Semiotical Epistemology

Abstract

Peirce‘s semiotic concepts are commonly reduced to his famous triad of icons, indexes, and symbols. This is due to his commentators‘ neglect of the philosophical and cognitive purposes of these and other concepts. Besides creating a theory of the most diverse types of signs, Peirce also embedded this theory in a no less original phenomenological soil which demands the full dismissal of any illusion that cognition and knowledge occur in a dual relation between an object and a subject of knowledge. Although dyadic relations are omnipresent in human experience, they are always subsumed in triadic relations, that is, mediated relations, sign relations, since the sign, for Peirce, is a synonym of mediation. This already begins in thought, extends to perception and, obviously, to external signs (sounds, words, visual forms, and all their hybrid forms). On the basis of mediating processes, this paper aims at clarifying the originality of Peircean epistemology in its construction of a sign theory of cognition.