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Peirce's theory of communication

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Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen Peirce’s Theory
of Communication
and Its Contemporary
Relevance

Introduction

The mobile era of electronic communication has created a huge semi-

otic system, constructed out of triadic components envisaged by the
American scientist and philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914), such
as icons, indices and symbols, and signs, objects and interpretants. Iconic
signs bear a physical resemblance to what they represent. Indices point
at something and say “there!”, and symbols signify objects by conven-
tions of a community.1 All signs give rise to interpretants in the minds
of the interpreters.
It is nonetheless regrettable that the somewhat simplistic triadic ex-
posé of Peirce’s theory of signs has persisted in semiotics as the some-
how exhaustive and final description of what Peirce intended. The more
fascinating and richer structure of signs emerging from their intimate
relation to intercommunication and interaction (Peirce’s terms) has been
noted much less frequently.
Despite this shortcoming, the full Peircean road to inquiry – per-
formed by the dynamic community of learning inquirers, or the com-

1
In fact, according to Peirce (2.278 [1895]): “The only way of directly communi-
cating an idea is by means of an icon; and every indirect method of communicating an
idea must depend for its establishment upon the use of an icon.” Peirce’s chef d’œuvre
came shortly after these remarks into being as his diagrammatic system of existential
graphs, a thoroughly iconic representation of and a way of reasoning about “moving
pictures of thought”, which encompassed not only propositional and predicate logic, but
also modalities, higher-order notions, abstraction and category-theoretic notions. The im-
portance of iconic representation (such as images and pictures) in scientific and every-
day communication was since noted many times, starting with the works of Bertrand
Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Otto Neurath, although as logics they had to await
the heterogeneous systems of the late 20th century. (The references to Peirce are to the
Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols., ed. by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and
A.W. Burks, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1966, by volume and
paragraph number.)

81
munity of quasi-minds consisting of the liquid in a number of intercon-
nected bottles, or the scientific communities of the users of the data that
is being provided by Nature or the vastly mounting electronic sources –
reflects the contemporary weight put on all kinds of multi-agent systems
in computation. However, the weight ought still to be amplified by in-
corporating the Peircean idea of communication as a dialogue between
the interlocutors of a general nature of a mind who are putting forward
signs, into the richer semiotic picture emerging from a truly transdisci-
plinary multi-agent research. The agents are not only abstract commu-
nicators but also signs, and thus also minds and in a bona fide relation
with objects. As some signs are in a sense phenomenal they are suitable
for framing the electronic communication of machine-like quasi-minds.
What the correlates of Peirce’s concepts of representamen (a sign put
forward by the Utterer), interpretant (what the sign determines within
the mind of the Interpreter), and various subspecies of interpretant (e.g.
the intentional, effectual and communicational ones) in the context of
contemporary media-driven communication and learning are, is some-
thing that needs to be sought for in the general amalgamation of Peirce’s
sign-theoretic triadism and the communicational and action-theoretic
dyadism. This is yet to be accomplished. Its importance can be seen, for
instance, from the perspective of Peirce’s unexpected late idea of the
commens as the locus where the thoughts of all minds participated in the
creation of the common ground meet.
The formation of common ground by continuous communication
and interaction reflects the computational desire to furnish multi-agent
systems with properties that would enable them to entertain appropriate
interoperation. Thus the initiatives of semantic and pragmatic webs re-
ceive increased semiotic motivation, as soon as they are adjoined with
an understanding of Peirce’s theory of communication. Above all, the
phrase “medium of communication” was taken by Peirce to illustrate a
broader notion than just the noun “sign”, namely a species of Thirdness,
a category of mediation, synthetic consciousness, prediction of the future
courses of events, continuity, learning, growth.

The Rationale and the Goal of the Present Paper

In evaluating what is going on in the interplay between technological

growth and philosophy, one fruitful approach is to try to draw focal par-
allels and to do comparisons between the notions used in both fields,
rather than to seek some overarching philosophical foundation for some
particular set of technological innovations wedding them in one fell

