Semiotics

Why do we need a specific discipline for study of the nature, function, and importance of signs?  Many might ask this question, seeing in semiotics a superfluity simply layered over more traditional philosophical disciplines, such as logic.  However, we today face a crisis not only of personal meaning but more fundamentally of intelligible meaning—of the possibility for a realism that comprises not only the world outside the mind but the mind-dependent realities that make up much of our daily human experience.  Modernity’s fragmentation of “meaning”—into the false dichotomy of “objective facts” and “subjective values”—has sent us spiraling away from a coherent mode of life for centuries.  It is correct to insist upon both a retrieval of traditional disciplines of knowing and, with them, the knowability of the real (beyond the narrow domain of mathematics). However, these retrievals fall short by being insufficiently capable of addressing the “subjective” dimensions opened up by modernity’s inward turn—not that modernity correctly identified the nature of these experiences, but it did bring their importance to a new light, and that importance must be addressed.  That such a return to realism has remained dissatisfactory and unpersuasive to many should not be taken as merely a sign of some intellectual immaturity on the part of those who reject it but should make us question whether there is a deficiency in the explanatory power of the doctrines that purport to explain the real.

At the heart of this deficiency seems to be neglected treatment of relation and a misunderstanding of its role in the constitution of both the mind-independent universe and the web of human experience—which is to say, in the life of signs.  Absent a recovery and furtherance of the scholastic doctrines of relation and its gradually emerging semiotic insight—found most fully in the work of John Poinsot (that is, Joannes a Sancto Thoma, or John of St. Thomas, 1589–1644) and revived through the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)—we remain subject to legitimate criticisms and objections from within an idealist paradigm that otherwise proves more “intuitive” to the consciousness of modern human life.

It is at precisely this juncture of intellectual history that semiotics provides the insights necessary for the development of a robust realism truly sufficient for the challenges of the twenty-first century.  Understood not merely as the study of symbols, language, or communication but rather as concerning the action of signs (semiosis), semiotics today constitutes both the retrieval of a long tradition and the innovation that transcends the impasse of modernity.  A trio of key figures—Augustine, Poinsot, and Peirce—will help us to unveil the role of signs in the constitution of experience and the intelligibility of the universe.  But let us begin by disambiguating some common confusions of terminology.

I. Clarifying the Meaning of “Semiotics”

“Semiotics” is the standard name used for the study of signs and their various applications.  This use follows from Charles Sanders Peirce, the American polymath most often regarded as the founder of semiotics’ modern development in the United States.  The root of the word comes from the ancient Greek σημεῖον, “semeion”, most commonly translated as “sign”.  The particular derivation of “semiotics” common today first comes into the English language through John Locke’s 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where he proposes the three principal divisions of science to be φυσική (physike), πρακτική (praktike), and a study to be named either λογική (logike) or what “may be called σεμιοτική” (semiotike), “or the Doctrine of Signs”. The term “semiotic” was evidently taken up by Peirce throughout much of his work—who never cites Locke on this point but was known to have read his Essay—and it has since evolved into “semiotics” as a general term for the study of the action of signs, such that “semiotics” is the generally accepted nomenclature for the study of both the sign itself and its applications, with the latter often being modified by a prefix (e.g., “biosemiotics”) or a genitive construction (“semiotics of ___”).

However, there have long been and still remain some lingering confusions about the meaning of the term, despite this lineage. These confusions stem especially from confused translations and traditions in the twentieth century, which it will benefit us to clarify briefly.  In particular, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), in a series of courses taught between 1906 and 1911—notes from which were posthumously edited and published by his students as Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics)—proposed a science of semiology.  Saussure’s proposal was specifically for a science “that studies the life of signs within society” (Saussure, ca. 1906–11, 16) and that would thus provide a general science for understanding the laws or conventions by which social life is governed—including, especially, those constituted by or through linguistic signs, which were seen as central to the social fabric.  From the perspective of Peircean semiotics, there are several problems with Saussure’s proposal if it is taken precisely as given in the Course in General Linguistics.  First and foremost, he regards the relationship between a linguistic sign and its object to terminate within the mind.  This renders his an essentially idealist proposal and therefore makes social “realities” merely a kind of constructed fiction.  Second, he suggests a psychologistic foundation for the study of signs, following the dualistic trajectory of modern thought (Saussure, ca. 1906–11, 16).  Third, he makes no connection between social and natural signs; this both presumes and reinforces a divorce of all human cultural or social phenomena from the natural.  While Saussure does leave open the possibility of such a connection, he nevertheless greatly emphasizes the conventional and arbitrary nature of linguistic signs as more perfectly exemplifying the nature of signs as such (Saussure, ca. 1906–11, 68).  Fourth, this divorce of nature and culture leads to an indefinite deferment of signs’ meaning—in other words, there is a kind of infinite regression in the search for meaning’s foundations (cf. Deely 2001a, 682–85), which ushers in both relativism and nihilism, and which leads to its ultimate realization in the deconstructionism developed by Jacques Derrida (1930–2004).

Later thinkers in the semiological tradition, such as Émile Benveniste (1902–1976), have attempted to reform Saussure’s proposal (Benveniste 1966){1} but—though improvements have been made to its structural development—these do not correct the flawed principles, and thus they remain inadequate to provide an understanding of the sign’s proper nature.  Exacerbating this confusion, the English translations of some French works in the semiological tradition, such as those of Roland Barthes (1915–1980), have often seen the word “sémiologie” rendered as “semiotics”.  Similarly, the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics (of whom a chief representative is one of its founders, Juri Lotman, 1922–1993), particularly during the Soviet era, produced many works in “semiotics” that were much more heavily influenced by Saussure (and by Roman Jakobson, 1896–1982) than they were by Peirce.  Furthermore, the scattered nature of Peirce’s own writings and their complicated publication history has led many into confused interpretations of his thought.  These various causes have led many to conflate Saussurean semiology with Peircean semiotics, or to otherwise mix up the relations of their respective thinking.

Thus, although many insights come out of the semiological tradition, particularly as concerns questions of fiction, literature, narrative, and the development of culture, it neither rests upon nor provides a coherent whole from which to think about the nature of reality.  Thus, if taken as the foundation for one’s study of signs, the semiological tradition results in the adoption of an anti-realist and ultramodernist position that despairs of attaining truth about the world and our place within it, independently of our own creative and arbitrary action. 

By contrast, and as has only recently begun to be fully realized, the semiotic tradition initiated by Charles Peirce constitutes not a wholly novel path in thinking but, in fact, a resumption of the realist way of signs developed among the later Scholastics.  As John Deely (1942–2017) writes, “Peirce violated the cardinal commandment of modernity: Thou shalt not learn from the Latins.  He read even there, and what he found, more than any single influence, revolutionized his philosophy.  From [John Duns] Scotus [ca. 1265/66–1308] in particular, but also from [Pedro da] Fonseca [1528–1599] and the Conimbricenses [active 1591–1607], he picked up the trail of the sign” (Deely 2001a, 613).  Such a doctrine, as we will detail in the remainder of the article, presents a comprehensive perspective on signs as spread throughout the whole structure of the universe—not merely as they pertain to human understanding of that universe, but to the actual being of the universe itself—and thus a roadmap to an intelligible universe comprising nature and culture alike.  Understanding nature and culture as parts of one whole, in fact, can be accomplished only through a proper semiotic study of signs and their action.

This semiotic system is realist, in the simple sic et non sense that “either we know things independent of our mind or not.”  But this is not a naïve realism; rather, it forms a kind of “critical realism” (in the sense of Jacques Maritain, 1882–1973, especially as discussed in his Degrees of Knowledge) that strives after a deep understanding of the means by which reality is grasped—and how that grasp extends beyond the entia naturae of the world to include the entia rationis similarly constitutive of our experience without bifurcating into dualism.  Semiotics, that is, does not merely study the role of signs in human understanding, nor propose an abstract system of signs as a hermeneutic device for interpreting phenomena of our experience, but uncovers the action of signs themselves, dissolving many of the difficulties that have plagued human inquiry since the ascension of modernity over Scholasticism.

II. Restoring Relation to Reality

Ascribing this triumph of modernity—or, we might say, the defeat of Scholasticism—to a single or even small set of causes cannot be done.  The factors involved are innumerable: not only errors in certain Scholastic thinkers or traditions, not only superior rhetorical techniques of the moderns, not only technological advances in printing and reproduction, not only an increasingly literate nonclerical populace, and not only the political fragmentation of Christendom, but a thousand other twists and turns contributed to the demise of the Scholastic university and the doctrines taught within its halls.  If we might capture this transformation in a sweeping generalization, however, we would say that habits of the practical displaced the thirst for speculative inquiry into abstruse questions of metaphysics and logic.  Thus, while speculative inquiry remained, it was progressively transformed into an instrument of practical mastery.  It is neither a coincidence nor the result of a conspiracy that the greatest semiotician of the Latin Age, John Poinsot—a Dominican devoted to the thought of St. Thomas—was a contemporary of René Descartes (1596–1650), but the latter is nearly a household name throughout the Western world, while the former remains virtually unknown outside specialized circles of Scholastic study.  Poinsot’s two great works—Cursus Philosophicus and Cursus Theologicus—exceed a total of eleven thousand pages in modern editions.  By contrast, one can carry around all the major philosophical works of Descartes in a slightly oversized pocket.  Poinsot’s works are intricate, detailed, and take into account a millennia-long dialectical tradition, which Descartes dismisses with a few sweeps of the pen, making his texts the easier work to digest by far—to the profound impediment of the Western mind.

Principal in the Cartesian philosophy, which triumphed not as a systematic doctrine but as an attitude about thinking, was the reduction of truth’s domain to the confines of absolute certitude, represented by “clear and distinct ideas”, themselves exemplified by mathematics.  But one finds neither meaning nor morality in mathematics alone, and thus the Cartesian turn left non-mathematical reality relegated to a lesser sphere of things known, turning mind-independent natural realities into nothing more, and quite often less, than the shadows of our ideas.  This idealism has proven itself, ultimately, a solipsistic coffin from which there is no escape.

2.1. Triumph and Trap of Idealism

In the third of his Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, Descartes writes that “the principal and most frequent error to be found in judgments consists in the fact that I judge that the ideas which are in me [quae in me sunt] to be similar to or in conformity with certain things outside me.  Obviously, if I were to consider these ideas merely as certain modes of my thought, and were not to refer them to anything else, they could hardly give me any subject matter for error” (Descartes 1641, 16; translations throughout, unless otherwise noted, are my own).  Despite disagreeing with Descartes on the origin of these ideas—and thereby establishing the infamous “rationalist” versus “empiricist” debate—John Locke (1632–1704) presumes alongside him that “ideas” are “that term which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks” (Locke 1689, xxxix).  Locke therefore proves himself no less fundamentally an idealist than his opponent.  With the sole exception of Thomas Reid (1710–1796), no important figure of the modern period stood tall against this idealist presupposition—and Reid’s efforts nevertheless fell short, for he fell victim to another poisoned seed of modern thinking, namely, its confusion over the semiosic character of sensation.{2}

Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753) takes the idealist position to its logical extreme, and asking (rhetorically), “what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations?” adds that:

An idea can be like nothing but an idea. . . . If we look but ever so little into our thoughts, we shall find it impossible for us to conceive a likeness except only between our ideas.  Again, I ask whether those supposed originals or external things, of which our ideas are the pictures or representations, be themselves perceivable or no?  If they are, then they are ideas, and we have gained our point; but if you say they are not, I appeal to anyone whether it be sense to assert a colour is like something which is invisible; hard or soft, like something which is intangible; and so of the rest. (Berkeley 1710, n. 4 and n. 8)

It is just this paradigm of thinking that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) had earlier named “the way of ideas” [la voie des idées] (Leibniz 1704, 57/62).  It was from this misbegotten path that David Hume (1711–1776) strayed into the inescapable thicket of skepticism; and within which path—seeing Hume so ensnared and thereby staying within its steps—Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) posited his transcendental idealism, a theory that despaired of the world’s in-itself (i.e., mind-independent) intelligibility but nonetheless attempted to produce a systematic method for certainty about it and how we might live within it. 

Many important streams of intellectual inquiry have flown through the Western world since the death of Immanuel Kant, but by and large we can see the world still swims, if not in his wake, in the poisoned water that he distilled—a poison that leaves many in the unquestioning acceptance that things themselves, outside the shallowest realizations of sense perception and the intelligibility of number and measurement, are not truly knowable, at least, not in the sense that one can say beliefs about natures or moral rectitude are unquestionably true.  This unthinkingly follows in the tacit nominalistic supposition that relations themselves are not a constitutive element of the mind-independent reality we experience but are rather a product of our mind.  Simultaneously with this acceptance, the mind becomes, instead of that which discovers the intelligible, that which crafts it. 

Thus, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), “the last true giant encountered far down the way of ideas” (Deely 2001a, 572), tried in some sense to escape the modern paradigm by reestablishing the reality of relation.  Nevertheless, Hegel remained bound to the path, and attempted to “work out an ideal categorial scheme from which it will be possible by a principally deductive thought to arrive at the details of the natural world” (Deely 2001a, 574; see also Peirce 1903d, 177).  Hegel’s efforts at crafting an a priori categorial deduction for mind-independent intelligibility thus give weight to the claim of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) that, “compared with realism, idealism, no matter how contrary and untenable it may be in its results, has an advantage in principle” (Heidegger 1927, 207/251).  In other words, if we have a “realism” that concerns itself only with the reality of things and not with the reality of relations as well, we will have an incomplete account of the reality of our experience—leaving the most meaningful aspects of that experience to be supplied by ideas “in the mind” or some constitutive activity of that mind itself.

