Gérard Deledalle, Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs. Essays in Comparative
Semiotics. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000.
Reviewed by Geoffrey Sykes
For the past four decades Gérard Deledalle has been the main
exponent of American philosophy in France. Books such as La
Philosophie Américaine and À la Recherche d’une Méthode have become widely
known and circulated. Much of his exposition has been centred at l’Université
de Perpignan, in southwestern France, in regular weekly seminars that ran
for over 25 years until his retirement. Commencing with his personal association
with John Dewey, Deledalle’s scholarship, including several publications on
Peirce, would seem to run counter to postwar French interest in structural and
Marxist semiotics, and philosophical traditions. Yet it is part of his professional
achievement not only to represent pragmatism as a minority, mainly American
influence, in France, but through its advocacy to help question and overcome
stereotypical divisions between European and American thought. Through
personal and professional contacts, he has introduced the work of James, Dewey
and Peirce, and pragmatism generally, to thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Lacan.
Such introductions, and the consequent influence of pragmatism on post-structural French
thinking, cannot be underestimated, and testify to Deledalle’s role in modern French
philosophy and semiotic theory.
The reason Deledalle might not be more widely known and read outside of France is
simple: most of his books were written in French, and have remained untranslated. We are
indebted to Susan Petrilli for the English version of the short, but elegant and penetrating,
intellectual biography Charles S. Peirce, 1839-1914 : An intellectual biography. Deledalle’s
other English contributions, to Semiotica and international meetings, such as IASS
congresses (Deledalle: 1992), have remained dispersed and not always readily accessible.
The recent publication of an anthology of Deledalle’s papers, Charles S. Peirce’s
Philosophy of Signs, provides a necessary and helpful catch-up and introduction for English
readers of Deledalle’s life-long work. Seventeen papers are included, previously published
in whole or part between 1964-1999. This is “a collection of papers written over fifty years”
(vii). Any problem of translation of the thirteen articles first published in French, and
included in whole or part, has been overcome by the author, who has undertaken virtually
all translations, including Latin, Greek and German quotations.
The papers are not ordered chronologically, but organized into four distinct,
thematic parts: Semiotic as Philosophy, Semeiotic as Semiotics, Comparative Semiotics and
Comparative Metaphysics. The largest part is Comparative Semiotics, which uses the
exegetical strategy of comparing Peirce, indirectly or in terms of his direct reception, with a
number of prominent philosophers such as Wittgenstein, De Saussure, Jakobson, and
Morris.
A leading question can immediately, if somewhat rhetorically, be asked: what are we
to make of this publication? By this, I mean, is it fundamentally a re-issue, of retrospective
worth and interest for a history of ideas, or an anthology of one scholar’s lifetime work?
Does this retrospective publication and translation add anything to the field of contemporary
Peircean studies? My response to the last question is affirmative: there appear to be
several distinct approaches present in the book, towards pragmatism, semiotics,
philosophy, metaphysics, and biography, all of which deserve ongoing attention by
Peircean scholars. What is distinct in its content might be explained in part by the book’s
inter-cultural origins.
The French context suggests a dialectic with other semiotic and philosophical traditions,
which led, at least indirectly, to a focus on pragmatic themes that remain as pertinent
as ever. The sectional presentation and introduction of the book implies that the selection
of papers in this anthology is not merely one of editorial or bibliographical convenience.
Rather, it is an aspect of an argument and a contemporary approach to Peirce that
seeks a response by a wider, international audience.
The Introduction states clearly that Peirce’s semiotic should be approached in terms
of the philosophical questions it addressed: that the philosophical hue of Peirce’s writings
distinguishes them from the ethnology of Levi-Strauss, and the linguistics of Jakobson or
De Saussure. The introduction stresses another distinctive theme – that Peircan exegesis
should be mindful of the context of the writing and publication of his seminal work.
Deledalle alludes to dates and periods of Peirce’s life – 1867, 1878, 1906 – that were
elaborated in Charles S. Peirce, 1839-1914 (1990). There is a correspondence of audience,
circumstance, chronology and ideas that can be overlooked by overly philosophical
readings. Peirce may be polyglot, even a genius, but he cannot mean all things to all
readers: it is more likely that he only ever meant a few things to a few people at any one
time.
