Peirce’s philosophy of language

Abstract

Peirce’s philosophy of language is woven around his pragmatic maxim. From early on in his scholarship to late, Peirce expanded his pragmatism into a fabric of semiotics. In this paper, Peirce’s pragmatism is taken to be an integral part of his semiotic system, and his method of making ideas clear is accounted for in terms of his theory of signs. For Peirce, a sign stands for or represents something in connection with some interpretant. This claim applies to linguistic expressions: words and sentences. A sign or a term refers to an object determined by its interpretant. In further analysis, object represented goes the way from immediate object to dynamic object, and interpretant from immediate through dynamic to logical interpretant. Departing from the prevailing scheme of sense–reference ascription, Peirce’s pragmatism is a method of determining meaning rather than a theory of what meaning is, and further, it is a semantic theory rather than a linguistic pragmatics. Making meaning clear goes through a semiotic process where linguistic signs, objects in the world, and the minds of speaker and hearer are intimately interrelated; it follows that Fregean anti-psychologism goes astray in the search for meaning.