Confidence through the semiotic process

Abstract

AbstractPeirce’s semiotics is a formal doctrine of signs. As such, semiotics “would be concerned, in part, to determine the conditions for counting anything as true” (Liszka 1996: 2). Sometimes, semiotics is reduced to its first branch, speculative grammar, which concerns the classification of signs. However, critic and methodeutic are fundamental to guarantee the accuracy of the semiotic process. Critic gives “the conditions which determine the reasoning to be secure” (c.1902, CP 2.1) and methodeutic is the “study of the necessary conditions of the transmission of meaning by signs from mind to mind” (c.1897, CP 1.444). When we observe the system of sixty-six sign classes, we can find a method that provides confidence in the reasoning process. That means we can find classes of signs that represent critic and methodeutic in this system. The set of symbolic signs are the core of this process. In this paper, I will examine the interpretants of symbolic signs in order to describe the production of interpretants that increase the level of confidence in reasoning, contributing to the evolution of thought. The system of sixty-six sign classes provides a more complex set of interpretants, which might show the relation between the three branches of semiotics.