Media theorist: Charles Sanders Peirce. What he does and how it relates to us as media students.

1. Charles Sanders Peirce

2. About Charles Sanders Peirce.
Charles Sanders Peirce was an American
mathematician, philosopher and logician. He is the
founder of pragmatism (the attribute of accepting
the facts of life and favouring practicality and
literal truth) and the father of modern semiotics (it
is a theory of the functions of signs and symbols).
At age 12, Charles read his older brother's copy of
Richard Whately's Elements of Logic, then the
leading English-language text on the subject. This is
where his fascination with logic and reasoning
began.

3. Main Area of Study.
Though Peirce received a graduate degree in chemistry from
Harvard University, he never succeeded in keeping an
academic position.
Eventually, he made a career as a scientist for the United
States Coast Survey (1859-1891), working especially in
geodesy (the science of measuring the size and shape of the
earth and its gravitational field) and in pendulum
determinations.
From 1879 until 1884, he was also a part-time lecturer in
Logic at Johns Hopkins University. In 1887, Peirce moved
with his second wife to Milford, Pennsylvania, where, after
26 years of prolific writing, he died of cancer.

4. Peirce’s three stages of meaning.
Logic is described by Peirce as the science of the laws of
signs, and it may be divided into three areas of study:
(1)"critical logic" (the study of the relations of signs to
their objects) (a first)
(2)"speculative grammar" (the study of the meaning of
signs) (a second)
(3)"speculative rhetoric" or "methodeutic" (the study of the
relation of signs to their interpretants) (a third)
Logic is the theory of the conditions that determine the
truth of signs.

5. What impact does it have on us as Media
students?
“A sign depends on its object in such a way as to represent
its object — the object enables and, in a sense, determines
the sign.”
This relates to us as Media students because when we see
something (a sign), automatically we get a denotation and
then from that, we can make connotations which are
endless. This is what determines the signs meaning.
People can interpret a sign in many different ways, eg when
you hear/see the word love, someone may think of their
family or someone else could think of God as part of their
religion.

6. Bibliography of Charles Sanders Peirce.
PEIRCE, Ch.S., Collected Papers, Vol. 1-6, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1931-1935.
PEIRCE, Ch.S., Collected Papers, Vol. 7-8, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1958.
PEIRCE, Ch.S., Collected Papers, electronic version, InteLex
(http://www.nlx.com)
PEIRCE, Ch. S., Writings of Ch.S. Peirce: A chronological Edition, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1982-1999 (6 volumes to date).
PEIRCE, Ch.S., Reasoning and the Logic of Things. The Cambridge
Conferences Lectures of 1898, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
PEIRCE, Ch.S., The essential Peirce: selected philosophical Writings,
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992.
PEIRCE, Ch.S., The essential Peirce: selected philosophical Writings. Vol. 2,
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998.