PEIRCE SIGNS AND MEANING

CS Peirce was the founder of pragmatism and a pioneer in the field of semiotics His work investigated the problem of meaning which is the core aspect of semiosis as well as a significant issue in many academic fields Floyd Merrell demonstrates throughout Peirce Signs and Meaning that Peirce39s views remain dynamically relevant to the analysis of subsequent work in the philosophy of language Merrell discusses Peirce39s thought in relation to that of early twentiethcentury philosophers such as Frege Russell and Quine and contemporaries such as Goodman Putnam Davidson and Rorty In doing so Merrell demonstrates how quests for meaning inevitably fall victim to vagueness in pursuit of generality and how vagueness manifests an inevitable tinge of inconsistency just as generalities always remain incomplete He suggests that vagueness and incompletenessgenerality overdetermination and underdetermination and Peirce39s phenomenological categories of Firstness Secondness and Thirdness must be incorporated into notions of sign structure for a proper treatment of meaning He also argues that the twentiethcentury search for meaning has placed overbearing stress on language while ignoring nonlinguistic sign modes and means Peirce Signs and Meaning is an important sequel to Merrell39s trilogy Signs Becoming Signs39 Semiosis in the Postmodern Age and Signs Grow This book is not only a significant contribution to the field of semiotics it has much to offer scholars in literature philosophy linguistics cultural studies and other academic disciplines in which meaning is a central concern