A call for help is a sign, but not one on the Peircean list. Some would call it an index but that is absurd. It is intentional and addresses an intentional being. Not on the list.

I guess that the reading made by Paul Ricouer around Aristotle's mimesis in three stages, could suggest another relationship between objects and representamen

Thank you very much for your answers.

Mr. Brandt, I'm afraid I also consider a call for help as an index. It exists a contiguity, a real link, between somebody that is calling for help and its own shout. In this case the object is the person who is calling for help, and the representamen is the voice that is catching somebody's else atention. I'ts an indexical relationship.

Mr. Echavarría, as you suggest I would like to deep into the category of mimesis staged by Ricoeur. But I'm afraid that Aristotle's mimesis is the same that likeness for Pierce. So that we are in front of iconic signs and iconic relationship between object and representamen.

Mr. Díaz :

It is Ricoeur's reading of Aristotelian mimesis, not Aristotle himself, where the first stage (or mimesis 1) is a foreshadowing, the second (M2), a configuration and the third (M3) a refiguration. So, this is not a simple case of mimesis as a copy, a likeness, because each stage increases and assumes other relationship between representamen and objects

Mr. Diaz. I know you would say that a call for help is an index. The conductor's signs to the musicians orienting the music he conducts is – to you - indexical, because of the shere contiguity, and the only relevant feature is contiguity. But that is nonsense. Contiguity is not what works COGNITIVELY in this case, it is INTENTIONALITY, which is a perspective absent from the Peircean picture. Reducing meaning to that picture will be possible for all thinkable examples, if you are insensitive enough. Peirce is a dangerously insensitive philosopher; reductions are always possible, but are they worth it? If you are ready to accept all these reductions, why are you asking the question? That's my question.

Dear Mr. Brandt:

In my opinion, the fact of intentionality in many signs, it is not adding something to the character of the relationship between representamen and object. The majority of things, as we perceive them, are groups of indexes, whose last objects are not easily accesible. And they have no intentionality at all (at least from the point of view of an atheist as me). Anyway, intentionality belongs to the relationship between representamen's producer and representamen itself (cautioned for an interpreter), not to the relationship between representamen and object. And this is the matter I propose.

I apreciate your point of view. I consider it enriches the debate.

Leave out all human perspectives from semiotics, and you get "relations between representamen and object". That's killing semiotics altogether. Peirce's problem is that he wants it to be a path toward logic, nothing else.

Mr Brandt: Peirce always had an interpreter, a human interpreter, in mind. In my opinion, this is a humanistic perspective. It's an interpreter who has the power to discriminate signs because of the kind of link between representamen and object. An interpreter who is very differently affected by an icon if it has an indexical component. This is the case of photography, so many different of painting for people, because of its indexical hue.

I'm very interested in the relationship between representamen and object precisely because of the important consequences that this link has for people.

If the 'Object' in this crazy sign model – there are alternatives – is something like the meaning of a sign, and the meaning is an online instruction, as in the conductor's signing to the orchestra, then the 'interpreter' (not the Interpretant) is in the Object, and this subjective instance is intending to understand the intention of the signer. Peirce's Interpretant does not, as you well know, allow any analysis of performative signing. His Semeiotic has nothing to do with analyzing meaning in the human world, only with classification on forms of information transfer in nature. AAnd as you know, the Interpreter is another sign, and so on, infinitely.

The InterpretANT is another sign. Pardon.

There may of course be any number of relations between representamen and object, so you must add to Peirce's explicit characterization the idea that what we are distinguishing are types of motivation (in his early writings, Peirce had a useful term for that, the ground). Convention is a motivation, not in the sense of a "natural relationship", but in the sense of what justifies/explains/motivates the relation between the two items. And I don't think there is any serious way of reducing similarity to contiguity - or the reverse (but you can try to convince me). On the other hand, I have always found it very problematic that symbols are defined, not only be convention, but also by habit - that is a huge difference. Also, some signs are clearly based on pre-existing conventions (for instance, restroom signs are based on the earlier convention of woman having shirts and men trousers) and other create the conventions. This is a subdivision of the notion of symbolic ground, so that is not very problematic, nor are the subdisvions I have proposed in my writings between different kinds of iconic signs (primary and secondary iconic signs - depending on whether similarity motivates the sign or vice-versa) and different kinds of indexical signs (abdutive, if the sign relies on our knowledge of a pre-existing contiguity, such as the traces left by feet - and performative, if the sign creates the contiguity, such as it the case with pointing and arrows). I think the issue of separating habit and convention is more serious, because here we really would have to split up one of Peirce's categories into two, and we would have to admit that Peirce found three categories wherever he looked because he was a triadomanica after all

