The Range of Peirce’s Relevance (Continued)

Abstract

2. The Present Range A survey of the fields in which Peirce's relevance is now recognized may best begin with that in which such recognition is most nearly universal. The commonest English form of the name of that field is now semiotics. As a field of systematic study, it is still so young that there are as yet few if any univer sity departments bearing its name; but there are several interdisciplinary programs and research centers, and several national societies and journals; and there is an International Association for Semiotic Studies, which was founded at Paris in 1969; which publishes the most voluminous journal in the field, Semiotica-, and which held its first congress at Milan in 1974 and its sec ond at Vienna in 1979. At the latter there were three working devoted to Investigations into Peirce's Theory of Signs. The Charles S. Peirce Society holds its regular single-session annual meeting in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association; but, by invitation, it has been holding twoor even three-session meetings in conjunction with the annual meetings of the Semiotic Society of America. Moreover, the latter Society frequently has one or more Peirce sessions in its own program. Papers on Peirce are in creasingly frequent in the semiotic societies of other countries also. It may soon be the case, if it is not so already, that more papers on Peirce are presented to semiotic societies and published in semiotic journals than to all other professional societies and in all other professional journals taken together. Though the history of semiotics may be traced back to the ancient Greeks, and though Peirce and Saussure had modern predecessors, it has become common to recognize them as the modern founders of semiotics. (Saussure's term s?miologie is already obsolete, and so, apparently, is Peirce's preferred spelling semeiotic) Peirce's most fundamental published papers go back to 1867-1871, a decade before Saussure's M?moire and half a century before his Cours. Those early papers of Peirce were first ^published, and much of his relevant later work was first published, in 1931 1935, in the first six volumes of his Collected Papers, one of whose two editors was Charles Hartshorne, an older colleague of Charles Morris at the