Abstract
For very many biosemioticians, and certainly for Thomas A. Sebeok – who would lay the foundations for what would become the contemporary project of biosemiotics in the 1970s – the lifelong investigation into “the logic of signs” undertaken by scientist and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce serves as a model for those wishing to begin the investigation into the bio-logic of sign relations in living systems.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
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- 1.
Peirce’s words are cited throughout this volume by using the standard notation employed by Peirce scholars and codified by the Peirce Edition Project, which is in charge of preparing the definitive scholarly editions of Peirce’s work. The abbreviations used throughout this volume are the standard ones employed in Peirce scholarship: CP refers to the Collected Papers (volume and paragraph); while EP refers to the Essential Peirce (volume and page).
- 2.
A recurrent problem in understanding Peirce’s formulations before one has grasped the logic of his overall system is exhibited by just this statement, which, if read naively, may give the mistaken impression that Peirce’s sign logic is essentially “cognitive”. In Peirce’s system of signs, however, terms like “knowing”, “cognition” and “mind” take on technical meanings so far beyond their more circumscribed conventional usage, that one can only proceed with providing introductory explanations of his work knowing that the more sophisticated understandings cannot be introduced until later. Thus, the preceding formulation could have more accurately been written as: “…a sign logic by which any mode of being capable of taking habits comes to participate effectively in making the supra-sensible at least potentially sensible.” But that is not the way to begin discussing Peirce if one wants to cultivate a hearing for his views, I have discovered (which is why several of his seminal but denser writings, such as his “On a New List of Categories” (1867), have not been included here).
- 3.
The “Further Readings” section at the end of this volume is intended to provide sufficient enough guidance to the major introductory materials, so as to lead unto a lifetime of Peirce study, for those so inspired. At the minimum, the two-volume Essential Peirce anthology assembled by the scholars at the University of Indianapolis’ Peirce Edition Project includes those major texts by Peirce with which all biosemioticians should at least be conversant, whether or not one wants to adopt the Peircean approach to biosemiotics.
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Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 2.6.15–18.
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The last view is essentially that of Christian theology, too. The theologians hold the physical universe to be finite, but considering that universe which they will admit to have existed from all time, it would appear to be in a different condition in the end from what it was in the beginning, the whole spiritual creation having been accomplished, and abiding.
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Favareau, D. (2009). The Logic of Signs. In: Essential Readings in Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9650-1_3
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