@ Ruben Diaz de Corcuera

A suggestion: Before trying to add or subtract types of signs to Peirce's classification, shouldn't your "critical revision" of Peirce first question the usefulness of his triadic model to begin with? I agree with Per Aage Brandt that Peirce's semiotics is logical and reductionist. All of these typologies of signs that people keep generating over simplify the complex process of constructing meaning. These sign models don't bring us any closer to appreciating situational uniqueness and cultural diversity. The fact that so many different kinds of sign relationships have been proposed attests to this. MEANING is not in the relations between triadic sign components; if anything, it is in the construction of these relations, in the interpretive paths taken in CONTEXT. An isolated sign can only be the artefact, a de-contextualized product of interpretation; and meaning almost never results in a chain is distinct signs - it's more open ended than that. Furthermore, the triadic model fails completely when we try to describe the construction of linguistic meaning. For example, what is the object (or referent) of a morpheme like "-ish" in English? For an excellent critique of the triad, see Rastier, Francois. "La triade sémiotique, le trivium et la sémiotique linguistique", Nouveaux actes sémiotiques n° 9, 1990, pp. 5-39. (I don't know if an English translation exists, yet.)

Dear Mr. Sonesson

I have to say you are right. It is not possible to reduce icon to index. Although I would like to develop a little bit more some aspect of this particular relationship between both sign classes.

I’m trying to develop here a Morris’ idea according to what, symbols imply icons and icons imply indexes (1938: 60).

First of all, it seems to me very important the distinction between genuine and degenerate icons introduced by Pierce. I understand that genuine or hipo iconicity has rank of firstness for Pierce. Genuine iconicity is about similarity between qualia. Degenerated iconicity is that which exists between a photographic portrait and the person portrayed in it. The object of this portrait is a consolidated semiotic object, which means that it already incorporates an incalculable number of signs (among them, a key sign, the name).

A first clue about relationship between icon an index is provided by a singular fact: denotation in index is situated as the origin of signifier, whereas in icon, at least in degenerated icon, denotation is the target of the signifier. Then it happens that a vast and fickle, but finite group of indexes constitutes (may be by means of a symbolic simple naming act) the object of a vast group of degenerated icons (and by extensión, symbols too).

Furthermore, hipo icons or genuine icons, seem to share the same segments of continuum on object, than indexes on signifier.

Icons and indexes do not differ on signifier. They differ on interpreter. One can see, for example, a landscape in a wet spot on the wall (it is known that Leonardo da Vinci used this method in order to stimulate his pictorial imagination). Or one can see only a wet spot on the same wall.

The interpretant difference between hypo icons and indexes is even more subtle. If one depicts a stain of red paint in its concrete and particular redness, comparing it to the concrete and particular redness of other stains of red painting or any red thing else, that would be a performance mode icon (hipoicónico). This is what Pierce called firstness. If I face the same stain of red paint as the trace of someone or something, as the remnant of a voluntary or involuntary action performed in the past or in the immediate present with some intention or not, this is a way of indexical interpretation. Same signifier, different types of sign.

Furthermore, the perception has indexical chain appearance. The distal stimulus, the physical characteristics that are present in the stimulus, is dynamically linked to the proximal stimulus (which falls within the threshold of perception and competence of each sense), so the second is index of the first. And the proximal stimulus is dynamically connected to the percept, the structural organization of the stimulus, the quantitative and qualitative reduction which is operated by the interpretant mind, which transforms the stimulus but does not break the bond with it. Then the percept is an index of the proximal stimulus. Indexes are present, therefore, along the entire inferential chain that leads us up to the recognition of the denotatum in itself, up to the recognition of denotatum in the icon and also up to the recognition of the icon in the denotatum (why not?), in this last case icon swaps its role with object.

And finally we will incorporate into my chain of reasoning what we might call forensic perception. If we push icon to the extreme represented by the super icon, it is to say to the bound with its denotatum, over there where we can confuse one and other, it reaches more importance a deeper level of perception, the scientific level of discrimination, to which we have to go in order to dispel the doubts about whether denotata are legitimately what they seem to be or just iconic signs. At these levels of perception, usually techno mediated, indexes are the most important signs, these in which signifiers are directly caused by denotata, these which are by their own semiotic nature, by its direct link to objects, scientific stuff, proofs of the authenticity or inauthenticity of an object.

It is not possible to reduce icon to index, because of the character of one or another sign, As it was said at the begining, the difference don’t lie in the signifier but in the interpretant. But it is interesting to enphasize that when the interpreter is devoided of the resource of iconic recognition what remains in any case as a significant belongs to the indexical class of signs. Class of signs that would have infraestructural, semiogenetic character.

