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Peirce never wrote a treatise on semeiotic (also spelled semiotic, although Peirce seemed to prefer semeiotic in his late years). His ideas had to be collected from dozens of articles published throughout half a century of research, from manuscripts and notes in notebooks and from the letters he exchanged about the subject. A compilation of texts from very different sources and periods shows – as it could be expected when we talk about Peirce – a theory in constant evolution. There was not a single time in which, while working on his semeiotic, Peirce failed to introduce new terms and interpretations. Besides that, in his large philosophical architecture, semeiotic works like an amalgam capable of unifying several disciplines. It is mentioned and discussed in articles and letters about subjects as different as logic, mathematic and metaphysics. Peirce felt the obvious necessity of adapting the terminology and the notation according to the canons accepted by each of these sciences. As a result, chart ing the evolution of Peirce’s semeiotic demands knowledge in the various sciences it dialogues with, which was only possible to accomplish recently and yet in an incomplete way.

The initial question, which has produced a lot of controversy among Peircean scholars, is how we should picture the evolution of Peirce’s thought. Some, like Ransdell, argues that Peirce maintained throughout his career the essence of the arguments presented for the first time in the articles published in the 1860’s. Murphey (1993, p.3), on the other hand, believes that Peirce’s philosophical architecture is similar to a house whose interior is being continuously remodeled, although preserving most of its structure. Short (2004) affirms that Peirce abandoned many of his juvenile ideas. Savan (1977, p. 179) goes further to say that Peirce’s mature Theory of Signs has little to do with his first formulation in 1860’s. It is necessary, thus, to know a little about how these changes may have happened.

The study of the signs had been present in Peirce’s intellectual life since at least the middle of 1860’s, when he was still a college student at Harvard. In 1865, at the age of 26, Peirce made a series of conferences in Harvard about the logic of sciences wherein he proves to dominate Kant’s transcendental philosophy, the foundations of logic and the theory of probability, as well as the problem of representation – or how the ideas appear in the human mind. This last one is an important logical problem, for the truth of any proposition analyzed depends on it. Throughout his intellectual life, Peirce tried to study this matter under all the possible points of view. He extracted lessons from philosophical texts since antiquity, such as Plato and Aristotle, going through medieval ones up to his contemporaries of the 19th century.

The closest we have to a systematic exhibit of his Theory of Signs, made by Peirce’s own hands, is a brochure written to follow a series of lectures he gave at the Lowell Institute, in Cambridge, in October 1903, focused mainly on logic. This brochure is normally referred as Syllabus among the scholars, many of whom consider it the most finished version of his semeiotic. In its pages appears the famous inverted triangle with ten genuine classes of signs created from three triadic divisions (or trichotomies). This is the classification found in most manuals and articles on Peircean semeiotic.

However, Peirce never considered the version published in the Syllabus the final word on the problem of classification of signs. As we will see shortly, the 1903 classification, although important, represented the beginning of a new round of creative revisions of his semeiotic, which went through the years of 1905 and 1906 and, actually, never ended. The number of trichotomies, which in the 1903 Syllabus was only three, from 1905 on came to be ten, with the daunting perspective that the classes of signs could be counted by thousands. Between 1907 and 1909, Peirce had taken his semeiotic to such new directions in comparison with the past ones that the classification of the Syllabus was not even considered by him a starting point for his new classificatory exercises.

First phase: 1867 to 1883 – The triadic sign and the denial of the Cartesian intuition

Peirce starts to develop his theory of Sign already in the first articles published by him, between 1867 and 1871. The first of them, which many scholars consider Peirce’s most important contribution to occidental philosophy, is “On a New List of Categories” (1867), referred normally in the short form of New List. There Peirce revises the table of categories of both Aristotle and Kant, exposing for the first time his tripartite ontology. In the two following years (1868 and 1869), he publishes three other articles, today referred by the experts as the “cognition series”. In these texts, he develops his concern about the origin of knowledge in our minds presenting an alternative for Cartesian gnosiology. Peirce strongly refutes the idea that knowledge is grounded on an artificial doubt, as it is the case of the Cogito. Contrary to Descartes, he defends that inquiry must begin with a genuine doubt, and that we must seek its answer not getting rid of pre-concepts but trying to correct and refine them throughout the process of inquiry.

The dispute between nominalism and realism is the background of these texts. The controversy is a derivation of the old “question about the universals” that has divided philosophers since Classic Antiquity. It may be put this way: is an idea a mere creation of our minds in order to give sense to the multitude of impressions, or does this idea really exist in the world and what we do is try to apprehend it the best we can with the limited powers of our intellect? Roughly speaking, whoever believes that the concepts are just names created by our minds to subsume the sense impressions is a nominalist. The realist, on the other hand, believes that general ideas, or universals, are in some way present in the reality, acting independently of whatever we may think of them. If nominalism is correct, Peirce argues, we are condemned to individualism, for each one of us will develop his own conceptions about the world; but if realism is correct, only the union of efforts of all intelligent minds may be able to form a true concept about reality. Nominalism leads to solipsism, but realism opens the doors to pragmatism as a method to clarify the ideas in the search for Truth.

Actually, both nominalism and realism had many ramifications in the history of philosophy, including doctrines that proposed an intermediate position between the extremes. Peirce, probably on Kant’s track, was an assumed nominalist in his youth, but changed his mind and reached maturity proclaiming to be an extreme realist.

The fact that Peirce had abandoned nominalism does not mean that he had become anti-idealist, however. As noticed when we mentioned his concept of information, while Peirce should be considered a realist regarding logic, he also proclaimed to believe in a kind of objective idealism when he talked about metaphysic. That is why some commentators prefer to say that Peirce developed a sort of sui generis idealism-realism. The fact is that Peirce’s inaugural article is markedly Kantian and nominalist. In the New List, the element that condenses the knowledge about the world is the representation – a mental manifestation that bridges between the world and the intellect. It all starts, Peirce describes, with the synthesis of the senses impressions, where the mind creates ideas or general concepts through a process of comparison. Peirce proposes that two major groups divide the categories present a priori in the mind during this task: Being and Substance. While Substance remains as something uncognizable, in the Kantian transcendental sense, Being manifests itself to mind in the three ways that reflect the three possible types of comparison: quality (when related to a ground), relation (when related to a correlate) and finally representation (when related to an interpretant).

