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But it is not by chance that in 1.540 Peirce established a difference between sign and representamen; when he says that he uses the words 'sign' and 'representamen' differently, he means that the sign is the concrete, token element (the utterance) used in the concrete process of communication and reference, whereas the representamen is the type to which a coding convention assigns a certain content by means of certain interpretants. "By sign I mean anything that conveys any definite notion of an object in any way, as such conveyers of thought are familiarly known to us. Now I start with this familiar idea and make the best analysis I can of what is essential to a sign, and I define a representamen as being whatever that analysis applies to. . . . In particular all signs convey notions to human minds; but I know no reason why every representamen should do so." I read this passage as the proposal of a difference between a theory of signification and a theory of communication. Representamens are type-expressions conventionally correlated to a type-content by a given culture, irrespective of the fact that they can be used in order to communicate effectively something to somebody. |
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Peirce continually oscillates between these points of view, but never makes their difference explicit. Therefore when dealing with interpretants the object remains as an abstract hypothesis which gives a sort of pragmatic legitimacy to the fact that we are using signs; and when on the contrary dealing with objects, the interpretant acts in the background as an unnoticed but highly effective mediation which permits us to understand signs and to apply them to such and such concrete experience. |
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7.2. Interpretant, Ground, Meaning, Object |
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Let me examine some basic definitions of interpretant. In 1.339 the definition looks rather mentalistic: "A sign stands for something to the idea which it produces, or modifies. . . . That for which it stands is called its object, that which it conveys, its meaning; and the idea to which it gives rise, its interpretant." But in 2.228 (probably some years later, according to Hartshorne and Weiss, who, without identifying the date of the first fragment, list it among the texts of 1895 and give the second one as written in 1897) Peirce specifies: "A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, it 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 a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representation." As everybody realizes, in the second fragment the interpretant is no longer an idea but another sign. If there |
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