The point is not the (exasperating) sign typolgy (really, 66 diferente signs just from nine trichotomies, is not very operative), but the categories which found all the system, and the purpose of all that "antihegelian" and pragmatic monster. Based on Thomas Short (Peirce´s Theory of Signs, 2007), cognitive and embodiment semantics, colombian academic Douglas Niño, propose the coherence and also the limitations (lack of a syntetic view of semiosis) of the system, instead just the signs typology, which is the consecuence of the peircean categories.

http://www.academia.edu/2046397/Signo_y_Proposito._Presentacion_y_critica_de_la_propuesta_de_Thomas_Short_del_modelo_de_signo_de_Charles_S._Peirce

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259264474_Signo_Peirceano_e_integracin_conceptual_una_propuesta_de_sntesis

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236156727_El_signo_peirceano_y_su_impacto_en_la_semitica_contempornea

Chapter Signo Peirceano e integración conceptual: una propuesta de síntesis

Chapter El signo peirceano y su impacto en la semiótica contemporánea

Could be symbolic

I have read the answers regarding Peirce's semiotics with bemused interest. It is apparent to me that no one in this thread has achieved any sort of understanding,  even at the most basic philosophical level, of Peirce's semiotic research, which doesn't seek to reduce anything but seek to capture the dynamic process of inquiry, whether in humans or other minding beings, in ways that vastly open up inquiry. That Peirce does not capture intentionality, for instance, is an extraordinary claim that ignores his deep-rooted and broad teleology and everything he says about thirdness, while saying that he is only after logic betrays a severe misunderstanding of what logic is in Peirce's eyes (nothing short-mindedly formal and detached from the human or other organisms). Many are here in effect accusing Peirce of some sort of crass nominalism (or positivism, or scientism) while he is a champion of the exactly opposite attitude.

Peirce's classification of signs is no mere rigid list, and is not meant to be a table where anything can be pigeonholed neatly. Someone seeking to give a full account of proper names, for instance, would come to recognize that nearly all semiotic functions described in Peirce's "semiogram" (so to speak) are relevant, and not just one or two. To intimate  that Peirce's semiotics ignores the "context" is to ignore everything he has said about collateral observation and collateral experience, not to mention his theory of information, both in its early form (1865-67) and the later forms.

François Rastier's understanding of Peirce's triad as displayed in his "La triade sémiotique, le trivium et la sémantique linguistique" is from beginning to end a demonstration of his nearly complete misunderstanding of Peirce's semiotics. Apart from his criticism of Morris, whose transformation of Peirce's semiotics was severely damaging, there is much that is not excellent in that paper, in great part because there is nothing there regarding Peirce's triad that is correctly understood, not even the notions of object, sign, interpretant (which is not the same as the "signified"), and ground, and not even the graphical representation of the triad, which in Peirce can never be a triangle, since a triangle is simply made of three binary connections that fail to capture what is irreducible in triadicity. The limitations inherent to Greimas's semantic square come precisely from the fact that there is nothing triadic in it (even though its application is completely triadic, seemingly unbeknownst to the user): it is a collection of binaries, and binaries are indeed a hallmark of reductionistic nominalism; they simplify analysis with dyadic distinctions that are certainly useful to scratch surfaces, but not much more. Peirce's notion of iconicity goes beyond notions of similarity or resemblance, his notion of index goes beyond contiguity, and his notion of symbol goes beyond concepts such as convention or habit, all for the same reason: what Peirce's notion captures is a structure more fundamental than anything that those less fundamental concepts can convey.

That some have problems with the idea that triads are everywhere is only a result of not knowing the argument behind it, and that absence of knowledge produces the feeling that the claim is arbitrary. But that genuine triads cannot possibly be reduced to dyads, and genuine dyads cannot possibly be reduced to monads, has become incontrovertible (even though nominalists generally seek to reduce the triadic to the dyadic, and in so doing forget the human that Per Aage Brandt is right not to want to lose). And that polyads (higher than triads) are in principle reducible to combinations of triads (and triads only: no need to add monads and dyads) is  a mathematical theorem that has been demonstrated by different mathematicians using different strategies in recent years. This means that tetrads, pentads, hexads, etc., are perfectly fine in a Peircean outlook: they all ultimately rely on triads.

As long as some reduce Peirce's semiotic contribution to icons, indexes, and symbols in the simplistic, recipe-based, ways illustrated throughout this thread, there is no hope to do his work any justice. It takes years to appreciate what Peirce's fundamental work in semiotics (itself not detachable from his other philosophical pursuits) was all about. Trying to grasp him out of a few detached paragraphs from the Collected Papers (whether or not translated by Deledalle--whose understanding of Peirce was better than Rastier's) or out of someone's incompetent course or book about Peirce's semiotics can only lead to one consequence: dreadful dis- and mis-information about what Peirce developed. To understand Peirce, there is no shortcut: one has to capture the evolving continuum of his thinking, without reducing his thoughts to scattered or detached points arbitrarily marked off on a thin line.

In other words, just because someone does not see how to apply what he or she has read in Peirce to a particular object of analysis like the suffix "-ish" or a call for help (which is of course analyzable in a Peircean way once one understands how to apply the theory in all of its complex sophistication) is not automatic evidence that something must be missing in Peirce, but evidence that the said someone is likely not to have sufficiently studied and reflected upon Peirce's writings--all of his texts that bear on his semiotics, including those that do not discuss semiotics but have direct implications for a richer and deeper understanding of his semiotics and the vast project it represented.