Tony Jappy.Peirce’s Twenty-Eight Classes of Signs and the Philosophy of Representation: Rhetoric, Interpretation and Hexadic Semiosis. Bloomsbury. vi - xi, 212 pages

Between the years 1903 and 1910, Charles S. Peirce spent considerable energy trying to expand the tenfold classification of signs he published in the Syllabus for his 1903 Lowell Lectures (see CP 2.233-72; EP 2.289-99). Albert Atkin characterizes the semiotic theory emerging from these late explorations as “speculative, rambling, and incomplete” (2010 : para. 2); and T. L. Short comments that “Peirce’s later taxonomy ... is sketchy, tentative, and, as best as I can make out, incoherent” (2007 : 259-60). Contrary to these assessments by leading scholars of Peirce’s semiotic theory, Tony Jappy purports in this book to show that one iteration of this late system, mentioned only in a single 1908 letter to Lady Welby, is a “coherent” (3), “fully functional, organically organized and autonomous system” (177). Jappy fails to defend either the coherence or the importance of the 28-sign classification, and that which is of genuine scholarly interest in this book is obscured by Jappy’s pervasive misinterpretations of Peirce. Before developing these criticisms, let me begin by summarizing the content of Jappy’s book, which consists of five chapters. Chapter 1, “The Philosophy of Representation”, provides a mixture of historical background on semiotic theory, focusing primarily upon John Locke’s semiotic theory, and background on important elements of Peirce’s philosophy like his architectonic classification of inquiries, his phenomenology, and his categories. Jappy’s discussion of these aspects of Peirce’s philosophy is brief, uneven, and it fails to illuminate the real importance of these topics for understanding Peirce’s semiotic theory. The chapter concludes by reviewing the 10-sign classification published in Peirce’s 1903 Lowell Syllabus. Chapter 2, “The Transition” traces the development of Peirce’s semiotic theory between the 1903 Syllabus and the 28-sign classification developed in 1908. In the course of this chapter, Jappy reproduces, in clear and carefully constructed tables, four of Peirce’s late semiotic classifications. Three of these four (Table 2.2. is missing) and five additional typologies from this period are included in an appendix (180-188). The collection in one place of these diverse typologies, which are scattered throughout Peirce’s unpublished manuscripts and letters, is the most important contribution of Jappy’s book. Scholars researching the development of Peirce’s semiotic theory during this transition period will find Jappy’s typological tables quite helpful. With that said, Jappy’s explication of these transitional typologies is not very instructive. He is usually content to trace terminological transitions, regarding every new term for an old concept as an important “theoretical advance” (65). When he does offer interpretations of the transitions he is documenting, Jappy errs almost unfailingly, reaching such implausible conclusions as : Peirce abandoned his triadic conception of semiosis for a hexadic conception (51-2); Peirce’s 1906 definition of a sign as a medium for the communication of a form from an object to an interpretant is “radically different” than prior definitions (55); by 1906 speculative rhetoric became “redundant” because signs are determined exclusively by their dynamic objects, with their utterers contributing nothing (60-1); and intellectual concepts lack objects (71-2). The third chapter, “The Sign-Systems of 1908” introduces the 28-sign classification. This typology proposes six triadic divisions of signs, with each division being defined according to Peirce’s universal categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Concerning the category that the sign’s dynamic object belongs to, a sign is either an abstractive, concretive, or collective, respectively; concerning the category of the sign’s immediate object, the divisions are descriptive, designative, and copulate; concerning the category of the sign itself, Peirce’s terms are mark, token, and type; concerning the category of the sign’s immediate interpretant – hypothetical, categorical, or relative; concerning the …