Common sources for the semiotic of Charles Peirce and John Poinsot.

Beuchot, Mauricio ; Deely, John

The prevalence today of "semiotics" as the preferred linguistic form for designating the study of signs in its various aspects already conceals a history, a story of the ways in which, layer by layer, the temporal achievement we call human understanding builds, through public discourse, ever new levels of common acceptance each of which presents itself as, if not self-evident, at least the common wisdom. Overcoming such present-mindedness is not the least of the tasks faced by the awakening of semiotic consciousness.

One need not go back very far in the literature on this subject to find that the term more widely bandied about with regard to the study of signs and sign-systems (codes) was rather "semiology," particularly in its French form. As recently as 1971, Thomas Sebeok reported that. "this is the term that, reinforced by the prestige of Parisian intellectual life, now turns up regularly in British newspapers and magazines, such as The Times Literary Supplement, and in an outpouring of volumes on the most diverse verbal and nonverbal arts, ranging from architecture . . . to cinematography."(1)

What a difference a day makes. There are a host of reasons, from superficial to profound, that play a role in the current dominance of "semiotics" as the preferred linguistic form for designating the study of signs. The reversal of dominance in the discursive rivalry between "semiology" and "semiotics" as cultural forms of understanding, we want to suggest, is owing to the gradual, not to say grudging, recognition of the comparative depth, scope, and importance of the studies authored, on the one hand, by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and those who took their principal inspiration in the study of signs from his work; and, on the other hand, by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and those who took principal inspiration in the study of signs from his work. Saussure, of course, coined the term "semiologie," while Peirce, though he did not coin the word "semiotic," nonetheless took it over from the desuetude into which it had fallen as a neologism at the end of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1690 and put it into current circulation.(2)

The last word has not been spoken, but insofar as it is a question of positive evidence, we are obliged to grant that despite their coevality, Saussure and Peirce formulated their ideas for a doctrine or general theory of signs completely independently of one another.(3) This comparative autonomy of their central proposals is reflected in the fact that Peirce sees semiotic as a foundational and architectonic inquiry, while Saussure sees it as a subalternate science that, when realized, "would form a part of social psychology, and hence of general psychology."(4)

Partly for reasons of European chauvinism, partly for reasons of their respective biographies (which, in Peirce's case, destined his work to a long obscurity, while the remarks of Saussure on semiology were brought to light within three years of his death), Saussure's proposal for a development of semiology as "a science which studies the life of signs at, the heart of social life"(5) immediately caught the imagination of Europe's intellectual class and became a rallying cry for a flurry of writing. However, what Sebeok said of the works of "Morris, Hjelmslev, Barthes, and their numerous epigones on the holistic force of semiotics" can also be said of Saussure's own remarks on semiology: they "hardly exceed programmatic pronouncements."(6) By contrast, Peirce's writing on semiotic comprises the body of many volumes and calls for a fundamental rethinking of the traditional questions of science, epistemology, and experience together with a recuperation of the previous history of philosophy neglected by modernity, with a particular emphasis - for good reasons, some of the specifics of which we shall be shortly considering - on the achievements of Latin scholasticism.(7) In short, Peirce's call for a doctrine of signs, demanding a thorough overhaul of intellectual traditions and disciplines in general, even had it been more effectively promulgated in his lifetime, lent itself nowhere near so easily as Saussure's vision for semiology to a popular rallying point for journalistic indulgences.

The fact remains that, as far as the contemporary scene goes, Saussure became the father of semiology and Peirce the father of semiotics, both conceived as the general study, science, or doctrine of signs.(8) In gaining a cultural beachhead for thematizing and generalizing thought about the sign, semiological thinking led the way. The semiological tradition took as its basis the idea that "what Saussure has written about language can be extended to the sign in general."(9) For Peirce, by contrast, language was only a species of "the sign in general" and, as a species, did not and could not exhaust the generic element which pertained to all signs and sign-systems, most of which are definitively not of the character specific to the linguistic sign.(10) Thus the semiological tradition has always thought in terms of the play of differences at work in the contrast between "signifiants" and "signifies" (exactly what Derrida has termed "differance"(11)). At the same time, the tradition of semiotics, without by any means denying the limited viability and importance for human discourse, as such, of such a dyadic model, has always further insisted on the inadequacy in principle of any dyad or approach in terms of dyadic oppositions for explaining the sign in its proper being, which consists rather in an irreducibly triadic relation between representamen or sign-vehicle, object signified, and the interpretant linking the two through the action of signs, the process labeled by Peirce "semiosis."(12)

The MacCannells wrote a book aptly titled The Time of the Sign.(13) Indeed, one of the mysteries at which we can so far only guess is the matter of why semiotics arrived only so lately on the scene of human knowledge reflexively considered. For some, this neoteric quality is itself a sign that semiotics pertains more to the fads and fashions than to the substance of knowledge. Semiotics, as they would have it, is a matter for the sociology of knowledge and pop culture to reckon with, not for the serious disciplines with an indubitable pedigree like physics (which goes all the way back to the seventeenth century) or philosophy (which is even older).

Notwithstanding, we are convinced that the identification by Peirce of the action of signs as a distinct subject; matter, whose study gives rise to a distinct body of knowledge, ensures that semiotics as a distinct field of investigation and growing body of transdisciplinary knowledge cannot much longer be kept, out of the substance and foundation of the university curriculum, particularly as that curriculum lays any claim to continuing the tradition of education in the so-called liberal arts, which have always had an implicit semiotic character. This despite the great resistance of the practitioners of the traditional disciplines to a study which inherently penetrates their academic fortress and moves freely across established disciplinary. boundaries (precisely in order to investigate what makes such boundaries proper and possible in the first, place as achievements of semiosis), and despite the great confusion of semiotics with particular methods such as hermeneutics or therapies such as deconstruction. While sometimes enhancive of semiotic consciousness, such methods emphatically do not and cannot, in the nature of the case constitute that consciousness or gainsay its positive achievements as establishing the foundations of knowledge and experience in the sign.

It is a matter of some importance in this regard that Peirce, in giving his lifelong study of signs the name "semiotic," fastened on the first proper designation of the field he could find in the philosophical literature. Such a procedure was imposed upon him by a subfield of semiotics to which he is so far, practically speaking, the only semiotician to have given serious consideration, namely, the subfield of the "Ethics of Terminology," as he called it.(14) When Margaret; Mead, many years after Peirce's fateful choice, proposed the adoption of the term semiotics "for patterned communications in all modalities,"(15) she was only picking up on the already growing influence of Peirce's choice in English-speaking circles to apply a logically proper name "implying the identification of a single body of subject matter," as Sebeok put it in his preface to the volume promulgating Mead's exhortation.(16)

Nor is it without interest that Peirce also followed Locke in accepting as a synonym or ampliation for the name "semiotic" the classical expression "doctrine of signs" or "doctrino signorum" since, again following the obligations imposed by the Ethics of Terminology, this alternative appellation hooked up the development of the proposed new study with the considerable achievements in understanding the sign that formed the Latin heritage of scholasticism. Already, by the time of Locke's Essay, this heritage had faded to the status, effectively speaking, of a background phenomenon for the rise of classical modern philosophy in its twin guise as rationalism and empiricism. Both rationalism and empiricism were rounded alike on the disastrous assumption that ideas are the objects of direct experience - rather than, as semiotics in our day would have to prove all over again (the work of the Iberian semioticians as synthesized in Poinsot's Tractatus having been lost),(17) the signs on which the experience of objects is founded and structured throughout.

One of the most surprising discoveries of semiotic research, if not indeed the most surprising one - credit for which assuredly goes to Umberto Eco and the stream of researchers who have worked under his tutelage - is the discovery that the notion of sign as super-ordinate to the division of natural and cultural phenomena is not to be found in the ancient world before Augustine, so far as our present knowledge of historical documents allows us to conclude. Among the Greeks, [Greek Text Omitted] did not mean "sign in general" as signum did among the Latins. On the contrary, [Greek Text Omitted] was understood in the Greek Umwelt in opposition and contrast to [Greek Text Omitted], as a natural phenomenon contrasts to a linguistic and cultural one.(18)

However, the journey from the suggestion of the possibility of resolving the ancient and no less modern(19) dichotomy between inferential relations linking natural signs to the things which they signify and equivalence relations linking linguistic terms to their objects signified through the assignation of the name signum as "implying the identification of a single body of subject matter," to the actual resolution and the demonstration that signum does indeed provide a unified object of scientific and philosophical investigation, proved to be a very long one indeed. It is no less than the question of whether the whole enterprise of semiotics is no more than a nominalism. So far (again) as our records show, the journey between these two points in the resolution of this question is one of the heretofore untold stories of the Latin Age, a story which begins with the texts of Augustine in the fifth century and requires a thorough retelling in unfamiliar ways of the history of Latin scholasticism as culminating in this regard with the texts of John Poinsot in the seventeenth century. For Poinsot was the first author to show that inasmuch as relation as such is indifferent to the opposition between what is from nature or from mind, since the sign consists in a relation, it can only be a vehicle indifferent to its status as a creature of nature or culture in what it conveys.