Peirce did not write systematic large-scale accounts of his schemes, in which a
consistency of terminology would be ensured. As a result, he probably often contradicted
his own “ethics of terminology,” transforming, eliding and substituting key words of his
semiotic theory. Throughout his book, Deledalle responds to changing nuances in the
meaning of terms such as “sign,” “representamen,” “semiosis,” and “icon,” and invites us
to re-read Peirce accordingly.
The argument about contextualized exegesis suggests parallels between this
anthology and Peirce’s own writings. Deledalle writes in a concise, notational and nuanced
conceptual style that is flexibly adapted, in individual papers, to various audiences and
circumstances. Any approach to the assemblage of writings selected from thirty years’
output needs to be qualified by a sense of the author’s own “different periods and in
different contexts” (viii). Thus, the paper on Lady Welby is from a collection in a book
dedicated to Peirce’s correspondence with that English linguist: a response to a colleague,
Jerzy Pelc, is previously unpublished. The Conclusion of the book involves a close study
of Peirce’s “Contributions to The Nation” journal. This involves close analysis of key terms
such as “sign” and “phanoscopy,” as they are introduced and discussed by Peirce in that
publication.
Critical articles by Peirce on fellow philosophers such as Dewey and James are seen to qualify
generalized, retrospective claims about what these thinkers had in common. Once again,
the stress is on a contextualized exegesis that reaches beyond the pages of philosophy.
What other approach would suit a thinker who arguably gave some currency to the term,
“pragmatism”?
In a further similarity, whether intended or not, Deledalle’s peripatetic and notational
style seems to resemble the concise, conceptualized form of Peirce’s prose since both
share a sense of interdisciplinary intellectual inquiry, distributed across a miscellany of
publications. The result can be enjoyable and exploratory for the reader, sharing the
subtleties and shifts of argument across different circumstances and times.
There is arguably one more similarity between Deledalle and Peirce, and that is in
content. Behind a miscellany of publications and concise elliptical style there is a
controlling, motivating and coherent “philosophy of signs.” The Introduction hints at one
main theme that will provide a thread of coherence through its various papers. That theme
is the pragmatic nature of semiosis: of the fallible, experiential process of sign acts and sign
making that is the subject matter for any semiotic analysis and theory. It is a theme or
premise that will be echoed again and again in the papers that follow.
The first two essays overlap in their presentations of Peirce’s triadic semiotics as
“Peirce’s New Philosophical Paradigms.” They aim to set forth the philosophical context
and “paradigms” that question and inform Peirce’s development of a semiotic, and in
particular trace the transformation of Peirce’s work between “New List of
Categories”(1866/67) and “The List of Categories: A Second Essay”” (1894), in terms of a
response to philosophical problems; in particular, the debate between nominalism and
realism that characterized the differences between English and European philosophy up to
the twentieth century. Deledalle sees the crucial role of phenomenology or “phaneroscopy”
in developing mature categories (9), and in providing a philosophical basis for Peirce’s
pragmatic semiotic.
As demonstrated in Charles S. Peirce, 1839-1914, and argued in the Introduction of
this book, Deledalle has an acute historical sense. The first paper, “Peirce’s New
Philosophical Paradigms,” stresses the significance of 1885-1887 as a delineator of the
development of Peirce’s mature thought. The paper repeats the seminal role of one paper,
“On a Logic of Algebra” (1885), in anticipating the mature categories of Firstness and
Secondness (8-9). The 1885 paper responded to mathematical epistemology, or a
philosophy of mathematics, and revised icon and index sign types from the “New List”
(1867). The article, inspired by De Morgan’s theory of a logic of relatives,
began a decadelong inquiry into diagrammatic signs and reasoning, which explained
abstract and intuitive thought within a representamen/sign act/interpretant relationship.
Analysis of the iconic nature of mathematical expressions helped resolve the dualism
of realism and nominalism that had pervaded his work up until 1885. “We are beyond
nominalism and realism. The mind is in the world and in continuity with it. The law
is a natural as well as logical process.” The law is also, we might add, as Deledalle does
in later papers, “geo-social” (43), produced by and in public and communal testing (51).
