[CG] Interpretants

I rarely comment on discussions of interpretants, because nobody, not even Peirce, had a complete, coherent, and decisive theory of interpretants. Perhaps some Peirce scholars have developed theories that go beyond what Peirce wrote. That is possible, but nobody can claim that their theories are what Peirce himself had intended. On these issues, I recommend the article by Albert Atkin in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first version in 2006 and major update in 2022: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-semiotics/ Atkin has a thorough list of references for anybody who intends to study this topic. See below for some quotations from the end of the article that show how incomplete, indefinite, and uncertain Peirce's own writings happen to be. I don't want to discourage anybody from discussing interpretants. But since Peirce himself was uncertain and indecisive, nobody can claim that their interpretation is what Peirce had intended. John _______________ As is common with all of Peirce’s work in philosophy, various changes in terminology and subtleties with accompanying neologisms occur from one piece of work to the next. His work on interpretants is no different. At various points in his final accounts of signs, Peirce describes the division of interpretants as being: immediate, dynamic and final; or as emotional, energetic, and logical; or as naïve, rogate and normal; or as intentional, effective and communicational; or even destinate, effective and explicit. As Liszka (1990, 20) notes, “the received view in Peirce scholarship suggests that the divisions of interpretant into immediate, dynamic, and final are archetypal, all other divisions being relatively synonymous with these categories.” There are, however, some dissenters from this view. In discussing the interpretant, Peirce describes one of the trichotomies above as follows: In all cases [the Interpretant] includes feelings; for there must, at least, be a sense of comprehending the meaning of the sign. If it includes more than mere feeling, it must evoke some kind of effort. It may include something besides, which, for the present, may be vaguely called “thought”. I term these three kinds of interpretant the “emotional”, the “energetic”, and the “logical” interpretants. (EP2. 409). . . Peirce describes the dynamic interpretant as deriving its character from action (CP8 .315 1904), but later says, “action cannot be a logical interpretant” (CP5 .491 1906). This seems to make the two inconsistent. (See Liszka (1990, 21) for more on the problems with Fitzgerald’s claim). Moreover, this inconsistency seems to suggest a problem for Short’s view since his account also suggests that the dynamic interpretant should include the logical interpretant as a subdivision (Short 1981, 213). Short, however, claims textual support for his own view from instances where Peirce mentions the emotional/energetic/logical trichotomy alongside the apparently separate claim that signs have three interpretants. (Short sites (CP8 .333 1904) and (CP4 .536 1906). Short takes this as suggesting that the two should be treated as different and distinct trichotomies. (Short 2004, 235). How far the textual evidence on the matter will prove decisive is unclear, especially given the fragmentary nature of Peirce’s final work on signs. However, one or two things militate in favor of the “received view”. First, Peirce is notorious for experimenting with terminology, especially when trying to pin down his own ideas, or describe the same phenomenon from different angles. Second, it is unclear why trichotomies like the intentional/effectual/communicational should count as terminological experiments whilst the emotional/energetic/logical counts as a distinct division. And finally, there is little provision in Peirce’s projected sixty-six classes of signs for the kind of additional classifications imposed by further subdivisions of the interpretant. (For more on this discussion see, Liszka 1990 and 1996; Fitzgerald 1966; Lalor 1997; Short 1981, 1996, and 2004).