6.

Semiotic foundations of pragmatics

Winfried Nöth

1. Semiotics as a general framework of pragmatics

Levinson (1983: 1–5) gives the standard account of how semiotics, the general
study of signs, is considered to be fundamental to linguistic pragmatics. The au-
thor of the Cambridge Textbook on Pragmatics begins with Charles W. Morris
(1901–1979), the founder of a general semiotics first outlined in 1938. Morris’s
“science of signs” (1938: 1–2) is both broader and narrower than the scope of mod-
ern linguistic pragmatics.1 It is broader insofar as it is not restricted to the study of
verbal communication but deals with “signs in all their forms and manifestations,
whether in animals or men, whether normal or pathological, whether linguistic
or nonlinguistic, whether personal or social” (1964: 1), acoustic, visual, olfactory,
gustatory, or tactile. It is also broader since pragmatics, as conceived by Morris,
comprises branches of language studies which today fall into the domain of other
disciplines of linguistics, such as “psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, neuroling-
uistics, and much besides” (Levinson 1983: 2). It is narrower insofar as Morris
aims at a science of signs “on a biological basis and specifically within the frame-
work of the science of behavior” (1946: 80) indebted to the positivist paradigm of
psychological and social behaviorism. As Levinson (1983: 2–4) points out, the
scope of pragmatics became still narrower in the frameworks of logical positivism
and analytical philosophy of ordinary language: Carnap (1942) restricts prag-
matics to the logical study of language use, for Bar-Hillel (1954) pragmatics is the
study of language use involving indexical words, and Montague (1970: 68) con-
ceives pragmatics as a contextual theory of truth conditions founded on intensional
logic.
Sign behavior, according to Morris, involves three main factors: “that which
acts as a sign [the sign vehicle], that which the sign refers to [the designatum], and
that effect on some interpreter in virtue of which the thing in question is a sign to
that interpreter” [the interpretant] (1938: 3). Based on this triad, Morris (1938:
6–7) defines semiotics as a field of study of the following three domains corre-
sponding to three well-known branches of modern linguistics: syntax (or syntac-
tics), the study of the relation between sign vehicles, semantics, the study of the re-
lations between sign vehicles and their designata, and pragmatics, the study of the
relation between sign vehicles and their interpreters (cf. Posner 1985).
20th century semiotics has developed in many directions, and some of the
schools of semiotic research have largely ignored the pragmatic dimension of sign
processes. This is especially true of structuralist semiotics in the tradition of Fer-
168 Winfried Nöth

dinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965), whose focus

is entirely on language as a system and not on language use. It is no wonder, there-
fore, that Jacob L. Mey, once Hjelmslev’s PhD student in Copenhagen, in his In-
troduction to Pragmatics, disregards semiotics entirely as a framework of lin-
guistic pragmatics and that Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, while reducing
semiotics to “a theory of codes”, dismiss its relevance to pragmatics altogether
(Sperber and Wilson 1986: 7, 2).
The structuralist and behaviorist heritage of semiotics has been an important
obstacle to a more fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue between general semiotics
and linguistic pragmatics. For a long time, it has impeded the spread of the seminal
ideas which the semiotic writings of Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) offer to lin-
guistics in general (Nöth 2002a) and pragmatics in particular. Only relatively re-
cently has the relevance of these ideas to pragmatics become acknowledged,2 but
so far mostly only by philosophers of language and hardly by linguists (e. g., Le-
vinson 1983: 1, fn. 1).
When Morris conceived the triadic subdivision of semiotics into syntactics, se-
mantics, and pragmatics, he was clearly influenced by Peirce. Peirce had also pro-
posed a triadic framework for the study of signs, but the three branches of se-
miotics which Peirce set up describe a much wider field of study. Peirce was
inspired by the medieval canon of the three liberal arts, the trivium of grammar,
logic, and rhetoric.3 In contrast to the Saussurean tradition, in which linguistics is a
branch of semiology (cf. Nöth 2000: 72–73), Peirce considers linguistics and se-
miotics as two different branches of the system of sciences. Whereas linguistics, in
Peirce’s “detailed classification of the sciences” of 1902 (CP4 1.203–283), is a
branch of the empirical or special sciences, semiotic(s), “the quasi-necessary, or
formal, doctrine of signs”, belongs to the normative and formal sciences (CP 2.227,
c. 1897). In contrast to the empirical sciences, which study “what is in the actual
world”, semiotics, as a normative science, aims at inquiring into “what must be the
character of all signs” and “what would be true of signs in all cases” (CP 2.227).
The normative approach is particularly evident in logic since to decide whether a
statement or conclusion is true or false is a normative decision. This is why, to
Peirce, semiotics was “only another name for logic” (CP 2.227, c. 1897).
The three branches of semiotics, in Peirce’s redefinition of the trivium of the
liberal arts, are the following: (1.) speculative (or formal) grammar, (2.) logic
(proper), and (3.) pure, formal or speculative rhetoric.5 Speculative grammar, the
precursor of Morris’s syntactics, is the study of signs as such; it inquires into “the
general conditions of signs being signs” (CP 1.444, c. 1896), and it is a “general
theory of the nature and meanings of signs, whether they be icons, indices, or sym-
bols” (CP 1.191, 1903). Of the branches of modern linguistics, not only syntax, but
also phonology and morphology belong to this branch of semiotics. Logic proper,
the second branch of semiotics, which Peirce also calls “critic”, is the precursor of
Morris’s semantics and certainly also comprises linguistic semantics. According to
 Semiotic foundations of pragmatics 169

Peirce, it deals with the relations of signs to the objects that they represent, being
“the science of what is quasi-necessarily true of signs […] in order that they […]
may be true; [… it] is the formal science of the conditions of the truth of represen-
tations” (CP 2.229, c. 1897).
Speculative rhetoric, the precursor of Morris’s pragmatics and with it of lin-
guistic pragmatics, deals with the relations of signs to their producers and inter-
preters; it studies the effects created by signs in the participants of the process of
semiosis. Speculative rhetoric is “the study of the necessary conditions of the
transmission of meaning by signs from mind to mind, and from one state of mind to
another” (CP 1.444, c. 1896); it deals with “the formal conditions of the force of
symbols, or their power of appealing to a mind” (CP 8.342, 1908). Speculative
rhetoric is broader than Morris’s pragmatics in two respects. First, to study how
signs are transmitted “from one state of mind to another” means that this branch of
semiotics does not only study signs in communication but also in thought not com-
municated to any other interpreter. Thinking has pragmatic dimensions since it “al-
ways proceeds in the form of a dialogue – a dialogue between different phases of
the ego” (CP 4.6, 1906). Second, speculative rhetoric is also conceived as a rhet-
oric of fine art, a rhetoric of “practical persuasion”, and a rhetoric of science (EP
26: 329, 1904). Peirce had the vision that the rhetoric of science, which he also
called methodeutics (Santaella 1999), was “destined to grow into a colossal doc-
trine which may be expected to lead to most important philosophical conclusions”
(CP 3.454, 1896).

2. Semiotic foundations of communication

Linguistic pragmatics studies how language is used in communication, especially,

how verbal messages are exchanged between speakers and hearers in dialogue.
Merely incidentally transmitted utterances, monologues, and other forms of lan-
guage use without an addressee are of no concern to the field of study (cf. Levinson
1983: 16).
Communication is a central issue of semiotics; its study is also called semiotics
of communication (Santaella and Nöth 2004). The general study of signs and sign
processes may thus provide a theoretical framework for linguistic pragmatics.
Among its topics of relevance to linguistic pragmatics are: (1) models and func-
tions of communication, (2) the instrumental view of language in communication,
(3) the problem of intentionality, (4) the nature of cooperation in conversation, and
(5) the dialogical nature of the sign and its relevance to the study of communi-
cation.
170 Winfried Nöth