Henceforth, the representamen of sign acts could be located in complex graphic form
in the artefacts of mathematics and culture: the mind can be studied in the world of
dynamic rich signs. The development of indexicality into Secondness is central to Peirce’s
work, which can be seen as a whole as a speculation on the sign/object relationship.
Peirce, in terms of Deledalle’s interpretation, invites a specific semiotic explanation of
action and “behavior,” something omitted from many semiotic and pragmatic theories.
These early papers convincingly argue that “Peirce’s semeiotic is a branch of
philosophy” (xiii), that what is distinct about his theory of signs can be described in terms of
the philosophical questions, of ontology, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics and language,
that it addresses and seeks to resolve. The title of the book thus remains convincing:
Peirce’s semeiotic truly is a Philosophy of Signs.
Paper three, “Peirce’s First Pragmatic Papers, 1877-1878” (23-33), is a brief yet
tantalizing study in intellectual biography. As is suitable from the author’s culture, it focuses
on an aspect of the “French connection” in Peirce’s life. Peirce travelled to France, spoke
French fluently and wrote in it often. In 1904 he was given the great honour of election as
foreign associate to the French academy of science.
This paper compares French and English versions of well-known and seminal
papers, “How To Make Our Ideas Clear” and “The Fixation of Belief” (both published in
Revue Philosophique, 1878-79). It demonstrates subtle inflections and differences of
meaning that resulted from changes in language and audience. It also outlines the possible
historical influence of French politics, including the Paris Commune and libertarian thought,
on the social philosophy of “The Fixation of Habit.”
The result is no arcane or dry hermeneutic, but something representative of a type of
intellectual biography that integrates very particular circumstances and events of a
subject’s professional and personal life, with the content of their ideas. Such an approach
makes a lot of sense for a pragmatist who argued ideas need to be assessed in terms of
their outcome or communication in sign acts. As detailed as it is, what is frustrating about
the paper remains its strength: its specialism and concision. How many other digressive
narrative sequences, involving Peirce’s work at Johns Hopkins, with the Metaphysical Club,
in travels to Europe, in the Coastal Survey or while at Arisbe, await further analysis?
A sense of concision and brevity is shared with other papers, and it is not really a
judgement on the anthology to note as much: within and between papers many different
themes and points are made, seemingly in passing. These cannot all be taken up with the
constraints or purposes of the present volume, yet we are tempted on occasions to want
more development.
Part Two is “devoted to Peirce’s theory of signs” (35). It takes up themes introduced
in the first part directly. The organization of the First and Second section is thus very clear:
having clarified the philosophical background, the focus is on distinct features of semiotic
theory. “Sign: Semiosis and Representamen” and “Sign: the Concept and its Use” focus
immediately on themes that Deledalle regards as central to a pragmatic understanding of
Peirce. A sign has two aspects or “acceptations”: the sign object (representamen) and the
sign action (semiosis) (37). These two aspects function with an effect that is conceived as
the interpretant, third acceptation of the sign.
Focus on these key terms allows Deledalle to expound the general features and
terminology of Peirce’s semiotic. A representamen is the sign object: it can function as a
symbol (a general sign acting in a repertory of signs), an index, or icon (likeness to
objects); yet its function as a sign can only be analyzed in the process of semiosis
through a relational act that produces an interpretant effect (38-39). Through semiosis natural or
dynamical objects are transformed into immediate objects: the potential of transforming any
object or stimulus to become part of semiosis, to change from dynamic to immediate object,
led Peirce to argue the whole universe “is perfused with signs, if it is not composed
exclusively of signs” (5.448).
Deledalle notes the semiosis of Peirce’s own ideas, which results in a kind of
“terminological laxity” (42) in the progressive development of a key term like
representamen. This term seems to change from a Kantian mental image or idea, to an
aspect of the process of semiosis, of the mind in the world and thought in action. In the
latter it is a “written, gestural or spoken sign” (43) participating in a continuous, temporal
discourse of a community (51). Deledalle traces a move from mentalist to sociological
concepts of truth and epistemology. Peirce sees a “regressus ad infinitum” in the interplay
of sign act, object and interpretant that is discursive and communicative in effect. Peirce
moves from singular acts of indexicality to a composite discursive account of truth and
mind. The result provides, in a semiotic model, a theory of mind and cognition that “all
thought is in signs” outside of mental signs (43).
