Abstract

This book has two objectives: to provide a comprehensive and consistent account of Peirce’s theory of signification; and to situate that theory at the center of a general semiotics. The author’s strategy is to identify Peirce’s three conditions for signification and to devote a chapter to the analysis of each. Greenlee accepts Peirce’s view that anything is potentially a sign and that an analysis of signification cannot be just "dynamic," i.e., causal, but he departs from Peirce on other matters. Whereas Peirce argues for the division of signs into three kinds, Greenlee maintains that these are factors of signs rather than exclusive categories, so all signs can be viewed as symbols. Further, whereas the elements of the triad of signification are different in kind for Peirce, Greenlee treats them all as signs. In this manner the sign, the object, and the interpretant is each a kind of sign rather than a distinct kind of thing, and signs become explicable in terms of their relations to other signs. The triad then becomes polyadic and interpretation becomes a continuous process. One may question whether or not Peirce could accept all that this entails.