Afterwards, Peirce applies a similar trichotomy to representation, originating what he called at that time Resemblances (later Icons), Indexes and Symbols. The word representation, then, as used in the “New List”, equals what later Peirce would define as the genuine relation between sign, object and interpretant (S-O-I). There is, as we see, a triadic and indecomposable relation in the production of a sign: significance does not occur in the relation between the sign and its object only, as the majority of the previous theories of the signs affirmed, but it demands a third correlate. This new element is the interpretant, seen as the effect produced in the mind by the sign and, therefore, another sign. At this time, it must be clear, Peirce still saw representation as restricted to thought – a kind of internalized discourse inside the mind, based only on general concepts and very similar to the functioning of language (Short, 2004, p. 10).

In the three articles following the New List, dedicated specifically to the problem of cognition, Peirce eliminates the bipartition between Being and Substance, assuming the thesis that there is not such thing as the Kantian uncognizable object, but everything can be learned by experience. The central purpose of these articles is to defend the idea that human cognition is a dynamic process that does start with an artificial doubt, as proposed by Descartes, but happens in media res. We should start the inquiry with our preconceptions or imperfect ideas and only slowly, by a continuous process of inferences, improve them in the direction of Truth. Using hypothesis and their empirical tests against reality, we should be able to produce an argumentation not concatenated as a chain (that cannot be stronger than its weakest link), but weaved like a cable made of thin and subtle fibers, provided they are so numerous and intimately connected to guarantee its strength.

For the 1860’s Peirce, the “train of thought” is a sequence of concepts without beginning or end. They all blend with each other the same way dots merge to create a line. A thought is a sign that represents a previous thought, which assumes the role of its object, and is interpreted by a subsequent thought, which assumes the role of its interpretant – and so on ad infinitum (Short, 2004, p.9). This mental semiosis assumes a fundamental role in the pragmatic search for Truth, which is expected as the result of the whole process. Although this is an infinite series, semiosis does not have to drag out forever because the inferences occur at infinitesimal intervals, which are agglutinated through the schema of time. Peirce resorts to the paradox of Zeno describing the race between Achilles and the tortoise to show that the idea of an infinite series of interpretants does not imply endless semiosis. As much as Achilles will eventually reach the tortoise, the infinite series of inferences will produce a co gnitive result.

In a review dedicated to the re-edition of the works of bishop George Berkeley’s (a well-known nominalist of the past), published in 1871, Peirce takes another step towards realism, although a type of realism still distant from the scholastic kind he would assume in the future. For example, the realism of this period still lacked a clear notion of Secondness as the expression of a reality that exists outside mind and independent of what we think of it. This is precisely the role the index will take in the years to come. Although Peirce had already divided the sign in Resemblances, Indexes and Symbols, they were still mental stuff. In addition, Peirce still holded that the logician should consider only the types of representation derived from the symbol. Therefore, whatever is exterior to mind should not interest him/her.

This nominalist leftover lasted the whole 1870’s and influenced the foundational text on Pragmatism, How to Make Our Ideas Clear, published in 1877. According to Houser (2002), this article intended to show “that the pragmatism were an improvement of the method of Descartes of classifying ideas through his test of clearness and distinction”. This means that Peirce restricted his Pragmatism to a method to make clear concepts only, relating their meaning to the practical consequences implied in their acceptance. Peirce’s tendency to nominalism in this period is noticeable, for example, when he writes that nothing forbids us from affirming that “every hard body remains soft until we touch it” (EP1: p. 132); i.e. he defends that the idea of hardness is something that exists in our minds and has nothing to do with the reality of things.

Fourth phase: 1905 to 1914 – The multiplication of trichotomies and the notion of ultimate interpretant

The last phase of Peirce’s semeiotic is the least known and understood. This is due to, in part, the fact that it represents a revolution in the way Peirce understood his theory, probably motivated once again by his concern to link semeiotic with Pragmatism as well as with his metaphysical cosmology. While he smoothed over the matters in order to adjust one discipline to another, Peirce would make constant alterations in the sign classification, most of them tentatively. The pages of his logical notebooks written in this period are full of sketches of classifications, introductions of new terms, a profusion of triadic divisions and many geometric drawings, mainly triangles, used heuristically to explore and make evident the relations among the elements of the classes of the Signs. Many of these drawings are contradictory and although most of them are dated, Peirce did not authorize us to simply consider the posterior versions as improvements from the previous ones. Whenever Peirce came to an impass e in the research, he would frequently return to the old classifications, sometimes created many years ago, dismissing as incorrect the recent attempts.

In 1905, Peirce demonstrated to have adopted a realistic notion of Thirdness, that he interpreted as a kind of conditional future, a would be that could not be reduced to any series of instances. Consequently, he then explicitly corrected his 1878 opinion about the hardness of the object being a matter of subjective opinion and declared that it depended on Pragmatism to insist about the reality of general potentialities in nature (Short, 2004, p. 15). The acceptance of the reality of the laws of nature, considered then as habits analogous to the beliefs of the mind, stimulated Peirce to approximate semeiotic a bit more (which had already been extended to comprise symptoms and physical signals) to this ever more realistic Pragmatism. After all, the pragmatic kernell was precisely the notion of the habit of conduct. Habit became a keyword linking semeiotic and Pragmatism.

In a series of articles written for the philosophical magazine The Monist during that period, Peirce made the first attempts to extract from semeiotic a definite proof of Pragmatism or, more appropriately, Pragmaticism, as he started to call his philosophy in an attempt to dissociate it from the version popularized by James and his disciples. In order to fight the nominalism that infected these popular versions of Pragmatism, Peirce emphasized that his proof should also be a proof of realism, in which the truth must be considered as what would appear in the final opinion of the research made by a community ideally infinite and honestly dedicated to this search. Note, however, that he still considers the summum bonum of Pragmaticism as being a concept, i.e. reality is still what will appear in a symbol synthesized by an ideal mind summing up the minds of all members of a community of researchers.

