Dicent Indexical Legisign – A New Element in the Periodic Table of Semiotics

The seventh sign in Peirce's famous 10-sign taxonomy of the 1903 Syllabus has gone strangely unnoticed. It is the sign type of "Dicent Indexical Legisigns", a result of the combinatory strategy of the 3x3 elementary sign aspects defined by the three basic sign trichotomies of Qualisign-Sinsign-Legisign, Icon-Index-Symbol and Rheme-Dicisign-Argument, a new strategy developed by Peirce in that text. It is well known how such aspects do not combine freely, hence not resulting in 3x3x3 = 27 sign types, but only in 10 sign types. The Dicent Indexical Legisign (no. 7 in the list of the ten types) forms the middle of three Dicisign types in the ten-types classification, the other two being the Dicent Sinsigns (4) and the Dicent Symbols (9), respectively. There are thus three subtypes of propositions – "Dicisign" or "Dicent" having been chosen as the notion for the new, generalized concept of proposition. This new taxonomy thus adds two simpler sign types to the crucial category of "Dicent Symbols" which had constituted the center of Peirce's logic and semiotic interest in propositions ever since the 1860s. Dicent Symbols and Dicent Sinsigns constitue sign types with a long ancestry in Peirce – the former are simply ordinary propositions (even if they are, in 1903, considerably extended such as to cover also partially or wholly non-linguistic versions of propositions), and the latter are Indices able to express propositions, like the standard Peircean example of weathercocks, considered as signs at least since the 1890s. Dicent Sinsigns, however, in addition to such natural dicent indices, also comprise the special sub-subsets of replicas, that is, individual, concrete expressions of three higher, general categories: Dicent Incexical Sinsigns, Dicent Symbols, and Arguments (2.265). This covers, e.g., all sorts of particular utterances or representations of standard propositions, such as this very sentence you are now reading on page or screen. So, the two combination definitions defining Dicent Symbols (Legisign+Symbol+Dicisign) and Dicent Sinsigns (Sinsign+Index+Dicisign) are pretty easily interpreted from or extended from already studied standard sign types in the development of Peirce's semiotics. But what about the Dicent Indexical Legisigns? Which kind of signs do they cover, more precisely?
Land: 
Dänemark
Thema und Achsen: 
Gründung und logische Grundlagen der Semiotik
Semiotik und Philosophie
Institution: 
Aalborg University
Mail: 
stjern@hum.aau.dk

Estado del abstract

Estado del abstract: 
Accepted
Desarrollado por gcoop.