In the world outside academia, this “advantage” of idealism is seldom a consciously formed belief but rather forms a background presupposition that has an influence across myriad avenues of human culture, most especially in politics, entertainment media, and education, in each of which it does not take much investigation to discover certain idealist thinking behind the practices followed.  But the most evident sign of the way of ideas’ continued influence can be found in a commonly used pair of opposed terms, widespread in the English-speaking world today: namely, the opposition between “subjective” and “objective”.  By the latter term, especially when used in modification of the term “truth”, people commonly mean that which is “free from personal feelings or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased” (Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 1994).  By contrast, “subjective” has been taken to signify that which is precisely in opposition to the supposedly “objective”: what is a matter of feeling, opinion, what is not based on fact and not verifiable by any shared measure.  It is considered an objective fact, for instance, that the atomic weight of gold is 196.96~ u or that the average height for men in the United States of America is 5’9”, whereas it is a subjective opinion whether green beans are a tasty vegetable or King Louis IX was the greatest monarch of France.  What ensures the “objectivity” of our facts, however, is not a penetration into the intelligible essences of things, but a consensus in the measurements conducted by many.  It is not the things themselves, that is, in which we trust as “objective”, but a kind of intersubjective agreement among different individual psychological subjects.

But this is not a tenable solution to our questions (or crisis) of meaning, as Heidegger indicated.  Far too many phenomena of our experience do not admit of such intersubjective agreement, for those phenomena cannot be reduced to the quantitative measurements by which that agreement is possible (Deely 2009, 8–16).  We need a richer account of reality—and this is just what semiotics provides.

2.2. Nominalism and Relation

Before turning to the principles of semiotics itself, however, we must indicate the more fundamental recovery (upon which semiotics relies, but which it also strengthens), namely, the proper understanding of relation.  This understanding has always been difficult to achieve, as evidenced by the long tradition stemming from Aristotle’s treatment in chapter 7 of his Categories.  Aristotle’s text on relation—the second longest chapter in the Categories, only slightly shorter than that concerning substance—consists in a dialectical inquiry as to the nature of relation and the difficulty of identifying it as a distinct category.  Most of the chapter, the astute reader will notice, consists in saying what relation is not, for it seems to affect all the other categories somehow, but be none of them.  Nor, for that matter, is the relation itself something in substance or the other categories.  Thus, as he concludes, substance and the other categories seem to somehow be relative, but relation itself is something other.  In his commentary upon this chapter, Boethius introduced the helpful distinction between what he termed the relativum secundum dici and the relativum secundum esse (Boethius ca. 500 ad: lib. 2, 235–237), which terms name, respectively, the relativity of beings and that relation itself.  This distinction, as Deely has demonstrated well, proves remarkably difficult to render in concise and intelligible English translation, but Deely himself has most often rendered them, respectively, “being according to the way in which it must be expressed in discourse” and “relation according to the way it has being” (Deely 1985, 462–63; 472–79).  I propose instead that we translate relativum secundum dici in full as “the expression of substances and inherent accidents as relative” or as “the relativity of beings” for short; and the relativum secundum esse as “relation according to its own existence” or “relation itself.”  I emphasize this distinction here not only because it proves integral to understanding the Thomistic tradition of treating relation and so too of signs, especially in John Poinsot—and even though he seemingly makes no use of the distinction himself, the distinction aids us in understanding the terminology of relation and therefore the semiotics developed by C. S. Peirce—but also because the failure to understand this distinction results in countless errors.   

Both during the Latin Age and in the ensuing centuries, this distinction was often misunderstood, confused, or forgotten.  Unfortunately, the void left by this missed understanding has most often been filled by nominalism.  While a great many theories fall under the broad umbrella of “nominalism”, all of the major proposals receiving that name (and even quite a few that have not), prevalent in the intellectual West since even before modernity, generally hold either that mind-independent relations (relationes reales) do not have existence or that they cannot be known—which, for the nominalists, are effectively the same thing.  This belief is found not only in the lingering influence of the most famous of nominalists, William of Ockham (1285–1347), and his followers such as Gabriel Biel (ca. 1420–1495) and John Mair (1467–1550), but also in Petrus Ramus (1515–1572), Pedro da Fonseca (a stimulating force in the assembly of the Conimbricenses, crucial figures in the history of semiotics), Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), and all the moderns mentioned above.

Among the Scholastics, the theories of relation are made more complex by precise terminological debates—such as over the meanings of ens and res, absoluta and relativa, and by issues such as analogical or univocal predication.  It would take a lengthy monograph to investigate these issues with the meagerest sufficiency.{3} But the pivot from Scholasticism to modernity consists largely in the choice to ignore such theoretical complexity (see Locke 1689: book 3, ch. 10, n.2.1).  Thus, all the great figures of modernity simply dismiss, rather than debate, the reality of relation.  The nominalist reduction of relations themselves to mere productions of the mind, however, is well exemplified by Locke:

When the mind so considers one thing, that it does as it were bring it to, and set it by another, and carries its view from one to the other—this is, as the words import, relation and respect; and the denominations given to positive things, intimating that respect, and serving as marks to lead the thoughts beyond the subject itself denominated, to something distinct from it, are what we call relatives; and the things so brought together, related. . . . All names that are more than empty sounds must signify some idea, which is either in the thing to which the name is applied, and then it is positive, and is looked on as united to and existing in the thing to which the denomination is given; or else it arises from the respect the mind finds in it to something distinct from it, with which it considers it, and then it [i.e., the mind] includes a relation. (Emphasis added; Locke 1689, book 2, ch. 25, nn. 1 and 2)

Put otherwise, the thinkers of modernity seem almost universally to deny that there is anything belonging to relation itself independently of either the relata or the activity of the mind.  They might accept the mind-independent reality of the relativa secundum dici, as though, in things, there are “respects toward”—for instance, I might have a feeling of love for some woman, which determines my disposition toward her, and she might feel loved, an orientation internal to a substance—but they do not accept the reality of the secundum esse, such that there is any “being-toward” irreducible to the related things—so, for instance, between the woman and me, there is no reality that could be called “love”—and thus they hold the relativum secundum esse to be a mere fiction of the mind. 

If we take relation itself to be nothing but a mind-dependent objectivity, having no correlate in the world of subjective beings, nominalism follows as a foregone conclusion: the “universality” of the mind’s intentions would be wholly from the mind itself, and not correlate to any real sameness between the objects regarded under the same concept.  Every sign can be only conventional (see Gilson 1955, 491–92; Deely 2001a, 388–89)—which entails that there can be no necessity in signification, leading to an infinite regress in the search for meaning—if there are no mind-independent relations.

2.3. The Realities of Relation

This nominalistic misconception of relation, found among many late Scholastic thinkers but endemic to the whole of modernity, runs directly against one of the most impactful understandings of relation established by Boethius’s terms of the secundum dici and the secundum esse.  We find this understanding explicitly articulated in the Summa theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas.  In discussing the Divine Relations, St. Thomas writes:

It must be considered that only in those things which are said to be “to something” [ad aliquid, a common name for relation among the Scholastics], is there to be found something which is according to reason alone [secundum rationem tantum] and not according to thinghood [non secundum rem].  Such is not to be found in other genera, because the other genera, such as quantity and quality, signify something inhering in some other [being] according to their proper intelligible rationales.  But those things which are said to be “to something” signify only the respect to another in their proper intelligible rationales. (Aquinas 1266–68, ST I, q. 28, a. 1, c.)

In other words, first: the to something of relation is distinct in its proper intelligible rationale—as the relativum secundum esse—from the relativity of things themselves, considered either as substance or as its accidents, the relativum secundum dici.  Second: the intelligible rationale of relation is indifferent regarding whether it is “of reason” (secundum rationem) or “of things” (secundum rem).  This clarifies that there is a certain positive being to relation itself, secundum esse, even if it is not mind-independently existing (see Poinsot 1631–32, TDS 93.18–96.36 / Reiser 1:580a32–582a16; Kemple 2025, 27–35).  This indifference, which stems not from the mind but the very nature of relation itself, in its own positive intelligible rationale, proves to be the key to a retrieved realism—a realism that does not attempt to reduce reality to substance alone, but recognizes that relation is “an equally valid primordial mode of reality” (Ratzinger 1970, 132).  For St. Thomas, this indifference of relation is not a mere negation but something that seems integral to the very rationale of relation and that helps to explain the procession of the Divine Persons as really distinct and yet substantially one.

John Poinsot’s own analysis of relation follows Thomas’s interpretation of the relativum secundum dici and secundum esse but with an explicit, conscious rejection of nominalism, which was far more prevalent in his own time than in that of Aquinas.  Thus, repeatedly and adamantly, Poinsot makes and defends the claim that:

There are found in mind-independent reality [in re . . . inveniuntur] without any [constitutive] consideration from the intellect, some things having no existence other than being towards another.  Therefore there can be found mind-independent relations, which are not mere expressions of relativity [i.e., what belongs to substances or accidents, the secundum dici] and thus are able to constitute a category distinct from those in absolute things. (Poinsot 1631–32, TDS 82.12–14 / Reiser 1:574b26–29)

Nevertheless, despite the reality of mind-independent relations, relations do not include mind-independent existence in their essential intelligible rationale.  This requires us to recognize a distinction between what actually exists and what is real, or, we might say, between what exists in its own right and what has a “reality” because of the mind’s own operations.  While we often today conflate what is actual or existent and what is real, semiotics demands a distinction between the two; for relations may be real without being actual, or may have a “positive” being without existing in their own right.  Poinsot confirms the teaching of St. Thomas: “Only relation has both the existence of being [esse ens] and being-towards [ad ens], and on that basis from which it has being-towards, it holds itself positively, yet nevertheless it does not on that account have itself as a mind-independent entity” (Poinsot 1631–32, TDS 95.26–29 / Reiser 1:581b1–5).  Charles Peirce, similarly, identifies this irreducibility of relations across his own writings, most especially and prominently in the triadic relations that he identified as the key to signification.  Thus we might say that, commonly in the theories of St. Thomas, Poinsot, and Peirce, relation is conceived as always needing some subject—a mind-independently existing entity—from which it issues forth, but its own proper being consists in an irreducible suprasubjectivity, to use the term given it primarily by John Deely: that is, a being that does not exist without a subject, but that cannot be reduced to the subject from which it comes.  For instance, the fictional character of Edmond Dantès—the protagonist of Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo—is not a particular subject, but a suprasubjective pattern of relations which can be differently realized while remaining truly representative.  For instance, we might say that the 2026 PBS miniseries represents the character more faithfully than the 2002 Kevin Reynolds film.  Similarly, we might say that one man better realizes the suprasubjective pattern of relations that constitutes “being a professor”—specifically in the art of teaching students—than another.

Put otherwise, to escape the modern impasse (or “epistemological quagmire”, as I like to call it), realism must recognize that reality itself is constituted not solely from entities, but also from relations, which are in their positive being irreducible to those realities from which they always come, and at which they sometimes terminate (see Kemple 2020).  Tacit in this recognition is the rejection of modernity’s divide between “subjective” and “objective”, as dividing the “mental” and the “physical”, or the “inner” and the “outer”.  Rather, we see—as the Scholastics did—that the “objective”, as that which is precisely the terminus of a relation to the cognitive powers, potentially comprises both entia naturae insofar as they are known and entia rationis insofar as they are conceived (Maritain 1959, 90–100; and Deely 2009, 1–37).  In realizing that “objects” are relationally constituted, but indifferent as to whether they are mind-dependent or mind-independent beings, we can see more clearly how things become known truly without being wholly certain: for the mind-dependence of certain relational objectivities gives us an intelligible point of reference without necessarily attaining to the full truth of the thing itself.  As an example, the genus of “animal” is a kind of relationally constituted object that we may truly predicate of this or that individual, inasmuch as it exhibits behaviors that correspond to that generic term.  Yet this mind-dependent object—“animal”—while it may not give us total certitude as to the constitution of the individual entity in question, nevertheless does tell us something true about it.

More importantly for our own day and age, without such recognition of relations as “those things the whole existence of which consists in being towards another,” we will be incapable of addressing the realities of culture.  That is, “together with ens rationis, relations provide the whole fabric of our cultural experience—which experience, today, permeates nigh on the entirety of our human lives” (Kemple 2025, 34).  Though “culture” has always existed, that is, so long as human beings have been engaged in linguistic communication and therefore adding mind-dependent objectivities to our world, its distinctiveness from mind-independent nature was largely obscured until the modern break.  But, even though modernity realized better the conventional structure of much that comes to exist in culture, its nominalism has led to, instead of that culture’s flourishing, a deviant development that renders cultural reality increasingly at odds with nature.

Subsequently, we must see how relations structure not only the being of things but also their signification.

III. Principles of Semiotics

Looking at introductory works in semiotics, one finds a wide range of opinions as to its methods, means, and purported principles, as well as methods of entry into the study.  In the author’s opinion, the chief principles of its practice concern a proper understanding of the sign itself and its characteristic action: that is, the ratio formalis signi (formal rationale of signs) and the ratio formalis significandi (the formal rationale of signifying).  Together, these two notions help us to identify the diverse elements of signs and sign-action, the scope of their existence and influence, and their role in constituting both natural and cultural entities.

