< previous page page_193 next page >

Page 193
to Dynamic Objects is solved. It is true that signs cannot give us a direct acquaintance with objects, since they can only prescribe to us what to do in order to realize this acquaintance. Signs have a direct connection with Dynamic Objects only insofar as objects determine the formation of a sign; on the other hand, signs only 'know' Immediate Objects, that is, meanings. There is a difference between the object of which a sign is a sign and the object of a sign: the former is the Dynamic Object, a state of the outer world; the latter is a semiotic construction and should be recognized as a mere object of the inner world, except that, in order to describe this 'inner' object, one should make recourse to interpretants, that is, to other signs taken as representamen, therefore experiencing other objects of the outer world.
The Dynamic Object issemiotically speakingat our disposal only as a set of interpretants organized according to a compositional spectrum operationally structured. But while being, from a semiotic point of view, the possible object of a concrete experience, it is, from an ontological point of view, the concrete object of a possible experience.
All these remarks oblige us to revisit the notion of interpretant, not only as a category of Peirce's theory of meaning, but as a more central category of a general semiotics dealing, not only with semantics, but also with pragmatics. General semiotics should be conceived as a theory of all species of signs, concerned both with the structure of semiotic codes and with the inferential labor of text interpretation.
7.4. Unlimited Semiosis: A Pragmatic Perspective
7.4.1.
One could say that, sending back from one representation to another, Peirce is in fact betraying his 'medieval' realism: he cannot show how a sign can be referred to an object, and he dissolves the concrete relationships of indication into an infinite network of signs sending back to signs, as in a finite but unlimited universe of ghostly semiological appearances.
On the contrary, I believe that, with the doctrine of interpretants and the notion of unlimited semiosis, Peirce has reached the highest level of his realism. Except that this is not an ontological but a pragmatic realism. Let me first consider the philosophy of unlimited semiosis in the light of the requirements of present semiotics and then turn back to the interpretants as viewed in the light of Peirce's pragmaticism. We will see that in both cases the suggestions Peirce gives us are in the line of a pragmatic and realistic theory of intersubjective 'truth'.
The so-called Peircean medieval realism, with its taste for individual and concrete realia, should not be overestimated and should be always dialectically set against his pragmaticism. In this perspective Peirce was

 
< previous page page_193 next page >