Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy

Are indices a purely linguistic, textual phenomenon or are linguistic indices a special case of a more general type of indexical signs? In comparing Carlo Ginzburg's restrictive view of indices and traces in particular with Peirce's general approach to indexical signs, this paper argues that Peirce's account of indexicality makes it possible to connect the sciences and the humanities by a flexible relational concept of the epistemic function of an identification that indexical experiences allows for. In this way Peirce's flexible concept of indexicality allows us to connect e.g. the experience of a condensation trace of an electron in a cloud chamber with that of the trace of a deer in the snow.