2.1. Models and functions of communication

Most theories of pragmatics take a very rudimentary model of communication as

the point of departure of their analyses of speech acts. With reference to Grice
(1957), Levinson considers the triad S-U-R, sender (speaker, writer), utterance,
and receiver (hearer, reader), to be fundamental: “Communication consists of the
‘sender’ intending to cause the ‘receiver’ to think or do something, just by getting
the ‘receiver’ to recognize that the ‘sender’ is trying to cause that thought or ac-
tion” (Levinson 1983: 16). The utterance, in this triad, is a “linguistic token”; U has
meaning, which becomes “mutual knowledge” to S and R in the process of com-
munication, but initially, U may have two kinds of meaning, possibly in conflict, a
“speaker meaning” and a “sentence meaning” (Levinson 1983: 16).
Leech, in his Principles of Pragmatics, proposes a flow diagram of communi-
cation according to which an S uttering U to H is engaged in three kinds of semiotic
transaction: (1) an interpersonal transaction, or discourse, (2) an ideational trans-
action or message transmission, and (3) a textual transaction or text (Leech 1983:
59). As to its three constituents, S-U-H, and its notion of message transmission, this
model is certainly inspired by the technical model of the “flow of information” from
S to H by Shannon and Weaver (1949). This model is inadequate for the study of
human communication, since it is linear, unidirectional, and assigns a merely pass-
ive role to the “recipient” of the message, making the sender the only active agent in
communication. It disregards H’s autonomy in the process of interpreting S’s mess-
age as well as the important elements of circularity by which S and H are connected
in communication through feedback loops by which H contributes to the production
of S’s message from the moment of its articulation on (cf. Nöth 2000: 244–46).
A much cited communication model in linguistic pragmatics is the semiotic
model of the six factors and functions of communication which Roman Jakobson
proposed in extension of Bühler’s triadic organon model of language (Bühler
1933). Jakobson defines the factors involved in a process of communication as fol-
lows: An addresser sends a message to an addressee. This message refers to a con-
text (the “referent” of the verbal message) “seizable by the addressee”. Addresser
and addressee have a common code, such as the vocabulary and grammar of the
language in which they communicate, and finally, there is a contact which serves as
“a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the
addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication” (Jakobson
1960: 353).
Each of these six factors is the determinant of a specific communicative func-
tion; one and the same message may have several functions, but one is usually pre-
dominant. Messages which focus on the referent (context), such as informative, de-
scriptive, or narrative texts, have a predominantly referential function. The
emotive or expressive function is predominant when the focus is on the speaker’s
attitude in relation to the meaning of the message. The use of interjections, a tremb-
 Semiotic foundations of pragmatics 171

ling voice, or the frequent use of the pronouns I or me are examples of signs of an
utterance in which the emotive function of language is predominant. The conative
function is oriented toward the addressee; its most typical grammatical expressions
are the vocative and the imperative. The phatic function predominates in messages
which, without necessarily conveying any particular meaning at all, serve “to es-
tablish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel
works (‘Hello, do you hear me?’), to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to
confirm his continued attention (‘Are you listening?’)” (1960: 355). The metalin-
guistic function predominates when language is used to refer to language and ver-
bal communication; metalanguage is language about language, e.g., as in grammar
books or in the discussion of questions of terminology. Finally, the poetic function,
according to Jakobson, predominates when the focus of verbal communication is
on the qualities of language irrespective of its message, e.g., on the sound pattern,
rhythm, or meter of a text.
Although Peirce considers the model of the sign to be more fundamental than
the model of communication, it is not true that the founder of modern semiotics had
little to say about the topic of communication, as Habermas (1995) believes. El-
ements of a Peircean theory of communication have meanwhile been recon-
structed.7 In his manuscript on Pragmatism of 1907, Peirce defines communication
of a speaker with a hearer as follows: “Signs mostly function between two minds,
or theatres of consciousness, of which one is the agent that utters the sign (whether
acoustically, optically, or otherwise) while the other is the patient mind that inter-
prets the sign” (EP 2: 403). In this description, the characterization of communi-
cation as a theater, a staged scenario of acting agents, is more than a mere meta-
phor. Actors on stage do not act autonomously, but they represent actions and act
on behalf of other agents. But who should be the agents in communication if not S
and H? This question is the topic of sections 2.2 and 2.3.