3.1. Formal Rationale of the Sign

Ask most persons what they mean by a “sign”, and you will likely receive similar sets of answers: specific sensible phenomena that provide instruction or notice of something that you can or must do.  The most frequent answer is “stop sign”—often synecdochally representing other road signs as well—followed closely by “exit” signs or “open” signs.  After some reflection, many will add signifiers more esoteric, as portents, omens, other indirectly given directions from the divine; or unintended communications, such as body language, evasive behavior, indications of infidelity or some secret being kept, and so on.  Pressed further, some may consider natural phenomena such as animal tracks, geological findings, fossils, or complex patterns of signs requiring careful interpretation, such as weather forecasts, or even forensic analysis and medical diagnosis.

In each case, however, the respondent thinks primarily of some thing signifying an object.  However, the doctrina signorum teaches us that signs are most properly understood as relations within which signification is able to occur.{4} Regardless of whether we possess a full consciousness of this, we tacitly recognize its truth in the way we talk about signs: as understood or missed, as interpreted correctly or not, as explicit or implicit—that is, we recognize always that signification comprises not only a signifier, but both a signified and an interpretant, a toward-which and a to-whom.  The stop sign (the white text of the word, the red surface, the octagonal shape) signifies the law (to stop one’s vehicle) to the vehicle’s operator.  We find this formal rationale of the sign most clearly articulated by John Poinsot, who asks: “whether the formal rationale of the sign consists primarily and essentially [primo et per se] in a relation according to its own existence [secundum esse], or in a relation according to the relativity of beings [secundum dici], that is, in some absolute being [i.e., a substance], which founds such a relation” (Poinsot 1631–32, TDS 117.20–24 / Reiser 1:646b16–21).  After making clear that the rationale of the sign pertains to the relativum secundum esse and is not constrained to the predicamental relation, Poinsot goes on to answer the question by saying that “The rationale of a sign formally speaking does not consist in the relativity of beings but according to the existence of the relation itself” (Poinsot 1631–32, TDS 119.13–16 / Reiser 1:647a30–33).  Poinsot’s rationale for this answer proves illuminating.  We quote it here at length:

I have said “formally speaking” because materially and presuppositively the sign expresses the rationale of that which is manifestative or representative of another, which, without a doubt, implies more than just a relation itself [secundum esse], as we will show presently.  Formally, however, the rationale of the sign does not express only the rationale of that which is representative of another, since it is clear that many things manifest or represent something other, and not only through the mode of the sign—as God represents creatures, and every cause its effect, and as principles manifest their conclusions, and light manifests colors; nevertheless these do not have the rationale of a sign.  Therefore, to represent another is required for a sign, but a sign does not consist in this alone; rather, it adds something beyond representing, and formally expresses representing another deficiently or dependently upon the very thing signified, and as though substituting in the capacity of that thing.

. . . . The conclusion is drawn primarily from the teaching of St. Thomas.  For St. Thomas expressly posits that a sign is in the genus of relation which is founded upon some other.  But a relation which is founded upon something other is a relation according to the way it has existence [secundum esse] and belongs to the predicament of “to something”, if it is real.  Therefore a sign consists in a relation itself [secundum esse]. (Poinsot 1631–32, TDS, 119.17–120.6 / Reiser 1:647a34–b14)

Note carefully the reasoning, here.  In the first paragraph, Poinsot makes clear that, although when it is regarded materially, there is within the functioning of the sign some being having relativity—a relativum secundum dici—nevertheless, the formal rationale (which is to say, the precise intelligibility of that which makes something to be a sign at all) consists in the relation itself, the relativum secundum esse.  Put otherwise, it is the positive reality of the relation that makes a sign formally to be a sign, not the thing through which some signification is accomplished, which serves only a material role.  He argues for this on the basis that signification differs from representation, in that the latter encompasses a broader range: there are some entities that represent but do not signify, whereas all things that signify also represent.  What distinguishes signification is that it represents “deficiently or dependently upon the very thing signified”.  The signifier is determined in its role as a signifier by that dependence, by the object.  The object is that by which the signifier is measured in its role as signifier.  Put otherwise, we may say that the signifier lacks a certain perfection found fully only in its signified, whereas what represents may contain that perfection in itself.  Thus, Poinsot says that God “represents creatures”, for whatever perfection is found in a creature is found more eminently in God—there is a likeness between the two, but the perfection in God is not dependent on what is found in creatures.  Conversely, a creature may signify a perfection found in God, but deficiently.  So too, a statue of Augustus Caesar may signify nobility, while the man himself represented it.

Simultaneously, we must also recognize that signification is never merely dyadic.  That is, to be a signifier is not only to be of some object but also to some interpretant.  The interpretant consists in a receptive capacity—or passive potency—which, by the mediation of the signifier, is moved to some actuality with respect to the object.  Thus, the relativum secundum esse constituting the sign is irreducibly triadic: it includes not only the signifier (sometimes called the “sign-vehicle” or “representamen”) and the object (sometimes “signified”, “significate”), but so too the interpretant.  We will discuss the interpretant more below (3.3).  But first, we must make a clarification regarding the sign as a relation.

3.2. Importance of Signs as Relations

To see the importance of realizing that signs are themselves formally relativum secundum esse and only materially relativum secundum dici, let us take up the common Scholastic distinction between the formal and the instrumental sign.  The instrumental sign is what most people consider to be a sign: this or that sensed object through which our minds are directed to another.  Under this term we would include traffic signs, store signs, gestures, printed or spoken words, and, in fact, anything at all perceived through the senses that is used to effect a relation of signification. 

Formal signs, on the other hand, are those whose whole being consists in effecting the relation of signification (Poinsot 1631–32, TDS 27.13–15 / Reiser 1:10a4–6)—that is, a formal sign, as signifying, brings the relation of signification, latently present, into complete actuality.  They differ thus from instrumental signs: an instrumental sign, in order to signify, needs first to be ascertained as an object itself, in order that, subsequently, the relation of signification comes into being (Poinsot 1631–32, TDS 27.15–18 / Reiser 1:10a6–10).  If I do not see the stop sign, no law about stopping my vehicle is signified to me.  A formal sign, however, needs no such material object. Put otherwise, the fundamental distinction between formal and instrumental consists in how they differently relate of themselves to the recipient of the sign action, for the “first founds a formal representation acting within a cognitive power, [while] the second founds an instrumental representation moving a [cognitive] power from without” (Poinsot 1631–32, TDS 163.20–23 / Reiser 1:669a43–47).  The formal sign, therefore, does not signify by being sensible, but rather by founding an intentional relation of cognoscibility.

We experience formal signs in our own intellectual concepts, which have no materiality whatsoever in their constitution but simply render present to us their respective intelligible objects in their intelligibility.  This intelligible presentation requires a phantasmal particular through which the intelligibility is realized.  Debates may be had over whether the phantasm, too, functions as a formal sign or whether it is an instrument.  The answer is complex: on the one hand, strictly as a percept through which the particular is realized, the phantasm seems to play the role of formal signifier—for its own being as a phantasm consists entirely in ordering the mind to the object.  Simultaneously, on the other hand, the phantasm does seem “instrumental”, inasmuch as we must grasp its material and particular object to see in it the intelligible and universal object.

What this shows us, however, is that the identification of signs as being either “instrumental” or “formal”, if we conflate the signifier with the formal rationale of the sign, will lead us into a misunderstanding.  That is, the “formal sign” and “instrumental sign” do not designate formally different kinds of sign-relations, but rather material differences of the signifiers or sign-vehicles: namely, whether that signifier has to first be rendered an object in order for the formal sign-relation to be realized.  We see here again the importance of the distinction between the relativum secundum dici and the relativum secundum esse.  The “formal” and “instrumental” signifiers differentiate the relativum secundum dici only, not the relativum secundum esse.  As such, they are material or presuppositive but not formal differentiations of signs.

Recognizing that the difference is merely material and not formal helps us to much better realize the nature of signs themselves.  As John Deely writes:

. . . whether we speak of psychological states (“ideas and feelings”) or sense perceptible phenomena (“natural and conventional occurrences”) as “signs”, the realization that the sign strictly speaking, in the being proper to and constituting itself as such, consists not in any particular thing—natural or cultural, inner or outer—as vehicle but in the very relation itself triadic and imperceptible (in contrast to the related things) uniting three particulars (two of which need not even exist outside of the in-principle-public sphere of objectivity), as Poinsot demonstrated, was a decisive moment for the theory of knowledge. (Emphasis added; Deely 2015a, 190).

As Deely goes on to say, this realization of the sign as essentially triadic helps to clarify the fundamental difference between sense-perceptual sign-use and intellectual sign-use, revealed precisely in the species-specific human reflectivity by which we realize ourselves as sign-using entities.  In other words, we alone can grasp the sign-relational constitution of our experience.  This difference is manifestly present in the human use of language (see 3.5 below).  Additionally, as Deely goes on:

This realization also reveals as a blind alley the many attempts to isolate “signs” as some class or subclass of objects among other objects that can be seen and pointed to.  For signs prove to be rather strictly invisible networks of relations which every object presupposes in order to be as an object (in order to be, that is to say, as something experienced and apprehended).  Far from being reducible to any subjectivity, whether physical or psychological, signs belong rather to the suprasubjectivity whereby subjectivity itself is objectified and made public in communication (intersubjectivity achieved, wherever it occurs) and, in principle if not always in fact, in human understanding. (Deely 2015a, 190.)

In other words, while sign-relations may be realized through different kinds of vehicles—sensible, phantasmal, conceptual, some of which vehicles may themselves require objectivization before their semiosic function is realized, some of which may not—the essential nature of the sign as such a relation remains always the same.  Thus, signs are not one kind of object in the world of objects, but rather that by which any thing is turned into an object in the first place (see Maritain 1959, 90–100, on “Thing and Object”).  In other words, we must not conflate the sign-relation with the sign-vehicle, which may or may not be an object, but realize that every object presupposes a sign-relation: for it is only by being signified, somehow, that something is an object at all.

As a further consequence of this realization, we see the scope of semiotics to be far broader than language or even cognition—for we can recognize semiosis occurring even in unthinking forms of life, that is, in entities having no intentional bearing to the world around them.

3.3. The Scope and Causality of Signification

Peirce once wrote, in a letter to William James, that “our Reason is akin to the Reason that governs the Universe; we must assume that or despair of finding out anything” (Peirce 1909, 502).  While this begins as an assumption, it seems one verified by every truth we discover—so long as we do not falsely believe those truths to be exhaustively realized in their representations, but conveyed through deficient and dependent significations.  Signs, being relations, may bring the things related (the relata) into the unity of the relation more or less perfectly.  Some sign-relations are very imperfect.  Some are perfective, enlarging the being of their interpretants—such are the signs employed by properly cognitive agents, and most especially by intellectual agents, who are capable in their semiosic operations of truly becoming, in some way, all things.

But even those entities that do not become all things may, in some way, become something more by the use of signs.  As discussed below (4.1), the very possibility of evolution depends upon this causality of signs.  Thus, from the lowest of life forms—and perhaps even below the threshold of living—we see an intelligibility of the universe through our own understanding of signs.  It is thus that, though developing out of the tradition of logic, semiotics considers not only the signs specific to human understanding but signs throughout the entirety of existence.

To understand how this is possible, we must first grasp the causality that is specific to the action of signs.  As is well known, Aristotle divides his causes into four: the agent and final being regarded as extrinsic, and the formal and material being regarded as intrinsic.  Over time in the Scholastic reception of Aristotelian thought, however, gradually certain distinctions began to emerge that crossed these extrinsic-intrinsic boundaries: as final cause was recognized to be both something stemming from the intrinsic nature of living entities and something causing action from outside those entities.  For instance, it is the final cause of the individual soldier that he see his brothers in arms alive through the fight; while it is the final cause of the general that the army be victorious.  These ends may align or diverge, but both can cause the soldier to behave in a certain way.  Similarly, the Scholastics noted that, although formal causes always somehow determine the intelligible rationales of their effects, these forms need not enter intrinsically into the entities in question in order for such effects to occur.  Thus, they distinguished two extrinsic formal causes as well: namely that which is operative in techne or in the divine ideas, which they named exemplar causality; and that which is operative in signs, or objective causality, which we might also name specifying causality.

This notion of the objective cause is most explicitly elaborated by Poinsot, though one finds it articulated nascently in St. Thomas’s work, as well, in his own use of the term “object”.  Specifically, we see that objects are always related to cognitive and affective powers of the soul.  This relation can happen in two ways, inasmuch as those powers may be passive or active.  An object related to a passive power is called an obiectum movens—literally, “an object moving”, but the term can perhaps be rendered more accurately in contemporary English as a “stimulative” object (Deely 1985, 467–68).  By contrast, an object related to an active power is that at which the power’s activity comes to a certain rest or completion, and it is called a “terminative object” (obiectum terminans).  Poinsot states that both senses of object consist in an extrinsic formal cause of specification (Poinsot 1631–32, TDS 166.4–11 / Reiser 1:670a21–29).  The terminative specifies the power as that by which the operation is determined: if I am to read Euclid’s Elements, there are specific kinds of actions I must take to do so, such as acquiring the book, opening it, moving my eyes across the words, etc.  The stimulative object, however, determines my powers as to what they receive: my eyes are determined by the colors of what they see, my ears by the whir of computer and HVAC fans, and my fingers by the smoothed, worn-down keys of my keyboard.  Distinctive in the different kinds of specification, however, is that the terminative orders us to a certain kind of completion, whereas the stimulative always orders us to something more.  The many colors in my office order my vision not only to themselves but to the surfaces from which they reflect, and thus a perception of the color allows a perception of the surface—which in turn, allows a perception of some whole physical being, giving me an awareness of something more than I can see, as such, given that my sense experiences are enmeshed in a web of prior experience through which I have learned there consistently to be something more than that which is directly sensed.  Similarly, the sound of my HVAC is not the HVAC itself, and it may sound normal or as though something has gone awry, as though the machinery is breaking down.  And my keyboard signifies not only the capacity to make letters appear on the screen, or to command my computer to perform various tasks, but includes by association the signification of the many things that have been done through it.

