Interpreting object-sign relations

Any semiotic process relates three components: a sign, an object, and an interpretant. The last of these components that we have not yet discussed explicitly is the interpretant. The interpretant is whatever a sign creates or determines insofar as it stands for an object (see Kockelman 2013a: 46). It is in these “proper significate effects” of signs that meaning is anchored in the Peircean model (CP 5.475; see also 2.1.2). Interpretants can be classified in many different ways. Let us take up a classification that pertains particularly to human interpreters and their responses.¹² An affective interpretant is a

11 Persons, of course, are interpretable objects to themselves too. As will be seen more precisely in section 2.3, we also know ourselves as immediate objects based on the signs we can perceive and interpret.

12 It is important to emphasize that the interpretant is not an interpreter (i.e., a person) (see also Dewey 1946: 87). The core of Peirce’s model of semiotic processes is not tied to humans or any other particular kind of agent (although Peirce himself at times hesitated on this matter, see e.g. Deely 1990 or Daniel 1989: 84 on Peirce’s famous “sop to Cerberus,” EP 2: 478–481). In Peirce’s monist thinking, all phenomena are described according to the same general principles. All actually existent processes (Secondness) embody chance or possibility (Firstness) and are bound by habit or law (Thirdness) to various degrees. “Matter” (which Peirce also called “effete mind”) is more heavily bound by law than

“mind” (but not entirely; Peirce was one of the first to advocate the view that Newton’s laws are merely

feeling caused by a sign, i.e., a change in the interpreter’s bodily state (which is itself a further sign for the interpreter). An energetic interpretant is a behavioral response, i.e., a physical or mental effort. A representational interpretant is a speech act or a mental state that represents the object-sign relation with propositional or conceptual content. (See Kockelman 2005.) Any interpretant can itself be a further sign to be interpreted — and so on in a web-like manner. A sign will usually give rise to several different kinds of interpretants simultaneously or in succession. Ultimately, a sign may produce a “habit-change” or a “modification of a person’s tendencies toward action” (Peirce 1955: 277). An ultimate interpretant, whether affective, energetic, or representational, is itself no longer a sign but a disposition to behave in certain ways (e.g., a habit, belief, or a propensity projected on others). (See e.g. Kockelman 2005: 274–278; 2013a: 65–66; Cf. Peirce 1955:

276–279; de Waal 2013: 83–84.) It is an interpretation (e.g., “that person is angry,” “this text is ironic”) within which an interpreter acts until other signs give sufficient reasons to change that interpretation. We will return to ultimate interpretants in section 2.2.3.

We can now put together the previous discussion in the form of the following diagram (1) of the semiotic triad. As illustrated by the two levels of arrows pointing in opposite directions in the diagram, there is, at a lower logical level, a vector of determination flowing from the dynamic object through the sign to the interpretants and, at a higher logical level, a vector of

“representation” from the interpretants to the immediate object (Parmentier 1994). In order to avoid terminological confusion, the vector of

“representation” might be more appropriately called the vector of mediation (or standing in relation to) (Colapietro 1989: 17–20). When these vectors are brought into proper relation in semiosis, knowledge of objects through signs is possible. To simplify, one might say that the vector of determination is the reality working its way into the semiotic process. That is, any sign is grounded in prior processes and constrained by them. The vector of mediation is the way in which interpretation of signs makes them effective in particular ways (i.e., makes the reality experienceable and knowable in particular ways) and shapes the future direction of the unfolding process.

(See also Kockelman 2013a: 174 on protentive and retentive framings of semiotic processes; and see the discussion of sieving, ontological assumptions, and ontological transformativity in 2.1.3.)

a statistical average, see de Waal 2013: 151). For Peirce, the very possibility of humans having minds presupposes the “mind-like” nature of the universe. Only something that is interpretable can be interpreted. That is, the human mind has, in a sense, grown out of the universe and is not a distinct substance as per some dualist views (see also e.g. Damasio 1999). A person is a particular manifestation of mind in the universe (among other things), and the mind is merely a “species of semiosis” (Colapietro 1989: xx). As Deely (1990: 86) puts it, the “action proper to signs” is seen “as already at work in physical nature itself beyond the bounds of organic matter or prior to its advent.”

That is, anthroposemiosis presupposes physiosemiosis (and zoosemiosis).

Diagram 1 The vectors of “determination” and “representation.”

Semiosis, in other words, is a relation between object-sign and sign-interpretant relations. In Kockelman’s (2005: 234; 2006a: 6; see also Peirce CP 8.332; Colapietro 1989: 6) formal definition, a sign stands for its object on the one hand, and its interpretant on the other, in such a way as to make the interpretant stand in relation to the object corresponding to the sign’s own relation to the object. A sign, therefore, is that which “has the ability to redirect the flow of energies” and which “puts things in touch with each other” thereby enabling the exchange of information (Esposito 1979: 23).

Signs give us an awareness of how we are in the middle of things: a sign is

“anything that has roots and bears fruits; it is anything that is grounded and growing” (Colapietro 1989: 22). The semiotic process, then, is a series of interactions, or relations between activities, that creates a “pathway through time” (Deely 1990: 90).

The importance of the temporally unfolding chain of interpretants for the Peircean model cannot be overemphasized. Meanings do not inhere in signs (as the “other side of the coin”). They are mediated by dynamic and interactive relations between objects, the signs they give rise to, and the interpretants that are calibrated to the signs in actual semiotic events. This kind of model opens to empirical inquiry the question how habits and regularities (i.e., socially shared, culturally transmitted, or temporally relatively stable kinds of meaning), which structuralist views tend to abstract into systems purified from time, space, and variation, come about and persist or change over time. Moreover, it should be noted that the set of signs that an interpreter can perceive in any discursive artifact (such as an online dating advertisement) and the range of interpretants an interpreter can produce are not predetermined or limited to those traditional units and categories defined within linguistics (see also Nieminen 2010: 37–48). Rather, the interpretation of texts is a layered and creative interactive process that involves many dimensions of “meaning” (including, say, ethnopsychological interpretation of what someone’s linguistic structures say about their

SIGN OBJECT

DYNAMIC IMMEDIATE

INTERPRETANT₁…

personality, grounded in the interpreter’s cultural and personal backgrounds).