In the course of these researches, Peirce discovered that his logic, seen already as identical to semeiotic, could be expressed through a visual syntax based on graphics – named Existential Graphs by Peirce – capable of performing the manipulation of the logical signs in a much better and more concise way. Although Peirce presented two quite developed versions of this graphical system, he would not complete them the way he had wished, probably barred by difficulties to represent the idea of continuum. However, his research about the Existential Graphs triggered a new branch of logic that has been producing promising results in the more recent years.

As Peirce himself points in a letter to Lady Welby, between 1905 and 1906 he worked intensively over his classification of signs. This new round of inquiries convinced him that a complete classification of all possible signs would demand at least 10 trichotomies that, if freely combined, could result in an astonishing figure of 59,049 Classes of Signs (CP 1.291). Nevertheless, Peirce explains, if we impose some logical mathematical limitations, the total number of classes would be restricted to only 66. Peirce also affirms that he had found the need to distinguish between two semeiotic objects (the immediate, present inside the Sign, and the dynamic, which always remains out of the sign) and three types of interpretants that he names as intentional, effective and communicational – but which later would be called immediate, dynamic and final.

Thomas Short (2004) states – and we agree – that the introduction of these three interpretants does not substitute the trichotomization made in 1904, when he divided the interpretant in emotional, energetic or logic. The trichotomy immediate, dynamic and logical pertains to the sign considered as a system of relations in evolution or, in other words, as a Class of Sign. The division in emotional, energetic and logic expresses the ontological status that each one of the interpretants (immediate, dynamic or logical) can assume. When the sign is analyzed in its elements and relations, the first division occupies a horizontal axis; the second, a vertical axis. The result of the combination of both of them is that the process of interpretation always occurs in three types of interpretants chosen among nine possibilities.

There is no doubt that this proliferation of interpretants reflects Pierce’s increasing concern with the third branch of semeiotic, trivium. Nevertheless, he does not see Rhetoric as identical to Methodeutic – the science that studies the methods to be applied in the scientific inquiry. He now sees Methodeutic as Rhetoric in the narrow sense (Bergman, 2000, pp.246-247) while Rhetoric in the broad sense must consider semiosis in all possible dimensions. Deducing the implications of increasingly panpsychist cosmology, Peirce concludes that the process of interpretation does not happen only in human minds. On the contrary, it is the existence of interpretation of signs in the world that explains the emergency of human intelligence. As we have already seen, the universe is a quasi-mind perfused with signs. Trying to discover the “real thing” behind the veil of signs is a foolish illusion for, as Peirce writes in 1906:

“… these signs are the very thing. Reals are signs. To try to peel off signs & get down to the real thing is like trying to peel an onion and get down to [the] onion itself, … If not consciousness then sciousness, is the very being of things; and consciousness is their co-being. … (apud Brent, 1993, p.300)

This vision of the universe as quasi-mind leads Peirce to introduce, still in 1906, the idea of commens or co-mind, a kind of mental substratum that permeates and shapes the reality. Now Peirce considers the co-mind as a necessary pre-supposed so that the sign can transfer the shape of the object to the interpretant in the communication process (Houser, 1998, p. xxx). Note that the co-mind is neither the fusion of two human minds that communicate, nor just the fusion of minds of a finite community of people, such as a group or society dividing beliefs and common purposes, as preached by his former versions of Pragmatism. The co-mind is, generically, the fusion of Object, Interpretant and Sign (O-I-S) at the very moment of communication, when information is transmitted from the Object to Interpretant having the sign as a medium. If we parallel this process with communication, the object assumes the position of an emitter (utterer) and the interpretant, a receptor (interpreter). The sign is the mediu m and, finally, the message is the Form or Idea (information) transmitted by the sign.

With the introduction of the concept of co-mind, Peirce was very close to a complete fusion between his Theory of Sign and Pragmatism. The last step would be the elimination of the intellectualist anchor he had placed over his philosophy when he affirmed that the final interpretant of a concept could only be another concept, i.e. a symbol. This barrier is finally overcome in 1907, when Peirce develops the concept of ultimate logic interpretant. According to Peirce, the ultimal instance of interpretation cannot be a symbol, a concept or a thought because this would cause it to be interpreted in further thoughts ad infinitum – as it had already been affirmed in the 1860’s in his articles about cognition. In order to avoid the infinite progression, Peirce gave to the ultimate logic interpretant the status of a habit or, when the occasion made it necessary, the effect of a change of habit produced by any intelligent mind – not necessarily human.

In 1909, while Peirce drafted A System of Logic, considered as Semeiotic, he affirmed that the ultimate interpretant was not the way a finite group of minds effectively act under the influence of a concept, but as any mind, in the general sense of the word, would act under its effect. This is an important modulation because it harmonizes the general term of logic and semeiotic with his idea of Thirdness present in nature, as he had announced in 1906. The conditional future, the habit that does not exhausts itself by any number of occurrences, or better saying, the very change of habit towards the full reasonability is now considered as the ultimate purpose of his Pragmatism.

Scholars disagree about the exact place of the ultimate interpretant in the semeiotical classification. Savan (apud Santaella, 2004, pp 78-87) believes that it is the highest degree of Thirdness applied to the Dynamic Interpretant because it is the Dynamic Interpretant the one that refers to the effects produced in the mind of the interpreter and capable of generating deliberate conduct, including a change of habit. The other two interpretants, Immediate and Final, are not that crucial for the pragmatic method. In our opinion, though, it is up to semeiotic, as the General Theory of the Signs, to consider the ultimate instance in the Immediate and Final interpretants as well. When the ultimal instance occurs in the Immediate Interpretant, we have a habitualized interpretability; when it occurs in the ambit of the Final Interpretant, we have the very sign assuming a habitual purpose, i.e. becoming a legisign.

If on the one hand semeiotic and Pragmatism now appear hand in hand by the concept of habit, on the other hand this union obliged Peirce to review the strength of the pragmatic maxim because the habit is not sustained by logical considerations only, but it demands ethical and aestheticals ones too. No wonder thus, that Peirce started to place ethics and aesthetics as normative sciences responsible, together with logic, for controlling the human conduct. The Pragmatism (or Pragmaticism), set mainly over the deductive logic, becomes limited – not to say diminished – in this new configuration. In fact, in October 1913, a few months before his death and while writing his last article, Peirce shows uncertainty about the validity of the Pragmatism, for his method of clearing up ideas might have been too clung to the analytical deduction while despised the creative power of abduction, or uberty (EP2, p.463 e ss).

