Three plates, three jobs
Not all signs are the same
Sign · A trichotomy, 1867– · Wherever something stands for something to someone
Ask what kind of relation this is, before asking what it means.
Looks like: a picture of a pipe. Came from: smoke, a footprint. Was taught: a flag, a red light, the word pipe, which does not resemble a pipe at all. Language is that third job. Smoke does not pretend to be fire. A sentence can lie. Magritte painted a likeness and wrote a word across it so you would feel the cut.
Sourced
Peirce asked what kind of standing-for is happening: icon, index, symbol. Most signs mix the three. Saussure mapped language as a system of differences. The point is the relation, not a label.
A smoke plume and a repeating number are not signs in the same way.
Concordance
- The thing
- Three ways of standing for: resemblance, trace, convention.
- Seen
- Smoke over a field. Elsewhere in the house: a footprint, a flag, a portrait.
- Sourced
- C. S. Peirce’s trichotomy of icon, index, and symbol. Most signs mix the three. The point is the relation, not a label.
- Miss
- A smoke plume and a repeating number are not signs in the same way.
- One question remains
- What kind of sign is this?