The more familiar to me these objects are themselves, the richer the possibilities of signification.  We can observe, for instance, in non-human animals a greater awareness than we have ourselves to the sense-perceptual possibilities of the world.  Highly attuned to the needs of survival, we see these animals keener in recognition of threats and opportunities, of weather and dangers.  From the experience not only of their individual lives but in the genetic lineages of evolutionary selection, we see their ability to find food and shelter by signs we do not ourselves directly recognize.  So too, in ourselves, we can see the refined palates of sommeliers and the gustatory precision of the gourmet, or the sensitivity to light and shadow of the painter, the trained ear of the pianist or the mechanic—those who see in their instruments and objects more than we ourselves can, for they have not only received much by sensation (species impressae sensibiles, in the later Scholastic tradition) but carefully collated their experiences so as to be well-attuned to those objects (through species expressae sensibiles) in future encounters.

But it is not just corporeal experience that comes to our awareness through the causality of signs.  We human beings, through our intellective faculties, are able to see in and through the objects of sensation the intelligible objects irreducible to those material particulars.  The multitude of sense-perceptual experiences we have, in other words, signify to us something beyond the merely corporeal, and thus we are able to receive the specification of intelligible objects (species impressae intelligibiles).  Composed with other notions of the intelligible, we form concepts that signify the meaningful governance of our objects of experience (species expressae intelligibiles), such that we are able to judge the corporeal dimension in light of the intelligible.  That is, through these species expressae we signify to ourselves formal intelligibilities and how they may be judged of material particulars.  But this involves us in a necessarily recursive process, for the development of these species—at both the sense-perceptual and the intellectual levels—is complex, observing not a singular, linear line of objective causality but a multitude of differing experiences seeking resolution.  To effect this resolution we often need a great deal of what Peirce named “collateral experience”: that is, a kind of rich phenomenological diversity that is not disconnected from but alongside the object in question, so as to understand it not strictly through itself but in the many relations by which it is constituted in actual existence. 

This phenomenological wealth is concentrated in the entity that receives the action of the sign, the interpretant.  As Deely writes:

[The interpretant], not the idea of the sign-relation as triadic, is the theoretical point which marks the principal advance of contemporary semiotic consciousness over the achievements in this area of the Latin Age; hence it is not surprising that the spelling out of this notion proves to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of difficulties for contemporary semiotics. (Deely 2015a, 36)

The full explication of this importance exceeds the confines of an encyclopedia article, and has not yet been given even in the most advanced of semiotic literature.  We will continue to touch upon a few of its points below (through section 4).  But as Deely adds, and as is most important for us to recognize here, “What is essential to the interpretant is that it mediates the difference between physical and objective being, a difference that knows no fixed line” (Deely 2015a, 37).  In other words—reading “physical” as the Greek “natural” and “objective” as including but not reducing to the “cultural”—the interpretant is that wherein signification is capable of growing, for it is by the interpretant that something new or different happens as a consequence of sign-relations’ actuality.  It is the complexification of the interpretant that allows semiotic causality to span the entirety of the universe.  But to understand this better, let us move on to another key distinction.

3.4. Signs by Nature and by Convention

A distinction first introduced by Augustine in his De doctrina Christiana is that signs have long been differently regarded inasmuch as they are by nature or through some convention.  Fundamental to this distinction is the manner in which the sign-vehicle accomplishes its relating.  This differentiation in manner does alter the status of the whole relation, however, and so—unlike the distinction between formal and instrumental—there is a modal difference between natural and conventional signs.  This modal difference must be recognized and understood as an antecedent to comprehending the living growth of signification.

This modal difference consists in the necessity of a natural sign-vehicle’s relation to its object and the contingency of the conventional sign-vehicle’s relation.  Put in other words, the natural sign-vehicle cannot but signify, at least virtually, its object.  Thus, the representative element of the sign-vehicle is of that object by its very nature, whereas the conventional sign is either by imposition—that is, stipulation—or by custom:{5}

A natural sign is one that represents from the nature of a thing, independently of any stipulation and custom whatever, and so it represents the same for all, as smoke signifies a fire burning.  A stipulated sign [signum ad placitum] is one that represents something owing to an imposition by a public authority, like the linguistic expression “man.”  A customary sign [signum ex consuetudine] is one that represents from use alone without any public imposition, as napkins upon the table signify a meal. (Poinsot 1631–32, TDS 27.19–28 / Reiser 1:10a12–23)

We will turn momentarily (in 3.5) to the distinction of stipulative and customary signs.  For the moment, let us simply consider these two under the generic heading of “conventional” as opposed to “natural”.  As we see in Poinsot’s example, the natural “represents the same for all”.  This does not mean, of course, that the natural sign-vehicle signifies the same to all—since signification is dependent upon the interpretant—but that in itself it has the same representative power for every person who might encounter it.  The smoke intrinsically of itself represents fire, just as the hoofprint intrinsically represents the deer, and the concept intrinsically represents the intelligible object.  By contrast, the attachment of the conventional sign-vehicle to the object carries with it no necessity but depends upon extrinsic circumstances in order that the representative relation be established.

An interesting development of this same basic division can be found in the works of Peirce, who notes that sign-vehicles may be differentiated in a multitude of ways—how they are in themselves, how they respect the interpretant, and how they respect the object—including, rather famously, the differentiation into iconic (commonly, what signifies by similitude), indexical (by association or causal relation), and symbolic (by convention) sign-vehicles.  Notably, he defines the icon as “a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own and which it possesses, just the same, whether any such Object actually exists or not” and adds that “unless there really is such an Object, the icon does not act [as] a sign; but this has nothing to do with its character as a sign” (Peirce 1903a, 291), or, we might say, with its representative capacity.  The symbolic sign-vehicle always relies upon some stipulation, at least initially, as it is itself something sensible, but its object is something intelligible; whereas the indexical sign-vehicle can be either by some natural connection of efficient causes and their effects (as in the case of a weathervane) or by experiential association (as JFK’s “We choose to go to the Moon” speech always reminds me of Logan International Airport, where it was played regularly during the time I lived in Boston).

The kinds of sign-relations affected by these vehicles are not mutually exclusive of one another, but—in fact—occur in a kind of hierarchy: every symbol incorporates elements both indexical and iconic, and every index relies upon icons to function.  For instance, the sentence “I know a deer passed through my yard last night from the hoofprints” is itself a symbol, comprising a multitude of other symbols, which—in order that it be understood—includes (among many other sign-relations) recognizing the indexical sign of the hoofprint pointing to an actual existence, and an icon (that hoofprints are alike to the hoofs of deer).  While this trichotomy of sign-vehicles does not map on to the distinction between natural and conventional, it does help us to triangulate better the meaning of the distinction.  For not all natural signs are iconic (as smoke is not an icon of fire), and not all indexical signs are natural (as JFK’s speech has no intrinsic representation of Logan International), but in each case we can see something of the natural signification’s possibility, such as it belongs to the hoofprint that it represents not only the sameness in shape of the hoof (iconically) but also the having-passed of the deer (indexically).  By contrast, every iconic sign is a natural signifier—even if the iconic sign is something that has been itself produced by a human being.  A portrait, for instance, may be intended not to signify anyone in particular but may nevertheless bear a striking resemblance to some actually existing individual.  Someone who knows this individual, seeing the portrait, will be specified by its very nature, that is, its own intrinsic being, to think of that person.

This intrinsic relationality follows inasmuch as the representative quality consists in a “mind-independent proportion and connection” (Poinsot 1631–32, TDS 140.10–14 / Reiser 1:658a2–25) with its object, such that there exists a relation between them, even if that relation is never made actual until some mind recognizes the proportion and connection in question. 

Quite importantly, in the semiotic of Poinsot and Peirce alike is a recognition—explicit in the former and hinted at in the latter—that conceptual sign-vehicles are themselves always natural rather than conventional.  That is, it is of the nature of the conceptual sign-vehicle that it have a sameness not in an intrinsic or physical form but in intentional being.

The smoke signifies not only that there exists a fire, but also—by its color, opacity, and texture—indicates the qualities of the fuel, the conditions of combustion, extrinsic environmental factors, and even the conditions of light in the surrounding atmosphere.  The better-developed a percept of a horse, the more accurately it can be cognitively represented according to, for instance, length of limb and size of head, or number of toes—or the more accurately the being of the horse can be understood from its concept, including truths such as the length of its pre-natal gestation or age of sexual maturity or chromosomal pairings.  In each case, the conceptual sign-vehicle, just as the instrumental, is measured in its significative quality as what is measured by what measures.

The truth that every conceptual sign-vehicle bears this kind of mind-independent relation of measured to measure not as a matter of convention but as a matter of its own proper natural being both renders nugatory the idealism characteristic of all modern philosophy and opens wide the gates for understanding culture. (Kemple 2025, 88–89)

With this lattermost point in mind let us now turn our attention to the differentiation and resolution of conventional signs.

3.5. Conventional Signs by Stipulation and by Custom

Though it may seem at first glance as though natural, stipulative, and customary signs are all irreducible to one another, Poinsot makes the perhaps surprising but very important observation that, although customary signs are truly distinct from both the stipulative and the natural, they are nevertheless always (and therefore necessarily) derivative from either one or the other.  In other words, a sign by custom comes either from the natures of the things involved or from some stipulation.  To see what this means, it is helpful to consider what precisely we mean by the terms “stipulated” and “customary”.

First, concerning stipulated signs (signa ad placitum):  These are, as Poinsot says, signs founded by a stipulation (impositio) by which some vehicle is “habilitated and appointed” to serve as a signifier for the intended object.  All stipulated signs, therefore, consist in extrinsic denominations—that is, ways of naming things by predicates that do not belong to the thing intrinsically, such as “professor” or “judge”.  These predicates are mind-dependent social objectivities constituted on the pattern of mind-independent realities, in a web of relativity to one another.  Thus, one person has the office of a judge, and another the office of a teacher, because of such a stipulation.  Specifically, this entails the imposition upon those persons that, within those offices, they have duties to perform in their respective functions, but they do not have the functions of one another (at least, not in the same manner or as regards the same purposes).  Were we to invent a new term altogether, for an altogether new office, this would require of us an act clearly stipulative.  One could also consider the framing of a constitution, the drafting of a law, or the naming of an institute.  Notably, all these stipulations will likely use old words, or variations thereupon, but impose upon them a meaning at least somewhat dependent upon the intent of the author.

Thus—in a point to which we will return momentarily—most stipulation seems to rely upon already-extant customary meanings.  But this point requires us first to understand the constitution of customary signs (signa ex consuetudine).  In contrast to the stipulative, Poinsot writes, customary signs signify “not by dimanating from a public authority, but from the mere inclination of particular individuals frequently to make use of them” (Poinsot 1631–32, TDS 278.1–6 / Reiser 1:719a23–29).{6}  We are all aware of customs arising or emerging from or through some frequent repetition.  But such frequent repetition often occurs because the action is (or was initially) found fitting to the circumstances of natural entities.  For instance, the dog, receiving food, attention, affection, and guidance from a human being, naturally takes to following him; and in seeing this relationship, we infer by custom that the human is the dog’s master.  Now, there is a mind-independently natural proportionality in the relationship between a human and canine creature, but there is no necessity in that relationship’s arising, or in its being something frequently repeated.  Because each creature finds it fitting, however, it emerges into a custom.  However, we may note that some customs arise not from natural fittingness but from a stipulation, or that what occurs by a natural fittingness receives a stipulated form.  For instance, there may be a natural fittingness to offering a noontime prayer every day, but that a church bell rings out this time for a reminder of this purpose requires a certain stipulation.  But we can see this practice continue even in the absence of the conditions under which it arose, as an astronaut in space may still observe a “noontime” prayer, even though the hours of his day are experienced differently.  Thus, as Poinsot says:

If custom respects some sign by appointing and proposing it for a sign, such a sign founded on custom will be stipulated.  But if custom does not propose or institute something as a sign, but expresses the simple use of the thing, and by reason of that use the thing is taken for a sign, such a sign is reduced to a natural sign. (Poinsot 1631–32, TDS 278.10–17 / Reiser 1:719a35–44)

As he goes on to show—and as we saw in our examples above—customs by this twofold respect are either the causes of signs or the effects of them.  In either case, customs themselves always function as signs, as well.  That customs are signs follows inasmuch as custom comes to possess the force of law: “a custom introducing something for signifying introduces that thing as a sign by the same authority by which the law itself would introduce it” (Poinsot 1631–32, TDS 279.4–6 / Reiser 1:719b15–18).

