Developing a Neo-Peircean Approach to Signs

This book takes up a number of Charles Sanders Peirce’s undeveloped semiotic concepts and highlights their theoretical interest for a general semiotics. Peirce’s career as a logician spanned almost half a century, during which time he produced several increasingly complex sign systems.The best-known, from 1903, defined amongst other things a signifying process involving sign, object and interpretant, the universally-known icon-index-symbol division and a set of 10 distinct classes of signs.Peirce subsequently expanded this process to include 2 objects, the sign and 3 interpretants.Uncoincidentally, in the 5 years between 1903 and the final system of 1908, he introduced a number of highly innovative semiotic concepts which he never developed. One such concept is hypoiconicity, which comprises 3 levels of isomorphism holding between sign and object and, in spite of the mutations these varieties of icon subsequently underwent, offers qualitative analysis as a complement to the traditional