It fell to Heidegger in challenging the continuance of modernity to ask in our time what is the basis for the prior possibility of truth as correspondence.(20) This question, however, belongs essentially to the presemiotic consciousness of modernity, inasmuch as it had already fallen to Poinsot in 1632 to show that the answer to this question lies in the nature of the sign as recreative in its proper being, indifferently, of something that began in mind or began in nature.

We already know that Poinsot, as the culminating figure in the line of the Iberian development of semiotic consciousness after Soto's return from graduate studies in Paris in the early 1500s, belongs to a quite newly rediscovered dimension of the Latin Age and the development of scholasticism. To this we may add that Peirce knew nothing of Poinsot's work,(21) despite the profound doctrinal confluence of the two in their understanding of the sign as essentially relative and irreducibly triadic.(22) Moreover, we know of the need of insights from both in bringing semiotic consciousness to an appreciation of its full horizon(23) (we might even say, pace Derrida no less than the whole project of semiology, its transcendental horizon, provided we understand that term in the semiotic sense established by Poinsot at the outset of his Tractatus de Signis(24)). What we want to investigate here are the sources in the Latin Age so far proven common to the semiotic of Charles Peirce and that of John Poinsot; so far, that is, as such sources can be presently outlined.

For Poinsot was among the very last of the great scholastics, and it is well known that, granting Peirce's ignorance of the work of John Poinsot in particular, scholastic philosophy nonetheless exercised in general an influence over the whole of Peirce's work from its beginning with the establishment of the semiotic categories and in each of its distinct phases thereafter. What we need to determine are the precise points and phrases of this influence, both in order to gain a more precise understanding of Peirce's intellectual history and in order to deepen our own appreciation of semiotic consciousness as an historical achievement of human understanding. There is much in this story still to be determined;(25) yet the main lines of what we can narrate at this point are both sufficiently surprising and sufficiently interesting to warrant at least a preliminary telling on this on this occasion.

We take as our focus here one of the principal themes of Peirce's semiotic: the nature of the sign and its relation to thought. In effect, Peirce put a great deal of effort into studying the relation of the sign with thought, and we need to clarify the place that he assigned thought in the phenomenon of signification, in the semiosic event. In this as in other themes, a scholastic influence manifests itself in Peirce's thought, particularly from the work of Duns Scotus.(26) Even though Peirce does not always follow Scotus faithfully (it was not his objective to be nor did he think of himself as a "Scotist"),(27) Scotus is an influence that accompanies Peirce in each phase of his philosophical development. And, in the later Iberian work assimilating and integrating the influence of Scotus in a semiotic context, he considered himself also subject to the influence of scholastic tradition deriving from the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.(28)

It may be that a main source of Peirce's original contact with scholasticism was through the huge work of Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande (the medieval part comprises tomes 2-4, the first of which was published in 1861), which our author made use of as early as 1866,(29) citing Prantl in his first of twelve lectures on "The Logic of Science and Induction" given that year at the Lowell Institute.(30) Although Prantl's book is the work of an Hegelian and is highly prejudiced against scholasticism, it contains a wealth of detailed information and numerous textual citations from scholastic authors.(31) From this same year of 1866 Peirce cites the classical work of Peter of Spain, the famous Summulae Logicales, which Peirce uses in his 1867 memoranda on "Aristotelian Syllogism."(32) From these same beginnings of his intellectual work Peirce, in various writings, makes use of St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Sherwood or Shyreswood, and William of Ockham.(33)

Between 1867(34) and 1871, and thence until 1883, we find Peirce drawing substantively from the Cursus Philosophicus Conimbricensis of 1607, that is, the course developed by the Jesuit professors of the Colegio Real of Coimbra, Portugal, between 1591 and 1606. So, while he explicitly cites the treatise On the Soul, it is highly probable that he made use of the other parts, the treatise on logic with its chapter "de Signis" in particular, since he expressly regarded it as a development of the logic of St. Thomas Aquinas.(35) As a result, he would have been influenced by the one who redacted this course, no less a person than the Jesuit professor Pedro da Fonseca, who came to be a classical semiotic source and one of the pioneers in developing semiotics in an important way with an excellent chapter dedicated to thematic study of the sign. And, on the other hand, Fonseca was one of those who was more influenced by Duns Scotus and who enhanced this influence among the post-mediaeval scholastics. In this way we encounter, in a variety of forms, the presence of Duns Scotus, an author who was highly appreciated by Peirce because of his influence in shaping Peirce's own theory of the sign and its relation to thought.(36)

In fact, one of the ways in which Peirce defined the sign was the following: "A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity."(37) By standing "to somebody" the sign refers itself to the cognitive system of the human being, to the human mind, to human thought. And the standing "for something," in Peirce's expression, corresponds to the scholastic expression "stare pro," which is nothing other than to represent, that is to say, to be the vicar of something. Peirce's definition in this instance is very similar to the definition of Scotus, who says: "To signify is to represent something to the understanding."(38) In order to expand the representation in question to the senses as well as to the intellect, Pedro da Fonseca, who follows Scotus closely, states that to signify is "to represent something to a cognoscitive faculty."(39) Fonseca (1528-1599) taught at Coimbra, and, as we mentioned above, it was well-known that he was more influenced by Scotus than by Aquinas.(40) Fonseca inspired and shaped the development of the Cursus Philosophicus Conimbricensis, influencing especially the Dialectic (or Logic) of the course, which was published in 1606 and 1607.(41) The great work which Fonseca had written on his own was the Institutiones Dialecticae, published in Lisbon in 1564, from which we have taken the just-cited definition of sign to correspond in the clearest manner possible to Peirce's definition.

Of all the definitions we could mention, however, that which perhaps most nearly approaches that of Peirce is one formulated by John Poinsot, a Porteugese scholastic who came after Fonseca, also a Porteugese. Poinsot, in his Tractatus de Signis of 1632, writes: "a sign is that which represents something other than itself to a knowing power."(42) Poinsot came under Fonseca's influence, exactly as did Peirce, by way of having read the Cursus Conimbricenses, but also by having been a student of the professors involved in that project during his undergraduate years at Coimbra.(43) Peirce read Scotus directly in the Opus Oxoniense and Fonseca by way of the Logic of the Cursus Conimbricenses. Poinsot, the great semiotician of the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, and Peirce, the great semiotician of the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, were both under the tutelage of Fonseca as well as Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham. An author as perspicuous as Luigi Romeo considers Fonseca to be the first classical author of semiotic,(44) but this judgment needs to be qualified in view of Fonseca's doubts about the unified nature of the sign as an object of inquiry.(45) If we take as our criterion of semiotic foundations the establishment of the manner in which the sign provides a unified object and field of inquiry throughout the entire range of significations, which was the central thrust of the later work of Poinsot written in direct counterpoint with the positions of Fonseca and the Conimbricenses, then the title of founder of semiotics undoubtedly belongs to Fonseca's Iberian successor, John Poinsot.(46) What it seems must be ruled out is that Peirce ever acquired an awareness of the work of Poinsot.(47)

If we consider, too, the ontological explanation of the sign, or rather, of the semiosic phenomenon, there is a further coincidence of Peirce with Fonseca and, even more, with Poinsot. Peirce says that the sign is a relation. There are according to him, however, three basic types of relations: (1) the monadic relation or relation of firstness (which properly speaking is not actually a relation, although we think it in terms of the relation it involves with something consignified); (2) the dyadic relation or relation of secondness, based on firstness, which is a relation between two things, and; (3) the triadic relation or thirdness,(48) based on both the preceding types and which is a relation between three terms, among which the third element or element of thirdness acts as mediator. Furthermore, according to Peirce, the sign relation is exactly the relation of thirdness, or rather, Peirce seems to have taken the relation of representation in signification as the paradigm for establishing this relation of thirdness. This thirdness or third which plays the role of mediator between sign and object is the interpretant, or thought, since it is a sign of the second instance which occurs (or can occur) in the mind or quasi-mind of an interpreter.