2.2. Are verbal signs instruments of those who communicate?

Most approaches to linguistic pragmatics are based on the assumption that verbal
messages are instruments by which senders seek to influence receivers. Language
use is regarded as a means to some end. Searle (1969: 48), e.g., writes: “The sen-
tence” uttered by a speaker who knows its meaning “then provides a conventional
means of achieving the intention to produce certain illocutionary effects in the
hearer.” Leech (1983: 36), too, postulates that speaking is a means to an end and
hence an instrument for a purpose: spoken or written messages are “transferred” or
“transmitted” from a speaker to a hearer, and the speaker’s purpose in this “trans-
action” is to “convey a particular illocutionary force to the hearer” (Leech 1983:
58–60).
The view that verbal signs are used as instruments has been defended since an-
tiquity. It is central to one of the earliest treatises on the philosophy of language,
172 Winfried Nöth

Plato’s Cratylus. In this dialogue on the relation between words and the objects for
which they stand, Socrates compares the practical utility of the craftsman’s tools
with the utility which words have for a speaker. A tool, says Socrates, is naturally
adequate and appropriate to the task for which it serves. To the weaver, the “right
and natural” (391E) instrument is the shuttle, to the blacksmith, the anvil and the
hammer serve best to shape the iron, and to the shoemaker, the awl is the natural
tool for piercing leather. As any practical action requires its proper tool, so does the
act of speaking. The speakers’ appropriate instruments for communicating their
ideas are their words (388a-389c). Practical instruments have a practical utility,
whereas words serve a semiotic utility. As the weaver’s shuttle is useful for separ-
ating the warp from the woof, so is the word useful to the speaker who wants to
communicate or to organize his or her ideas.
In the history of semiotics, the instrumental theory of the sign has lived on in
many variants (cf. Nöth 2009). In the context of pragmatics, Wittgenstein’s (1953)
revival of the topic is of special interest. “Instrument”, or “tool”, are appropriate
characterizations of verbal signs in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language since
these terms illustrate that the proper study of verbal signs is the study of their use.
What language and instruments have in common is that they are both used and
have functions: “Think of the tools in a box: there is the hammer, pliers, a saw,
screwdriver, a glue-pot, nails and screws. – The functions of words are as diverse
as the functions of these objects” (§ 11). Whereas Socrates focuses on the utility of
verbal signs in communication, Wittgenstein’s focus is on their meaning and the
way meaning is revealed in the use of signs. Not only is language in general an in-
strument, but also “its concepts are instruments” (§ 569). Instruments as well as
language have their sense in their employment: “Look at a sentence as an instru-
ment and its sense as its employment” (§ 421).
Although the view that language serves as an instrument in communication is a
proverbial commonplace, Peirce contests it. A tool is only a means, i.e., an efficient
cause, but not an end, i.e., not a final cause, in the craftsman’s process of producing
an effect. Words used in communication, by contrast, are more than mere tools
since they have purposes of their own, which is not their speakers’ purpose. What a
word means is not determined by its user. The truth conditions of a proposition are
not determined by the utterer of the sentence which it contains either; they are de-
termined by the reality to which it refers and by the consequences the utterance
has. Whether an argument is valid or not is determined by the logic of language and
not by the person who argues, and whether a speech act is felicitous or not depends
on whether it fulfills certain felicity conditions that cannot be ignored by the ut-
terer. Hence, to use words means to be constrained by restrictions determined by
language and the consequences of its use.
Instead of saying that it is the speaker who produces the utterance in accord-
ance with the rules of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, we can also say that these
rules determine the speaker to speak the way he or she speaks, but the pragmatist
 Semiotic foundations of pragmatics 173