Thus we can see that the habilitation of the terms to the aforementioned stipulated functions—not only those of the judge or teacher, but also the policeman, director, president, and so forth—depends upon an already-extant frame of customary signs.  Natural fittingness and stipulative action therefore build upon one another through the mediation of custom.  We may stipulate anything, that is, as a sign, for any purpose; but for that stipulation to endure, for it to grow in the lives of human beings, it ought to be fitting to nature.  Customs derived from stipulations contrary to nature will divide the life and experiences of the human being.  As Deely writes:

The human animal, as inventor of the Rule, needs also to realize that this inventor is in dire need of being wary of the surrounding virtualities which measure, in every case, how truly reasonable the “rule” is against the background and in the context of what humanity must depend on . . . in order to pursue its seemingly (but not entirely in fact) “unlimited semiosis”.  Otherwise, we risk making a semiotics on the model of the Hobbesian King, answerable to nothing below and hence immune to considerations of justice or injustice. (Deely 2015a, 88–89)

To put this otherwise, our ability to develop signs through stipulation and custom accelerates the growth of signification, but unless these signs are rooted ultimately in what is independently of our minds, they will either wither and die or grow malignantly and contrary to the natural good.

Notably, such conventional signifiers embrace many nonlinguistic phenomena, but, in the specifically human world of operation, they presuppose the linguistic context.  Thus, John Deely has proposed that all of our nonlinguistic “cultural” phenomena be identified as postlinguistic: flags or seals signifying institutions or governmental entities, gold signifying wealth, logos signifying corporations, croziers signifying bishoprics, and so on and on.  Common to all these phenomena’s intelligibility is a linguistic context in which alone their signification can be explained as to their intended objectivity.  Someone might, by drawing upon previous comparable experience, be able to “intuit” that a bishop holds a position of social importance based upon not only his attire or bearing but the degree of deference or respect that others show him—but the why of these social relations requires language in order that the object be evaluated at a properly human level of cognition (see Deely 1994, 122, 151–53, and 217–18).

3.6. Speculative and Practical Signification

Among the most neglected of distinctions in the treatment of signs is that between speculative and practical signification.  Of principal importance here, again, we must note that the distinction concerns not the sign-vehicle itself but rather the totality of the relation.  What is at once a signifier for a speculative concern can, at another time, signify with respect to practice—as St. Thomas tells us, drawing upon Aristotle, the speculative becomes practical “by extension” (Aquinas 1266–68, ST I, q. 79, a. 11, s.c.).

Thus, the origin of difference in whether a sign functions speculatively or practically—though this difference is not exclusively in any one of the three elements of a sign-relation—is to be found in the interpretant, as that from which the object is regarded as an end to be understood or one to be achieved.  The extension from speculative to practical consists in the revelation of some operable relation within the intelligible, that is, “not truth absolutely, but as it is concordantly and in conformity by holding itself to a correct end, that is to the work which it intends” (Poinsot 1637–44, ed. Vivès, t. 9, 30b).  Note that we are here relying upon a somewhat narrow definition of “practical”, as pertaining to that which is properly human.  Do non-human animals not make use of “practical” signs?  Strictly speaking, no; for every semiosic operation of creatures below the level of human intelligence is ordered toward the operable, and, in fact, the whole of the animal’s “conception” of any and all objects is comprised within such an ordering.  There are no “speculative” significations in animal intelligence, and thus none that are distinctly “practical”.

This confused nature of animal semiosis helps us better to see the distinction in our own.  The attainment of speculative signs stands as a singular achievement of human intelligence among all animals.  Our ability to inquire into the intelligible rationales governing not merely the operability of objects relative to ourselves but also in what they themselves are gives our cognitive lives a depth unparalleled on earth.  But this enriches our practical semiosis, as well, for in that discernment of intelligible rationales among the objects of our cognition, we are far better enabled to observe the possibilities of operable relations.  In this, we are able not only to respond interpretively to sign-vehicles, but so too to stipulate certain objects (words, such as commands, or road signs, or the like) for the purpose of practically signifying both for ourselves and for others.  The possibilities of communicating practical signification depend heavily upon the resolution of instrumental sign-vehicles to antecedent formal signification, that is, to a shared universe of discourse and the ability of interpretants to receive the intended directions of praxis given by the stipulated practical signs (see Deely 2015b, chs. 8–10).  The purpose of the practical sign, that is, consists in being directive, either for oneself or for another, of operations through which actions may lead to the intended end (Poinsot 1637–44, t. 9, 30b–31b).

It is worth noting that the principal discussion of practical signification that occurs among the Scholastics concerns the sacraments.  While they are often described as “outward signs of an inward grace”, we must not understand that “outward signification” to be nothing other than a speculative or manifestative sign-relation, but rather that the sacraments direct the individual in a distinct context of practical operations.  We will discuss this more below (4.3).

It is also worth noting that C. S. Peirce, although he did not adopt the precise Scholastic terminology distinguishing speculative from practical signification, nevertheless implicitly observes it both through his own terminology (as, e.g., “logical” and “final” interpretant) and through his doctrine of “pragmaticism”, in which practical operability is the ultimate realization of any concept’s meaning.  Contrary to the “pragmatism” of James, Dewey, and Rorty, however, Peirce’s “pragmaticism” is not governed by a nominalistic rejection of intelligibility; to the contrary, he asserts that its governing logic is the operation of abduction, that is, the ability to conceive intelligibilities in the first place, which are subsequently put to further investigation through deductive rigor and inductive testing—and thus, Peirce too sees that the speculative becomes practical by extension, not merely in the actual operations by which some end is pursued, but in the intelligible direction of the agent toward that end (Peirce 1903b).{7}In alignment with the just-mentioned necessity of a shared universe of discourse, Peirce asserts that the recipient of some instrumental signification must have, in order to grasp its intelligibility (and thus to act upon it practically), sufficient preexistent “collateral experience” to comprehend the relation between the sign-vehicle and the object.  We will see the importance specifically of the Peircean approach below as well (4.2).

IV. Semiotic Insights

What, ultimately, is the purpose of studying semiotics or applying semiotics to our other studies?  To many, it might appear merely as a superficial pretense—pouring old philosophical or logical wines in a new skin.  However, although it has its roots in the study of logic and although it extends to every question of philosophical importance, it may go even further than this, for it both extends into the process of discovery proper to non-philosophical science (and allows us to resolve those sciences and their discoveries back to philosophy, and therefore understand their discoveries with fuller meaning) and allows us better, I would argue (albeit likely inviting some controversy in the process), to interpret questions properly theological.

To help clarify the principles of semiotics and the efficacy of semiotically informed inquiry across the range of human knowledge—and so as to thereby better affect its unity—let us consider three examples of the insight these principles bring to phenomena of human experience, first, concerning signification of natural phenomena; second, concerning the signification of cultural phenomena; and third, concerning the signification of the spiritual life of the human being, which can, in fact, be known only through signs.

4.1. Natural Signification

It is commonly understood among semioticians that the use of signs and the existence of corporeal life are coextensive—and it has been argued by Deely that sign-relations have an extension into both the purely spiritual life of finite beings (i.e., angels—see Deely 2004) and the inorganic material development of the cosmos, as well (“physiosemiosis”; see, e.g., Deely 2001b).  But it is useful not merely to note the pervasion of semiosis in vital activity; rather, we can understand certain observed effects and theoretical possibilities through an understanding of the causality of signs. 

The most evident example of this concerns the theory of evolution, for which there exists strong evidence of its happening but, at times, certain apparent weaknesses in the explanation of its occurrence.  Put otherwise, looked at through the strictly mechanistic lens under which it is often examined—in which time and randomness are supposed as the main driving factors—evolution seems almost impossible: the development of a functional “aboutness” and the adaptive pursuit of life are inexplicable by mere mechanical (i.e., efficient and material) causation alone.  Mere appeal to final causality also leaves a gap between the organism and its (re)orientation toward vital ends.  Understood in terms of semiosic causality, however—the objective specification by which an interpretant is reordered (or participates in the reordering of itself) toward an object—the idea of evolutionary advance becomes more intelligible.  That is, so long as we understand that interpretants are not strictly individuals but can comprise a group, the idea of emergence becomes less a handwaving solution and more fundamentally intelligible.

Biological traits are not merely caused by efficient vires a tergo—that is, “forces from behind”, or causes that cause something chronologically consequent to themselves—rather, they are for something, and succeed or fail depending upon a kind of vis a prospectu—that is, a final cause, a “force from the foreseen”.  This functional being-toward-an-end cannot be explained by the winnowing effected through the success and failure of mutations or other adaptations alone, since selection presupposes criteria of success that are not themselves explained by either mutation or environmental pressures.  The difficulty, then, is not whether the mechanisms of evolution eliminate or preserve traits, but how purposive structure appears at all without a tacit teleological ordering.  But to explain the development either of the cosmos as a whole or of life in particular by appealing to a teleological structure as an a priori necessity would merely be an appeal to a deus ex machina.

A Peircean account of semiosis resolves this problem by helping us to understand biological function both as itself always a certain sign-action and as presupposing a semiosically structured environment.  That is, not only extrinsic stimulations but likewise internal orderings of organic parts (DNA, RNA, molecular structures, etc.) act as complex chains and webs of sign-relations; environmental and systemic conditions serve as objects (not as external things objectivized, but as this- or that-toward-which the interpretant is reordered nonetheless—such a distinction, between the external and the internal object, being identified by the terminological pairing of exosemiosis and endosemiosis, respectively); and the interpretant is not a mental act or concept but rather a stabilized habit of response.  When the interpretant constitutes a regulatory system, developmental pathway, or genetically transferred habit, evolution can be described as the historical stabilization of interpretants that correctly navigate the pressures of the environment.  Selection does not thereby create the living semiosis for evolving organisms but rather describes the reordering of semiosic relations that successfully mediate between organism and environment.{8}

This reframing shows that evolutionary explanation already depends on a recognition of semiosic structure in the cosmos, even if it does not name it.  Normativity, functionality, and end-directedness emerge as immanent features of any organized system precisely because of the objective-specifying causality of sign-relations rather than external efficient causes.  Thus, semiosis articulates the operation of extrinsic formal causality under contingent material conditions: it is the reception of and response to objects which determines the possibilities of genetic “success”—that is, the ability to form habits responsive to the environment across generations—and what we name as “evolution” is the temporal unfolding of such objectively specified habituation.

We can also see in non-human animal behavior how such semiosic adaptation alters the processes of life.  Domesticated animals often come to adopt patterns of interpretation that are not only contrary to their genetic lineage but that disincline them to survival outside the home or care of human beings.  For instance, many dogs and cats, particularly those raised exclusively in the care of humans and without early exposure to the outdoors or wild animals, fail to develop any predatory behaviors precisely because prey has never been objectivized for them as such.

4.2. Cultural Signification

For the purposes of this article, we may define culture as the web of semiosic relations by which shared objectivities shape our common interpretations of regularly occurring phenomena.  Thus, each culture comprises a multitude of symbols, both linguistic and postlinguistic, by which interactions are governed to varying degrees of efficacy.  Such a phenomenon has always existed, so long as human beings have shared symbolic signification of their social governance.  Prior to the emergence of later-modern thinking, “culture” was not commonly given an explicit name, except with reference to practices of religious worship or education.  It is beyond this article’s scope to investigate the emergence of cultural consciousness as an explicit object, but suffice it to say that it appears in no small part through growing awareness of the contrast between governance under different symbols within the same social environments understood precisely through the modern idealist perspective outlined above (2.1 and 2.2).

Thus, culture emerges through conventional signification and gains strength through well-wrought stipulations of symbolic vehicles by which both common understanding and cooperative praxis are accomplished.  As obvious examples, we might consider the U.S. Constitution and its process of amendment, the drafting of a new law, corporate mission statements and bylaws, the appointment of officials, the ceremonies of coronation or knighting, the signing of a contract, and so on and on.  The better articulated each such stipulation is, considered not only in terms of its intrinsic coherence but its receptibility by others, the more enduring it tends to prove.  A new law, for instance, may fall flat—despite the authority behind its stipulation—if the populace totally disregards it; while a ceremony of coronation, despite being seen as antiquated by most modern sensibilities, nevertheless retains a cultural weight—as evidenced by the crowning of King Charles III in 2023. 

By contrast, we see cultures begin to fragment whenever communication becomes disordered and those living amid the same social structures lack shared governance through common patterns of semiosis established by symbolic signifiers.  When laws receive radically different interpretations not only in a singular instance but across generations and within institutions (as, for example, the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), or when there is competition for the public installment of symbols for opposed beliefs (as the locations of mosques and churches, or crucifixes and satanic imagery), we can see the application of the term “culture” become strained, to say the least.  Instead, we start talking about “multiculturalism” or “culture wars”—inapt terms that further misdirect our minds away from both the reality of culture and the practical operability possible with respect to it.

Crucial to recognize, however, is that an internally coherent culture may nevertheless be at odds with nature.  Consider this passage from C. S. Peirce:

Every sane person lives in a double world, the outer and the inner world, the world of percepts [or objectivized things] and the world of fancies [or pure objects not correlative to things as such].  What chiefly keeps these from being mixed up together is (besides certain marks they bear) everybody’s well knowing that fancies can be greatly modified by a certain non-muscular effort, while it is muscular effort alone . . . that can to any noticeable degree modify percepts.  A man can be durably affected by his percepts and by his fancies.  The way in which they affect him will be apt to depend upon his personal inborn disposition and upon his habits.  Habits differ from dispositions in having been acquired as consequences of the principle, virtually well-known even to those whose powers are insufficient to its formulation, that multiple reiterated behavior of the same kind, under similar combinations of percepts and fancies, produces a tendency—the habit—actually to behave in a similar way under similar circumstances in the future.  Moreover—here is the point—every man exercises more or less control over himself by means of modifying his own habits; and the way in which he goes to work to bring this effect about in those cases in which circumstances will not permit him to practice reiterations of the desired kind of conduct in the outer world shows that he is virtually well-acquainted with the important principle that reiterations in the inner world—fancied reiterations—if well-intensified by direct effort, produce habits, just as do reiterations in the outer world; and these habits will have power to influence actual behaviour in the outer world; especially, if each reiteration be accompanied by a peculiar strong effort that is usually likened to issuing a command to one’s future self. (Peirce 1906, CP.5.487)

We see here, particularly in this latter portion of the quote, an implicit appeal to the importance of practical signification even when it is not actually enacted through physical operation: the practical signification formulates in us a kind of habit for future action just as much as (albeit of a somewhat different kind of habituation) carrying out the physical operations themselves would do.  These “habituated fancies”, however, can become objects of communication even when they are never embodied in mind-independent realities conformed to the objectivity as such.  Were this not the case, much literature, especially in the genres of fantasy and science fiction, would never have been produced.  So too, other artistically rendered media—illustrations, paintings, cinema or television, and now especially the digital medium—allow us to craft increasingly elaborate representations by which we can share these “fancies”, allowing a kind of perceptual reinforcement of their habituation.  Cultural symbols can thereby come to signify governing objectivities not only distinct from the possibilities of nature but even contrary to it.

