Dear Gary, I hope this email finds you well. I thought your post yesterday on AI and intelligence from a Peircean perspective was excellent and illuminating. Bravo.
Best, — L Sent from my iPhone On Jul 2, 2026, at 12:02 AM, Gary Richmond <[email protected]> wrote: Jon, List, Pietarinen's paper has provoked a thought that I had not previously fully appreciated and which seems relevant in response to your critique of my thesis that AI represents a form of intelligence. What especially struck me is not just Pietarinen's regarding nonhuman sign users as potentially viable participants in inquiry, but his suggestion that Peirce's account of communication may itself involve two overlapping triadic relations. One, the semiotic triad, Object - Sign - Interpretant, which describes semiosis as such: the object determining the sign, determining an interpretant which may itself become a new sign in the continuing growth of inquiry. Pietarinen also identifies a second triad, what might be calls the communicative triad, Utterer - Sign - Interpreter. The self-same sign that mediates between object and interpretant also mediates between participants in inquiry. Communication, in this view, is not something added onto semiosis, rather, semiosis is intrinsically communicative. Peirce's definition that a sign is "something which stands to somebody for something" perhaps deserves to be taken quite literally in human communication, perhaps especially that communication involved in inquiry. If this is correct then inquiry begins to look quite different. It is not just a series of individual, personal acts of reasoning; and neither is it simply transmission of information between inquirers. Rather, it is possible to see inquiry as a developing network of overlapping sign relations in which interpretants generated in one communicative exchange can become signs in another. Thus, the community of inquiry is nourished by the continuing semiosic processes through which meanings are created, criticized, revised, and further developed. In my view this also helps clarify the place of AI within inquiry. In an earlier post I remarked that, as I see it, AI can participate in semiosis without possessing mind. Rather, Pietarinen's analysis suggests that AI systems can function as a participant within the communicative dimension of semiosis. From my own experience, I believe that one can say that the kind of continuity that develops in an extended human-AI interaction isn't at all that involving an artificial personality, but merely the continuation of the inquiry. Jon, you raise what seems to me to be an important qualification. You ask whether present or future AI systems might actually possess ends of their own, or, do they merely function as sophisticated means -- tools -- by which we humans pursue our ends. At present I strongly agree with you that AI does not exhibit autonomous purposiveness in the sense Peirce associates with organisms, individual humans, and communities. However, my proposal does not require such autonomous purposiveness. In my view, participation in semiosis needn't imply independence of purpose. For example, scholarly books and academic papers certainly preserve and transmit signs without possessing ends of their own. AI differs from them, however, in actually being able to respond, criticize, reformulate, compare alternatives, and extend an inquiry (btw, my sense is that one can't really see this capacity without at least experimenting with AI in an inquiry of her own). So for me the question is not whether AI is or can become an autonomous inquirer, but if responsive AI sign systems can contribute genuine interpretants to inquiries whose ultimate aims, however, remain those of human individuals and communities. Whether this ultimately proves to be a plausible way of understanding contemporary AI remains an open question. Still, it strikes me as a distinctly Peircean question. If communication is recognized as intrinsic to semiosis rather than external to it, then the possibility that responsive AI sign systems can participate in the communal growth of inquiry no longer seems conceptually outlandish. At the very least, I believe that it is a philosophical question well worth investigating. I would certainly be eager to read the thoughts of especially young interested people as this question regarding AI seems to me now to be a kind of philosophical "Wild West" (as one young educator whom I'll discuss in a future post, put it). Best, Gary R. On Wed, Jul 1, 2026 at 6:23 PM Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Gary R., List: Back in 2009, I started an Engineering Philosophy Committee within the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and it still exists to this day despite not attracting any additional members beyond the original cohort. "AI" has been its primary topic of discussion lately, so I shared the link to Pietarinen's paper. One of the other members proposed defining intelligence as "using innate and external tools to enhance the survival of the individual and the species," and I replied that I am now open to defining it instead as the capability to participate in the genuine (triadic) process of semiosis, in contrast with inanimate objects and their non-intelligent reactions being degenerate (dyadic) outcomes of that process. I also quoted Peirce directly, as follows. CSP: The action of a sign calls for a little closer attention. Let me remind you of the distinction referred to above between dynamical, or dyadic, action; and intelligent, or triadic action. An event, A, may, by brute force, produce an event, B; and then the event, B, may in its turn produce a third event, C. The fact that the event, C, is about to be produced by B has no influence at all upon the production of B by A. It is impossible that it should, since the action of B in producing C is a contingent future event at the time B is produced. Such is dyadic action, which is so called because each step of it concerns a pair of objects. But now when a microscopist is in doubt whether a motion of an animalcule is guided by intelligence, of however low an