The Implications of Peirce’s Marriage of Semiotics and Pragmatism

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of Peirce’s marriage of pragmatism and semiosis. In providing an account of Peirce’s pragmatism and his theory of signs up until the publication of “Pragmatism,” a comparison can be made between these two theories as described independently of one another, and as described in terms of one another. From this, it will be shown that the character of Peirce’s pragmatism, when formulated in semiotic terms in his essay “Pragmatism,” changes into a semiotic principle acknowledging reality and possibility. In order for signs to continually develop and produce interpretants which themselves become signs, there must be supposed an end to the sign chain, hence the final logical interpretant. It is in his attempt to prove pragmatism in semiotic terms that Peirce comes across this need of a final logical interpretant. Pragmatism, then, ceases to be just a theory meaning. It becomes a theory that explains the very nature of semiosis.