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Page 195
"the conclusion (if it comes to a definite conclusion), is that under given conditions, the interpreter will have formed the habit of acting in a given way whenever he may desire a given kind of result. The real and living logical conclusion is that habit: the verbal formulation merely expresses it. I do not deny that a concept, proposition, or argument may be a logical interpretant. I only insist that it cannot be the final logical interpretant, for the reason that it is itself a sign of that very kind that has itself a logical interpretant. The habit alone, which though it may be a sign in some other way, is not a sign in that way in which that sign of which it is the logical interpretant is the sign. The habit conjoined with the motive and the conditions has the action for its energetic interpretant; but the action cannot be a logical interpretant, because it lacks generality." Thus, through pragmaticism, Peirce has joined his Scotist realism: the action is the place in which the haecceitas ends the game of semiosis.
But Peirce is not only a contradictory thinker, he is a dialectical one, and more so than he is usually believed to be. The final interpretant is not final in a chronological sense. Semiosis dies at every moment. But, as soon as it dies, it arises again like the Phoenix. Individual action lacks generality, but uniformly repeated actions can be described in general terms. Just at the end of the above quotation, Peirce adds: "But how otherwise can a habit be described than by a description of the kind of action to which it gives rise, with the specification of the conditions and the motive?" Thus the repeated action responding to a given sign becomes in its turn a new sign, the representamen of a law interpreting the former sign and giving rise to new processes of interpretation.
In this sense Peirce verifies the behavioristic hypothesis in semiotics, to the extent that it can be useful: if one hears a strange sound in an unknown language and detects that, every time it is uttered, its receiver reacts with a facial expression of rage, one can legitimately infer that that word is a nasty one; the conventional behavior of the receiver becomes an interpretant of the meaning of the word. I do not know what it precisely means but I can begin to list it among insults, therefore acquiring a first definition by hyperonimy. In this dialectical opposition between semiosis and concrete action, Peirce displays what he calls his 'conditional idealism' (5.494): any sufficient inquiry in principle can lead to a sort of objective agreement on the concrete results of semiosis. The final interpretant is at the same time a result and a rule.
The system of systems of codes, which could look like an irrealistic and idealistic cultural world separate from the concrete events, leads men to act upon the world; and this action continuously converts itself into new signs, giving rise to new semiotic systems. The Peircean notion of interpretant takes into account, not only the synchronic structure of semiotic systems, but also the diachronic destructurization and restructurization of those systems.

 
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