If Pragmatism is kept restricted to intellectual minds, semeiotic does not suffer from this limitation and spreads out through all possible fields of phenomena. When searching in his Theory of Sign for a definite proof of his Pragmaticism, Peirce ended up taking semeiotic to the maximum degree of the transdisciplinarity. Semeiotic is so general that might even be able to compete with mathematic as the science of the first universal principles. If the universe is made of signs, and semiosis is another name for communication, as Peirce seems to sustain in the final phase of his intellectual life, then a unified theory of reality seen as a process of development of information, if we should be able to conceive it someday, it will necessarily involve semeiotic.

Our first steps on the way to the solution of the enigma of the 66 classes of signs, still in the entrance of the labyrinth of semeiotic, must cross phenomenology or, using the term invented by Peirce, phaneroscopy. He defines it as:

that study which, supported by the direct observation of phanerons and generalizing its observations, signalizes several very broad classes of phanerons; describes the features of each; shows that although they are so inextricably mixed together that no one can be isolated, yet it is manifest that their characters are quite disparate; then proves, beyond question, that a certain very short list comprises all of these broadest categories of phanerons there are; and finally proceeds to the laborious and difficult task of enumerating the principal subdivisions of those categories (CP 1.286)

Peirce starts this task taking into account the two most influent lists of categories in the history of philosophy: Aristotle’s, with its table of ten predicates, and Kant’s, which enumerated twelve basic categories. Peirce noticed that these two lists shared a similar internal pattern: they always suggested triadic ramifications among their elements. This insight was enough for him to develop his fundamental list of three categories, which in the New List are called quality, relation and representation.

In the following figure, we present Peirce’s first list of categories in a triangular scheme, which allows us to visualize the relations among them.

Peirce tried other words to summarize his categories, but remained unsatisfied because none seemed to be able to capture the deepness of their meaning. On the contrary, the choice of terms from common language or extracted from classic Greek or Latin vocabulary only worsened the confusion because they sometimes carried along meanings that had little to do with those he wished to express. In order to prevent contamination of his three categories with the rancidity accumulated by the philosophical terms of the past, Peirce resorted to mathematics. He finally decided to call them Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness and made a great effort to prove that they were universal, complete and irreducible (CP 8.328; 6.342-343).

The categories and their degenerations

Peirce’s first formulation of the categories was born under the aegis of his juvenile nominalism. When he started his way towards realism, he felt the necessity of revising them. That happened in 1885, when in the article One, Two, Three: Fundamental Categories of Thought and of Nature Peirce presented his categories no longer using the traditional logic of subject and predicate, but from the point of view of the logic of relations (Murphey, 1993, p.303).

The result of his continuing research on the essence of the categories debouched, in 1903, on the third conference he gave in Harvard in April 1903, The Categories Continued, when Peirce introduced the concept of degeneration of the relations. He was then convinced that the more complex categories (Secondness and Thirdness) could suffer what he called degeneration: a reduction of their ontological state. Thus, while Firstness cannot suffer degeneration, Secondness can degenerate towards Firstness; Thirdness, in its turn, can suffer two degrees of degeneration, becoming initially Secondness and, in a subsequent degeneration, Firstness. When not degenerated, the categories are called genuine (CP 5.66).

The resulting six divisions are:

Firstness

Firstness of Secondness

Firstness of Thirdness

Secondness

Secondness of Thirdness

Thirdness

During the fourth of his conferences in Harvard, The Seven Systems of Metaphysics, Peirce presented the diagram below, showing the possible ways of combining the categories and their degenerations and how each combination origins a different philosophic system. In this figure drawn by Peirce, each category is represented by a correspondent number of traces (cf. EP:180):

From the Categories to the Predicaments

In another version of Peirce’s original diagram, a little modified, it is possible to notice more clearly how the categories and their degenerations relate to one another. We have created a specific notation to facilitate its visualization: we will use an apostrophe (’) to indicate one degree of degeneration and two apostrophes (”) to indicate two degrees of degeneration. The three fundamental categories occupy the central hexagon of the figure, but their expansion (through degenerations) intersperses their own degenerated stages among themselves, as it can be seen in the figure below:

The more intermal part of the figure corresponds to the three cenopitagoric categories as they really appear in the phaneron. By maintaining the term categories for the elements of the internal part, we will use Predicaments for the more external ones, which include the categories and their degenerations. The predicaments can be thought as rhemes or predicates that represent the fundamental categories for an interpretant mind. By mind we mean not only human minds nor minds of living beings, but the Peircean notion of mind as a property of the whole universe.

Universal Predicaments

We claim that the categories and their degenerations can be arranged in a table of fundamental ontological properties, as we do below. Our choice of colors was inspired by Goethe’s theory of colors, wich we found surprisingly close to Peirce’s ideas.

The categorical degenerations suggested by Peirce are neither marginal phenomena nor extravagant refinements of his metaphysics. On the contrary, they reveal what we will call “Universal Predicaments” that can be organized in a triangle as below:

The arrows that go from 1 to 2, and then from 2 to 3, mean material implication or illation. This is the implicative movement that produces the most fundamental rule of logic, the guiding-principle that Aristotle called nota notae, from the latim nota notae est nota rei ipsius or “the predicate of a predicate is also the predicate of the subject of the predicate” (Lizska, 1996, p.58). Peirce used several symbols to express this logical relation, but the one seeming more appropriated to him was , certainly because it expresses an inequality useful to the numerical treatment he was “-<” applying to his Categories.

The arrow that goes from 1 to 2, taken separately, means involvement, in such a way that we can say, applying the nota notae principle, that:

1) quality is involved in spontaneity
2) spontaneity is involved in individuality
3) quality is involved in individuality

The inversion in the direction of this arrow produces what we will call dissolution.

