Lotman’s Semiosphere, Peirce’s Signs, and Cultural Processes

Abstract

This paper brings Lotman’s semiotic space to bear on Peirce’s concept of the sign with respect to broad cultural processes. Consideration of cultural processes in the Peircean mode calls for an extension of Lotman’s pair of terms, primary and secondary modeling systems, in view of Peirce’s notion of the sign as triadic. As a consequence of this extension, the premise in this inquiry has it that: (1) triadic signs within complex cultural processes are interdependent, interrelated and interactive, (2) triadic signs make up an interconnected, contradictory complementary convergent whole, which is inconsistent and/or incomplete, depending upon the cultural context, (3) inconsistency and incompleteness are of the nature of Peirce’s vagueness and generality respectively, the first being chiefly of the nature of the category of Firstness and the second chiefly of the nature of Thirdness, (4) the role of Secondness unfolds through acts of selection from the possibilities of Firstness, such acts of selection involving a separation of signs, their semiotic objects and their interpretants, (5) Thirdness renders signs general, yet generalities are almost invariably incomplete, given human fallibilism, hence the ‘final sign’ or ‘final interpretant’ is always out of reach, and (6) fallibilism breeds a tendency, within broad cultural processes, toward either (a) successive differentiation (or heterogeny) of signs, or (b) hegemony, dominance and subservience, and superordination and subordination.