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The study seeks to contribute to the concept of semiotic causation by building a nomenclature of effects (interpretants) produced by signs. As a starting point, the suggested approach uses Charles Peirce’s idea that the interpretant itself is a sign that is produced by another sign. From this, the study suggests that Peirce’s ten-fold division of signs can be used as a basis for the division of interpretants and, thus, proposes a nomenclature that distinguishes poti-interpretants (interpretants that are quali-signs), sin-interpretants (interpretants that are sin-signs), and legi-interpretants (interpretants that are legi-signs), also differentiating between iconic, indexical, and symbolic interpretants, as well as rhematic, dicent, and argumentive interpretants. The article uses Peirce’s famous whistle example (EP 2:4–5) to illustrate how the proposed systematics of interpretants works and demonstrates that it aligns well with Peirce’s distinction of feeling, reaction, and thinking, as feeling corresponds to the production of iconic poti-interpretants and iconic sin-interpretants, reaction corresponds to the production of indexical sin-interpretants, and thinking corresponds to the production of legi-interpretants. The article also suggests how the proposed ten-fold systematics of interpretants can be reconciled with Peirce’s original classifications of interpretants, as immediate-dynamical-final interpretants correspond to the triad of poti-, sin-, and legi-interpretants, while emotional-energetic-logical interpretants correspond to the three sub-classes of sin-interpretants, i.e. iconic sin-interpretants, rhematic indexical sin-interpretants, and dicent indexical sin-interpretants. The study then explores how the suggested classification of interpretants can be used to draw distinctions between different kinds of semiosis in different agents. In particular, the study shows how the proposed ten-fold classification can be applied to analyze diverse biosemiotic and anthroposemiotic processes. It also tests how different capacities to produce interpretants can be used to distinguish full-fledged signs from quasi-signs and demonstrates that in some cases of zoösemiosis, as well as in proto-semiosis and tardo-semiosis, the production of symbolic interpretants is diminished.

This paper addresses what in 1909 Charles Peirce calls the “greatest discrepancy” between his trichotomy of interpretants and Victoria Welby’s three orders of signification. That discrepancy concerns the difference between Peirce’s dynamical interpretant (as the actual effect a sign produces) and Welby’s notion of meaning (as involving the intention of the sign-user). After providing a close reading of the March 14, 1909 letter in which Peirce compares his triad with hers, I re-evaluate what scholars have made of the discrepancy and defend the view that it is a genuine one. I argue that, as Peirce understood it, the root of their disagreement stems from their different views about the aim of semiotics more generally. Welby limits her study of signs to language, whereas Peirce is interested in applying Semeiotic to the science of reasoning. I conclude by suggesting that Peirce and Welby ought to form an enterprise, as each seems to add what the other lacks: Peirce complements Welby’s theory by generalizing the sign, and Welby complements Peirce’s theory by further developing the speculative rhetoric of the sign.

The theses offer a general theory of translation that encompasses the relation between theoryand practice and the different models of translation that generate theoretical concepts likeequivalence and ethics. The instrumental model that understands translation as a reproduction or transfer of a source-text invariant is critiqued, whereas a hermeneutic model that understands translation as an interpretation that varies the source text is advanced. Verbal choices are treated as interpretive moves that vary a range of textual features according to factors that are drawn decisively from the receiving culture where they are arranged in hierarchies of value. The interpretive act performed by translation is informed by global cultural hierarchies in which value is distributed unevenly across major and minor languages, redefining the ethical and political stakes of a translation project.

The theses offer a general theory of translation that encompasses the relation between theoryand practice and the different models of translation that generate theoretical concepts likeequivalence and ethics. The instrumental model that understands translation as a reproduction or transfer of a source-text invariant is critiqued, whereas a hermeneutic model that understands translation as an interpretation that varies the source text is advanced. Verbal choices are treated as interpretive moves that vary a range of textual features according to factors that are drawn decisively from the receiving culture where they are arranged in hierarchies of value. The interpretive act performed by translation is informed by global cultural hierarchies in which value is distributed unevenly across major and minor languages, redefining the ethical and political stakes of a translation project.

Diverse phenomena in sociocultural life are analyzed with recourse to Pence's concept of the dicent interprétant. Attention to the semiotic role of the interpretant, itself a sign that articulates with connected signs in the generative process of semiosis, contributes to expanded understanding of ritual and attendant anthropological objects. I discuss how semiotic ideology makes possible, and makes real, a particular transformation of potentials of form expressed as likenesses into actual existents represented as contiguities. I develop an indexical treatment of such transformations that I label dicentization. Indexicality and iconicity have become central to linguistic anthropology and dicentization offers an account of how they work together beyond language in cultural semiosis. The article generalizes and applies the resulting explanatory model to a range of social phenomena described in the literature, including Aboriginal Australian iconography, Medieval Japanese asceticism, Homeric and Freudian psychologies of rage, and traps and primitivism in African and modern art. The analysis contributes to a semiotic realist conception of the continuity of representation and reality.

