not a matter of fact but “a matter of a way of thinking or even of linguistic expression.” So, where does he differ from Dewey? One central difference is the teleology. For thoroughgoing Darwinians like Dewey and James, the universe is changing all the time, but it is not changing in any direction.

That was intolerable for Perice, who insisted (Menand again) that “God’s love must play an important role” – his their of “agapism.” God is overseeing and directing evolution toward an end and specifically that the universe is being evolved “from a condition of chaos, in which things happen entirely by chance, toward a condition of absolute law, or complete determinism, in which chance will disappear and all habits will be perfectly fixed.” By a moral/intellectual law of natural selection, bad habits are gradually rooted out and bad ideas die. Directed by logic, thought moves toward “the fixation of certain opinions, equally destined, the nature of which will be the same in the end, however the perversity of thought of whole generations may cause the postponement of ultimate fixation.” Truth is not merely a “set of words” or a “set of ideas,” but the teleological fixation of opinion, the union of belief and fact.


Browse Our Archives