The arrow that goes from 2 to 3, taken separately, means abstraction, in such a way that we can say, applying once again the nota notae principle, that:

1) particularity is an abstraction from individuality
2) generality is an abstraction from particularity
3) generality is an abstraction from individuality

The inversion of the direction of this arrow produces instantiation.

The movement from 1 to 3 described by the arrows causes semeiosis to develop, in such a way that a state in which there is little variety of properties of few things develops continuously into a state of many properties involved in many things, generating increase of information. In fact, in 1893 Peirce affirmed that:

Analogous to increase of information in us, there is a phenomenon of nature–development–by which a multitude of things come to have a multitude of characters, which have been involved in few characters in few things (CP 2.419).

Uncertainty in the predicaments

The analysis of the diagram of the relations among the universal predicaments reveals that, apart from a clear general tendency towards the increase of information, there is a principle of uncertainty between conjugated pairs of predicaments, here algebraically expressed by the sign of multiplication. According to this principle, in any state of information there will always be an entanglement between opposed pairs of predicaments, in such a way that we will never be able to distill them until their purity. The correlation happens as the table below exposes:

The relations above can be better represented in the following figure:

Let us explore a little more the meaning of this principle:

a) Quality x Particularity

Quality is pure intensity and originality, but these characteristics will fade when appearing replicated. On the other hand, a Particular is a replication of a model, and qualitative variations disturb its aimed fidelity to the norm expressed by the model. An artist, for instance, a painter, uses a qualitative strategy, while the graphic technician responsible for reproducing the painting on a printed poster uses the replicative strategy. For the first one, the loss of originality decreases the value of his work whereas, for the second, the occurrence of originality in the copies is considered a mistake to be eliminated. In fact, since Benjamin (1980), much has been said about the relations between quality and particularity in the work of art submitted to processes of replication, which tend to consume, to a certain degree, its qualitative or original “aura”.

b) Chaos X Order

Chaos and order are closely related (Prigogine, 1996), as well as their derivations in the form of spontaneity x necessity, irritation x habit. Although there is a teleological movement conducting the reality to the strengthening of law and to the crystallization of habit, the principle of uncertainty affirms that, in any given state of information, chaos and order appear in varied tinges, without ever allowing one to eliminate completely the other. There are neither laws so rigid that cannot suffer exceptions, nor such absolute chaos that does not contain in its interior a seed of order.

c) Individuality X Holicity

An individual only exists as a fracture in the continuum, whereas the continuum only exists as the suppression of individuality. For this reason, one depends on the other. Actually, they co-exist so that every individual has idealized limits and every continuum can be thought as an individual (cf. CP 4.172). The Principle of Uncertainty of Heisenberg and its derivations in the form of oppositions like particle x wave type, locality x non-locality, discrete universe x holographic universe seem to be born from this correlation.

The categories and their degenerations, once applied to logic, enabled Peirce to build his first classificatory system upon three correlates, destined to the audience of the lectures that he gave in Lowell Institute, in 1903, and printed in the Syllabus.

Between 1902 and 1903, in the same period Peirce intensified his studies about Perception, he understood that a complete description of the sign should take into account not only its representative and interpretative aspects, but also the material or presentative ones too. Something is a Sign only if it is interpreted as such by something or someone. This is the presentative dimension that, added to the other two, will form the three correlates of the 1903 3-trichotomic classification (based on three trichotomies):

The relations among the three correlates can be represented by Peirce’s symbol of illation enchaining the three of them: 1C -< 2C -< 3C.

The Table of the Ten Classes of Signs

The crossing of the three ontological Categories (Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness), with three Correlates of the Sign (1C, 2C and 3C), produces the following Table of Signs (the terminology is the same used by Peirce in 1903):

Having this list of nine genuine types of signs (that is, signs without any degeneration) in hand, we can relate the three Correlates using the same rule of material implication we already discussed when we saw the universal predicaments.

By the principle of the nota notae, the Third Correlate can be a Quality in any situation, for this predicament is always present in all three Correlates, whether in its pure form or involved in Existence or Law. The Third Correlate can be an Existent only if the two others are at least Existents too. And it can be a Law only if the two others are necessarily Laws. Similar restrictions occur between the First and Second Correlates.

When we apply this rule to explore the possible combinations among the genuine types of signs distributed in the three correlates, we have the formation of ten Genuine Classes of Signs:

The ten genuine Classes of Signs can be arranged triangularly to form the famous figure Peirce made of them in the Syllabus.

The arrows that go from 1 to 2 and from 2 to 3 fulfill the same functions we saw in the discussion about the predicaments: involvement and abstraction when the movement is crescent; and instantiation and dissolution when the movement is the inverse.;

The degeneration of the types of signs

As we did when deriving six universal predicaments from three Categories, we now apply the notation of an apostrophe (’) to indicate one degree of degeneration, and two apostrophes (”) to indicate double degeneration. A genuine Secondness can degenerate in Firstness of Secondness (1’) and a genuine Thirdness can degenerate either in a Secondness of Thirdness (2’) or in a Firstness of Thirdness (1”).

In the table below, I present the genuine signs and their possible ontological degenerations the way I conceive them:

Some of the terms above, as Syntax, Metaphor and Ergoseme were created or discussed by Peirce in his articles and manuscripts. In this case, my concern was to try to respect the meaning intended by Peirce, although using it in favor of the theoretical board that I am assembling. Metonymy has an already established meaning in semeiotic and Theory of Language, pairing with Metaphor – what I found interesting and promising for the research on the relations between semeiotic and cognitive sciences in general. Altersign and Holosign are my introductions. They were made, however, trying to respect the rule of composition adopted by Peirce when inventing Qualisign, Sinsign and Legisign, in which the prefix denotes the main property of each type of sign.

The Periodic Table of 66 Classes of Signs

If we apply the principle of material implication among the Correlates (1C-<2C-<3C), taking into account the types of genuine and degenerated signs that we have described before, we get as result the arrangement of 66 Classes of Signs.

In our Semeiotic Wheel, we cross Goethe’s Theory of Colors and Peirce’s Theory of Categories to build a moving disk where the 66 classes of signs follow naturally from the logic described above.