The explanatory value of niche construction can be strengthened by firm footing in semiotic theory. Anthropologists have a unique perspective on the integration of such diverse approaches to human action and evolutionary processes. Here, we seek to open a dialogue between anthropology and biosemiotics. The overarching aim of this paper is to demonstrate that niche construction, including the underlying mechanism of reciprocal causation, is a semiotic process relating to biological development (sensu stricto) as well as cognitive development and cultural change. In making this argument we emphasize the semiotic mechanisms underlying the niche concept. We argue that the “niche” in ecology and evolutionary biology can be consistent with the Umwelt of Jakob von Uexkull. Following John Deely we therefore suggest that investigations into the organism—environment interface constituting niche construction should emphasize the semiotic basis of experience. Peircean signs are pervasive and allow for flexible interpretations of phenomena in relation to the perceptual and cognitive capacities of the behaving organism, which is particularly pertinent for understanding the relation of proximate/ultimate selective forces as co-productive (i.e., reciprocal). Additionally, theoretical work by Kinji Imanishi on the evolution of daily life and Gregory Bateson’s relational view of evolution both support the linkage between proximate and ultimate evolutionary processes of causation necessitated by the niche construction perspective. We will then apply this theoretical framework to two specific examples: 1) hominin evolution, including uniquely human cultural behaviors with niche constructive implications; and 2) the multispecies and anthropocentric niche of human-dog coevolution from which complex cognitive capacities and semiotic relationships emerged. The intended outcome of this paper is the establishment of concrete semiotic mechanisms and theory underlying niche constructive behavior which can then be applied to a broad spectrum of organisms to contextualize the reciprocal relation between proximate and ultimate drivers of behavior.

New discoveries in the life sciences have affirmed that the virtual script as well as its context-dependent reading and interpretation determine the final living creature (cell, protein or animal). An extended understanding of Darwinian Theory is crucial for understanding life as semiosis in terms of Peirce and Eco’s semiotic models. The semiosis of living systems is potentially unlimited. Genes are not static and unchangeable scripts, but can always be reinterpreted by new interpretants that illuminate them from different points of view, depending on which properties are relevant in a particular context. The encyclopedia is a term, in Umberto Eco’s semiotics, which represents the multidimensional space of semiosis that is governed by a self-sustaining production of interpretants. The paper will present the idea of understanding the Extended Synthesis in terms of a biosemiotic enyclopedia.

This article is interdisciplinary in its claims. Evolving around the ecological concept of affordance, it brings together pragmatics and ecological psychology. Starting from the theoretical writings of Peirce, Dewey and James, the biosemiotic claims of von Uexküll, Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and some empirical evidence from recent neurobiological research, it elaborates on the concepts of experiential and enactive cognition as applied to music. In order to provide an operational description of this approach, it introduces some conceptual tools from the domain of cybernetics with a major focus on the concept of circularity, which links perception to action in a continuous process of sense-making and interaction with the environment. As such, it is closely related to some pragmatic, biosemiotic and ecosemiotic claims which can be subsumed under the general notion of functional significance. An attempt is made to apply this conceptual framework to the process of musical sense-making which involves the realisation of systemic cognition in the context of epistemic interactions that are grounded in our biology and possibilities for adaptive control. Central in this approach is the concept of coping with the environment, or, in musical terms, to perceive the sounding music in terms of what it affords for the consummation of musical behaviour.

Most specialists agree that Peirce upholds his abstract definitions of reality and truth simultaneously and consistently with his pragmatic clarifications of those concepts. But some might assume that his pragmatic clarifications (the third grade of clearness) restrict the extensions of abstract definitions (the second grade of clearness), such that anything real must both be independent of what anyone thinks about it, per the abstract definition, and be an object of the would-be “final opinion”, per the pragmatic clarification. I call this reading Interpretive Dependence of the second grade of clearness on the third grade. In contrast, on Interpretive Independence, which I defend here, a concept can have a different extension on the second grade than it has on the third grade, such that it could be true, in a purely abstract sense, that there are realities that can never be known (metaphysical realism). “True” here must also be interpreted only according to an abstract definition, namely, one which Peirce endorses in 1906 and which, I argue, is a deflationary definition. Interpretive Independence not only allows Peirce to explain the intuitive appeal of metaphysical realism, while at the same time rejecting it, it also allows him to explain how there can be truths about fictional objects and truths in pure mathematics.

In his later years, Peirce devoted much energy to the project of a book on logic, whose intended title was “Logic, considered as Semeiotic.” That the science of logic is better considered as semeiotic is indeed one of the most fundamental tenets of Peirce's mature philosophy of logic. But what is the primary motivation for considering logic as semeiotic and what advantages did Peirce see in doing so? If logic is to be considered as semeiotic, this can only mean that its objects and their functioning are to be described in purely semeiotical terms. But did Peirce succeed in providing such a description? This paper focuses on the semeiotical functioning of the fundamental triad of logic: terms (rhemes), propositions (dicisigns), and arguments; it also discusses the idea of an extension of the science of logic and offers examples of the kind of extension that Peirce had in mind.