Hi Ken and all.
Just met a deadline! So time to reflect on other things
Ken, many thanks for the more recent references to Peirce that you cited. When I did my research in the area in preparation for ‘In Search of Semiotics’, I had to do it the hard way using the Collected Papers and other sources, like his letters to Lady Welby etc.
I recently wrote a paper for IDJ in which, among other things, I spelt out some of the reasons why I did not find Peirce very satisfying when it came to the kind of issues Gunnar mentions. Here is an extract.
> 2. Museum semiotics
> It is possible to see semiotics as part of a much older
> tradition of classification, criticism and scholarship—
> what we might call museum semiotics.
>
> One of the great delights of old museums was the
> collections of specimens. While the purpose of museum
> scholarship and collecting was to bring the foreign and
> exotic to the heart of empire—a project to amass and
> amaze with its scale and variety—collecting and classifying
> specimens was often an end in itself. It is within that
> tradition of collecting and classification that semiotics
> developed, adding to other ancient traditions such as those
> of tropes found in classic works on rhetoric: simile, metaphor,
> synecdoche, hyperbole and so on. Classification
> categories such as icons, indexes and symbols were
> included. As in an old museum, these classifications
> could be mapped onto popular categories such as pictures,
> words, diagrams, charts. But life outside a museum is
> never so clear cut, and this is where the problem begins
> for semiotics (and for many other attempts to organize
> and classify). The question we have to ask is whether
> or not we can use a system of classification from the
> museum to bring something to life in the world outside.
>
> In museums this question arose most powerfully with
> Darwin’s explanation for the diversity in living organisms,
> and with the subsequent growth of ecology in which
> we look to explain organisms within their environment.
> Whether something is a butterfly or a beetle and whether
> it can be distinguished from other butterflies and beetles
> takes second place to finding out what it does within
> its natural environment. As information designers,
> our primary questions should be: what is the context
> (environment) in which information will be used, and
> how do we expect people to use it in that context? This is
> a shift away from the traditional question of whether we
> are designing a book, a brochure or a website.
>
> If semiotics is to survive as a relevant contributor to
> information design it must emerge from the museum
> project of its past and deal with the material, historical
> and communicative context in which information design
> exists. So far, semiotics shows little sign of doing so—just
> as we have yet to see programming languages that
> address pragmatics.
Sless, David 2017
From Semiotics to Choreography
Information Design Journal 23(1)
It might stimulate more discussion on Peirce's semiotics on this list.
BTW, shortly after I finished ‘In Search of Semiotics’, we got a puppy. I called him Peirce. Alas no longer with us, his pictures still hang in our collection of family photos.
David
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