82
swoop. One reason for this is that technological advancements have of-
ten been made, and sometimes rightfully so, completely in ignorance of
philosophical problems. But in doing so, these developments have in-
vented as well as reinvented concepts that have already been far and
wide in philosophy. In some cases philosophical terminology has just
been hijacked by hackers. Such is the case with the all-pervading use of
the concept of ontology in computer science, which has hardly anything
to do with its metaphysical homograph. In web technology, there is no
single ontology, but a library of “possible modes of being”. It is up to
the users to make queries and pick relevant ontologies that would work
as shared formal specifications of the conceptualisations of what there is.
Ontologies tend to reflect interpretations of terms of logical or represen-
tational languages, and in that way are dependent on the universes of
discourse, or more precisely, on those universes that are in some sense
common and shared between the agents who operate on them. There
are no self-sustaining substances in user-independent reality.
In the long run, we may witness a convergence of at least some sub-
set of such concepts and vocabulary. For instance, this is likely to hap-
pen due to the recently emerged paradigms that aim at new approach-
es to the organisation, acquisition and evolution of data contained in the
web, namely the programmes of the “semantic” and “pragmatic” webs.
The aim that has been announced quite openly is that these systems are,
or will be, built upon the sign-theoretic principles of pragmatic or prag-
maticist philosophy, most notably upon those that Peirce is claimed to
have envisioned.
I want to know why. My purpose here is thus to concentrate on two
interrelated issues. First, the aim is to understand, not the overall and
certainly very complex pragmaticist and sign-theoretic philosophy of
Peirce’s, but rather what is going on in his highly interesting concept
and theory of communication. Of course, this theory cannot be severed
from other parts of Peirce’s thinking, such as his doctrine of categories,
pragmaticism, and sign-theoretic and logical semeiotics. But as I hope it
will turn out, its essentials can be understood without overkill from
Peirce’s phenomenology (“phaneroscopy”), metaphysics, or the later the-
ory of signs.
Second, the purpose is to assess the relevance of Peirce’s theory of
communication to some of the emerging contemporary issues in com-
puter science, web technology, and the overall modern era of commu-
nicating systems. I have no interest in presenting details of these inno-
vations; I hope that many of them will be familiar. As it turns out, a
number of technological and computational innovations will have prob-

83
ing contacts with Peirce’s ideas (or ideals) of scientific inquiry and com-
munication. One of the main reasons is that being semeiotic, his philo-
sophical and logical concepts are very widely applicable and not limit-
ed to human users or inquirers. For that reason they are not limited to
the linguistic notion of communication either, but reach over virtually
anything that one can think of communication to be now and in the
future, including notions that one day will emerge from the sciences of
artificial intelligence, neuroscience, quantum theory, bioinformatics, and
so forth.
The second task is easier. Even though we by no means yet have be-
fore us a full picture of Peirce’s theory of communication, I believe that
we understand it well enough to perceive its relevance to a host of issues
in the applied sciences of computation, communication and information.

Triangulate Them All

So, what is Peirce’s theory of communication? There is no simple an-

swer to this, and the question has been debated in the literature pro-
gressively more during the last decade or so.2 It is becoming an increas-
ingly topical issue in attempts to understand his philosophy from the
perspective that aims at strengthening the coherence of his writings, and
avoids drawing his boundless fields of interests away from each other.
One of the curious aspects of Peirce’s communicative approach to
signs is its apparently dyadic, two-place nature. Prima facie, one may
think that his view of communication is related merely to transmissional
aspects of signs between two (possibly interpersonal) agents, the utterer
and the interpreter of the sign, in a suitable medium of communication
– not unlike Shannon’s and others’ later syntactic theories of communi-
cation, which focus on the question of in what media and how informa-
tion ought to propagate. This, as I hope to be able to communicate,
does hardly any justice to Peirce’s own intentions.

2
See e.g. Mats Bergman, “Reflections of the Role of the Communicative Sign in
Semeiotic”, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philos-
ophy 36 (2000), pp. 225–254; Jürgen Habermas, “Peirce and Communication”, in
Kenneth L. Ketner (ed.), Peirce and Contemporary Thought, New York: Fordham University
Press, 1995, pp. 243–266; Jørgen D. Johansen, Dialogic Semiosis: An Essay on Signs and
Meaning, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993; Joseph Ransdell, “Some Leading
Ideas of Peirce’s Semiotic”, Semiotica 19 (1977), pp. 157–178.

