A Reply to Rohr

David Rohr, of Boston University, has written a highly critical review of my book, Peirce’s Twenty-Eight Classes of Signs and the Philosophy of Representation : Rhetoric, Interpretation and Hexadic Semiosis, from Bloomsbury’s Advances in Semiotics series. As a rebuttal of each of his charges would require a text twice as long as the review, in this reply I shall simply comment at length upon a number of the more damaging criticisms after having referred briefly to a number of others of a similar vein. This will give the reader a good idea of the rather uneven grasp Rohr has of Peircean semiotics, and, at the same time, show that Rohr, willfully or otherwise, has misrepresented, misinterpreted, or simply misread my book. To begin with, I apparently “err unfailingly” and reach “implausible conclusions” by stating that Peirce abandoned his triadic conception of semiosis for a hexadic one; by claiming that the 1906 definition of the sign is “radically different” from that of 1903; by claiming that by 1906 speculative rhetoric had become “redundant”; and by claiming that intellectual concepts lack objects. I shall take this first group of objections in turn before dealing with more serious charges, and will complete the reply with three comments on the character of the review itself. With respect to the first point, I maintain that by expanding the original three correlates of 1903 to the six described in the letter to Lady Welby of 23 December 1908 Peirce did base the process of semiosis on six correlates. Prior to 1907 he had not mentioned the concept : in 1903 he simply defined the sign as being determined by its single object in such a way as to determine a single interpretant. The dynamism is implicit here, but by 1908 it had become explicit, and his developing conception of sign action had involved six correlates since 1904. Moreover, the determination sequence defined in the 23 December 1908 letter to Lady Welby (SS : 84-85) – and quoted by Rohr, too – involves six distinct correlates, a sequence which clearly shows the process to be hexadic. Concerning the two definitions of the sign mentioned by Rohr, readers can judge for themselves : There are several definitions of the sign to be found in the Lowell Lectures, including others based around the representamen, a term which is not to be found in any of his discussions of signs and sign classes after 1906. The one from 1903 above is based on Peirce’s theory of triadic relations, and defines the sign as a species of representamen. The definition from 1906, however, is no longer triadic, but involves six correlates, rather. Moreover, it defines the object to be an independent “subject”, the embodied form of which is communicated via an immediate object to the sign and subsequently to three interpretants in the course of semiosis, a process which explains how signs acquire the characteristics we perceive or understand them to have. This is to my mind a radical difference from 1903, and heralds the structure of the two grander typologies of 1908. As for speculative rhetoric’s being made redundant by Peirce’s expanding conception of the object, I repeat part of the argument from the pages referred to by Rohr, as it shows how Rohr has misrepresented my wording : What Rohr fails to mention is that I was discussing the traditional conception of rhetoric as being the sphere of influence of an utterer, and that this conception, if we follow the logic of the definitions Peirce gives in 1906, is redundant : from a logical, as opposed to a …