Thus we can see that among the many currents always affecting the cultural constitution of human societies is technology, specifically technology understood not narrowly as the devices or systems by which we mediate our interactions with the world, but more broadly as the extensions of our own faculties through these interactions, and therefore as a modulation of our habits of thinking.  In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we have seen a shift both profound and rapid in these consequences of technological media, as first radio, then the television, and now the internet have given us a disproportionate amount of information—extending beyond our natural capacities (i.e., as animals whose cognition always is tied in this life to the material, we are not meant to be exposed to global quantities of information).  As a consequence of this disproportion, one can see a breakdown in the ability to interpret that information, leading not only to intensified neuroses and even psychotic breaks, but, on a somewhat more pedestrian and yet nevertheless profoundly dangerous level, exacerbations of ideological and conspiratorial thinking.

This influence upon thought cannot be traced to any mechanistic manipulation of the mind but is essentially a semiosic phenomenon that extends beyond the merely sense-perceptual realm of objectivity and into the specifically intellectual cognition characteristic of human beings.  Increasingly, that is, in the environment of informational overload, it is difficult if not impossible to resolve those individual signs to particular “facts” (for which alone, over recent centuries, the mind has been trained to seek in the discernment of truth), and as a consequence, many persons decide upon certain beliefs as a priori principles for crafting coherent narratives.  Thus, a chosen or preferred idea becomes normative for evaluating the truth or falsity of all else that is encountered.  When the objects evaluated against that idea are themselves only digital representations of real things (at best), one can persist in the habituation of “fancy” ad infinitum, as reality’s presence is inherently capable of being masked by the very nature of digital representation.

Semiotics can help us not only to unveil these culture-constituting and psychologically affective relations, but also to discover healthier and better means of producing social relations: not only to avoid the excessive habituation of “fancy” but so too to produce objective structures that are perfective of human life, embodied through signs and symbols that help direct the mind toward what is true and good (see Deely 1994 and Minerd 2017 for fuller discussion of entia rationis in the constitution of moral and cultural phenomena).

4.3. Signification of the Spiritual Soul

Few concepts remain as evocative, or as contested, as that of the spiritual human soul.  Because of our linguistically enlarged consciousness, we are capable of a self-awareness unique among animals and, within that awareness, find ourselves both an object and a subject seemingly existing beyond the bounds of materiality.  The objectivization of ourselves appears through both linguistic signifiers, especially in our efforts for stipulation of both speculatively and practically intended language with any originality, and postlinguistic phenomena, especially works of art.  That we signify something about ourselves in every use of language may be obscure to those who do not reflect upon the linguistic structure of our articulations.  But in every proposition we form, we signify not only our grasp of universal concepts (at least implicitly) but also our grasp of the truth that is coextensive with being, through the copula (again, whether explicit or implicit).  Thus, although we are principally ordered by such signs toward the objects they specifically designate, we have also the ability to discern something of our own nature and functioning through reflection upon the experience of human semiosis.

Jacques Maritain, in a brief essay better known by its earlier title of “Sign and Symbol” but revised and later published as “Language and the Theory of Sign,” introduces the distinction “between the direct sign (which denotes an object) and what might be called the reverse or inverted sign (which manifests the subject)” (Maritain 1956, 60).  As Maritain describes the functioning of the reverse sign:

The letter A signifies the sound A, mourning weeds signify death.  But the sign can also act in the inverse way.  While manifesting an object it can by a kind of inverted or retroverted signification also denote the subject itself which is using the sign and its states, its dispositions, and its secrets which it does not admit to itself, the subject being in that case taken as object by some observer.  This is the sense in which Freud and his disciples understand the word “symbol”; they no longer think of its direct but only of its reverse or inverted signification. (Maritain 1956, 60)

Maritain’s own discussion of these reverse signs is rather limited.  It is worth noting that the retroverted signification by which an observer attends not to the object formally designated by the sign-vehicle, but to the intermediary condition of the utterer—that is, the subject—may also be conceived by the utterer himself, of course.{9}  To be an object is, in principle, to be public and therefore potentially related to any cognitive subject with the faculties necessary to discern it.  In linguistically (or postlinguistically) signifying some object to others, we retain always the possibility of signifying it to ourselves, as well—including our very selves as the objects signified.  While Maritain uses slang as an example of such subjective exhibition (notable in that familiarity with slang is revelatory of one’s belonging to the group from out of which it has grown), we could turn in quite another direction and consider also prayer as both a reverse and a practical signifier.

To see this, consider how St. Thomas describes prayer as belonging to the practical intellect, disposing the individual to receive the effects of God by placing a certain order in the soul (Aquinas 1270–72, ST II-II, q. 83, aa. 1–2).  Thus, through prayer we signify not only to God but also to ourselves and in some measure even to others our own willingness to act in accordance with God’s grace and by its execution help to instill in ourselves an ordering toward His will.  This practical signification to ourselves and others seems especially evident in vocal prayer.  As St. Thomas writes, we employ the voice in praying

for the purpose of exciting an interior devotion, by which the mind of the one praying is elevated to God, because through exterior signs—whether of the voice or of other things done—the mind of the human being is moved both according to apprehension and consequently according to affection. (Aquinas 1270–72, ST II-II, q. 83, a. 12)

And:

Vocal prayer is not offered to God for the purpose of making known something which He does not know, but for the purpose that the mind of the one praying, or of other persons, may be raised to God. (Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 83, ad 1)

Thus we may consider liturgy, for instance, as a complex structure of practical signs intended to direct the mind toward God.  But so too we may consider each act of prayer, in reflectively observing how we from out of ourselves intend the prayer’s ordination of the self toward God and toward the object for which we are making some petition, as a signifier for our own being toward the objects of prayer (see Poinsot 1637–44, t. 7, 739–829).

Notably, though much of the matter of prayer is taken from public revelation, and some prayers directly, there remains a large degree of conventionality in its constitution (evident, for instance, in the act of translating these prayers from one language to another).  Thus, we observe a wide diversity of legitimate forms of prayer, so long as they truly direct the mind toward God and not toward something either falsely representing God or masquerading under His will.  Thus the matter can be rather diverse, although it must in each case nevertheless be appropriated to the object of signification, considered both speculatively and practically (Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 83, a. 13, c.).  A more complex form of instituted signification—still conventional and yet far less arbitrary—is to be found in the sacraments.  

In his commentary upon St. Thomas’s treatment of the sacraments, John Poinsot defends the interpretation that the sacraments are practical signs.  It must be known that the term “sacrament” here comprises not only the familiar sacraments of the New Law, but so too those of the Old: sacraments under both covenants being understood as practical signs, with the difference that, under the New Law, the signification is conjoined with the causality of grace.  Now, as noted above, a sign-relation (that is, a sign properly speaking) finds its distinction as practical rather than speculative primarily from the interpretant—but, as also noted, we can intend by our stipulation of such sign-vehicles for others to enter into the same intended efficacious relation to the object as well.  As Poinsot writes:

A sacrament essentially has the existence of a practical sign, because it essentially holds itself as instituted by God, not purely in order to represent a sacred reality to us—as an image or some figure does—but in order that the sign be ordered to our sanctification, and that through the reception of the sacraments we be initiated and consecrated, and successfully pursue our sanctification.  Therefore, in these signs the institutor does not intend only representation, but the sanctification and consecration of those who use them.  And therefore, these signs do not hold cognition as their end, and thus are not speculative; but rather, they have an operation as their end—that is, our consecration and sanctification—and thus they are practical signs. (Poinsot 1637–44, t. 9, 31b)

The precise nature of a sacramental sign’s institution consists in further complexities (pertaining to very nuanced questions of the Old and New Law, the causal efficacy of Christ, the instrumental causality of New Law sacraments following the institution by Christ, and the distinction between the thing itself [res] and the sign [signum] of the sacrament—and how the term is analogically predicated of these; Poinsot 1637–44, t. 9, 8a–9b).  Limiting our own concern here to the practical causality of the sign, it is important to note that this practicality does not of itself entail any efficient causality, but only the directive ordering of the mind toward the object as an end to be accomplished.  Thus, the sacraments of the Old Law ordered the mind toward the promise of grace, whereas those of the New Law also cause what they signify.

V. Historical Overview of Semiotics

There are many ways to tell the history of semiotics.  The most thorough investigation to date is found in John Deely’s Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, which examines the role of the sign as both implicit and explicit in all the major thinkers of the Western tradition, and how it did or did not figure into their philosophical doctrines.  One can also look at the history in a narrower perspective, with a focus specifically on the explicitly reflective study of the sign—in which case, it helps, in some sense, to approach the question’s framing somewhat anachronistically.  That is, as aforementioned, the term “semiotics” is not introduced with anything like its present signification until the nascent suggestion at the end of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and not at all brought into systematic treatment under this name until Charles Peirce.  However, we do find the doctrinal development that underlies the Peircean semiotic to have roots in the Latin Age of philosophy, and so it is along this thread that we will outline the history of semiotics.

5.1. From Antiquity through Augustine

So long as human beings have used language, there has been some awareness of signs and their use.  Thus, we find concerted studies related to language in a number of Platonic dialogues, in several of Aristotle’s works (most importantly the Peri Hermeneias and Rhetoric), and in the Rhetoric to Alexander (likely authored by Anaximenes of Lampsacus, ca. 380–320 bc), and of course in all the Roman tradition of oratorical studies as well.  Latently present in all of these works are considerations of signification, although without explicit or focused consideration of signification’s own nature—beyond, at least, the questions of logic and rhetoric.  So too, in many of the scientific treatises of Aristotle, the Hippocratic Corpus, and the works of Galen (ca. 129–216 ad)—among many others—a kind of sign-based inquiry reading from effects to causes and the identification of various symptoms can be found, even as the deeper questions remain unidentified.

It is thus that in the works of St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 ad) we first find a concerted study of signs themselves as a formally distinct object of inquiry.  Signs receive his attention principally in two key texts: first, and somewhat briefly, the De doctrina Christiana, in which Augustine provides a novel definition of sign, namely (in my own translation): “A sign is anything which, beyond the specification which it brings into the senses, makes something other than itself come into cognitive awareness” (Augustine ca. 397 ad, II.1).  We must note that he includes as an integral part of his definition that the sign is something sensible.  Augustine’s principal purpose behind this definition is to investigate the nature of the sacraments, and specifically how their sensible elements are entered into the efficacy of grace.  Nevertheless, his definition will be adopted for many other, broader intentions among the Scholastics, and the second element—the restriction of signifiers to things sensible—will be a matter of controversy from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries.

“Concerning signs”, Augustine continues, “some are natural, and others are given.”  This distinction seems the first of its kind.  Of the natural, to which he pays little attention, he says that they are “those which, without any will or other appetite to signify beyond themselves make something other to be cognitively grasped, as smoke signifies fire” (Augustine ca. 397 ad, II.1).  By contrast, the given or instituted signs are those “which living things give to one another for the sake of demonstrating, insofar as they are able, the motions of their souls, whether concerning things sensible or intelligible” (Augustine ca. 397 ad, II.1).

The only purpose of the signa data, Augustine says, is to demonstrate the motions of our own souls: to make outward and therefore receptible by another person something that is internal to ourselves and thus to bring to another’s mind what is in our own, by bringing what is in our minds somehow into a thing in the corporeal world.  The intention to communicate relies upon a kind of mutual “transcendentality” between the one communicating and the one being communicated to.  The thing given or instituted as a sign, if it succeeds in its purpose, serves to signify something that it does not contain precisely in itself, as it is in itself.  As Augustine portrays it, there is a stark divide between the signifier and the significate in given signs: the volitional element of the signa data means that such a sign, even if closely aligned with one that is natural—such as a grimace when pained—requires a spiritual accomplishment in order that communication be effected.  The grimace, after all, may be proximately intended to communicate a pain, but, if there is no pain, or if the grimace is exaggerated relative to the pain actually felt, the intent in communicating is not ultimately to let others know that one is in pain, but to receive sympathy, or pity, or to deceive the recipients otherwise about one’s own state.{10}

Second, the text of the De magistro, written around 388 or 389 ad, takes the form of a short dialogue between Augustine and a presumably fictionalized version of his son, Adeodatus.  The principal question pursued by the interlocutors is this: Can one man be called the teacher of another?  Broadly, the dialogue may be divided into three parts: the first, covering the initial seven chapters, concerns the relations of linguistic signs to one another and our distinct awareness of the role of linguistic signs in our experience.  Concluding this first section is the recognition that signs are broader than the linguistic alone, leading to the second part, in which Augustine and Adeodatus debate the relation between signs and the objects they signify—both those objects that are in the mind of the communicator and those objects independent of any finite mind, hinting, albeit obliquely, at the triadicity involved in signification.  But this second part ultimately concludes with a denial that our learning is accomplished through signs themselves, which are relegated, in the third part to an incidental and instrumental role in the mind’s grasp of true knowledge, which Augustine proposes can be accomplished only by divine illumination.