84
 Second, Peirce’s theory of communication is primarily a logical the-
ory. This is the reason why some researchers, among them Richard J.
Parmentier, have dismissed it as unsuitable for inquiries involving social
and cultural aspects.3 In response to this, it can be noted that the con-
cepts of what is social and what is cultural can be stretched and given
Peircean twists; for instance, a broad understanding of socialisability tran-
spires in the currently popular multi-agent systems research in compu-
tation.4 Whether that is justified, I do not seek to address here. Likewise,
the 20th-century concept of logic, pulled apart from its semiotic roots,
is exceptionally limited and certainly not representative of Peirce’s
overall aims. In fact, according to Peirce “logic is rooted in the social
principle” (2.654 [1893]). (Cf. the somewhat contrapositive declaration
in another place, “the social principle is rooted intrinsically in logic”,
5.354 [1893].) It is vital in deciphering these sentiments to recognize
that for Peirce, logic takes in also all kinds of considerations of what
one’s rational action would be in situations that call for moral judge-
ments. This is connected with the fact that for Peirce, logic is a norma-
tive science, viz. the notion of truth in logic has a normative component
in it.
As is well known, Peirce laid practically all his divisions out in the
triadic, three-place format. The reasons for this were many. Most notably,
there was a mathematical reason: given Peirce’s assumptions concerning
mathematical relations (he was one of the founders of the algebraic logic
of relations), no three-place relation can be constructed out of just one
and two-place ones. Because of this, it seems that his overall method of
communicating signs is in some way in discrepancy or disagreement
with the triadicity of the other parts of his theory of signs.
So, the question is: how does the notion of communication between
two agents fit into this triadic picture? The answer is in fact found in
Peirce’s unpublished MS 318 [1907].5 In that manuscript, Peirce ex-
plains his sign-theory from the communicational perspective. First of all,
3
Richard J. Parmentier, Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic Anthropology, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994.
4
In my forthcoming paper “Games and Multi-Agent Systems: Limitations, Prospects
and Foundational Perspectives” I argue that one rarely noted virtue of multi-agent sys-
tems is that they provide much more precise sociological analyses of social codes and
practices than the semi-formal notions of “a game” or “games people play” in social
inquiries.
5
MS references are to Charles S. Peirce, Manuscripts in the Houghton Library of
Harvard University, as identified by Richard Robin, Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of
Charles S. Peirce (Amherst: University of Massachusettes Press, 1967), and in “The Peirce

85
there are signs that have no utterers. These are the signs found in
nature. Then there are signs that have no interpreters, such as encrypted
messages, or the golden plate on the side of Pioneer 11 at the moment
of uttering this sentence. The utterers and the interpreters associated
with these kinds of signs will receive the prefix “quasi”, and they can be
thought of as positions, phases of the thinking mind, or semiotic roles in
the process of semiosis. In other words, they are theoretical entities
devoid of actual minds connected with brains. (Cf. the concept of “nat-
ural intelligence” in automated reasoning research.) In the special case
of signs being linguistic, that is, symbolic natural language assertions, the
utterers and interpreters are characteristically human beings. In that
interpersonal situation the utterer and the interpreter are to a degree
distinct from those of the object and the interpretant.
But what are we to say about the residual cases? According to Peirce,
the object-interpretant axis represents a continuum that is not meant to
demarcate objects and interpretants in any non-fuzzy, clear-cut manner.
Intertwined with the fact that some utterers can according to him be
assimilated or equated with objects, and some interpreters can likewise
be assimilated with interpretants, we get two dynamic scales within the
triadic division of signs, one representing the object–interpretant contin-
uum and the other representing the utterer–interpreter continuum. De-
pending on the nature of signs, these two scales may coincide, as is the
case for instance with non-linguistic signs that have utterers and inter-
preters.
The general picture that emerges is schematised in Figure 1. There
are two main trichotomies, the sign–object–interpretant one and the
sign–utterer–interpreter one. By moving along the base of the latter tri-
angle towards interpretants and the interpreter, the utterer’s state of in-
formation increases. Conversely, by moving from the interpreter towards
the object and the utterer the state of the information of the interpreter
increases. The dashed arrows show the increase and decrease of the
states of information of the utterers and the interpreters. The overlap-
ping area is the common ground, where the communicational interpre-
tants are determined. The angle α measures the degree in which the
objects and their utterers converge, and the angle β measures the degree

Papers: A Supplementary Catalogue”, Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society 7 (1971), pp.

37–57, by manuscript and, where applicable, page number. See also Charles S. Peirce,
“Pragmatism”, The Essential Peirce 2, Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1993, pp. 398–433, a critical transcription of this complex and multilay-
ered manuscript.

86
in which the interpretants and their interpreters converge. They thus
measure the degree of interpersonality in communicational sign-theo-
retic situations. From this figure it can be also concluded that it is the
breadth of the base of the sign–object–interpretant triangle that meas-
ures the distance between objects and their interpretants.

