The Aesthetic of Play by Upton Brian

Author:Upton, Brian [Upton, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262028516
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2015-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 10.2

The Peircean sign.

Peirce’s triadic signs can be linked together to form semiotic chains (figure 10.3). A mental state that serves as the interpretant in one sign may serve as the representamen of a different sign. So, for example, our knowledge that we have read the word ‘dog’ acts as the interpretant in a sign that has the word on the page as the object. But it also acts as the representamen in a sign that has our understanding of dogs as the interpretant and real-world dogs as the object. And our understanding of dogs can then act as the representamen in a third sign that has our understanding of loyalty as the interpretant, and so on. Reading the word ‘dog’ will not necessarily result in us just thinking about dogs; it can trigger a long sequence of associations as our thoughts hop from sign to sign along the semiotic chain. Eventually we might wind up at a sign whose object is quite remote from the original triggering stimulus—Alaskan sled races, ritual uncleanness, Egyptian gods, duck hunting, and so on. The Peircean sign isn’t merely a description of the relationship between a symbol and an idea. It is a modular building block for conceptualizing the iterative process of translating a symbol into an idea about something in the world.

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