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The Triadic Semiotic Theory of Peirce.
T HREE G ENERAL P RINCIPLES
Peirce developed a semiotic theory that is at once general, triadic and pragmatic.
It is general: in that it takes into consideration emotional, practical and intellectual
experience; it includes all of the components of semiotics; it broadens the concept of
the sign.
It is triadic: in that it is founded upon three philosophical categories: firstness,
secondness and thirdness; it brings three terms into relation: the sign or
representamen, the object and the interpretant.
It is pragmatic: in that it takes into consideration the context in which signs are
produced and interpreted; it defines the sign by its effect on the interpreter.
A Sign is Something (A) which stands to somebody (B) for something (C) in some
respect or capacity.
A sign is something, A, which brings something, B, its interpretant sign determined or
created by it, into the same sort of correspondence with something, C, its object, as
that in which itself stands to C.
I define a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its
Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant,
that the later is thereby mediately determined by the former
 To Charles Sanders Peirce, Anything in the universe can be brought to
anyone of three and only three modes of being Firstness, Secondness and
Thirdness:
 Firstness is the mode of being which consists in its subject's being positively
such as it is regardless of aught else. That can only be a possibility… The
mode of being a redness, before anything in the universe was yet red, was
nevertheless a positive qualitative possibility. And redness in itself, even if it be
embodied, is something positive and sui generis.
 Firstness is the mode of being of the category of the Object. Secondness is
the mode of being of the actual fact. Facts also concern subjects which are
material substances. They resist our will and compel us to consider their hic
and nunc nature. Secondness is the mode of being of the Sign or
Representamen. Thirdness is the mode of being which consists what we call
laws when we contemplate them from the outside only, but which when we
see both sides of the shield we call thoughts. (Interpretant).
 First, second and third are by no means linear categories.
 The first is that whose being is simply in itself, not referring to anything nor
lying behind anything. The second is that which is what it is by force of
something to which it is second. The third is that which is what it is owing to
things between which it mediates and which it brings into relation to each
other.
 The conception of being arises upon the formation of a proposition. For
example, the weather / is fine. A proposition always has, besides a term to
express the substance, another to express the quality of that substance; and
the function of the conception of being is to unite the quality to the
substance. Quality, therefore, in its very widest sense, is the first conception
in order in passing from being to substance.
 A Proposition consists in:
 A theme (What we talk about) and
 A predicate (What we say about it)
 e.g. the weather (theme) / is fine (predicate).
 This also means to establish a correspondence, an equivalence between A
and B or X and Y.
 i.e.: X (the weather) = is Y (fine). Or X = Y.
Third, let us imagine that our now-awakened dreamer, unable to shut out the piercing
sound, jumps up and seeks to make his escape by the door, which we will suppose
had been blown to with a bang just as the whistle commenced. But the instant our
man opens the door let us say the whistle ceases. Much relieved, he thinks he will
anything to do with it; and once more opens the mysterious portal. As he opens it, the
sound ceases. He is now in a third state of mind: he is Thinking. That is, he is aware
of learning, or of going through a process by which a phenomenon is found to be
governed by a rule, or has a general knowable way of behaving. He finds that one
action is the means, or middle, for bringing about another result. This third state of
mind is entirely different from the other two. In the second there was only a sense of
brute force; now there is a sense of government by a general rule. In Reaction only
two things are involved; but in government there is a third thing which is a means to
an end. The very word means signifies something which is in the middle between two
others. Moreover, this third state of mind, or Thought, is a sense of learning, and
learning is the means by which we pass from ignorance to knowledge. As the most
rudimentary sense of Reaction involves two states of Feeling, so it will be found that
the most rudimentary Thought involves three states of Feeling.