Signs
(representamens)

Utterer Interpretant

α β
Intentional
interpretant

Object Interpreter
Communicational
interpretant

Effectual
interpretant

Figure 1
Triadic system of communication in Peirce’s sign theory

The affinity of the utterer with its object is called by Peirce “the es-
sential ingredient of the utterer” (MS 318: 21). It is found in the utter-
er’s job to delineate the class of the universe of discourse understood to
be at issue in the dialogue, thereupon choosing the object or its instance
from the domain as intended by the utterance and as understood to be
predicable by the (uninterpreted) predicate term (termed by Peirce the
rhema) of the proposition in question. I will not delve into the issue of how
such choices are made; I can outrun comprehensive explanation by
noting that when the act of uttering and the object intended by the utter-
ance are in fact one and the same thing, there is no factual decision to
be made. When they are not, the notions such as the purpose and stra-
tegic considerations of the utterer and the interpreter will be of prime

87
importance. These are in turn related to Peirce’s notion of a habit and
its cultivation in possibly infinitely repeated runs of semiotic plays.
An open question that has not been noted before is whether Peirce
intended this interpretation to supply an objectual interpretation of the log-
ical quantifiers Σ and Π in the sense of choosing objects from the do-
main, and intending the names of these objects to function as values of
the rhemas and the quantifiers (the complex rules of such choices plus
applications of them to quantification were termed by Peirce selectives).
Or, did he espouse the substitutional interpretation, namely one where the par-
ticipants of the dialogue would be picking out names that are instances
of some given substitution-class of non-logical constants? 6 Peirce’s typi-
cal choice of the term was that of choosing “instances” as proper values
for logical constants, but in the end he left unspecified what he actually
meant by them. To what extent are we justified to take them as corre-
sponding to model-theoretical entities? 7
Quite another aspect of Peirce’s theory of communication is that if
the interpretant is what Peirce termed the ultimate logical interpretant, then,
because it represents a state of perfect knowledge, the ontological and
epistemological distinctions make no difference in scientific inquiry. The
object merges with its interpretant, disintegrating the triangle into a dyadic
relation between the sign and this ultimate logical interpretant. The max-
imal state of information leaves no latitude of interpretation because
there no longer is any difference between objects and interpretants.
There are a number of other notions of interpretants in Peirce’s sys-
tem which I will not go on to review here but which all make negligi-
ble distinctions between the interpretant and the object.
It may also be thought that because Peirce was keen to repudiate all
psychological influences from the province of logic and semeiotics, he
might have wished to altogether eliminate the concept of utterers and
interpreters from the dominion of sign action. This may be suggested by
his frequent tendency to assimilate, on the one hand, the utterers and
objects, and on the other, the interpreters and the interpretants. Upon
a closer inspection, this assimilation does not mean reduction. Rather,
the concepts of the utterers and the interpreters are, as Peirce puts it,
“welded” in one sign (4.551 [1906]), but they move along the distinct

6
This is the interpretation that was so named mainly after Saul Kripke, “Is There
a Problem about Substitutional Quantification?”, in G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds.),
Truth and Meaning, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976, pp. 325–419.
7
Some passages suggest that Peirce came close to the “discourse referent” idea of
the discourse representation theory of Hans Kamp and others.

88
scale from that of the objects and the interpretants, because the bases of
the triangles may have independently variable breadth.
Since every thought is a sign, no thought can evolve unless conceived
as dialogic, either between multiple, interpersonal parties or as a quasi-
dialogue within one mind. This quasi-dialogical perspective presents us
with a useful method of assigning semantic values to logical propositions,
whereas the former person-to-person dialogue is practical for various
pragmatic linguistic theories of communication and discourse.8
However, it is worth pointing out that Peirce’s opinion was that there
is little difference between multi-party interaction in, say, a social setting,
and the intrapersonal reasoning and action in logic, because “a person
is not absolutely an individual” (5.421 [1905]).9
There are further important issues. As remarked, Peirce’s theory of
communication comes extraordinarily close to the dialogical and game-
theoretic interpretations of logic. These interpretations can be viewed as
formal (logical) and strategic regimentations of relevant parts of Peircean
semiosis. Although invented quite independently,10 they follow suit and
endorse elements of communal or social approaches to meaning.11 Their
idea is to check the truth-values of propositions of a logical language.
For the most part, they lurk behind Peirce’s diagrammatic and iconic
systems of existential graphs, and point towards ways of extending these

8
The fully strategic versions of such dialogues give rise to, among other things, the
game-theoretic semantics of Hintikka (Jaakko Hintikka, Logic, Language-Games and Informa-
tion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), optimality-based theories for phonological,
syntactic, semantic and pragmatic inquiries in linguistics (Paul Dekker and Robert van
Rooy, “Bi-directional Optimality Theory: An Application of Game Theory”, Journal of
Semantics 17 [2000], pp. 217–242), and various conversational and dialogue games for
actual language users (Lauri Carlson, Dialogue Games: An Approach to Discourse Analysis,
Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983). These theories provide major frameworks from which
expressions – not only logical ones but also those coming from the domain of natural
language semantics/pragmatics interface – derive their meaning.
9
The multi-agent nature of communities has multiple contact points with Peirce’s the-
ological, cosmological, evolutionary and agapistic metaphysics. That he was caught between
the two fires of exact sciences and religious thought was one of the reasons of why his time
frittered away, hindering him of presenting his logical systems in a sustained, unitary form.
10
Risto Hilpinen, “On C. S. Peirce’s Theory of the Proposition: Peirce as a Precur-
sor of Game-Theoretical Semantics”, The Monist 65 (1982), pp. 182–188.
11
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, “Some Useful Social Metaphors in Logic”, in Proceedings of
the Second International Workshop on Computational Models of Scientific Reasoning and Applications,
CSREA Press, 2002.