order, the test he always used to apply when I went to school, and I suppose he does so still, is to ascertain whether event, A, produces a second event, B, as a means to the production of a third event, C, or not. That is, he asks whether B will be produced if it will produce or is likely to produce C in its turn, but will not be produced if it will not produce C in its turn nor is likely to do so. (CP 5.472-3, 1907) This seems consistent with my colleague's proposal, but even more general--using tools to enhance survival is just one example of the kind of means-ends reasoning that Peirce evidently associates with intelligence. The question, then, is whether current and foreseeably imminent "AI" systems qualify as intelligent in either sense. Can they use tools to enhance their own survival, or produce one event as a means of producing another in pursuit of their own ends? Or are they merely additional tools that we humans can use to enhance our survival, and as means of pursuing our ends? I strongly suspect the latter. Moreover, as I have said before, despite their increasing sophistication, they still only ever execute discrete operations--they do not perform continuous inferences. Hence, my ongoing use of scare quotes for "AI." Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Structural Engineer, Synechist Philosopher, Lutheran Christian www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt<http://www.linkedin.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt> / twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt<http://twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt> On Tue, Jun 30, 2026 at 11:32 PM Gary Richmond <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Jon, List, Jon, thank you for sending a link to this recent paper by Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen on organizational semiotics. Although his principal concern is not artificial intelligence as such, his conclusions seem highly relevant to the topic of this thread. One of the most interesting features of Pietarinen's paper is that he deliberately broadens the scope of Peirce's semeiotic beyond human organizations. He argues that pragmaticism "does not assume that sign users are human beings" and that Peirce's framework is broad enough to include "nonhuman elements of intelligent action and agency." Instead, he proposes that human organizations, institutions, synthetic sign systems, and human-computer interactions ought to be understood within the same semiotic framework and not as fundamentally different kinds of phenomena. I think that Pietarinen offers an important clarification of the position I have recently been trying to develop. My earlier posts argued that AI should not be evaluated primarily by asking whether it possesses consciousness, subjective experience, or mind in the human sense. In my view, the more fundamental Peircean question concerns the role AI may play within semiosis itself. If intelligence is understood as participation in the generation, evaluation, and development of interpretants, then the question becomes whether AI systems can genuinely contribute to the growth of inquiry. Pietarinen's conclusion appears to point in this direction as he argues that machine intelligence should be understood neither as an imitation of human consciousness nor as an autonomous superintelligence standing outside human inquiry. Instead, it belongs within a much broader semiotic universe in which both human and nonhuman agents may participate in sign processes, semiotic habit formation, and the development of meaning as I argued earlier. This also helps -- I hope-- clarify something I suggested in my previous post concerning long-term interaction with AI. The continuity that develops is not, in my experience, the persistence of an artificial self: it is the continuity of an inquiry itself. As questions accumulate, hypotheses are refined, arguments revised, and habits of interpretation established, a continuous semiotic process develops that neither participant could sustain alone. The continuity lies not in an enduring machine personality but in the continuing development of interpretants. Perhaps this points toward a broader conception of inquiry than many, perhaps most Peirce scholars have generally entertained. Peirce repeatedly emphasized that inquiry is irreducibly communal. We have -- quite naturally -- understood a community as consisting of human inquirers extending often through many generations. It may now be worth asking whether responsive AI sign systems capable of generating, criticizing, extending, and refining interpretants have become participants -- albeit admittedly a very different kind of participants -- in that same community of inquiry. Peirce's expansive conception of semiosis, habit-taking, realism concerning signs, and his insistence that sign users need not be exclusively human all seem to me to make the question of the intelligence of AI and its participation in human inquiry a philosophically legitimate one. Best, Gary R. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ► PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> . ► <a href="mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>">UNSUBSCRIBE FROM PEIRCE-L</a> . But, if your subscribed email account is not your default email account, then go to https://list.iu.edu/sympa/signoff/peirce-l . ► PEIRCE-L is owned by THE PEIRCE GROUP; moderated by Gary Richmond; and co-managed by him and Ben Udell. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ► PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . ► <a href="mailto:[email protected]";>UNSUBSCRIBE FROM PEIRCE-L</a> . 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_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ► PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . ► <a href="mailto:[email protected]";>UNSUBSCRIBE FROM PEIRCE-L</a> . But, if your subscribed email account is not your default email account, then go to https://list.iu.edu/sympa/signoff/peirce-l . ► PEIRCE-L is owned by THE PEIRCE GROUP; moderated by Gary Richmond; and co-managed by him and Ben Udell.
