Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839—1914) American philosopher, one of the founders of both pragmatism and semiotics. A true polymath with interests spanning the full spectrum from the hard sciences to the humanities, Peirce wrote voluminously on an incredibly wide range of subjects (mathematics, physics, geodesy, spectroscopy, astronomy, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy, to name but a few), but published little in his own lifetime, and even today in spite of considerable editorial efforts the vast bulk of his work remains unpublished. As it stands, his published output runs to 12,000 pages, while his unpublished output is in excess of 80,000 handwritten pages, not all of them well preserved. It is probably fair to say his true legacy is yet to be fully appreciated; certainly in his own lifetime the scale of his achievement was exceedingly little known. Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a prominent professor of mathematics at Harvard University. He was one of the founders of the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, where Peirce would later find employment thanks to his father’s influence, and one of the founders of the Smithsonian Institute. Peirce followed in his father’s footsteps and went to Harvard too, where he completed a BA, MA, and MSc in rapid succession. In his time at Harvard he was fortunate enough to gain the friendship of the great American philosopher William James, who would provide crucial assistance to him throughout his life; he was also unfortunate enough to make an enemy of Charles Eliot, who would become president of Harvard and effectively block his chances of employment there. From 1859 until 1891, Peirce was employed by the US Coast and Geodetic Survey and was by all accounts a terrible employee, using his time to pursue his own projects. The unfortunate fact that Peirce never held a tenured university position (he was a part-time lecturer at Johns Hopkins University for years, his only academic appointment) coupled with the entirely haphazard way in which he wrote and published has meant that the dissemination of his ideas has followed a slow and uncertain path. In critical theory, it has undoubtedly been Peirce’s theory of semiotics which has been the most influential, while philosophy has tended to focus more on his theory of logic and his notion of pragmatism. But Peirce himself always held that logic and semiotics were inseparable since thought could not take place except by means of sign. His theory of semiotics influenced scholars as diverse as Deleuze, Gilles (who makes extensive use of it in his books on cinema), Eco, Umberto, and Kristeva, Julia. Peirce took what might be termed a pansemiotic view of things, meaning that he thought that literally everything, from chemical reactions to human communication, could be understood from a semiotic perspective. His theory of signs was constructed with this in mind. Peirce’s work has at its core a system of three interrelated universal categories, which he simply named firstness, secondness, and thirdness. These terms are slippery, but taken together offer a powerful ontology: firstness is a mode of being which does not require reference to anything else, it exists in a state of immediacy; secondness, in contrast, is precisely a category of reference, of comparison and reflection, an intermediary state of relatedness; thirdness is pure mediation, it combines first and second things with other first and second things, as in memory and synthesis. The sign, as Peirce conceives it, belongs to the category of thirdness. Peirce’s model of the sign has three components, rather than the basic two adopted by suture, which he termed the representamen, the interpretant, and the object. The representamen is something which creates in the mind of an observer an equivalent sign; that sign is in turn the interpretant, namely the observer’s representation to themselves of what they have seen; this representation in turn becomes an object, namely the significance to the observer of the original sign. Since every sign creates an interpretant, which in turn becomes a representamen to another interpretant, and so on, semiosis (the process of sign production) must be regarded as infinite. There can be no first or last sign. To distinguish between these moments in the cycle of sign production, Peirce constructed an elaborate taxonomy of the parts of the sign. Further Reading: J. Brent Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (rev. ed. 1998). U. Eco and T. Sebeok (eds.) The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (1984). C. Misak The Cambridge Companion to Peirce (2004).