To adumbrate an analysis of the dialogue, we may say that a certain divide appears, a divide between the inner and the outer experience of the human person.  Signs dominate the outer experience, appearing ubiquitously in all efforts at communication and action.  However, the inner world of experience cannot illuminate the meaning of those external experiences except by means of some other source; the external does not make itself intelligible, in other words.  This can be conveyed through a conversation that unfolds between Augustine and Adeodatus concerning the meaning of the verb “to walk”, ambulare.  While we can show someone the act of walking in answer to the question, “What is walking?”, there are many ways in which the other might be confused: they might think we mean “moving” in general, or “going away”, if all we do is start to walk.  To explain “walking as such”, we seemingly need to add a specifically linguistic context of intelligibility.  This hints at a distinction between learning, which may take place in a context of sign-mediation but which does not require signs in order to happen, and demonstration made to another, which does require signs.  The sign is given in an attempt to provide a context in which another may grasp the meaning, but it does not instantiate the successful communication of meaning—that is, it does not cause the other to learn (Augustine ca. 388/89 ad: c. 9, n.33).

Augustine perceives the given sign as not only conventional but also incidental to knowing.  We seek names for that which happens in the mind, names that are incidentally words, for they pertain to meanings grasped that are not other but rather self-representations.  It is the self-representing meaning grasped that alone qualifies as knowledge: and, as we will see, this knowledge is not objective or mediated, but internal and immediate or unmediated.  In a way, this foreshadows the resolution of instrumental signification into formal signification (see 3.2 above); however, given his identification of signs as sensible, Augustine turns instead to the idea of divine illumination as that by which knowledge ultimately is explained (a relation of participation and participated), and therefore he implies that “signs” are properly understood only as the instrumental.

5.2. From Augustine through Poinsot

Thus, the Augustinian doctrine proved controversial to the Scholastic philosophers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially when drawn into contrast with the influx of Aristotelian texts, such as the Posterior Analytics, Metaphysics, and On the Soul.  To see these tensions, we can consider two figures of the thirteenth century: Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon. 

St. Thomas—whose name is ordinarily kept at the margins of semiotic discourse—takes up the Augustinian treatment of signs most extensively in the eleventh question of his Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, which may be read, in many ways, as a response to Augustine’s dialogue—being likewise titled De magistro.  There, we find St. Thomas directly investigating Augustine’s claim of whether or not one man, or Christ alone, may be called another’s teacher.  As Aquinas goes on to show, it is through the use of various signs that any teacher demonstrates to his pupils a process of reasoning, and that this demonstration of reasoning (not of the objects reasoned about, as such), precisely defined, is that in which teaching consists.  However, Aquinas wrestles with Augustine’s definition of the sign.  Ever charitable to his great predecessor, St. Thomas offers an addendum, which nevertheless does not fully clarify, by distinguishing between a general sense of the sign (communiter loquendo) and the way in which it is said “properly speaking” (proprie loquendo).  This addendum, however, is applied in what seems a backward manner.  As he writes in the De veritate:

The word “sign”, properly speaking [proprie loquendo], cannot be said of something unless one cognitively proceeds from it to something other by a process of discursive reasoning; and, according to this, signs are not in the angels, since their knowledge is not discursive, as was held in the preceding question.  And accordingly, signs in our experience are sensible things, because our cognition, which is discursive, arises from sensible things.  But commonly speaking [communiter], we are able to call a sign anything which by being grasped itself, makes something else to be known; and according to this common way of speaking, an intelligible form is able to be called a sign of that which is grasped through it.  Thus the angels grasp things through signs; such that one angel speaks to another through a sign, namely, through the specifying form, in which the understanding of one is rendered perfectly in ordination to another. (Aquinas 1256–59, De verit., q. 9, a. 4, ad 4)

As Deely writes of this passage, it seems as though by proprie loquendo Thomas means “loosely speaking” while communiter means “from the point of view of a scientific consideration of the matter” (Deely 2010, 247).  We can see here, without Aquinas’s mentioning it explicitly, the rising tension of his own understanding of the sign over against the Augustinian definition, which restricts it to the sensible.

This tension is drawn tighter by another passage from the De veritate, in the first article of the fourth question, response to the seventh objection.  We read:

The intelligible rationale of a sign belongs primarily to the effect rather than to the cause when the cause is the cause of the effect’s being (or existing) but not of its signifying, as in the example given [that is, of a tag attached to a jar signifying it to hold a certain wine].  But when the effect has from the cause not only the fact that it is, but also that it signifies, then, as the cause is prior to the effect in being, likewise in signifying; and therefore the interior word possesses the rationale of signification more properly than does the exterior word, because the exterior word is not instituted for the purpose of signifying except through the interior word. (Aquinas 1256–59, De verit., q. 4, a. 1, ad 7)

And this point, that the verbum interius—also called in many places the verbum cordis or verbum mentis—more properly possesses the rationale of signification, the ratio significationis, is reconfirmed repeatedly in texts of St. Thomas.{11}  How do we reconcile this assertion that the interior word possesses the rationale of signification more properly than the exterior word—and, indeed, that it is even more properly called a word than the exterior—with the previously cited claim that proprie loquendo signs are sensible things?  It may, ostensibly, appear an irresoluble textual difficulty.  But I believe a resolution is in fact quite simple: namely, that is, as Thomas uses these terms, the ratio significationis names one thing, and the signum names another.  The latter, in Aquinas’s use, names a thing, while the former names the action of the sign as such.  Or, to put this in other words: Aquinas has here implicitly distinguished between the sign-vehicle and the sign-relation.  For the intelligible rationale of signification consists in one thing making present a second to some third by an immanent operation in the cognoscitive faculty; but the name signum has been given to the effect, rather than to the cause, and thus it is said proprie loquendo of those sensible things that lead the mind from one thing to another rather than to the cause, which is the ratio significationis itself being in act: namely, the operation of the intellect in understanding through the constitution of the verbum mentis.

While Aquinas never contradicts the definition of Augustine, it is still important to note that his own treatment of signification is much more robust and complex, and that, moreover, armed as he was with the Aristotelian doctrine of act and potency, he is capable of establishing a framework within which the doctrina signorum would eventually come to flourish.

By stark contrast, Roger Bacon (ca. 1219–1292)—less concerned with maintaining venerable interpretations of his predecessors—openly challenges the Augustinian definition of the sign, most especially its explicit inclusion of the sensible.  As he writes, “A sign is that which brought before the sense or the intellect designates something to that intellect, because not every sign is offered to the senses, as the common description of the sign supposes” (Bacon, ca. 1267, p.3, c.2). However, despite his pivot toward a more universal possibility of signification, Bacon nevertheless confuses not only the nature of relation, but the relational nature of signification (see Deely 2001a, 368).  Most problematically, he asserts that “[a sign] is not referred to the thing which it holds in signification except per accidens, as for instance the knowable to knowledge” (Bacon, ca. 1267, p.3, c.2).  Effectively, therefore, Bacon severed the triadic relation of the sign and rendered it a concatenation of dyadic relations, with the relationship between signifier and interpretant being the essential dyad.  In this, Bacon offered a proto-Saussurean concept of the sign (a point I have not seen made elsewhere; see Deely 2001a, 365–76, for a more thorough treatment).

Similarly, other trends in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially concerning language—such as Robert Kilwardby (Deely 2001a, 439–41) or the Speculative Grammarians, also known as the Modistae (see Deely 2001a, 435–39; Kemple 2019, 39–51)—wrestled with the functioning of signs but failed to produce a significantly coherent doctrine.  Many developments and pregnant suggestions can be found in the work of Duns Scotus, though his own doctrine remains largely nascent and implicit, as he attends to signs in the context of other questions (Deely 2001a, 376–85).  In the meantime, the ascendancy of Ockhamist nominalism (and the various flavors of conceptualism that emerged in the meantime) led to further confusions over the functioning of signs.  Particularly pernicious was the diminished concern with sense perception in its continuity with intellectual functioning, as increased nominalistic tendencies drew more and more attention to the intellect alone.

Within the Thomist line of thought, some interesting contributions were made by Cajetan, but the real flourishing of the doctrina signorum began in the Iberian schools of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  Here we look in particular at a handful of figures: Domingo de Soto, Pedro da Fonseca, and the Conimbricenses, most especially Sebastião do Couto.

The work of Domingo de Soto exercises its influence across the latter half of the sixteenth century and first half of the seventeenth, and it is from his work that the terminology of signs largely comes to be established—not that he was the innovator of all the terms but, rather, that in his work the terminology coalesced into a standard nomenclature, even if the precise meaning and relations of these terms and their objects would see considerable debate afterward (Ashworth 1990).  But, despite the fact that he brought the discussion of signs into a central position within Iberian late Scholasticism—and thus set the trajectory that would lead to a doctrina signorum—a fundamental flaw nevertheless lies in Soto’s conception of the sign’s nature, for in his adoption (and systemization) of the language of formal and instrumental signification, Soto maintains the latent equivocation in the term signum.  As Deely writes:

The problem with this terminology . . . is that it at best glosses over and at worst conceals a serious theoretical equivocation.  One can interpret it as a consolidation of the scholastic realist critiques of Augustine made by Aquinas and Scotus.  Or one can consider it rather in the framework of the nominalist doctrine that there are no general or common modes of being, no relations existing apart from the activity of mental comparisons of actual individuals. (Deely 2001a, 409.)

In other words, though responsible for bringing the conversation concerning signs into the daily life of the Iberian peninsula, Domingo de Soto succeeded principally in shaping but not in resolving the difficulties through which a doctrina signorum finds solid footing.

Looking at the next crucial figure and inheritor of Soto’s doctrine, Pedro da Fonseca, we therefore see—in this distinction of instrumental and formal—the continued struggle with the treatment of Augustine’s definition of the signum.  As Fonseca writes in his Institutionum dialecticarum: “Formal signs are similitudes, that is, certain specifying forms of the things impressed upon the cognitive powers, by which the things signified are perceived.  Of this kind is the similitude which a mountain, as object, impresses upon the eyes” (Fonseca 1564, lib. 1, c. 8).  Unfortunately, Fonseca’s interpretation of the Augustinian definition leads him ultimately into the position that again leaves open the door to nominalism—for he not only accepts the primacy of the instrumental sign, but denies that the formal sign is truly called a sign at all; rather, he explicitly claims it is a kind of equivocation:

From this you will discern a most obvious distinction between these [instrumental] signs and the former [formal] ones: for the former are not necessarily perceived by us such that, through their perception, we may arrive at a cognition of the thing signified; whereas the latter, unless they be perceived, lead no one to the cognition of anything.  They also differ according to this reason: that the former are neither ordinarily named “signs” nor are they very properly said “to represent”; whereas the latter are so called in the highest degree. (Fonseca 1564, lib. 1, c. 8)

This failure to recognize the properly significative character of formal signs—a trajectory started over 1100 years before, with Augustine’s inclusion of the sensible as an integral element in his definition of the sign—seems to have led to the common modern presupposition of ideas as being improperly representative and properly, instead, objective.

Contrary to Fonseca, the Conimbricenses recognize not only the reality but even the centrality of the formal sign (Conimbricenses 1606/7, q. 2, a. 1 and a. 3), and especially the role of the concept as a formal sign.  Their treatise, De signis—the first part of the commentary on Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias, largely if not entirely authored by Sebastião do Couto (1567–1639)—is one of the most impressive and important systematic treatments of signs to date, addressing many of the questions earlier raised by Domingo de Soto with greater depth and clarity.  With a glance at the table of contents (particularly in the helpful 2001 bilingual edition translated and prepared by John P. Doyle), one can see inquiries into the general nature and conditions of a sign; into the divisions of signs (into natural and instituted, formal and instrumental, speculative and practical); into the distinction of spoken and written signification; into the similitude of our concepts despite the diversity of our words; and into the question whether all concepts are necessarily engaged in relations of truth or falsity.

Intertwined with their inquiries are many questions concerning the nature and constitution of relation, particularly as it comes to constitute signs across all the various divisions into natural and conventional, formal and instrumental.  However, crucially, do Couto claims that the formal rationale of the sign “consists not in the relations but in their foundations,” such that:

. . . a sign is understood to be constituted in its formal character by the fact that there is in it a reason to move a potency to knowledge of the thing it signifies.  But this it does by means of a fundamental proportion, and not by an intervening relation.  Therefore, it is by that proportion constituted in its formal character of sign. (Emphasis in original.  Conimbricenses 1606/7, q. 1, a. 1)

Put otherwise, the Conimbricenses’ commentary argues for an absolute primacy of the intrinsic proportionality within the sign-vehicle (i.e., the fundament) by which anything possesses the formal rationale of the sign.  Thus, the fundament as relativum secundum dici is said to have a “transcendental respect” to its termini, and thus any relativum secundum esse comes about as an extrinsic consequence (Conimbricenses 1606/7, q. 4, a. 1). 

