Peirce's Theory Of Interpretant

6. The role of an interprentant in semiosis.
An interpretant, one of the three interrelated parts of a sign, is the most distinctive and innovative element of Peirce's theory. By introducing the interpretant into semiosis Peirce makes it central to the content of the sign, to signification: a sign signifies only when it is being interpreted. The sign (as part of the tri-part Peircean sign) is the signifier, e.g an utterance or a written word; the object corresponds to whatever is signified and an interpretant refers to the degree of understanding that we have of the relation between the sign and the object. In one of his definitions of a sign Peirce refers to an interpretant as the effect that a sign has upon a person (Peirce, 1998, Vol.
The object places constraints on the sign that could signify it and limits the features that the sign can use for signification. Thus the sign signifies the object only through some of the object’s features and focusing our attention on some features of the object/sign relation.
The dynamic nature of signification is reflected in Peirce’s early account of signs as infinity of signs that precede other signs and follows them. In this account interpretants are presented as further signs, and signs as interpretants of earlier signs. A sign determines an interpretant, and interpretant is itself a sign, and this inevitably seems to lead to the concept of infinite semiosis.
To illustrate this point, we can think of a chain of signs where interpretants are also signs that determine other interpretants, and where there is a first and a last sign. The last sign has no interpretant as it terminates the semiotic process. If it did not terminate the semiotic process it would not be the final interpretant as it would be a sign that would generate another interpretant and the process would continue. But establishing the final sign is problematic: in order to be a sign in the Peircean sense, it must determine an interpretant, so the final sign must determine an interpretant in order to be a sign, and if it determines
If the final sign does not generate an interpretant and fails to be a sign because of it, then it has also failed to be an interpretant, since a valid sign is supposed to act as the interpretant of the previous sign. This means that the previous sign has failed to generate a valid interpretant and fails to be a valid a sign, and so on, until the entire semiotic chain collapses. So if we want to preserve the semiotic chain we should not consider this chain as finite, as having a definite beginning (first sign) and a definite end (last sign). In order for the chain to be a valid semiotic chain of signs and interpretants, we must allow for an indefinite semiotic process whereby signs generate further signs ad infinitum.
But what of the object that stands behind the semiotic process? Peirce divides objects into two major groups: immediate objects and dynamic objects. The immediate object is the object of the sign as we understand it at some given point in the semiotic process, and the dynamic object is the object of the sign as it stands at the end of the semiotic process. The immediate object corresponds to an interim understanding of the object, and the dynamic object is the object in its completeness, and the semiotic process tends towards our complete understanding of