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January 04, 2005
Sign, symbol, icon (White Ch. 3)
For help with White's references to Peirce's terminology in Chapter 3, I turned to the venerable first edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (hey, I can't afford the $3,000 for the second edition!):
C.S. Peirce has three types of sign:
icon: A sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own; relationship of similarity
index: A sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object; causal relationship
symbol: A sign which is constituted a sign merely or mainly by the fact that it is used and understood as such; conventional relationship
Now, the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy is from something like 1968, whereas the second edition just came out in the last couple of years. If anybody wants to consult that new edition, it could be very useful to us. Charles Sanders Peirce died in 1914; hence by 1968 his work had been pretty thoroughly read. But not with contemporary methodologies. I'm interested, for example, that White (p. 88), writing in 1978, seems to put Peirce's sign, symbol, and icon in a paratactic relationship, whereas the Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Peirce's language philosophy as subordinating symbol and icon as types of signs.
Everybody who was in 651 last spring, BTW, should be consulting notes (all those beautiful summaries!) on Saussure's sign theory from that course. Saussure's and Peirce's language philosophies are hardly synonymous, but they're drinking from the same semiotic well. If anybody wants to root around in the 651 repository and post a useful summary here, there would probably be no groundswell of local objections.
Posted by senioritis at January 4, 2005 09:57 PM