These 66 Classes of Signs can be arranged into a triangular figure that preserves the same relations of involvement and generalization of the Ten Classes of Genuine Signs. Actually, the triangle is clearly an expansion from the triangle presented by Peirce in the Syllabus and discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In fact, the genuine signs appear distributed throughout the triangle of the 66 classes maintaining the same logical relations of implication and involvement they have in the 10-class triangle.

The twelve voids, represented by black holes, appear by a mathematical necessity linked to the number of possible degenerations in each of the three vertexes: the pole of Thirdness may degenerate twice, the one of Secondness just once and the one of Firstness does not suffer any degeneration.

A similar feature can be seen in Cartesian geometry. World map charters face it when they struggle to represent the surface of the Earth (a three-dimensional object) on a bi-dimensional sheet of paper: they must choose between distorting the representation of the territories closer to the poles or, otherwise, leaving empty spaces, as we did.

Peirce never declared what relation he imagined to exist among the 3-trichotomic classification, based on three correlates and published in the Syllabus, in 1903, and his later attempts based on ten trichotomies. Some commentators affirm that the 10-tricotomic classification supplanted the previous ones (and, consequently, the early versions should be discarded). Others, in agreement to our opinion, suggest that the two classifications may have an illative relation: the 10-tricotomic must be considered a detailed development of the 3-tricotomic one, which remains valid to the analysis of less complex phenomena.

We think that the introduction of the new trichotomies opens the fan of the three correlates to show their minute constitution, revealing the detailed constitutive characters of each class of sign. In fact, the classification based on the three correlates seems to be rougher, while the 10-trichotomic presents a thinner grain of salt. Maybe that is why the idea of degeneration and its associated concepts, such as the Hypoicons, Hyposemes and Sub-indexes, all treated with some importance until 1903, disappear after 1905, probably turning out to be unnecessary thanks to the distinctions enabled by the new trichotomies.

The proposal of classification we will offer next is based on the distinction of eleven (and not ten, as Peirce did) essential characters of the sign, their ordering according to the rule of material implication, the trichotomic division of each one of the eleven characters according to the ontological categories and, finally, on what we believe is the dynamic movement that enlivens semiosis. Our starting point will be the list of 10 trichotomies Peirce presents in his manuscripts and some of the letters he exchanged with Lady Welby (CP 8.342 and ff; EP2: 477-491) after 1905.

There are many similarities between our proposal and Peirce’s late attempts, but there are also many important differences. Although it is possible to overlap mine and Peirce’s classification to some degree, the fact is that the introduction of the eleventh trichotomy blocks any possibility of correspondence point by point between them. In addition, we should not forget that Peirce did not explain in detail many of his new trichotomies, which would make the comparison even more difficult. We opted therefore for an analysis of our eleven trichotomies respecting the internal logic of our system, hoping the rationale we are using to construct the 66 classes of signs is sound.

The expansion of the trichotomies

After 1905 Peirce saw the need to expand his semiotic in order to handle the results he had obtained in studies such as the Theory of Perception. In addition, he hoped to extract from an enlarged semiotic his longed-for proof of Pragmatism. His studies in phenomenology led him to distinguish between the two types of objects: the dynamic, which is the object that determines the sign and always remains out of it; and the immediate, which is the object represented inside the sign.

In this same period Peirce also started to distinguish three types of interpretants, named by him, most of the times, immediate, dynamic and final (CP 4.536). Actually, this terminology varied quite much between 1905 and 1908, the period he was dedicating much attention to the division of interpretants, probably influenced, as we have seen, by the exchange of letters with Lady Welby.

In total,  Peirce’s mature semiotic counts six elementary trichotomies, now called aspects:

Sign (S)

Immediate Object (IO)

Dynamic Object (DO)

Immediate Interpretant (II)

Dynamic Interpretant (DI)

Final Interpretant (FI)

Peirce’s Ten Aspects

In the letters sent to Welby in 1908, Peirce worked with the hypothesis that the sign could be analyzed in ten trichotomies or ten aspects (CP 8.344) he listed this way:

1st, According to the Mode of Apprehension of the sign itself,
2nd, According to the Mode of Presentation of the Immediate Object,
3rd, According to the Mode of Being of the Dynamical Object,
4th, According to the Relation of the sign to its Dynamical Object,
5th, According to the Mode of Presentation of the Immediate Interpretant,
6th, According to the Mode of Being of the Dynamical Interpretant,
7th, According to the Relation of the sign to the Dynamical Interpretant,
8th, According to the Nature of the Normal Interpretant,
9th, According to the Relation of the sign to the Normal Interpretant,
10th, According to the Triadic Relation of the sign to its Dynamical Object and to its Normal Interpretant.

The result of the trichotomization of these ten aspects, including the names that Peirce suggested for each of the internal divisions in different moments, can be summarized in a table as Queiroz (2004, p. 101) did:

The aspects extracted from the analysis of the phaneron

The phaneron is formed by the collection of everything present in any mind at any given moment. It is the perfect sign, dynamic and built synthetically by the triadic relation S-DO-FI. The first work of the semioticist is to “break” these relations, in a way similar to what a chemist does with a substance, to achieve its elements and constructive relations.

When we apply the analytical tools given by phenomenology, we produce an analysis of the relations that goes from the genuinely triadic level towards the most degenerated ones until we achieve the constitutive elements of the sign. We will call Analytical Cascade of the Phaneron the representation of this analysis:

In the figure above, we count eleven trichotomies and not ten as Peirce insisted during all the mature phase of his research. The new trichotomy is the relation among sign, dynamic object and dynamic interpretant (S- DO- DI) and the question that naturally arises is about its impact in the arrangement of the classes of signs and how it can help us to produce a complete classification of all possible types of signs.

Descriptions of the new trichotomies

We have already described the six elementary aspects of sign – those which do not envolve relations. We are now going to describe the ones formed by dyadic and triadic relations.

Peirce explains that when we compose these relations, we shall take into consideration only those trichotomies in which the sign is a member of the relation. This rule excludes, for example, relations such as DO-DI, DO-FI or DI-FI (see in Liszka, 1996, p.130-131, a list with all possible relations left out due to this rule of exclusion).