Fonseca too sees the ontological structure of the sign, or of signification, in terms of relation, a view which is reflected in the exposition of his colleagues in the Cursus of the professors of Coimbra; but Fonseca and his team of investigators are unable to settle decisively on a unified view of the relation of signification.(49) It is once again Poinsot, Fonseca's successor, who seems to develop the principles implicated in Fonseca's work in a manner very similar to what we find in Peirce. Poinsot also posits as the formal and essential constitutive of the sign a relation: "the rationale of a sign formally speaking does not consist in a relation according to the way being must be expressed in discourse [a transcendental relation], but in a relation according to the way relation has being [an ontological relation]."(50) Moreover, he devotes an entire question of his first book on the sign to establishing that this relation, if it is not conceived triadically, is not a sign relation: "If power and signified are considered as termini directly attained through a relation, they necessarily require a double relation in the sign, but a sign considered in this way respects the cognitive power directly as an object, not formally as a sign. But if the power is considered as a terminus indirectly attained, then the significate and the cognitive power are attained by the single sign relation, and this relation is the proper and formal rationale of the sign."(51)

A relation according to the way it has being is truly a relation; a relation according to the requirements of discursively expressing being is something called or thought in terms of a relation. With this latter notion one refers to the monadic relation, merely reflexive, between a thing and the relation itself; and by this one excludes from signification the transcendental (secundum dici) or monadic relation. The ontological relation, by contrast, can only be a dyadic or a triadic relation. However, the specifically signifying ontological relation is not and cannot be merely dyadic, because the relation of signification does not obtain only between the sign and the signified, but also involves thought, at least - as Mercado put it - "aptitudinally."(52) It is precisely this last involvement that serves as mediator between the other two.

Furthermore, Peirce takes from the scholastics - Scotus in particular - the mediating role of thought between sign and object designated. Scotus had determined, as we know, that to signify is to represent something to the understanding; and he added:(53) "therefore what is signified is conceived by the understanding." That is to say, thought is what makes the sign the vehicle of the object, what enables a person to connect a sign with a thing; for the sign makes thought evoke the image or idea of the thing and thereby go to the thing itself (if it exists); it goes to the thing insofar as it is thought and hence to the actually existing thing when what is thought also exists. Besides taking this from Scotus, whom he knew well, Peirce cites Ockham, whom he also follows in other respects concerning the affairs of logic. He says: "Ockham always thinks of a mental conception as a logical term, which, instead of existing on paper, or in the voice, is in the mind, but is of the same general nature, namely, a sign."(54)

Peirce expounds the point clearly when he says that "a sign is something, A, which denotes some fact or object, B, to some interpretant thought, C."(55) He includes here as a technical term "interpretant," in the sense of that which receives the message of the sign; and it is not the same as "interpreter," but it is the mind or quasi-mind, as Peirce says of the interpreter in which the sign develops itself in the second instance, in a second order, beginning from the original sign. Something, then, is given in the interpretant which is not identical with the interpreter. Duns Scotus expressed the point thus: "To utter a [linguistic] sign does not reduce to the emission of a breath thus or so, but it is a sound so pronounced and articulated as to be a spoken word, and the imaginable word which corresponds thereto is the mental word."(56) In effect, "one forms a sound [sign] to signify and declare what one intends."(57)

In Peirce, thought is the mediator between sign and signified: "A representation is that character of a thing by virtue of which, for the production of a certain mental effect, it may stand in place of another thing. The thing having this character I term a representamen, the mental effect, or thought, its interpretant, the thing for which it stands, its object."(58) This passage emphasizes that the interpretant is a mental effect of the sign: a thought (or at least that an aspect of the interpretant is a thought). In other words, it is the object insofar as it is thought, evoked by the sign. The sign in the first instance provokes the idea of the thing in the mind, in thought: "A sign stands for something to the idea which it produces, or modifies. Or, it is a vehicle conveying into the mind something from without. That for which it stands is called its object; that which it conveys, its meaning; and the idea to which it gives rise, its interpretant."(59)

The foregoing is much inspired by a scholastic theory based on Aristotle. Thought is a mediator, as Scotus said; the word is the sign of the thing, certainly; but first it is the sign of it insofar as it is thought, that is, of its concept, then of it in itself:

Even though there is a great controversy over the spoken word, whether it is a sign of a thing or of a concept, notwithstanding, and granting in short that that which is properly signified by the voice is a thing, there are nevertheless many signs ordered to the same significate (to wit: the letter, the voice and the concept), just as there are many effects ordered to the same cause, no one of which is the cause of the other, as is clear from the case of the sun illuminating many parts of the medium. . . . And just as one can grant that a more proximate effect is in some way a cause in respect of a more remote effect, not properly, but on account of that priority which obtains among such effects respecting the cause; so can one grant of many signs ordered to the same significate that one is in some way a sign of the other, because it provides the understanding of that other, since the more remote would not signify unless the more immediate in some way signifies first, and nevertheless the one is not on this account properly the sign of the other.(60)

Scotus notes a gradation of signs. If indeed the spoken sign is a sign of a thing, it signifies the thing indirectly, through thought, by means of the concept whose content is the thing itself insofar as it is thought. In this way, the spoken sign signifies, simply, the conceived thing or object signified (which is why Scotus says at the beginning of the above quote that "in short that that which is properly signified by the voice is a thing"). The letter is in a way a sign of the word; the word is in a way a sign of the concept (that is, of the interpretant); and this last is properly a sign of the thing signified, as also are the written and spoken words through or on the basis of the concept, which illuminates the medium of understanding to which each of them belongs. Scotus also puts it this way: "The name essentially signifies the thing, whether the thing exists or not, because it represents the thing on the basis of the likeness which exists in the soul and which is a sign [of the thing]."(61)

Peirce draws heavily on the scholastics in the idea that the concept is a sign, namely, a sign of things prior to that sign by substitution which is the word.(62) What Peirce seeks to establish with the idea of the interpretant is that there is engendered in the mind of an interpreter a new sign beginning from the original sign. One needs to be quite clear about the coincidences between Peirce and scholasticism on this point.(63) For Peirce the interpretant is a sign of a term in addition to being a sign of the thing. This can be found expressed in the same manner among the scholastics. It would seem to contradict the scholastic theory, since it seems to decide that the concept is more the sign of the term, which seems to be the reverse of what the scholastics say. Nevertheless, we find the correspondence in what Poinsot designates the nonultimate and ultimate(64) significate of a sign.(65) A nonultimate significate will be the mental representation itself of a sign, for example, the concept which I form of the word "wall" when I hear it spoken. And the ultimate significate is the object signified - in our example, it would be a wall as such objectified or apprehended.

Having said this, there appears to be one important difference between Peirce and the scholastics as regards the interpretant. Peirce maintains that there is an infinite progression of interpretants giving rise one to another in a succession ad infinitum, while it is well known that, among the scholastics, arguments involving an infinite process were considered invalid. This apparent opposition is just that, a false appearance that arises from falling to consider the point of view from which the scholastics rejected the notion of infinite process. Infinite regress in an argument concerned with establishing the proper causes of physical events is what the scholastics rejected, accepting, and even explaining, that, within the order of discourse where relations serve to found other relations (in contrast to the physical environment, where relations are founded only on individuals and characteristics of individuals and never on other relations), infinite process is the norm. Indeed, just when an argument involves infinite process can it be said to involve the order of mind-dependent being in its proper contrast to what is mind-independent; or, as we could better say, semiosis insofar as it requires mind-dependent being to achieve its full actuality in anthroposemiosis.(66)

Thus the scholastics would have no difficulty with Peirce's notion that every sign produces an interpretant; but, since the interpretant is a sign, he holds that it produces in its turn another interpretant, and so on successively. Ernest Battistella insists that, since the interpretant does not have a mental or psychological character, it does not occur in the mind of an interpreter, but in the system of signs.(67) Battistella, however, also grants that the interpretant is sometimes "a mental sign," that is to say, even if it is not always and necessarily a mental mode of being, "it is the whole of that which is explicit in the sign itself, apart from its context and the circumstances of its utterance."(68)

There are three principal interpretants: the first is the emotional interpretant, which consists in the feeling caused by the sign; the second is the energetic interpretant, which is the effort moving the sign, which may be a muscular effort (that is, physical) or only mental; the third is the logical interpretant, which is purely mental, and consists in a conjecture or hypothesis concerning the behavior called for by the sign. It has the structure of an "if, then" clause. Only these logical interpretants are intellectual signs. Even in the case of these intellectual signs, there is not always produced a logical interpretant: the occasion might be too premature, and the previous interpretants might suffice; or too late, in which case the interpreter already knows a logical interpretant associated with the sign and does not develop conjectures proximate to the production of the sign and its finality or signification.(69)

Peirce also speaks of other kinds of interpretants: the immediate, which is the significate itself, the dynamic, which is the effect produced by the sign in an interpreter, and the final, which is the effect that the sign produces if it is able to fully realize its effect, that is, habits and dispositions for action. Eco explains the matter thus:

It is necessary to see that for Peirce mental life is like one immense chain of signs which reaches from the first logical interpretants (elementary conjectures which, inasmuch as they suggest phenomena, signify them) to the final logical interpretants. These are habits, the dispositions to action, and therefore for intervention in things, to which the whole of semiosis tends. . . . These habits are a series of final logical interpretants, by which semiosis comes to rest in them. . . . In this sense, one understands now that Peirce, at a determinate point affirms that there can be interpretants which are not signs (8.332,(70) 339(71)). The interpretant of a sign can be an action, a behavior.(72)

So, it is not so much a question of Peirce moving away from the scholastic idea of the concept as mediator between sign and thing as it is the fact that Peirce has with his interpretant a notion sufficiently supple and mobile to complete the types of effect that a sign is able to provoke. It will not always be a concept, or a conjecture (that is, an abduction) or an hypothesis that are signs, but sometimes the reaction that the sign provokes is an emotion or an action. This includes even the most complete conduct down to the final interpretant, which is a habit or a disposition that generates action and which is not an interpretant understood as a sign in the usual sense.(73) Precisely the idea of final interpretant puts a brake on the infinite process of interpretants which could in principle dissolve the sign, as always producing another sign in the one who interprets. And in this way the scholastic idea of thought as a mediator between sign and thing signified is safeguarded within the Peircean semiotic.

