The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), the founder of American pragmatism or "pragmaticism", sounds like a pretty extraordinary fella.
Max H. Fisch said:
Who is the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced?
The answer "Charles S. Peirce" is uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating. [He was] mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short story writer; phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician and metaphysician.
(in Sebeok, The Play of Musement)
For Paul Weiss, writing in the Dictionary of American Biography for 1934, Peirce was "the most original and versatile of American philosophers and America's greatest logician".
Bertrand Russell said Peirce was "certainly the greatest American thinker ever."
Peirce’s collected papers are published (a little haphazardly, apparently) in 8 volumes and there is also a chronological publication project in 5 volumes so far. Pierce’s published works run to about 12,000 printed pages and his known unpublished manuscripts (about 1650) run to about 80,000 handwritten pages.
Currently, considerable interest is being taken in Peirce's ideas by researchers wholly outside the arena of academic philosophy. The interest comes from industry, business, technology, intelligence organizations, and the military; and it has resulted in the existence of a substantial number of agencies, institutes, businesses, and laboratories in which ongoing research into and development of Peircean concepts are being vigorously undertaken.
I’m wondering if any of this stuff is useful for understanding the words of Scripture as signs and the Lord’s Supper as a (word) sign.
I’ve plagarised most of this stuff from: Burch, Robert, "Charles Sanders Peirce", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
What Peircean meant by "semeiotic" is almost totally different what has come to be called "semiotics," and which hales not so much from Peirce as from Saussure and Charles W. Morris…. Peircean semeiotic derives ultimately from the theory of signs of Duns Scotus and its later development by John of St. Thomas (John Poirot).
In Peirce's theory the sign relation is a triadic relation that is a special species of the genus: the representing relation. Whenever the representing relation has an instance, we find one thing (the "object") being represented by (or: in) another thing (the "representamen") to (or: in) a third thing (the "interpretant"); moreover, the object is represented by the representamen in such a way that the interpretant is thereby "determined" to be also a representamen of the object to yet another interpretant. That is to say, the interpretant stands in the representing relation to the same object represented by the original representamen, and thus represents it to yet another interpretant. Obviously, Peirce's complicated definition entails that we have an infinite sequence of representamens of an object whenever we have any one representamen of it.
If that’s confusing, this bit I really don’t get:
One set of distinctions among signs was introduced by Peirce in the early stages of his analysis. This distinction in this set turn on whether the particular instance of the sign relation is "degenerate" or "non-degenerate." The notion of "degeneracy" here is the standard mathematical notion, and as applied to sign theory non-degeneracy means simply that the triadic relation cannot be analyzed as a logical conjunction of any combination of dyadic relations and monadic relations. More exactly, a particular instance of the obtaining of the sign relation is degenerate if and only if the fact that a sign s means an object o to an interpretant i can be analyzed into a conjunction of facts of the form P(s) & Q(o) & R(i) & T(s,o) & U(o,i) & W(i,s) (where not all the conjuncts have to be present). Either an obtaining of the sign relation is non-degenerate, in which case it falls into one class; or it is degenerate in various possible ways (depending on which of the conjuncts are omitted and which retained), in which cases it falls into various other classes. Other distinctions regarding signs were introduceed later by Peirce. Some of them will be discussed very briefly in the following section of this article.
Signs are qualisigns, sinsigns, or legisigns, accordingly as they are mere qualities, individual events and states, or habits (or laws), respectively.
Signs are icons, indices (also called "semes"), or symbols (sometimes called "tokens"), accordingly as they derive their significance from resemblance to their objects, a real relation (for example, of causation) with their objects, or are connected only by convention to their objects, respectively.
Signs are rhematic signs (also called "sumisigns" and "rhemes"), dicisigns (also called "quasi-propositions"), or arguments (also called "suadisigns"), accordingly as they are predicational/relational in character, propositional in character, or argumentative in character.
Because the three trichotomies are orthogonal to each other, together they yield the abstract possibility that there are 27 distinct kinds of signs. Peirce argued, however, that 17 of these are logically impossible, so that finally only 10 kinds of signs are genuinely possible. In terms of these 10 kinds of signs, Peirce endeavored to construct a theory of all possible natural and conventional signs, whether simple or complex.
See further: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-semiotics/
BibliographyCollected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols. Edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur Burks (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1931-1958).
The Essential Peirce, 2 vols. Edited by Nathan Houser, Christian Kloesel, and the Peirce Edition Project (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1992, 1998).
Writings of Charles S. Peirce: a Chronological Edition, Volume I 1857-1866, Volume II 1867-1871, Volume III 1872-1878, Volume IV 1879-1884, Volume V 1884-1886. Edited by the Peirce Edition Project (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1993).
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