Relation of the Sign to the Dynamic Object (S-DO)

Relation of the Sign to the Dynamic Interpretant (S-DI)

Relation of the Sign to the Final Interpretant (S-FI)

Relation among Sign, Dynamic Object and Dynamic Interpretant (S-DO-DI)

Relation among Sign, Dynamic Object and Final Interpretant (S-DO-FI)

Axis of Semeiosis

The Analytical Cascade also enables us to divise the three great axis of Semeiosis. They are:

Objectivation (Ob):

IO ——–DO——–S-DO———S-DO-DI——— S-DO-FI

Interpretation (In):

II———-DI———–S-DI———-S-DO-DI

Signification (Si):

S ———-FI————S-FI———–S-DO-FI

The rule of the Triangle of Existence

The trichotomization of the eleven aspects of the sign would lead to the production of 78 classes. However, not all of them are logically possible. Twelve classes are logic aberrances because they do not respect what we will call the rule of the triangle of existence.

This rule is necessary to preserve the reality of Secondness in semeiosis. If the sign is an existent, for instance, it should be materially connected either to an immediate object or to a dynamic object. One cannot have a fingerprint without having it materially connected to an existent finger, nor one can satisfy the desire of eating a piece of cake without having a piece of cake really being eaten (or at least a hallucination that guarantees a fictional experience of a fingerprint and of a piece of cake being eaten).

The rule of the triangle of existence has two parts:

1) determines that there cannot be Secondness on the Signification axis without having Secondness in each of the other two axes. This must be true when we see Secondness in any of the four trichotomies placed on the Signification axis: S, FI, S-FI and S-DO-FI.

2) establishes that there should be a number of triangles of existence always equal to the number of Secondness manifested on the Signification axis. Thus:

a) If on the Signification axis there are existents in two periods, so there should be two existent triangles linking the three axes (one nested into the other).
b) In case S, FI and S-FI are existents, there should be so, correspondently, three nested existent triangles uniting the axes.

There is another important observation to be made: the trichotomy S-DO-DI participates both in the Objectivation and the Interpretation axes (because it is construed with DO and DI), so it is enough for S-DO-DI to be existent in order to guarantee existence conditions for both axes. Similarly, the trichotomy S-DO-FI participates in the three axes, so that the occurrence of an existent in this trichotomy automatically produces an existence triangle covering the flow of semiosis.

The eleven aspects of sign distributed along the three axis of the Cascade of Phaneron are ordered by a flow of information. The figure below shows semeiosis as a dynamic process organized in hierarchies.

Such flux of information needs no structural components such as “energy”, “matter” or “channel” but instead is defined as purely relational and based only on the aspects of the sign.

General Properties of Semeiosis

Semeiosis and dynamic systems

Semeiosis behaves like a system built from the recursive interaction among the trichotomies (11 aspects of the sign) on the axis of objectivation, interpretation and signification. The great system of semeiosis can be divided into smaller sub-systems. This nesting of systems creates dynamical hierarchies (cf. Collier, 1999. p. 111 and 2003, p. 109).

Semeiosis and periodicity

Semeiosis is a periodical flux. By periodicity we mean the phenomenon of repetition of a group of properties in steady intervals (Scerri, 1998), although there is increase of complexity in the whole. The periods seem to be connected as to produce what the systems theorists call resonance – a harmonic relation between frequencies that enable the emergence of new properties in the system.

The periods of the Solenoid of Semeiosis are:

Grounding

Presentation

Representation

Communication

Semeiosis and autopoiesis

Semiosis is autopoietic (Maturana and Varela, 1973, p. 78), i.e. it produces itself from a fundamental complementarity between structure and function.

Semeiosis and development

Semeiosis is ampliative, starting from the simple towards the varied and complex, i.e. it moves towards the increase of information.

Phases of semeiosis

Semeiosis has four phases which describe the stages of inquiry. A phase always starts with Firstness in an aspect of the signification axis and is completed with Thirdness in an aspect of this same axis, but on a higher period. In other words, the presence of the Thirdness (habit) in the signification axis always marks the end of a phase and beginning of the next one.

There is a good reason for that: the creation of a habit on the axis of Signification causes the whole period in question to close a loop of habits, producing a feed-back of information governing it. Depending on the probability law associated to such habit, the period might acquire a certain rigidity and opacity, losing its livelyness.

The phases already dominated by such habits leave the foreground, where the dynamism occurs and become inert. This is the same mechanism that sends to the genetic code the features selected in the biologic evolutionary process, or sends the habits acquired by iteration of experiences to the unconscious mental structures.

The phases of inquiry

The four phases of semeiosis can be related to the four stages of inquiry (cf. Santaella, 2004, p. 81):

Perceptive

Inquisitive

Deliberative

Scientific

The razor of causality

The trichotomization of the eleven aspects of the sign leads to the production of 78 classes. However, not all of them are logically possible. Twelve classes are logic aberrances because they do not respect what we will call the rule of the razor of causality. This rule is necessary to preserve the reality of Secondness in semiosis and thus also the causality.

If the sign is an existent  it should be materially connected either to an immediate object or to a dynamic object. One cannot have a fingerprint, for instance, without having it materially connected to an existent finger, nor one can satisfy the desire of eating a piece of cake without having a piece of cake really being eaten (or at least a hallucination that guarantees a fictional experience of a piece of cake being eaten).

The rule of the razor of causality has two parts:

1) determines that there cannot be Secondness on the Signification axis without having Secondness in each of the other two axes. This must be true when we see Secondness in any of the four trichotomies placed on the Signification axis: S, FI, S-FI and S-DO-FI.

2) establishes that there should be a number n of existence in the axis of Objectivation and Interpretation always equal to the number of Secondness manifested on the Signification axis.

There is another important observation to be made: the trichotomy S-DO-DI participates both in the Objectivation and the Interpretation axes (because it is construed with DO and DI), so it is enough for S-DO-DI to be existent in order to guarantee existence conditions for both axes. Similarly, the trichotomy S-DO-FI participates in the three axes, so that the occurrence of an existent in this trichotomy automatically produces existence also the the two other axis.

