Auke and Jon, Peirce developed his semeiotic as a tool for analyzing the many kinds of signs and their use in science and everyday life. Unfortunately, Peirce did not provide enough examples to clarify exactly how his terminology could be applied in all the many variations. The following excerpt shows why we need some examples to provide a basis for comparing and evaluating different interpretations: > JAS: I remain reluctant to classify any real signs as pure icons, indices, or symbols. Consider these comments by Peirce... AvB> You sneek in a restrictive clause: 'real' signs, see for comparison the sentence to which I responded. JAS> while I indeed consider signs to be iconic/indexical/symbolic rather than pure icons/indices/symbols... First example: An archaeologist sees something (a mark) and interprets it as a token of type bone. After further examination, it turns out to be a bone from a deer. Scratches on the bone could mean that some animal was eating the meat, or it could mean that some human was using the bone for some purpose. What purpose? Question: How could Peirce's terminology be applied to this example? A more complex example: The work by archaeologists in analyzing and interpreting the carvings on the Mayan ruins. For a brief summary of the 21st c. interpretation, see https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mayan-hieroglyphic-writing . A bit of Googling will dig out many more examples. Adding the words 'semiotic' and 'Peirce' will retrieve thousands of hits. When archaeologists first discovered the Mayan ruins, they had no evidence for interpreting the carvings. To use Peirce's basic trichotomy, mark/token/type, the archaeologists saw marks. They interpreted the marks as tokens of type human-artifact. By analyzing the stones, they could determine that the artifacts were a subtype called carvings. But are those carvings tokens of mere decorations? How could anyone determine the types that the ancient Mayans had intended? Some carvings were recognizable as icons of humans and animals or parts thereof. They might assume some symbolic purpose, perhaps religious or historical. After some abduction, they assumed that some of the carvings were symbols of sounds, and they used the modern Mayan language as a guide to interpreting the sounds. Finally, they were able to read the glyphs as words and sentences in the old Mayan language. Questions: How could Peirce's terminology clarify these issues? Could these or other examples resolve the debates on Peirce-L? John
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