We have now seen, in synoptic fashion, that semiotics is much indebted to a form of thought forgotten and unjustly denigrated, namely, Latin scholasticism. How much of this situation is due to prejudice and how much to ignorance? Along with the misunderstanding of those thinkers, should we not also include a semiotic analysis of the Sacred Scriptures which reached very high levels of complexity, namely, the literal, allegorical, moral, mystical, and so forth? It is clear, then, that the philosophy of language of the scholastics is present in a living way in the principal semiotic ideas of Peirce. Duns Scotus was always much appreciated by the North American pragmaticist.(74) Furthermore, this Scotistic influence was reinforced through the use made by Peirce of the Conimbricenses, that is, the work of the Jesuit professors of Coimbra, the authors of the celebrated Cursus of the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, already under the influence, as master, of Pedro da Fonseca, who followed Scotus more than Aquinas. By way of the Conimbricenses, Fonseca influenced Peirce, and through them he influenced as well the work of John Poinsot.

Thus the semiotic thought of the medieval and post-mediaeval period prepared the way for Peirce, a learned and careful reader of the scholastic writings. One can hardly avoid drawing from all this one further unexpected and perhaps extreme conclusion: that, in semiotics, the best students of the slow development of semiotic consciousness as it took shape between Augustine's suggestion of signum as a possible field of unified inquiry, and Fonseca as perhaps the classical initiator of the theory of the sign as a systematic project, were John Poinsot and Charles S. Peirce. Both were first - Poinsot absolutely and Peirce relative to contemporary awareness - explicitly to achieve the identification of a single subject matter at the heart of semiosis, namely, the irreducibly triadic and ontological sign-relation. Recognition of their achievements restores to philosophy its lost history, and provides for postmodernity the richest soil in which to continue the development of semiotic consciousness as the new matrix for human and natural science alike, and the proper paradigm under which to work through the positive implications of postmodernity as a new age in the history of philosophy and intellectual culture. It is finally, after all, a question of self-understanding.(75)

Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and Universidad Anahuac

1 Thomas A. Sebeok, "'Semiotics' and Its Congeners," in Frontiers in Semiotics, ed. John Deely, Brooke Williams, and Felicia E. Kruse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 261.

2 See John Deely, "John Locke's Place in the History of Semiotic Inquiry," in Semiotics 1986, ed. John Deely and Jonathan Evans (Lanham: University Press of America, 1988), 406-18. For Locke's actual text itself of 1690, see "Coining the Name," in Frontiers in Semiotics, 2-4, with detailed analysis of the coinage in Luigi Romeo, "The Derivation of 'Semiotics' through the History of the Discipline," Semiosis 6, no. 2 (1977): 31-8; John Deely, "Semiotic and the Liberal Arts," The New Scholasticism, 59, no. 3 (summer 1985): 296-322; and John Deely, "Locke's Proposal for Semiotics and the Scholastic Doctrine of Species," The Modern Schoolman 70, no. 3 (March 1993): 165-88.

3 See Thomas A. Sebeok, "The French Swiss Connection," The Sign and Its Masters, vol. 8, Sources in Semiotics Series (Lanham: University Press of America, 1989); see especially 290 n. 2.

4 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 2d ed., trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), 33; originally published as Cours de Linguistique Generale (Paris: Payot, 1915); and in a second edition in 1922 by Payot of Paris under the same title. The English translation includes the page numbers of the French original in square brackets in the margins, to which bracketed pagination reference is made.

5 Ibid.

6 Thomas A. Sebeok, "Ecumenicalism in Semiotics," in The Sign and Its Masters, 8:65.

7 "In the rise of medieval thought, I mean scholasticism and the synchronistic art developments, undoubtedly the crusades and the discovery of the writings of Aristotle were powerful influences. The development of scholasticism from Roscellin to Albertus Magnus closely follows the successive steps in the knowledge of Aristotle. Prantl thinks that that is the whole story, aid few men have thumbed more books than Carl Prantl. He has done good solid work, notwithstanding his slap-dash judgments. But we shall never make so much as a good beginning of comprehending scholasticism until the whole has been systematically explored and digested by a company of students regularly organized and held under rule for that purpose"; Charles S. Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 6:312. Throughout our notes we follow the standard form in abbreviating the citation of the Harvard edition of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce to "CP," followed by a volume and paragraph number(s) separated by a period. Dating within the CP (which covers the period in Peirce's life i. 1866-1913) is based principally on the Burks bibliography at the end of CP, 8.

8 Even here the choice among these partially competing, partially overlapping, terms is not inconsequential, as both Sebeok and Deely have particularly pointed out. See Thomas A. Sebeok, foreword to Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs, vol. 4, Sources in Semiotics 4 (1976; reprint, Lanham: University Press of America, 1985), ix-xiii; John Deely, "The Doctrine of Signs: Taking Form at Last," Semiotica 18, no. 2 (1976): 171-93; John Deely, "On the Notion 'Doctrine of Signs'," in Introducing Semiotic, Its History and Doctrine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 127-31; Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, s.v. "doctrine."

9 Whence "this is equally valid for semiology in general, governing all the relations of usage to schemata, of message to code, etc.," even though "this differance in language, and in the relation of speech and language, forbids the essential dissociation of speech and language that Saussure, at another level of his discourse, traditionally wished to delineate"; Jacques Derrida, "Differance," in The Margins of Philosophy (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), 12.

Where Derrida opens the way to semiotics, paradoxically, is in his rejection of its central concept. "Whence . . . the transformation of general semiology into grammatology, including the central concur of the sign, that maintained metaphysical presuppositions incompatible with the motif of differance," (emphasis added; ibid., 12) whereas in fact it is rather the Sausserean aspects of Derrida's notion of differance which engender the metaphysical presuppositions in question which are specifically tied, moreover, not to the late Latin notions of metaphysics, but to the specifically modern ones to be found in the context of Kantian writings diametrically opposed to the earlier traditions in this area of Latinity in particular (see note 11 below). This becomes (abundantly) clear in his epigone Bennington's analysis of "the sign" in terms of signifier and signified. See Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 23-42. (Of course, this depends on the extent to which Bennington's exposition can be considered sound, something that Derrida has made sure to compromise in advance: see "This book presupposes a contract" in Bennington, Jacques Derrida, 1).

More needs to be said on the profound difference between the problem-atic proper and adequate to semiotics and the convoluted analyses (epitomized in the works of Derrida) required to break out of the artificial constrictions placed upon the problematic of semiology as originally formulated by Saussure; but the best analysis of this point so far has been carried out by Floyd Merrell, Pt. 1 of Sign, Textuality, World, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Much of the semiological writing Merrell chooses to wrestle with, nonetheless, often proves from within the native perspective of semiotic largely beside the point. Cf. Floyd Merrell, Deconstruction Reframed (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1985).

10 Exactly for this reason Sebeok contentiously cast the contrast between semiology and semiotics as a contrast between the "minor and major traditions" of inquiry into the doctrine of signs: "in the major tradition (which I am tempted to call a catholic heritage), semiosis [see note 12 below) takes its place as a normal occurrence in nature, of which language ... forms an important if relatively recent component The minor trend ... asserts, sometimes with sophistication but at other times with embarrassing naivete, that linguistics serves as the model for the rest of semiotics - Saussure's le patron generale - because of the allegedly arbitrary and conventional character of the verbal sign"; Sebeok, "The Two Traditions" in The Sign and Its Masters, 63-4. This polemic became the motivating idea for the anthology Frontiers in Semiotics (see note 2 above), as explained in the preface thereto, pp. viii-xvii.

