Jon, Ulysses, List,
Ulysses’ museum specimen seems an especially good example because the same physical thing remains available to several communities while functioning differently within each of them. Jon’s second account therefore carries weight: biologists, museum administrators, and taxidermists bring different habits of interpretation formed by different practices and different collateral experience. No one has to retrospectively select a feature of the object since what each notices is already conditioned by their prior experience.
Still, I wonder whether Jon’s two alternatives, "two possible ways of accounting for different semiotic analyses of a particular sign token," need be sharply separated. The same token -- the specimen -- may participate in several sign types at once because -- as a biological example, as an asset of a museum, and as an instance of taxidermic technique -- the physical token is constrained by different habits of interpretation. The token remains the same, while the immediate objects differ. There may also be a sense in which the dynamical object also differs: the species in the first case, the institutional value in the second, and the preservation process in the third. Indeed, this may be what makes it a boundary object: It retains enough indexical continuity, so to speak -- it is this particular specimen-- to allow for communication across communities while remaining malleable enough to enter several different lines of inquiry, of semiosis. In a word, the communities are not united by identical interpretations, but they are also not dealing with wholly unrelated objects.
I question treating collateral experience as another component added to the specimen to form a kind of composite sign. Rather, it supplies the prior acquaintance -- the collateral knowledge -- and the habits by which the sign’s object can be identified and interpreted. To repeat: our three interpreters do not first encounter an object and then simply freely select certain qualities. Rather, their training has already formed different interpretive habits.
So, while I agree with the central point of Jon’s #2 I'd allow something of #1 as well. Different dynamical interpretants arise from different semiotic histories, yet those histories may also determine the specimen as a token of different sign types offering different immediate objects and, perhaps, even different -- though overlapping -- dynamical objects. That is to say that the “sameness” of a boundary object may itself be, shall we say, semeiotically layered rather than just 'given'.
Best,
Gary R
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Ulysses, List:As I understand it, Peirce's semeiotic requires collateral experience/observation for identifying the object of a sign; an interpreter must in some way already be acquainted with that object in order to understand any sign that refers to it. With that in mind, I can suggest at least two possible ways of accounting for different semiotic analyses of a particular sign token, such as a taxidermic specimen at a museum.
- The dynamical object is the same in all cases, but the immediate object is different because the sign type is different in each case; and since different sign types have different immediate and final interpretants, it is not surprising that their sign tokens produce different dynamical interpretants.
- The sign type is the same in all cases, such that its dynamical and immediate objects are also the same, along with its immediate and final interpretants; but the sign token determines different dynamical interpretants in different interpreting quasi-minds because the latter have been determined previously by different signs, resulting in different habits of interpretation.
Personally, I lean toward #2, which matches the colloquial description and seems consistent with your hunch.Regards,Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USAStructural Engineer, Synechist Philosopher, Lutheran Christian
On Fri, Sep 25, 2026 at 5:34 PM Ulysses <[email protected]> wrote:My understanding of a boundary object is something that means slightly different but partially overlapping things for different communities and thus can bring groups together but does not truly unite them.The example I am familiar with is a taxidermic specimen at a museum. For biologists it might be a token exemplar of a species. For museum administrators it might be valuable because of the relative rarity of species and how it aligns with the museum’s mission. In this case it would be sign of reputation or some social/normative value. For taxidermists themselves, the very same specimen might be a sign of specific techniques of animal preservation.I think examples like this bring about a few questions for Peircean semiotics. While colloquially we say it is the same object, is the object of the sign really the same in each of these cases? What is the sign in each of these cases, and does it include what Peirce sometimes terms collateral experience/collateral observation? For example do the different rational communities bring different experiences to bear on the object (based on their training) and form different composite signs (specimen + collateral experience) which form the basis of different interpretants?It seems like each group is picking up on different iconic and indexical qualities that coexist in the same object. Colloquially I would say they form different interpretations of the same thing. The way I would normally talk about it would include how individual acts of deliberation are consciously choosing to focus on different aspects of the object. I am not exactly sure how to square this with a language of interpretants where interpretants are always the product of previous steps in process because it seems like there are interpretative acts being made that single out what qualities in the object are being attended to before the object is even considered as a sign.My hunch would be that, through different training, people habituate their individual minds to form different percepts when in contact with the same object and this becomes the foundation of different perceptual judgements, leading to different chains of semiosis. In this case it’s not that the interpretant formed is reaching back in time and selecting the qualities in the object but rather a long running chain of previous semiosis is already forming different intermediate signs which become the inputs to the different interpretants.
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