The 66 Classes of Sign can be arranged in a triangular chart having the categories (Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness) as vertexes. The black windows or “holes” correspond to the classes eliminated by the rule of the razor of causality.

The arrows correspond to the logic relation of illation or material implication. The arrows that go from 1 to 2 correspond to the four periods semiosis: grounding, presentation, representation and communication. As a corollary, Presentation involves Grounding, Representation involves the first two and Communication involves all the other three.

The arrows going from 2 to 3, which we know indicate as generalization, here also correspond to the four phases or stages of inquiry: Perceptive, Inquisitive, Deliberative and Scientific. This means that all knowledge begins with Perception, that Deliberation demands both Perception and Inquisition and the scientific method is a generalization of the previous ones.

A handful of vagueness

Peirce’s categoriology, with its predicaments and relations of uncertainty, form the continuous substratum that allows the action of sign. Therefore, semeiosis should also be considered as a continuous phenomenon subject to the same relations of uncertainty, although also describable through general classes capable of grouping the signs according to their most remarkable features. As Mihai Nadin affirms (1983, p.163):

The typology of the sign classes (the ten, the 28, the 66), as confirmed by the mathematical theory of categories should be understood as a network of fundamental reference points in the generalized semeiotic field. Whenever this typology is transformed into an end in itself, it leads only to formalistic semeiotics. To give a name to a sign (to identify it) does not solve the problem of the way it functions in the semeiotic field. The sign can be conceived and interpreted only within the framework of the logic of vagueness and with the participation of the doctrine of the continuum. Fuzzy categories, the extension of the mathematical concept of category, fulfill this desideratum and perfect Peirce’s table of fundamental signs by realizing the image of the continuum, hence also the dynamics of sign processes.

The third branch of the trivium

The study of the formal proprieties of signs is the role of the first branch of semiotic, the one that Peirce called speculative grammar. The second branch is critical logic, the study of the conditions that enable the sign to truly represent its object. The third branch is communication, which Peirce also calls rhetoric or methodeutic – the study of the process of transference of information and the methods of inquiry necessary in the search of truth. Peirce said that communication (or rhetoric) was the most important of the three branches of semiotic, for it would lead to the most important philosophic discoveries. However, most part of his research in semiotic was dedicated to speculative grammar: an intense, almost obsessive, search for the correct definition of sign and the classification of its possible types that lasted for more than four decades.

The reason for that is simple: grammar, being more basic and universal, is the branch that must supply both logic and rhetoric with the fundaments that will allow them to fully develop. It is not possible to advance our understanding of communication without first solving some of the problems that surround the definition and the classification of signs. Peirce felt that deeply. To his great frustration, Peirce’s most important system of logic, based on diagrams (the Existential Graphs), remained incomplete because some of its aspects depended on the understanding of how the sign evolves when representing its object. Communication depends both on logic and grammar and there is no way for it to develop independently from its correlates.

That explains why Minute Semeiotic is dedicated largely to speculative grammar, in the hope that, when we clear up some obscure questions about the functioning of signs, a theory of the communication might be built on a more solid basis than the one we have today.

The most general definition of communication states that it is a transmission of information, with no need to worry a priori about what information is, where it goes through, and the kind of transmission that is involved. It is enough to verify that some change of state, or transformation, has happened either in the world external to us or in the interior of our minds, to establish the occurrence of some kind of communication.

If information flows everywhere, as physics and biology have demonstrated in the past decades, we should consider communication as an ontological component of reality. This is the vanguard position in the studies relating communication and semiotic, whose theoretical possibilities have been attracting researchers from several fields.

Communication is not the same everywhere, though. It is necessary to establish a communicational gradient that starts from the transmission of information in the basic level of matter, strongly constrained by the laws of physics, and climbs the ladder of complexity to achieve the freest and most creative forms, as those among intelligent and conscious beings. In fact, Nöth states that it is not possible to postulate a clear cut border between communicative and non-communicative phenomena in nature, but one should conceive a gradual transition which goes from the most rudimentary proto-communicative interaction towards the most complex ones (apud Santaella, 2001, p.17).

Following Peirce’s division of categories, we can say that there is a quality of communication that perfuses the whole universe. It might happen that such quality of communication is turned into local existence, allowing the transmission of information. And that single transmission might become a medium for a flow of meaning.

Therefore, we consider communication as a product of the intentionality, or “mentality”, which sprouts from the elemental levels of nature and goes up in the hierarchy of nature until it achieves its most elaborate forms in human consciousness (cf. Short, 2004, p. 14). That is the reason for adopting in this work the “grand vision” of the Peircean semiotic, which has been supported by Deely (1994). This conception of semiotic can comprise even the physical processes of nature, considered as result of the action of signs, a phenomenon Peirce named as semeiosis.

It is from this point of view that we defend that semiotic and communication can be united in the same science. The reason is that the action of signs corresponds precisely to the essential definition of communication we provided above: wherever there is semeiosis, there is also a change in the state of things, which involves a flow of information.

This broad conception of communication, based on a holistic approach of semeiotic, usually bristle the theorists who insist on a logocentric vision of the area, not to say a mediacentric one. They think the science of communication should be narrowed to the human culture (cf. Eco, 1977); some on them restrict the field even more to concentrate only on the media of Mass Communication. This restriction is, in my opinion, a kind of intellectual perversion because it transforms the accident in norm. Communication is not born with the drum, with the book, with the telegraph, newspaper, television or any other technology. On the contrary, these technologies are created only to widen, improve, and make more efficient a process of communication in which we are immersed and on which the survival of every organized system depends, be it a single individual or the most complex conceivable society.

That was certainly the opinion of Peirce in the last years of his intellectual production. In 1903, he affirmed that the whole universe is a sign similar to an impressionistic painting (CP 5.119). In 1905, he wrote that “a sign perfectly conforms to the definition of a medium of communication” (MS 283). In 1911, he defined sign using the reading of a newspaper as example: “if a person reads an item of news in newspaper, his first effect will probably be causing in this mind what may conveniently be called an “image” of the object, without making any judgment about its reality” (MS 670).

From the universe to a page of newspaper or a thought, therefore, there is a flux of information that unites us all as signs.