89
systems.12 The difference between dialogical and game-theoretic seman-
tics is that dialogues address proof-theoretical validity, whereas games
are semantic in the sense of establishing when the propositions are true
in a model and when they are false in a model. These theories distin-
guish players’ roles in terms of the polarity of the logical constant en-
countered in the formula, including logical connectives, and switch the
roles when negation is encountered. They are both strategic in that the
notion of a winning strategy represents the concrete concept that agrees
with the notions of validity (dialogues) and truth (semantic games) of prop-
ositions. Peirce had most of these features incorporated into his system
of logic, although he did not come to endorse any unequivocal game-
theoretic terminology.
However, Peirce’s communication theory is somewhat richer still. Its
all-important concepts of the common ground and the universe of discourse
(not limited to what we recognise as logical and model-theoretical do-
mains) make it applicable beyond proof theories and ordinary seman-
tics, placing pragmatic and discourse-related phenomena in linguistics
under logical and semiotic scrutiny. Because of this, one may see the
origins of speech-acts and theories of relevance in it, too.
The notion of the common ground is exceptionally important. It is
the very core for the success of the communicational view of semiotic
dialogues. It refers to what is common and shared between the dialogue
participants, determined in their common mind as the common com-
municational interpretant (cominterpretant), which gets them to understand
each other’s utterances. This common mind was once given a special
name of the commens.13

12
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, “Diagrammatic Logic and Game-Playing”, in Grant
Malcolm (ed.), Multidisciplinary Studies of Visual Representations and Interpretations, Elsevier Sci-
ence, to appear.
13
See Peirce’s remark on pp. 196–197 in C.S. Hardwick (ed. with J. Cook), Semiotics
and Significs. The Correspondence Between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1977, explaining the commens as “that mind into which the
minds of utterer and interpreter have to be fused in order that any communication
should take place”. This is the mind that determines a dynamic object of cominterpre-
tant in a meaningful communication. They are not objects located outside the minds,
yet are capable of representing a shared element of communication. Their determina-
tion, the commens, is also an ancestor of that which in many recent pragmatic theories of
language is referred to as the common ground of interlocutors. The significance of the
commens in the theory of signs is shown by Peirce’s omitted remark that it consists of all
that is understood between the communicative parties “when the sign in question is just
about to be made” (MS L 463: 29 [1906], not preserved in the normalised transcrip-

90
 The overall idea that is emerging but was never explained in full by
Peirce is not unlike what ensues from Donald Davidson’s triangulation
scheme.14 It permits one to conclude that whereas individually and com-
munally the speakers and hearers of language may be in error and igno-
rance, in larger respects, for any communication to be successful, the
beliefs of others are not to be taken to be radically different from our
own. Having a belief must be understood so that the belief is true, even
if it may turn out to be false. Peirce’s warrant for a similar outcome was
the inevitability of collateral observation and mutual experience plus the
maxim of summum bonum that the communities of inquirers share in com-
munication. The main idea is thus also congenial to Davidson’s principle
of charity in interpretation.
Secondly, also the concept of the universes of discourse is central in
Peirce’s theory of communication. In dialogues, they are not just do-
mains in a logician’s sense, but presuppositions shared in the conversa-
tion and established by the same principles as the existence of mutually
gained common ground.

Applications and Complications

Let us then look at what use some of these Peirce’s ideas can be put
into.

A Night at the Interopera

Interoperability is a show-off boasted in all corners of computing.

Dictionaries tend to define it as “compatible software or hardware”. But
it does not present just a technical challenge of some coding or manu-
facturing problem. Towards the other end, it has in fact been described
as “the ongoing process of ensuring that the systems, procedures and
culture of an organisation are managed in such a way as to maximise
opportunities for exchange and re-use of information, whether internally
or externally”.15
This pragmatic definition places central concern on what goes on in
the communities of engineers, researchers, managers, and other users of

tion). This phrase Peirce rejected and amended to the more cautious “in order that the
sign in question should fulfill its function”.
14
Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.
15
Paul Miller, “Interoperability. What Is It and Why Should I Want It?”, Ariadne 24
(2001), http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/interoperability/intro.html.