11 Looking from Saussure's identification of the sign as the correlation of signifiants with signifies, Derrida writes that "the signified concept [that is, the signifie] is never present in and of itself, in a sufficient presence that would refer only to itself"; Derrida, "Differance," 12. Jack Cahalan recently posed for us the counterfactual consideration of what might have happened if Wittgenstein had read Poinsot, pointing out in interesting detail the consequences of Wittgenstein's thinking of signs exclusively in terms of what Poinsot and his late Hispanic predecessors in particular characterized as "instrumental signification." See Jack Cahalan, "If Wittgenstein had Read Poinsot: Recasting the Problem of Signs and Mental Events," The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68, no. 3 (summer 1994): 297-319. Derrida's work calls for an exactly parallel effort of analysis, inasmuch as the Sausserean signifie is not at all what the scholastics called signatum seu significatum but rather what they termed the conceptus seu signum formale, that is, the foundational element of representation in the sign formally distinct from the triadic relation itself in which the sign properly consists and of which the Saussurean signifie, the Peircean representamen or interpretant, is but one of the three terms. As signum formale, the concept of course cannot have a "presence that would refer only to itself": that would obliterate the difference not between signifiant (a scholastic instrumental sign) and signifie (a scholastic formal sign), but, in scholastic terms, between signum and signatum: cf. Mauricio Beuchot, "Intentionality in John Poinsot," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68, no. 3 (summer 1994): 279-96, and 292 n.38; John Deely, "Idolum. Archeology and Ontology of the Iconic Sign," in Iconicity. Essays on the Nature of Culture, ed. Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld, find Roland Posner (Tubingen: Stauffenburg, 1986), 29-49.

There are semiotic problents with Derrida's reliance on what the scholastics described as "negative abstraction" (see Vincent Guagliardo, "Being-as-First-Known in Poinsot: A-Priori or Aporia?" in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68, no. 3 (summer 1994): 375-8, beginning at note 37) to arrive at the artificial unity of signifiant and signifie as specifically constituting the linguistic sign as such in its possible systematization as a scientific subject matter, such problems as Michael Shapiro has mainly, if indirectly (his interest being avowedly Peircean from the start), undertaken to thematize for scientific linguistics (for instance, Michael Shapiro, The Sense of Grammar [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983]). But, these problems to one side, I think Poinsot would have little trouble grasping Derrida's exaggerated central claim (as regards his theme of differance) that "essentially and lawfully, every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of differences. Such a play," that is to say, "differance," is a conception grievously compromised by its glottocentric origin in a dyadic conception of signification which itself proves wanting as a phenomenon signature which is neither a word nor a concept, as soon as it is considered in relation to the dynamic of semiosis. Thus, having grasped Derrida's understanding of differance, Poinsot would immediately point out necessary and essential ways in which that understanding is semiotically deficient vis-a-vis the action of sign as englobing the pragmatics of linguistic usage along with its semantics and syntactics, making a series of qualifications derived from the interdependency of linguistic anthroposemiosis with zoosemiosic modalities equally anthroposemiotic, on the one hand, and, on the other, from the intrinsic indifference of semiosic relations as relations to their environmentally determined status as physical as well as objective or objective only.

12 This last term, "semiosis" (sometimes "semeiosis" or "semeiosy"), is Peirce's own neologistic adaptation of the Greek term [Greek Text Omitted], which occurs at least thirty times in the Herculanean papyrus On Signs authored in the first century by Philodemus; see Philodemus, On Methods of Inference (c. 54 A.D.), rev. ed., ed. and trans. Phillip Howard De Lacy and Estelle Allen De Lacy et al. (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1978). See also Max H. Fisch, "Philodemus and Semeiosis (1879-1883)," section 5 of the essay "Peirce's General Theory of Signs," in Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism. Essays by Max H. Fisch, ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 329-30. In Philodenms's work, the term represents a type of reasoning or inference from signs. Peirce, however, uses the English transliteration to mean the more basic action of signs which itself underlies any and all inference, and indeed occurs objectively even when no inference happens to be made or when an inference is made incorrectly. Indeed, the action of signs as underlying and guiding, or at, least as able to guide, actual acts of inference of various kinds is taken today as the basis for semiotics as a form or body of knowledge. As biology is that complex of knowledge which results from analysis and study of the realm of living things, as physics is knowledge that results from the study and analysis of the action of bodies and their constituents in space, so semiotics is knowledge that results from analysis and study of the realm and action of signs.

13 Dean MacCannell and Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Time of the Sign. A Semiotic Interpretation of Modern Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).

14 Peirce's most complete statement on this matter can be found in his "The Ethics of Terminology" in A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic (Boston: Alfred Mudge and Son, 1903), 10-14; in CP, 2.219-2.226 continuing 1.202 (Burks, p. 295). This 1903 statement has been reprinted in full with glosses and a suggested addition in John Deely, The Human Use of Signs (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 173-4; see also [paragraphs] 107 and 294, and glosses 1 [on [paragraph]4] and 14 [the second on [paragraph]107]).

15 Thomas A. Sebeok, Alfred S. Hayes, and Mary Catherine Bateson, eds., Approaches to Semiotics. Transactions of the 1962 Indiana sity Conference on Paralinguistics and Kinesics (reprint; The Hague: Mouton, 1972), 275.

16 Ibid., 5.

17 See John Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis: The Semiotic of John Poinsot, ed. John Deely (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Mauricio Beuchot has published a partial Spanish edition of Poinsot's Tractatus under the title De Los Signos y los Conceptos (Mexico City: Universidad National Autonoma de Mexico, 1989). See also Beuchot's article, "La doctrina tomista clasica sobre el signo: Domingo de Soto, Francisco de Arauyo y Juan de Santo Tomas," Critica 12, no. 36 (Mexico, diciembre 1980):

Readers unfamiliar with the name or work of Poinsol should consult sections 1 and 2 of the editorial afterword to the Deely edition of Poinsot's Tractatus, 394-444; and, more recently, "A Morning and Evening Star: Editor's Introduction to the John Poinsot Special Issue, with a list of Poinsot's published writings," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 68, no. 3 (summer, 1994): 259-77. This ACPQ special issue on John Poinsot gives a pretty good idea of the general relevance and bearing of aspects of Poinsot's work on the contemporary situation in philosophy. See also the references in note 19 below.

18 See Umberto Eco, Roberto Lambertini, Costantino Marmo, and Andrea Tabarroni, "On Animal Language in the Medieval Classification of Signs," Versus 38/39 (maggio-dicembre, 1984): 3-38, incorporated as "Latratus Canis or: The Dog's Barking" in Frontiers in Semiotics, 63-73 (see the editorial note on the background of the "Latratus Canis" text on p. xix of Frontiers in Semiotics). The following is a quote taken from page 65 of this work: "One must realize that Greek semiotics, from the corpus Hippocratum up to the Stoics, made a clearcut distinction between a theory of verbal language ([Greek Text Omitted]) and a theory of signs ([Greek Text Omitted]). Signs are natural events acting as symptoms or indices, and they entertain with that which they point to a relation based upon the mechanisms of inference ('if such a symptom, then such a sickness'; 'if smoke then burning'). Words stand in quite a different relation with what they signify. This relation is based upon the mere equivalence or biconditionality which appears also in the influential Aristotelian theory of definition and tree of Porphyry which springs front it.

"It was Augustine who first proposed a 'general semiotics' - that is, a general 'science' or 'doctrine' of signs, where sign becomes the genus of which words ([Greek Text Omitted]) and a theory of signs ([Greek Text Omitted]) are alike equally species.

"With Augustine, there begins to take shape this 'doctrina' or 'science' of signum, wherein both symptoms and the words of language, mimetic gestures of actors along with the sounds of military trumpets and the chirrups of cicadas, all become species. In essaying such a doctrine, Augustine foresees lines of development of enormous theoretical interest; but he suggests the possibility of resolving, rather than effects a definitive resolution of, the ancient dichotomy between the inferential relations linking natural signs to the things of which they are signs and the relations of equivalence linking linguistic terms to the concept(s) on the basis of which some thing 'is' - singly or plurally - designated."

19 For this reason semiotics belongs definitively to postmodernity, as has been recently shown at length in Deely's study, New Beginnings. Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). See also the brief notice concerning Poinsot's work in this context, "A Prospect of Postmodernity," Listening 30, no. 1 (1995): 1-8.

20 Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1943); actual composition 1930. English translation by R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick. "On the Essence of Truth," in Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (Chicago: Gateway, 1949), 292-324.

21 See note 47 below.

22 See "Excursus on Peirce and Poinsot," in Tractatus de Signis, 492-8; Mauricio Beuchot, "El Pensamiento y su Relacion con el Signo en Peirce y la Escolastica," Morphe. Ciencias del Lenguaje (enero-junio de 1993): 133-142; Michael Raposa, "Poinsot on the Semiotics of Awareness," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68, no. 3 (summer, 1994): 395-408. Beuchot's and Raposa's work in this regard marks the beginning of what promises to be a growing literature.

