ABSTRACT

Charles Sanders Peirce’s naturalist philosophy similarly advocated such harmony with nature. Much of Peirce’s nature philosophy builds on the idea of oneness, a view that there is one substance, an interconnected unity, a philosophy manifested in its various flavours as monist. For biosemiotics, nature is one whole interconnected system, united through a network of signs. Semiotics at times reads as a departure from such interconnected unities, as if individuating, inspecting and classifying biological or other natural specimens. Peirce’s semiotic naturalism culminated in his assertions about pansemiotics. But pansemiotics also expands the claims of semiotics beyond how human beings interpret the world. It subsumes humankind as a participant in semiotic processes, rather than a controller, interpreter or generator of signs. Alfred Noth described Peirce’s ‘pansemiotic view of the universe’ thus. The point of departure of Peirce’s theory of signs is the axiom that cognition, thought, and even man are semiotic in their essence.