91
knowledge. It is also a utilitarian definition, where one is to maximise
something (here: chances to exchange information). Intentions to do this
clearly depend on the scope of common interest to have interoperative
systems and products in the first place. Indeed, humans can be stunning-
ly interoperable...
Besides computation, interoperability involves linguistic, social/com-
munal, legal and normative aspects, and so it is a good example of
Peircean inquiry as an indefinitely extendible and inexhaustible activity.
Its goal is to create communicational interpretants in a variety of cases,
across the boundaries of what is artificial and what is human, whatever
entities the subjects engaged in communication are taken to be.16

Weave This: Semantic and Pragmatic Webs

The goal of the next-generation web technology is to define meaning

into web documents. The increasingly popular albeit not yet very widely
implemented approach known as a semantic web uses mark-up methods
that instead of plain keywords, define the class and subclass hierarchies
and the relations between the concepts that appear on the page.17 This
metadata information provides the “semantics” or “meaning” of the
document. According to this project, it is hoped that the increased pro-
duction of metadata and ontology languages will create the network of
documents whose content could be automatically processed in a much
more elastic and adaptable manner than in the standard syntax-driven
string-matching search methods.
One may think that this approach has really nothing to do with
semantics. However, it in fact is a practical present-day version of the
Peircean notion of semantics, because it provides meaning of the data
or a code by translation. This is because for Peirce, semantics is in fact
a theory of translation, a rendition of a given symbolic statement into
some other statement, diction, or paraphrase, or into some other lan-
guage, or perhaps a hyperlink or a dictionary-like definition of it.
However, this understanding of semantics lacks the semiotic compo-
nents of the utterers and the interpreters of the data. And so one still
needs to understand how the metadata, such as one provided by the

16
Shared ontologies are good examples of cominterpretants in artificial systems.
17
See e.g. Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, London: Orion Business Books, 1999;
D. Fensel and M. A. Musen, “The Semantic Web: A Brain for the Mankind”, IEEE
Intelligent Systems, March/April 2001, pp. 24–25; The Semantic Web Agreement Group,
“What is the Semantic Web?”, 2001, http://swag.webns.net/whatIsSW.

92
newly devised schema of the Resource Description Framework (RDF),
will be connected to the interpreters and objects of data. This connec-
tion defines the pragmatic meaning of data. However, as such it does
not seem to hover at the back of the vision of a pragmatic web.18 The
perspective to the pragmatic web is rather in bringing the community
of inquirers, most notably web users, to bear on the issues of the purpose
of information. While such intentions and contexts of users surely play
a significant role in pragmatic accounts of meaning, and while these re-
searchers are certainly right in criticising the semantic web approach in
its limitation to the metadata idea ignoring the communities of human
users and engineers, this approach sidesteps the perhaps more profitable
possibility of incorporating truly semiotic pragmatics into the automa-
tised and computational level of the web. It correctly notes the insuffi-
ciency of the vision of the semantic web that does not think that all
human users, not just knowledge engineers in this self-critical approach
are indispensable. It asserts that new meanings or concepts do not sim-
ply emerge by adding more and more structural features onto the web
pages and by linking them more and more efficiently. Even so, there is
still a need for methodeutic, or semiotic pragmatics, that makes contact
with the third main aspect of inquiry beyond grammar and logical se-
mantics, but which would take place solely between computerised agents.

The Hydra of Lerna

One only hopes that from ashes of the vast amount of research done
on the multi-agent systemics precisely this pragmatic web challenge
springs into life. The challenge involves an attempt of building agents,
or pieces of advanced software, which are designed to play the different
semiotic roles of the quasi-utterers and the quasi-interpreters. That is,
they would play the different positions in the cycles of dialogical semiosis
as prescribed by Peirce’s theory. This is the way in which they are in-
tended to contribute to the generation of new objects and the evolution
of new meanings in the web.
Agent systems still lack the truly goal-directed specifications of pro-
cesses. Only when that is accomplished, could they be seen to create
habits and produce wherewithal for their revision and adaptation. This
is a long way off. Autonomous and proactive agents need to build sec-

18
As announced e.g. by Aldo de Moor, Mary Keeler and Gary Richmond, “Towards a
Pragmatic Web”, in U. Priss, D. Corbett and G. Angelova (eds.), Conceptual Structures: Integration
and Interfaces, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, no. 2393, Springer, 2002, pp. 235–249.

