<Articles>Peirce's General Theory of Signs

Abstract

Charles. S Peirce was one of the founders of Pragmatism, alongside William James and John Dewey. This paper looks at Peirce's later work on his theory of signs, or semiotic. Peirce's semiotic is a broad one, including as signs things that other semioticians may reject. Peirce's semiotic includes a key division of signs into the three categories of Icon, Index and Symbol. This trichotomy and the breadth of Peirce's semiotic makes it well suited to, for example, a semiology of cinema. The basic structure of the sign in Peirce is also triadic, being a relation between sign-object-interpretant, and this brings us to a further appreciation of the sign as sign-action: a move from semiotic to semiosis.