PEIRCE, PHENOMENOLOGY AND SEMIOTICS

Abstract

Semiotics (or semeiotics) is a field of research that began in earnest with the innovative thought of Charles Sanders Peirce but that only began to be explored within mainstream disciplines in the late 1930s (for the history of sign theory and precursors to Peirce’s semiotics see Deely 2001a). At the opening of the twentieth century, Josiah Royce at Harvard, and a few philosophers in Europe, gave some attention to Peirce’s theory of signs, but it was in the 1930s and 40s that the Unity of Science philosophers, largely at the urging of Charles Morris, recognized the importance of the systematic study of signs and of sign relations and, through Morris’s influence on Carnap, incorporated a limited form of Peirce’s tripartite science into philosophy with their famous trilogy: syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. But semiotics, as a complete science, soon became marginalized and largely abandoned by philosophy and it survived by finding refuge in linguistics and in the interdisciplinary research programme founded by Morris’s student, Thomas A. Sebeok. During the last generation, with the weakening of the hegemony of Analytic philosophy, semiotics has shown evidence of returning to philosophy and other established disciplines; this is especially true in Europe and South America. It remains to be seen if semiotics will survive as an interdisciplinary field of research as Sebeok believed it should be, or if it will evolve into a discipline in its own right, as seems to be happening with informatics, or if it will devolve into a variety of discipline-specific programmes.

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