93
ond-order evaluations of their own strategies, noting when a “habit-
change” occurs, namely when logical interpretants are produced in the
quasi-minds of agents as the end products of the process of semiosis that
terminates or is about to terminate. They need to learn whenever they
“feel” pain; whenever something meaningful happens to one of the indi-
vidual agents. But to know when that is to happen depends on a correct
evaluation of those habits that already are in agents’ possession.

Questioning the Web

Elements of such goal-directed agent systems are emerging with the

vision of a knowledge web. According to this vision, one tries to over-
come these shortcomings and supersede both the semantic and the prag-
matic web enterprises by taking agents as constructors building a huge
question-answering system on the web data, and responding queries on
an information-need basis. This is certainly a long way off, because one
needs to accomplish two things: one needs to (i) have a comprehensive
logic of questions and answers, and to (ii) define a workable possible-
worlds structure of the web. Neither has been accomplished as yet.
As to the first item, the quest for a logical relation between questions
and answers stands upon the edge of the theories of presuppositions.
(The task is also related to the extensions of Peirce’s theory of abduc-
tion.) This is because requests for information can be viewed as epis-
temic statements. The query “Bring it about so that S” has a meaning
in the non-imperative epistemic sentence “I know that S”. As to the
second item, the web nodes are to be viewed as knowledge providers,
and via that emerging structure the epistemic statements can be
translated to mean that “the user knows S in the information state w if
and only if S holds in all the web nodes accessible from w”.
The inquirers of the web information need to start off with mutually
agreed initial states representing actual states. But as they are software
agents querying other software agents, w codifies the knowledge in the
position they have reached within a “model-checking” game on the web.
An alternative, and I believe a complementary way to the building
of a knowledge web uses conceptual graphs.19 They are descendants of
Peirce’s existential (beta) graphs put in modern clothing. Their purpose

19
Guy W. Mineau, “A First Step toward the Knowledge Web: Interoperability Issues
among Conceptual Graph Based Software Agents, Part I”, in Uta Priss, Dan Corbett
and Galia Angelova (eds.), op. cit., pp. 250–260.

94
in the domain of a knowledge web is to provide good representational
formalisms to describe workings of software agents.

Semantic + Pragmatic Webs = The Semiotic Web

Both semantic and pragmatic web visions share the concern for the
inadequacy of the current conceptual scheme of the web. The initiative
of a semantic web aims at providing a “logical analysis” of the data,
while the initiative of a pragmatic web adds the human perspective to
it. Both approaches are somewhat unsatisfactory alone, but their merger,
when conceived from the perspective of semiotic and logical outlook on
inquiry, has attractive emergent features. The outcome is what could be
called the semiotic web. It combines both the semantic web and the prag-
matic web initiatives but surpasses them in being faithful to Peirce’s
pragmatic approach to inquiry. Unlike the proposed semantic and prag-
matic webs, one can operationalize the semiotic web by effective multi-
agent systems, by a logic of questioning and answering, and by taking
agents as roles in a dialogical semiotic inquiry of signs in the universe
of the web. The upshot is that not only the weaknesses of both semantic
and pragmatic web conceptions become addressed, but also it is seen
that these two enterprises cannot and should not be separated from each
other.

Pragmaticism in a Communicational Perspective

In the light of previous remarks, the common ground of pragmati-

cally inclined software agents is bound to be quite different from that of
humans. It is clear that software agents do not have similar self-aware-
ness properties, such as those telling what it is to be a member of the
common genus of homo; it is also quite clear that knowledge of the lan-
guage and knowledge of the universal aspects of grammar or specifica-
tions of a code is in the hands of the programmer. It is also clear that
the world experience differs. But agents do not need to be taken as fun-
damentally different from humans in all their aspects. For instance, com-
mon knowledge of rationality and common knowledge in general, essen-
tial in the creation of cominterpretants, are notions quite efficiently de-
finable at the logical level. To link languages to the world presupposes
that there is a great deal of common experience shared by the utterers
and interpreters of languages. In Peirce’s system, it is typically the cop-
ula that ties predicate terms to the elements of the domains of discourse.
In received systems of logic, the interpretation of a language is simply

