Continuing our study of NP Chapter 3:
§3.2 outlines the extension of the Dicisign concept — i.e. the range of semiotic phenomena to which it is applicable — and lists several “merits” of the concept (p. 52). The first of these is the one of greatest interest in biosemiotics: “it allows for the consideration of the role played by Dicisigns in pre-human cognition and communication in biology – and thus to envisage an evolutionary account for the development of propositions from very simple biological versions of proto-propositions and to the much more explicit, articulated, nested, and varied propositions in human cognition and communication.” In a footnote to this, Frederik makes the startling assertion that “most if not all animal sign use displays the characteristic double function of Dicisigns.” This is a preview, as it were, of a central task of this chapter (and indeed of the whole book), which is to elucidate this “double function of Dicisigns.” For the present, though, we are still working with the “blunt” definition of the Dicisign as “signs which say something about something” (p. 51). I’d like to raise a question here about the relation between Dicisigns and symbols. The question arises from the fact that in “Kaina Stoicheia”, which is mainly about propositions (EP2:311), Peirce names the symbol as “the genuine sign” (EP2:307), and does not mention the “dicisign” at all. Frederik tells us that Peirce’s “notion of propositions as it appears in the mature version of his semiotics in the years after 1900, peaking in his Dicisign doctrine of 1903 presented in the Pragmatism and Lowell lectures and the Syllabus,” is “further elaborated in the 1904 ‘Kaina Stoicheia’ ….” But as Frederik points out in his footnote (p. 51) about “degeneracy,” not all Dicisigns are symbols — only propositions are. Does this mean that non-symbolic Dicisigns — or “natural propositions” — are degenerate in some sense? And if so, what are the implications of this for Peirce’s doctrine of Dicisigns? One observation I should make here that pertains to this question: although Peirce does not mention the “Dicisign” by that name in “Kaina Stoicheia”, I think he does refer to it by another name, as “indexical proposition” (EP2:310). That part of “Kaina Stoicheia” may contain a clue to answering the question, and help to make our notion of the Dicisign less “blunt.” gary f.
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