sign

A sign is something that stands for something else to an interpreter.

This is Peirce’s formulation, and it is more careful than it sounds. The sign relation is triadic: it involves the sign itself (the representamen), the object the sign stands for, and the interpretant — the meaning produced in the interpreter by the sign. Without all three, there is no sign: a mark without an interpreter produces no meaning, and a meaning without a mark is not yet communicable [@peirce_CollectedPapers_1931].

The interpretant is the crucial third term. It is the functional effect the sign produces — the sign’s “meaning” in the sense of what it does, what it allows the interpreter to do or infer or feel. The interpretant is itself a sign (of the same object), which is why Peirce’s semiotics is intrinsically dynamic: signs generate interpretants that are themselves signs that generate further interpretants, producing an open-ended chain of semiosis [@short_PeirceTheorySigns_2007].

Types of signs

Peirce classified signs in multiple intersecting ways. Three basic types by the relation between sign and object:

• icon: resembles its object (a portrait, a diagram)
• Index: is causally or spatially connected to its object (smoke indexing fire, a finger pointing)
• symbol: is connected to its object by convention (most words)

Related terms

• interpretant — the meaning produced by a sign
• representamen — the sign vehicle
• semiosis — the process of sign-mediated meaning-making
• signifier / signified — Saussure’s dyadic account of the sign

Source: Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. Harvard University Press, 1931–1958. See also Short, T. L. Peirce’s Theory of Signs. Cambridge University Press, 2007.