There is a fascinating sub-section here on “Semiosis and Time” (50-53) suggesting
temporality as a factor essential to a pragmatic account of semiosis. Temporality involves
more than chronology, but was conceived by Peirce, we know, in terms of synechism or
continuity, as well as the discontinuity of Seconds. Deledalle stresses that the “continuous
temporal process” involved in any semiosis-structural analysis of representamen divorced
from the nuanced “existential” or “instantiated” context of spatial temporal relations, seems
almost impossible in Peircean terms. The temporal process can be understood in
infinitesimal intervals of particular movement, or in long discursive tropes of an expanded
community. Once again, it is the concision of this section that brings forth its own critique:
the topic it introduces is important enough to beg expansion. Gilles Deleuze (1986: 1-11)
has argued against the synchronous nature of structural semiotics, and that any
contemporary revisionist theory needs to be diachronic, and focus on the moving image
conceived in a temporal sequence. A comparative study of Deleuze and Peirce could help
elaborate the topic of temporality and semiosis.
In “Sign: The Concept and Its Use,” Deledalle provides close exegesis of the term
representamen, thus further illustrating the aim of providing a contextualized study of
Peirce’s thought. Through Deledalle’s focus on the etymological shifts of the term, we can
see how Peirce expounds, within a semiotic frame, notions of indexicality, context and
action that remain crucial to behavioral semiotics.
Part Three is the longest section of the book. It comprises eight papers,
commencing with an occasional reply to a fellow semiotician, Jerzy Pelc, that was
previously unpublished. This is followed by an exegesis of Peirce in terms of his reading of
Greek philosophy. “Semiotic and Significs” discusses Peirce’s mature correspondence with
the English linguist Lady Welby, and essays on De Saussure, Morris, Jakobson and
Wittgenstein follow. An unusual inclusion addresses the semiotic potential of Marshall
McLuhan’s writing on mass media, and seeks to commence what is claimed as a semiotic
of media.
The papers of Part Three have a valuable goal: to approach the comprehensive and
divergent writings of Peirce in terms of their reception by or comparison with that of other
philosophers. It is an innovative and useful approach in which themes of the preceding
Parts are dispersed, repeated and elaborated. The paper on De Saussure seems entirely
satisfying and helpful, with a detailed focused approach to a question that is often put:
how similar or different are “the a priori conditions” of Peirce’s and De Saussure’s thinking?
(100) Can Peirce’s Representamen be equated with De Saussure’s signifier? Detailed
comparisons are presented in tabulated lists. In conclusion, the social basis of sign theory
is acknowledged: nevertheless, Deledalle sees a psychologism in De Saussure that can be
contrasted with Peirce’s anti-psychologist behaviorism. The triadic dynamic of Peirce’s
schema cannot be reduced to De Saussure’s mentalist-based dyadic model. The paper
ends with a useful, diagrammatic attempt to map De Saussure within a more inclusive and
comprehensive Peircean schema.
The controversial topic of the use of Peirce by Charles Morris, and comparison of his
behaviorism and the semiotic behaviorism of Peirce, are directly addressed in “Peirce and
Morris.” The differentiation of physiology and natural signs, and human signs and
language, has been an issue in all branches of modern semiotics. Inquiry into corporeal
and facial signs and gestures has been too readily classified as physiological, rather than
classified according to a suitable repertoire or theory of sign types. Can one suggest that a
comparison of the behaviorism of Morris, and his mentor Peirce, might provide more
illumination about the boundary of natural and social signs, and corporeal behavior
generally, than the current fashion for biosemiotics?
Critical analysis of Jakobson’s appropriation of Peirce follows the discussion of
Morris, and then comparison between analytic themes of Wittgenstein, Frege and Peirce.
Once again, the strategy of employing such critical comparative readings seems
successful, and limited only by their length. One always wants more, much more, principally
because such comparison is a useful, indeed necessary way to expound Peirce in the
context of a history of ideas. Can one truly specialize in Peirce without regard for his place
in the crowded and competing fields of modern philosophy and semiotics? Undoubtedly
such comparative study will need to be based on a coherent reading of Peirce, something
that Deledalle provides in Part Two.