23 John Deely, "The Grand Vision," in New Beginnings, 183-200.

24 See "Contrasting Ontological and Transcendental Relatives," in New Beginnings, 249-53.

25 For example, more needs to be worked out before we can tell how Roger Bacon's De Signis of 1267 fits into the picture, even though it is already clear that it does not achieve the fundamental resolution Augustine's abduction called for. See the text of Bacon's Latin edited by Fredborg, Nielsen, and Pinborg in Traditio 34 (1978): 81-136, currently being translated and scheduled for bilingual publication in Semiotica upon completion.

26 See note 36 below.

27 In his c. 1896 work on "The Logic of Mathematics; An Attempt to Develop My Categories from Within," Peirce tells us: "From Kant, I was led to an admiring study of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and to that of Aristotle's Organon, Metaphysics, and psychological treatises, and somewhat later derived the greatest advantage from a deeply pondering perusal of some of the works of medieval thinkers, St. Augustine, Abelard, and John of Salisbury, with related fragments from St. Thomas Aquinas, most especially from John of Duns, the Scot (Duns being the name of a then not unimportant place in East Lothian), and from William of Ockham. So far as a modern man of science can share the ideas of those medieval theologians, I ultimately came to approve the opinions of Duns, although I think he inclines too much toward nominalism"; CP, 1.560. These comments reinforce Peirce's earlier remarks (1871) that "scholasticism proper" achieved "its greatest glory" when, "in the first half of the fourteenth century," Duns Scotus "first stated the realistic position consistently, and developed it with great fullness and applied it to all the different questions which depend upon it," although the overly-subtle Scotist theory of formalities left some developments "separated from nominalism only by the division of a hair"; review of The Works of George Berkeley, in CP, 8.11.

28 See note 35 below.

29 In Lecture 1 (September-October, Ms. 122) of the eleven Lowell Lectures of this year on "The Logic of Science; or, Induction and Hypothesis," in Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A Chronological Edition, ed. Max H. Fisch et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 1:358-75.

30 Ibid., 360.

31 In what Burks identifies as "Version b" of the third of his 1903 Harvard lectures on pragmatism, "The Categories Continued," Peirce with outrage asks us to "think of the labor of a generation of Germany being allowed to flow off into Hegelianism!" (CP 5.84), having earlier in the same paragraph commented retrospectively that "bad as Prantl's history is [for instance, Peirce wants us in 1901 (in a passage editorially deleted from the "Predication" entry for Baldwin's 1901-1902 Dictionary of Psychology in 2 vols., as reprinted in CP 2.361) that it "often naturally happens in Prantl's Geschicte" that quotations are misattributed, and (also 1901, this time a passage editorially deleted from the "Logic" entry for Baldwin, CP 2.218) that "his judgments are peremptory and slashing."] . . . any person who reads it critically, as every book ought to be read, will easily be able to see that the ancient students of logic, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Philoponus, even Chrysippus, were thinkers of the highest order, and that St. Augustine, Abelard, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Ockham, Paulus Venetus, even Laurentius Valla, were logicians of the most painstaking and subtle types. But when the revival of learning came, the finest minds had their attention turned in quite another direction, and modern mathematics and modern physics drew away still more. The result of all this has been that during the centuries that have elapsed since the appearance of the De Revolutionibus [1543] - and remember, if you please, that the work of Copernicus was the fruit of the scientific nourishment that he had imbibed in Italy in his youth - throughout these ages, the chairs of Logic in the Universities have been turned over to a class of men, of whom we should be speaking far too euphemistically if we were to say that they have in no wise represented the intellectual level of their age. No, no; let us speak the plain truth - modern logicians as a class have been distinctly puerile minds, the kind of minds that never mature, and yet never have the elan and originality of youth."

32 Peirce, "Memoranda on the Aristotelian Syllogism," in Writings of Charles S. Peirce, 1:505-14.

33 Although Peirce highly values the early scholastic work of Abelard, St. Anselm, John of Salisbury, Berengar of Tours, among others, he does not make a vain display of erudition in mentioning them overmuch; although he approved their theories in the development of the logic that they effected, he yet took the greater number of elements for his semiotic from the more mature stages of scholasticism, that is to say, from such authors as Roger Bacon, St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, William of Sherwood, Peter of Spain, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, and from such late medievals as John Buridan, Paul of Venice and Albert of Saxony; but he also made use of post-mediaeval scholastics such as the Conimbricenses and Eustachius, whom he cites. In his 1871 Berkeley review (CP, 8.11), Peirce even describes this more mature period (after the introduction of the complete translations of Aristotle's works around the twelfth century) as "scholasticism proper," associated especially with the works of Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham, which is exactly the lines along which the main schools between Aquinas and Poinsot were formed in the closing Latin centuries. This, of course, with many currents of cross-fertilization, as our present paper makes clear (and in sharp contrast to other currents of these later centuries which have fallen, as Peirce somewhat harshly put it, "into the merited contempt of all men"; [ibid.]).

In his appreciation of the scholastics, besides their many works, along with the work of Prantl, that of B. Haureau seems to have played a quite important role. See B. Haureau, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique, 2 vols. (Paris: 1872-1888).

34 This was the year of Peirce's fundamental work "On a New List of Categories," Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (1867), 287-98; in CP, 1.545-59 (Burks, p. 261). He presented it on May 14, 1867.

35 In Division 3, chapter 4 ("The Essence of Reasoning"), of his 1893 Grand Logic (or How to Reason: A Critick of Arguments), Peirce tells us: "For Thomistic Logic, I refer to Aquinas, to Lambertus de Monte whose work was approved by the Doctors of Cologne, to the highly esteemed Logic of the Doctors of Coimbra, and to the modern manual of [Antoine] Bensa"; CP, 4.27.

In a note to the text, the CP editors tell us that the "Logic of the Doctors of Coimbra" is the Commentariorum Collegii Conimbricensis in universam dialecticam Aristotilis Stagiritoe partes duoe, for which they cite the 1616 Venice edition, without telling us if this was the very edition that Peirce consulted of this work originally published in 1606.

36 Peirce preferred Aquinas and Scotus to Ockham because of their realism as opposed to Ockham's nominalism; our conjecture is that he preferred Scotus over Aquinas because Scotus's writing was focused more directly on the problems proper to experience and knowledge which lie at the heart of pragmaticism.

37 CP, 2.228; a fragment on semiotics written circa 1897. (In the following paragraph, 2.229, he cites Scotus.) Here we are not concerned with Peirce's further concern, of which we are well aware and in sympathy with, to understand the sign without the explicit reference to a human interpreter. See John Deely, "The Grand Vision," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 30, no. 2 (spring, 1994): 371-400; John Deely, "Physiosemiosis and Phytosemiosis," in Basics of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 83-104; Deely, New Beginnings, 151-244.

38 "Significare est aliquid intellectui repraesentare, quod ergo significatur, ab intellectu concipitur. Sed omne quod ab intellectu concipitur, sub distincta, et determinata ratione concipitur, quia intellectus est quidam actus, et ideo quod intelligit ab alio dinsinguit. Omne ergo quod significatur, sub distincta ratione, et determinata significatur. Hoc patet; nam materia prima, quae de se est ens in potentia, si intelligitur, oportet quod intelligatur sub ratione distincta. Et si ita sit de materia prima [that is, the very least of intelligible objects], multo fortius hoc erit verum de omni alio" (italics in original); Joannes Duns Scotus, Super libros Elenchorum, q. 15, n. 6, in Joannis Duns Scoti Doctoris Subtilis, Ordinis Minorum Opera Omnia, edito nova juxta editionem Waddingi XII tomos (Lyons 1639) continentem a patribus Franciscanis de observantia accurate recognita, apud Ludovicum Vives, Bibliopolam Editorem Via Vulgo Dicta Delambre, 13 (Paris, 1891-1895), t. 2, p. 22a.

39 "Significare nihil aliud est, quam potentiae cognoscenti, aliquid repraesentare"; Petrus Fonsecus (Pedro da Fonseca), Institutionum dialecricarum libri octo (Coimbra: Apud haeredes Joannis Blauij, 1564), here cited in the modern bilingual edition by Joaquim Ferreira Comes, Instituicoes Dialecticas (Institutionum dialecticarum libri octo), (Coimbra: Instituto de Estudos Filosoficos da Universidad de Coimbra, 1964), 1:34.

40 "His thought inclined more to Scotus than to Aquinas. . . . We owe to Fonseca the preparation of the grand course of philosophical Commentaries of the college of Coimbra"; G. Fraile, Historia de la filosofia, in Del Humanismo a la Ilustracion (Madrid: BAC, 1966), 3:469.

41 "De Signis" being chapter 1 of their commentary on Aristotle's De Interpretatione, in Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis et Societatis Jesu. In Universam Dialecticam Aristotelis Stagiritae. Secunda Pars (Lyons: Sumptibus Horatii Cardon, 1607). The 1606 original lacked Aristotle's Greek text.