95
given by the valuation function that assigns values to its non-logical con-
stants (functions, predicates and symbols). This provides the boundary
conditions upon which the semantic clauses are devised. However, in
the semiotic perspective such a valuation is itself subservient to a revised
dynamic and dialogical interpretation.
To summarise, the preceding discussion suggests that the two com-
ponents of being pragmatic should be taken equally into account in
semantic/pragmatic web enterprises:
First, there is the contextual/situational/environmental dependency of signs.
There are logical ways of attacking this, as witnessed by the conceptual
graph research based on the diagrammatization of propositions by Peirce’s
theory of existential graphs. Diagrammatic reasoning systems plus other
heterogeneous representation formalisms are typically context-depend-
ent by their very nature.
Second, there is the utterer’s meaning as distinct from that of the literal
meaning of the utterance. Recalling the divisions between different
notions of interpretants, the utterer’s meaning is to be found in the in-
tentional interpretant, intended to be mediated in as meaning-preserving
way as possible to the receiving effectual interpretant created in the
mind of the interpreter. By contrast, the literal meaning is to be found
in the immediate interpretant of the sign. The immediate interpretant is
that which is created even if there is no interpreter.
These points relate to the Peircean concept of the universe of dis-
course, which can be conceived in two ways.
First, there is the contextualisation task, which is made easier by there
being collateral observation and mutual experience shared by agents.
This is the task of “model-building”. It is quite explicitly described in
the presuppositions of Peirce’s diagrammatic and iconic theory of exis-
tential graphs as a collaboration between the Graphist and the Grapheus,
namely between the agent who proposes modifications to the graphs and
the agent who “creates the universe” and decides the truth of atomic ex-
pressions.20 There is no opponency or competition in this description.
Second, there is the sign-theoretical communicative task, where signs rep-
resent objects, their instances being chosen from the mutually observed
domain of discourse by the dialogue participants. This is the task of
“model-interpreting”, which is described by Peirce in the constitutive

20
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, “Diagrammatic Logic and Game-Playing”, in Grant
Malcolm (ed.), Multidisciplinary Studies of Visual Representations and Interpretations, Elsevier
Science, to appear.

96
rules of interpretation and considerations pertaining to the education of par-
takers’ habits. The discourse participants will have opposing purposes.
In view of these, the following points are to be noted:
(i) The easier it has become to transmit data through computerised
networks, the more difficult it has become to share data for mutual pro-
cessing and understanding. This is not so much a shortcoming due to
technological challenges than a failure to recognize Peirce’s concept of
a person not absolutely an individual. The multi-agent systems are the
proxy forces set out to do what humans have failed to accomplish.
(ii) What is more important than the complex attempt of making
incompatible vocabularies of databases and web documents to under-
stand each other is to refurbish methodologies for the sharing of mean-
ingful information. Already Peirce laid emphasis on the importance of
methodeutics for the community of inquirers, in order to study “the
methods that ought to be pursued in the investigation, in the exposition,
and in the application of truth” (1.191 [1903]). This is central in com-
munication, for “it is the doctrine of the general conditions of the refer-
ence of Symbols and other Signs to the Interpretants which they aim to
determine” (2.93 [1902]). Ultimately, there is then a need for finding a
“method of discovering methods” (2.108 [1902]) that would enable
inquiries to manage the ever-increasing streams of computerised infor-
mation.

Conclusions

I have identified some of the main issues and problems involved in

a general amalgamation of communicative and triadic viewpoints on
signs, and assessed the contribution it makes to the emerging contour of
a full Peircean notion of communication, as sculpted by the recent era
of intercommunicating computational systems.
What are the implications for a new research agenda for philosophy?
Peirce’s philosophy represents a drastic departure from the Cartesian
view of philosophy, the one-time programme of those who were trying
to understand, on the one hand, the discourse of the distinction between
mind and matter, and on the other, the discourse of the interaction be-
tween them. Peirce presents all interaction as triadic between signs, ob-
jects and interpretants. Of late, his philosophy has been reproduced as an
open-systems philosophy where systems, be they artifacts or human be-
ings, react upon environments in a non-programmed, habitual manner.
For that reason, some may regard it a never-never-philosophy, a Peirce-
an “would-be”, hypostatically abstracted metaphilosophical Erewhon. My

97
 view is that it is strictly rational, adhering to principles of logic, and
keeping a critical eye on other socio-logical principles of inquiry, includ-
ing the much less logical post-Marxist utopias of global communication
communities, or dystopias of all-pervading power relations. It empha-
sises the role of the community of inquirers, be they quasi-minds of soft-
ware agents or human interpreters, in creating new objects, developing
new meanings and concepts, and ultimately achieving the main goal of
scientific inquiry, namely the attainment of truth.
It is remarkable how well Peirce’s never-never philosophy has held
up its promises in the light of current technological advances – I see this
as a self-returning pragmatic maxim. I predict prosperity for Peirce’s
philosophy in the 21st century, not only because of its pragmatic solu-
tions to ever-increasing pragmatic questions, but also because we are
only beginning to see the grave limitations of the last century’s concep-
tions of logic and the impasse of analytical philosophy.21

21
This work has been supported by the Academy of Finland (project no. 104262)
and the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation.

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