5.3. From Poinsot through Modernity

Against this position of do Couto, as we have already seen, John Poinsot (1589–1644) maintains that the ratio formalis signi consists precisely in the relativum secundum esse, in the reality of the triadic relation that comprises all three terms, and not in the terms themselves.  This realization that the sign itself consists in the relativum secundum esse appropriates the ratio significationis earlier seen in St. Thomas (as distinguished from the signum) and acknowledges, contra Augustine, that the essence of the sign-vehicle is dependent upon that which makes it relative in actuality, and not upon any of its own intrinsic properties as such.  It is for this reason—this central importance of relation itself—that John Deely, in the 1985 edition and translation of sections of Poinsot’s Cursus Philosophicus, which Deely entitled the Tractatus de Signis, included, in addition to the three core questions on signs (q. 21, “De signo secundum se”; q. 22, “De divisionibus signi”; and q. 23, “De notitiis et conceptibus”), also two “preambles”, the first drawing from the treatment of ens rationis (q. 2, “De ente rationis logica”) and the second from the question on relation (q. 17, “De praedicamento relationis”), among other helpfully contextualizing materials.  This organization and its at times highly interpretive translation have drawn criticism, not only for their presentation but for a supposed exaggeration of Poinsot’s importance (Marmo 1987; Ashworth 1988; Leblanc 2022).  However, the essential breakthrough of Poinsot consists neither in terminological novelty nor in influence, but in certain insights that effect a cohesion of thinking not clearly seen beforehand (see Kemple 2025, 113n164).

Summarily stated, Poinsot’s decisive contribution to the history of semiotics lies in his articulation of signification as a relational reality irreducible either to mental representation alone or to purely physical causality, with relation itself being understood as that “whose whole being consists in being-toward”.  That is, against both nominalist reductions of signs to mental constructs and modern dualisms separating mind and world, Poinsot establishes the sign as an essentially triadic relation: sign-vehicle, signified, and cognitive power, unified in the relativum secundum esse, whose entire being consists in “being toward another”.  In doing so, he clarifies the ontological status of signs by grounding them in a metaphysics of relation that is indifferent, in itself, to the divide between mind-dependent (ens rationis) and mind-independent (ens reale) being.  This allows Poinsot to show how signs can operate seamlessly across nature and culture (or as natural and conventional signs) without collapsing into subjectivism or naïve realism, resolving a problem left underdeveloped by Augustine and later exploited by nominalist traditions.

Historically, Poinsot thus represents the culminating synthesis of the Latin Age of semiotic development and, at the same time, a suppressed precursor to genuinely postmodern semiotics.  By demonstrating that relations—and therefore signs—possess a positive being not exhausted by either subjective cognition or categorical accident, he provides the conceptual resources needed for identifying the proper nature of semiosis.  Poinsot’s doctrine of signs not only clarifies the nature of meaning and representation but reorients philosophy itself away from “epistemological” inwardness toward an account of human beings as essentially semiotic animals, whose access to reality is always mediated yet genuinely real.  In this sense, Poinsot stands as a central but long-overlooked figure in the genealogy of semiotics, bridging medieval metaphysics and contemporary relational thought.

Any truly thorough treatment of Poinsot’s doctrine runs far beyond the scope of this article (see Kemple 2025 and Deely 1985).  We have already outlined his major doctrinal contributions above.  Looked at historically, however, in terms of his impact, we must leap ahead centuries to find any students, armed with Poinsot’s insights and thereby producing a significant contribution to the tradition.  In other words, after Poinsot, it seems that—apart from a single student who attempted to incorporate the doctrina signorum as the principal starting point of education in logic, Miguel Comas del Brugar (ca. 1600–1660)—semiotics goes into a long silence.  What concern there is in the modern period comes largely in studies of language, but these are conducted against an idealist background, which always leaves the inquiries wanting.  Most notable among these linguistically minded inquiries were those of Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), and Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt (1767–1835).  While these three did not expressly avow nominalistic positions, an implicit dualism underlies their treatment of signification, there always being an inexplicable transformative element in the linguistic articulation distinctive to human beings, which results in a kind of symbolic transcendentality of human experience.  No theory of signs given by any of the three can effect a relational continuity between the mind-independence of the world and the experience of the world through linguistic signification.

5.4. From Peirce to the Postmodern

Not long after Humboldt passed, the young Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) began his own inquiries into the importance of signs, although these early investigations were far from the sophisticated doctrines he would later develop.  A precocious young man, Peirce began devouring college textbooks in logic at the age of twelve and began, as a consequence, to dig into the history of its development.  Similarly, he consumed at a rapid pace the work of Immanuel Kant and was deeply influenced by Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetics.  From a young age, thus, he began to develop a rather original approach to philosophy, first publicly realized in his early (Peirce 1867) “On a New List of Categories”, in which he—taking an idea from Hegel but developing it in a different direction—tried to put philosophical inquiry into a new frame, one that would encompass both the mind-independent intelligibilities of beings categorized by Aristotle and the cognitive classification effected by Kant, but would be reducible to neither.  This “phenomenology” (or “phaneroscopy” as he would also later call it) not only provides an ontological grounding for but also relies upon our experience of signification in order that it be itself made intelligible.  It is in this early work that Peirce first introduces the “trichotomy” of icon, index, and symbol: the first of many such divisions he would propose, and perhaps the most famous.  Other important trichotomies include the mark, type, and token;{12} and the rheme, dicent, and argument.{13}

Uniquely characteristic of these trichotomies is that they were distinguished by the diverse manners of the three different elements of the triadic relation: that is, by the sign-vehicle, by the object, and by the interpretant.  A quick word on these latter two elements: Peirce further distinguished the object into the immediate and the dynamic, with the former being that which is regarded precisely as related by the sign-vehicle and the latter some reality that is not directly known as such but the existence of which we may infer by the cognitive awareness of the immediate.  He also distinguished interpretants into at least three distinct kinds: the immediate, dynamic, and logical or final.{14}  (All-told, Peirce lists twenty-seven different kinds of “interpretant”, many of them being subdivisions of these three or alternative names.  We limit ourselves to these three as being not only simpler but also the most clearly important.)  The first signifies the receptivity had by any semiosic entity; the second, the reactivity by which, having received some specification from the sign, the semiosic entity reorders itself toward the object; and the third, the actual interpretation of meaning belonging to the object in some way.  While reception at the immediate further specifies the dynamic, and the dynamic specifies the logical (and thus, there is a kind of semiosis within semiosis, as each interpretant becomes itself a sign to another), so too the responses effected at the logical and the dynamic conversely habituate the chronologically prior interpretants, disposing them for future semiosic activity.

As an obvious example of this, consider the experience of becoming irrationally angry at some disturbance—say, being interrupted while working.  While one is focused on a task, events may occur that impress upon us and our awareness something other than the task—say, a knock at the door.  Since the task is believed to be important, the knock thus evokes not only awareness of its own presence but a negative reaction, anger, at the disturbance, which is judged to be an impediment to the good of accomplishing something that needs to be done.  So long as this belief persists—the belief that nothing could be, at this moment, more important than the task—the dynamic interpretant remains dominant and the individual remains angry at the interruption.  But, important though the task may be, the individual might stop and re-think, through other signs, whether the interruption merits such a response: it could be a legitimate request, an invitation, a spouse or significant other in need of help or simply unaware of the wish to be left undisturbed, and so on.  With such logical interpretants shifting one’s whole being toward such a sign—the knock at the door—one may habituate oneself away from irrational anger.

Through the complex relations of semiosis that Peirce attempted to outline—with some success, despite his ostracism from the intellectual community—I believe we see the crucial merit of semiotics: namely, in helping us to understand how it is (not just in general, but even in particular structures) that signs grow, and that, in and through that growth, there comes also a growth in being.  In other words, signification occurs not at a merely cultural level, or in some dualistic separation from the things from which signification arises and toward which it is directed, but in a manner integral to the signs’ being.  Thus, Peirce, inspired in no small part by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin (but also of Laplace), did not see in the operation of signs merely the development of human consciousness, nor did he stop at recognizing signs’ influence in non-human animal cognition, but indicated the causal governance of sign-relations even in entities having nothing that could be properly called a “mind” at all. 

5.5. From Postmodernity to the Future

The rediscovery of Peirce’s work, which nearly faded into oblivion, is thanks to a handful of persons: first, Josiah Royce, who alone of his contemporaries (eventually) began to see what Peirce was trying to convey with his theories; second, Charles Morris, who included some elements of Peirce’s work in his own thought; third, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur Burks, who put together an eight-volume collection of Peirce’s works (albeit organized in an objectionable way) between 1931 and 1958; and fourth, Thomas Sebeok, who took up the breadth of sign-relationality found in Peirce’s thinking and helped shape the distinct applications of its study in anthroposemiosis, as the study of specifically human sign-use; zoösemiosis, as encompassing all animals; and biosemiosis, as considering the action of signs at the most basic levels of life (Deely 2005).

As aforementioned, the recovery of Peircean semiotics has been muddled by the parallel development of Saussurean semiology.  Many valuable insights have been developed out of this tradition, but oftentimes at odds with rather than following from its own principles.  With deepening studies of Peirce and the Scholastic tradition, these insights can be resolved to a place of firmer footing and their specifically linguistic and cultural contributions made coherent with an understanding of nature.

Thus, as a final crucial figure in the development of semiotics, we should look at the author much cited throughout this article, namely, John Deely (1942–2017), who dedicated much of his life to synthesizing the insights of John Poinsot and Charles Sanders Peirce (see Nuessel 2024).  Deely’s own entry point into semiotics comes from the Thomist tradition, particularly in the line of Maritain, through whom he found the wealth of insight to be found in John Poinsot (Minerd 2024).  Given his own deep formation in St. Thomas and the Thomistic tradition, Deely was able to draw together the insights of the pre- and postmodern doctrines of signs in a true synthesis.  Chief among these synthetic points was the causality of signs.  As noted above, with Poinsot, this is a unique kind of extrinsic formal cause, the objective or specifying.  Though Peirce came close to identifying this, he nevertheless lacked the vocabulary.  In Deely’s words:

[Peirce] never fully got beyond the notion that some dressed-up version of final causality as teleology might be the causality proper to the action of signs, although a careful analysis of his texts indeed reveals that he was at the same time on the scent of distinguishing final causality in all its forms from what he called “ideal” causality. (Deely 2001a, 630.)

In this resumption of final causality—mistaken though he was, at least in part, in attributing it to signs—we see how Peirce placed himself at odds with the modern tradition.  Thus, as Deely went on to defend extensively throughout much of his work, Peirce is the last of the moderns but the first of those who deserve truly to be called “postmodern”.  Central to this advance is the restoration of communication as a reality.  A somewhat ironic consequence of the nominalist presuppositions imported unrealized throughout modernity, Deely notes, is that though communication was still quite commonly discussed—perhaps even more explicitly than in the premodern world—and many were eminently concerned with the question of how one mind could relate truly to another, the belief that relations were not themselves mind-independent realities left impossible any serious treatment of communication—like trying to start a car but never checking to see whether it had an engine.

Bolstered not only by his familiarity with Poinsot but also with the controversies over semiotics that came in the wake of Saussurean semiology and the gradual recovery of Peirce’s corpus (much of which still remains unpublished to this day), it is in Deely’s work that we likely find the surest foundations for a coherent doctrine of semiotics in the twenty-first century.  In his works we find extensive scholarship on the history of the sign (especially in Introducing Semiotic: Its History and Doctrines, Four Ages of Understanding, Medieval Philosophy Redefined as the Latin Age, and New Beginnings: Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought) but also insightful analysis of signs and their role in human experience and study (especially in Basics of Semiotics, The Human Use of Signs, Intentionality and Semiotics, and Purely Objective Reality).  Across his dozens of books and hundreds of articles, one finds a gradual coalescing articulation of the doctrina signorum as to its principal and most essential elements, alongside a searching historical consciousness and countless suggestions for further development of semiotics and its applications.

VI. Conclusion: The Future of Semiotics

Signs, it has been stated and defended throughout, are properly understood not as objects or as vehicles, but rather as the relations in which those vehicles effect the reorientation of an interpretant to some object.  Recognizing this structure of signs and its ubiquitous influence on the intelligible world, especially within our own experience as human beings, results in neither constructivism nor a naïve realism, but rather a realism that can best be described as semiotic.  We are thereby enabled to overcome the modern impasse without discarding the very real insights into subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and the constitution of cultural realities that emerge out of this tradition, but also without lapsing into the untenable situation of idealism, in which communication becomes a fiction in which we must trust rather than a truth in which we may find repose.

As we have attempted to show in this article, the domain of semiotics is broad, encompassing natural, cultural, and spiritual phenomena alike, and helping us to understand them all with greater clarity not only in their own essential constitution but most especially in their being-experienced by us.  Semiotic principles may be applied to any inquiry, not as a way of dissolving the different sciences but rather as a way of adding to them a clarity and precision, in much the same manner that logic was conceived to do in antiquity.  Unique to semiotics, in contrast to logic, however, is the universality of its own scientific objects, signs.  Where logic constrains itself to a limited scope of signification, semiotics allows us to see better the continuity of the universe.  Understanding the causality of signs does not diminish but rather enhances our understanding of all other kinds of cause.

Yet semiotics remains both a science and a practice in its infancy, and its application to every other inquiry—from the philosophical and theological speculations about the whole of the universe to the microbiological and quantum physical inquiries into the most minute parts of its constitution—will be long in development.  As we continue to retrieve the late Scholastic tradition, the work of Charles Peirce, and the sporadic and unsystematic insights born out of the semiological tradition, we will be able to deepen our understanding of the semiosic realities underlying all the objects of our experience and, indeed, our very manner of experiencing them.