42 "Signum est id, quod repraesentat aliud a se potentiae cognoscenti"; Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis, 116/34. In citing the Tractatus, we are following the established custom of citing page and line numbers.

43 John P. Doyle, "The Conimbricenses on the Relations Involved in Signs," in Semiotics 1984, ed. John Deely, Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985), 567-76.

44 Luigi Romeo, "Pedro da Fonseca in Renaissance Semiotics: A Segmental History of Footnotes," Ars Semeiotica 2, no. 2 (1979): 187-204.

45 In his Institutionum Dialecticarum of 1564 (note 39 above), Liber I, caput VII; see John Deely, Introducing Semiotic: Its History and Doctrine, 55-7.

46 See Part 1 of John Deely, Introducing Semiotic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), esp. 58-66, and 168-179 n. 9.

47 This was the reluctant conclusion conveyed by Max H. Fisch around 1983 in personal correspondence with John Deely on the question of whether Peirce had ever run across Poinsot's early seventeenth-century work on the sign.

48 Cf. "The Reality of Thirdness" from 1903: CP, 1.345.

49 See Doyle, "The Conimbricenses on the Relations Involved in Signs."

50 "Ratio signi formaliter loquendo non consistit in relatione secundum dici, sed secundum esse"; Poinsot, "On the Sign in Its Proper Being," bk. 1 of Tractatus de Signis, 119/10-15.

51 "Si potentia et signatum considerentur ut termini directe attacti per relationem, necessario exigunt duplicem relationem in signo, sed hoc modo signum respicit potentiam directe ut obiectum, non formaliter ut signum. Si vero consideretur potentia ut terminus in obliquo attactus, sic unica relatione signi attingitur signatum et potentia, et haec est propria et formalis ratio signi" (in the original Latin, this entire passage is in bold face type; here we have left it in roman face with our italics added); ibid., 154/21-30.

52 "Pero, en contra de la definicion, se arguye: 'caballo', en un libro cerrado, es un signo convencional, y, sin embargo, no representa, pues no esta presente ninguna facultad cognoscitiva a la que proponga su signo; luego la definicion es mala. Para la solucion de esta objecion, y para la inteligencia de todas las definiciones futuras, hay que tener presente una regla de los summulistas, a saber, que las palabras en la definicion no indican acto, sino aptitud. Los verbos (digo) . . . no expresan en ella su accion en acto, sino en aptitud . . . Asi el sentido es el siguiente: el signo es lo que puede representar a la facultad cognoscitiva algo distinto de si mismo." ("At contra diffinitionem arguitur, ly equus codice complicato est signum ad placitum, & tamen non repraesentat, cum nulla fit potentia cognoscitiva praesens, cui suum signatum proponat, ergo diffinitio est mala. Pro solutione huius obiectionis & omnium futurarum diffinitionum intelligentia notandum est summulistarum regula, scil. verba in diffinitione non dicunt actu, sed aptitudinem. Verba (inquam) . . . non illic exprimunt suam actionem in actum, sed in aptitudinem. . . . Itaque sensus est, signum est quod potentiae cognoscitivae aliquid aliud a se potest repraesentare"); Comentarios Lucidisimos al texto de Pedro Hispanotrans, trans. Mauricio Beuchot (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1986), 55.

Thus we find stated in a Latin author published in 1571 (who was perhaps read neither by Peirce nor by Poinsot) as common property of at least the later Latin Age (post 1245, the date of Petrus Hispanus' Summulae) an earlier version of Poinsot's formula "sufficit virtualiter esse signum, ut actu significet" which provides the basis for the idea of a virtual semiosis in physical nature (physiosemiosis) and hence the warrant for Peirce's Grand Vision of a universe "perfused with signs" (Poinsot, "On the Sign in Its Proper Being," Tractatus de Signis, 126/3-19, italics added: "quia sufficit virtualiter esse signum, ut actu significet . . . sic existente signo et significatione virtuali formaliter ducit potentiam ad signatum, et tamen formaliter non est signum, sed virtualiter et fundamentaliter. Cum enim maneat ratio movendi potentiam, quod fit per signum, in quantum repraesentativum est, etiamsi non maneat relatio substitutionis ad signatum, potest exercere functiones substituentis sine relatione. . . ."). See the application of Poinsot's formula to generate the idea of physiosemiosis in the loci cited at the end of note 37 above.

53 See text in note 38 above.

54 CP, 8.20. In the Iberian university world, where between approximately 1529 and 1632 the main thematic development of semiotic consciousness resulting in a foundational grasp of the role of the sign in the full extent of human experience originally took place, the fact that Soto had studied at Paris under nominalist professors suggested that the role of Ockham in bringing about, for instance, the distinction between formal and instrumental signs, so crucial to the Iberian semiotic development, would prove to be a central one. This impression was reinforced by Kaczmarek's studies (1980, 1981, 1983) showing that the contrast between "significare formaliter" and "significare instrumentaliter" could already be found in Pierre d'Ailly (a. 1396), a follower of Ockham; and the impression receives credence also from the work of Albert of Saxony (i. 1362-1365) clearly displaying more than a century and a haft before Soto's influential Summulae (1529, 1554) the summulist treatment of the logical term as an instance of sign as the more general foundational notion. See Ludger Kaczmarek, introduction, critical apparatus, and notes to Destructiones Modorum Significandi (secundum viam nominalium a. 1396), by Pierre (Petrus) d'Ailly (Munster: Munsteraner Arbeitskreis fur Semiotic, 1980); Ludger Kaczmarek, "Modi Significandi and their Destructions: A 14th Century Controversy about Methodological Issues in the Science and Theory of Language." Paper presented at the Seconde Conference Interuationale d'Histoire des Sciences du Langage [ICHOLS II], Lille, France, September 1981; and Ludger Kaczmarek, "Significatio in der Zeichen-und Sprachtheorie Ockhams," in History of Semiotics, ed. Achim Eschbach and Jurgen Trabant, Foundations of Semiotics 8 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1983), 87-104. See also John Deely, "The Coalescence of Semiotic Consciousness", in Frontiers in Semiotics, 9; Albert of Saxony (1316-1390), Perutilis Logica. (i. 1362-1365), bilingual edition (Latin-Spanish) with intro. and notes by Angel Munoz Garcia (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1988): Tractatus Primus, cap. 1-2, pars. 14-42, Latin pp. 73-80; and Domingo de ("Dominicus") Soto, Summulae (1st ed., Burgos, 1529; 3rd rev. ed., Salamanca, 1554; Facsimile of 3rd ed., Hildesheim, NY: Georg Olms Verlag, 1980).

Continued research on several fronts, however, is beginning to suggest that the role of Ockham is not so central as first seemed. It is now clear that, so far as semiotic and the fundamental questions of epistemology more traditionally conceived are concerned, it was Scotus more than Ockham who basically set the agenda of controversies between c.1310 and Poinsot's semiotic synthesis of 1632, the greater part of the Third Book of which is devoted to the semiotic resolution of the main epistemological distinction between so-called "intuitive" and "abstractive" awareness which Ockhamites took, more or less simplistically (as seems to have been Ockham's trademark), from Scotus: cf. Katherine H. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham. Optics, Epistemology and the Foundation of Semantics 1250-1345 (Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1988); John Deely, New Beginnings, 15-147; and Michael Raposa, "Poinsot on the Semiotics of Awareness."

Whatever may finally prove to be the case of the diminished importance of Ockham for the understanding of the historical emergence of semiotic consciousness in general, Peirce leaves no doubt whatever of Ockham's lesser importance in his own thought (as indeed could be readily abduced from his detestation of nominalism generally) as compared with Aquinas and Scotus. In Section 2 ("Why Study Logic") of his c. 1903 Minute Logic, (CP, 2.166), Peirce tells us: "The metaphysics of Aquinas, a modified Aristotelianism, had been immensely elaborated and deeply transformed by the vast logical genius of the British Duns Scotus, who died in 1308. The extreme intricacy of this system was felt to be an objection to it, and various attempts were made to introduce Nominalism - the simplest possible of all Logico-Metaphysical theories, if it can be sustained. These efforts finally culminated in the system of another Englishman, William Ockham. . . . Ockhamism [by contrast to the work of Aquinas and Scotus] was naturally unfavorable to anything mysterious, not to say, to anything religious." Nor, Peirce continues, can any mistake "be greater than to suppose that Ockhamistic thought is naturally allied to the conceptions of modern science: it is anti-scientific in essence. A scientific man whose only metaphysics has been such as his own studies have suggested will be definitely adverse to the ideas of Ockham, and, so far as his simple conceptions go, will agree with Scotus. Of course, he will know nothing of the opinions that are distinctively Scotistic, for so far as these are not technically logical they have in view theology", as, of course, is also true on the whole of the earlier work of Aquinas, both of which the Conimbricenses, and afterward Poinsot, assimilate and distribute according to their understanding of the requirements of the doctrine of signs, among other considerations.

Peirce goes so far as to say: "In the Middle Ages the question between Scotism and Ockhamism had been closely argued. Had the conceptions of modern science been present to the minds of the disputants, the victory of the Scotists would have been more overwhelming than it was. As matters went, Ockhamism derived its chief strength from its political alliance"; ibid., 2.167.

55 CP, 1.346.

56 ". . . assumere signum non est emissio anhelitus sic vel sic, sed iste sonus productus sic articulatus, est verbum vocale, et sic verbum imaginabile quod sibi correspondet, est verbum mentale, quod est quoddam formatum in actu a memoria" (c. 1302-1303); Scotus, Reportata Parisiensia in Opera Omnia, lib. 1, dist. 27, q. 2, n. 8; t. 22, p. 334b.

57 "Formatur enim verbum vocale ad significandum et declarandum illud quod intelligitur, sed quod vox non statim formatur ab intelligente inquantum intelligens, sed per aliquam potentiam mediam, puta motivam, hoc est imperfectionis in intellectu. Si igitur statim gigneretur vel formaretur, ut expressivum illius, quod latet in intellectu, et hoc virtute intellectus intelligentis, non minus esset signum" (c. 1300); Scotus, Opus Oxoniense, in Opera Omnia, lib. 1, dist. 27, q. 3, n. 14; t. 10, p. 370b.

58 Peirce, "That Categorical and Hypothetical Propositions are one in essence, with some connected matters," in CP, 1.564. (The main part of this work was composed c. 1895, but, according to Burks, the CP 1.564-567 segment bears the later 1899 composition date).

59 Peirce, "On Thirdness," in CP, 1.339 (ante 1914).

60 "Licet magna altercatio fiat de voce, utrum sit signum rei vel conceptus, tamen breviter concedendo quod illud quod significatur per vocem proprie est res, sunt tamen signa multa ordinata ejuidem significati, litera, vox, et conceptus, sicut sunt multi effectus ordinati ejusdem causae, quorum nullus est causa alterius, ut patet de Sole illuminante plures partes medii. Et ubi est talis ordo causatorum, absque hoe quod unum sit causa alterius, ibi est immediatio cujuslibet respectu ejusdem causae, quorum nullus est causa alterius, excludendo aliud in ratione causae, non autem excludendo aliud in ratione effectus immediatioris. Et tunc posset concedi aliquo modo effectum propinquiorem esse causam respectu effectus remotiorus, non proprie, sed propter prioritatem illam, quae est inter tales effectus ad causam. Ita potest concedi de multis signis ejusdem significati ordinatis, quod unum aliquo modo est signum alterius, quia dat intellegere ipsum, quia remotius non significaret nisi prius aliquo modo immediatius significaret, et tamen propter hoc unum proprie non est signum alterius, sicut ex alia parte de causa et causatis" (c. 1300); Scotus, Opus Oxoniense in Opera Omnia, lib. 1, dist. 27, q. 3, n. 19; t. 10, p. 377b-78a. Italics added to the partial English translation above.

A parallel passage (missing in the Codex Vaticanus) occurs in the Operis Secundae Perihermenias (p.1290: t. 1, p. 587a) which explicitly equivalates "conceptus seu passio animae" and which further clarifies the analogy with lighting by the sun: "sicut de sole illuminante multas partes medii, quarum quaelibet illuminatur a solo immediate, sed ordine quodam, quia remotum mediante propinquiori, et ubi est ordo causatorum, absque hoc quod unum sit alterius, ibi est immediatio cujuslibet, respectu ejusdem, excludendo aliud in ratione causae, uti effectus immediatarum; et tunc potest dici, effectum aliquo modo propinquiorem esse causam remotioris effectus, non proprie, sed propter propinquitatem illam quae talis effectus ad causam."

61 "Sive res sit, sive non, similitudines univoce sunt signa illarum. Ex istis sequitur, quod nomen essentialiter significat rem, sive res sit, sire non sit, quia rem repraesentat secundum quod similitudo ejus in anima est, et est signum"; Scotus, In Perihermenias, opus secundum in Opera Omnia, q. 2, n. 3; t. 1, p. 586a-b.

62 As Roman Jakobson says ("Algunas observaciones sobre Peirce, percursor en la ciencia del lenguage": "One must not forget that in the basic project of Peirce, his System of Logic, from the Point of View of Semiotic ([1909: December 17 letter to William James, CP], 8.302), the point is to show 'that the concept is a sign' and to define the sign and resolve it 'into its basic elements' ([ibid.:] 8.302, 305)"; Jakobson, El marco del lenguage (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1988), 36.

63 In one of Mauricio Beuchot's earlier works, more stress was placed on then-perceived discrepancies than on the similarities between Peirce and the scholastics on this point; continued research, however, has shown that the similarities run far deeper than the discrepancies concentrated on in that earlier work. See Beuchot, "La funcion del pensiamiento dentro del fenomeno semiotico en Peirce y la escolastica" in Investigaciones Semioticas (Valencia, Venezuela: 1984), 133-144.

64 This is anything but ultimate, inasmuch as, once become the basis for the objectification of a significate in its own right, that significate can itself become the locus for a whole series of further networks of sign relations. See the discussion of objective constitution in John Deely, "How Does Semiosis Effect Renvoi?" The American Journal of Semiotics 11, nos. 1 and 2 (1994): 23-8; also in New Beginnings, 216-22.

65 In his Tractatus de Signis, Poinsot explains this distinction in book 3, question 4, "What Sort of Distinction Is There between an Ultimate (or 'Final') and a Non-Ultimate (or 'Preliminary') Concept," 334-40/4.

66 These brief remarks must suffice here. Anyone interested in a full-scale treatment of the different points of view of traditional philosophy focused on mind-independent being vis-a-vis the doctrine of signs focussed on the indifference of semiosis to the contrast between objective and physical being should consult the index to The Human Use of Signs under the heading of "infinite process" and related topics.

67 E. Battistella, Pragmatismo y semiotica en Charles S. Peirce (Caracas, Venezuela: Eds. de la Biblioteca de la Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1983), 11.

68 Ibid., 53 cf. Deely, Basics of Semiotics, 25-7.

69 Cf. Battistella, Pragmatismo y semiotica en Charles S. Peirce, 164-5.

70 "I have not sufficiently applied myself to the study of the degenerate forms of Thirdness, though I think I see that it has two distinct grades of degeneracy. In its genuine form, Thirdness is the triadic relation existing between a sign, its object, and the interpreting thought, itself a sign, considered as constituting the mode of being of a sign. A sign mediates between the interpretant sign and its object. Taking sign in its broadest sense, its interpretant is not necessarily a sign. Any concept is a sign, of course.... But we may take a sign in so broad a sense that the interpretant of it is not a thought, but an action or experience, or we may even so enlarge the meaning of sign that its interpretant is a mere quality of feeling. A Third is something which brings a First into relation to a Second. A sign is a sort of Third. How shall we characterize it? Shall we say that a Sign brings a Second, its Object, into cognitive relation to a Third? That a Sign brings a Second into the same relation to a first in which it stands itself to that First? If we insist on consciousness, we must say what we mean by consciousness of an object. Shall we say we mean Feeling? Shall we say we mean association, or Habit? These are, on the face of them, psychological distinctions, which I am particular to avoid. What is the essential difference between a sign that is communicated to a mind, and one that is not so communicated?"; Letter on signs and categories to Lady Welby dated 12 October 1904; in CP, 8.332.

71 "Finally, in its relation to its immediate interpretant, I would divide signs into three classes as follows: 1st, those which are interpretable in thoughts or other signs of the same kind in infinite series, 2nd, those which are interpretable in actual experiences, 3rd, those which are interpretable in qualities of feelings or appearances"; in CP, 8.339.

72 Umberto Eco, Signo (Barcelona: Labor, 1976), 164-5.

73 Cf. R. Marty, "La semiotica de Ch. S. Peirce: presentacion formalizada," in Actiones textuales 2, no. 3 (enero-junio, 1991): 1; see also notes 70 and 71 above.

74 See our hypothesis in note 36 above.

75 A draft of this paper was circulated for discussion in the October 22, 1994, evening session of the C. S. Peirce Society held in Philadelphia. This session, titled "Articulating Differences", was organized and chaired by Vincent Colapietro in the framework of the nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America: see John Deely, "Why Investigate the Common Sources for the Semiotic of Charles Peirce and John Poinsot?", in Semiotics 1994, ed. C. W. Spinks and John Deely (volume in preparation). The present essay is based on a book in preparation by the two authors under the title Peirce and Scholasticism.