account of language and meaning goes a step further. According to Peirce’s prag-
matic maxim (see 3.1), it is not the rules of language and logic that determine our
utterances, but the anticipated feedback which the success or failure of our utter-
ances gives us whenever we speak. The anticipation of the effects of our words
makes us utter them in this or that way. Nor can it be argued that the utterer’s
thoughts in which his or her intention to speak is conceived use the ensuing utter-
ance as instruments to put the speaker’s intentions into effect. Utterances which ex-
press thoughts are interpretants of these thoughts, which make the interpretants the
final causes of the thoughts. Since the utterance is itself a sign with the purpose of
creating further interpretants in the hearer’s mind it cannot be merely instrument-
ally (or efficiently) caused by the thoughts in which they were conceived.
Nothing could be less in accordance with Peirce’s semiotic premises than a
dualist assumption of internal thoughts becoming merely externalized as spoken or
written words in communication. Sperber and Wilson (1986: 1), for example, make
this assumption when they reflect on the relationship between their own thoughts
and their expression in writing as follows: what we “put down on paper are little
dark marks […]. As for our thoughts, they remain where they always were, inside
our brains”. Peirce, by contrast, argues that signs exert their semiotic agency inside
as well as outside of human brains, and perhaps even more so outside than inside.
He underlines the latter view by saying that it is even “much more true that the
thoughts of a living writer are in any printed copy of his book than that they are in
his brain” (CP 7.364, 1902). Hence, thought-signs do not remain contained in the
container of a human brain just as written words do not remain fixed in their mean-
ing once they are written down. Words are symbols which live and grow outside of
human brains in the semiotic effects which they have, and this growth takes place
both in thought and in communication. What they have in common is their dialogi-
cal nature:
Before the sign was uttered, it already was virtually present to the consciousness of the
utterer, in the form of thought. But […] a thought is itself a sign, and should itself have
an utterer (namely, the ego of a previous moment) to whose consciousness it must have
been already virtually present, and so back. Likewise, after a sign has been interpreted,
it will virtually remain in the consciousness of its interpreter, where it will be a sign […]
and, as a sign should, in its turn, have an interpreter, and so on forward. (EP 2: 403,
1907; see below, 2.4 for the argument of the infinite regress.)
In sum, if signs have purposes, or final causes, and exert a semiotic agency of their
own, they cannot be the mere instruments, that is, instrumental (or efficient)
causes, of other signs; and since both thoughts and utterances are signs, utterances
cannot be the instruments of the thoughts in which they were first conceived.
Although the sign is not an instrument, instruments are necessary for the dis-
semination of signs. We need a pen and paper to write down words, and our voices
are necessary instruments by which our words reach their hearers, but these words
themselves are not our instruments. Not words are our semiotic instruments, but
174 Winfried Nöth

our voices, tongues and lips, pens, paper, typewriters, telephones, or computers
are. The instruments by which thought-signs exert their semiotic agency are the
neurons, the brain lobes, and the perceptual organs, eyes and ears, by means
of which thoughts are processed. This is probably Peirce’s most radical thesis:
our brain is not the only cause of our utterances; it is merely the efficient cause
of the thoughts and of their expression. The ideas on which this approach to semio-
sis is based have parallels in current quasi-biological positions of the philosophy
of mind known as memetics and teleosemantics; the biolinguistic assumption is
here that words in culture spread like genes spread in biological species (cf. Nöth
2009).
In order to deconstruct the autonomy of the speaking subject, Peirce, for the
sake of the argument, may exaggerate here and there when he speaks of the pur-
pose of the sign which is not the purpose of the user. Elsewhere, he acknowledges
two purposes, the purpose of the sign and the purpose of the sign user, in a mutual
feedback control circuit. In an evolutionary perspective, he describes the loop in
which sign users using signs and signs using sign users interact in terms of a pro-
cess of co-evolution:

Man makes the word, and the word means nothing which the man has not made it mean,
and that only to some man. But since man can think only by means of words or other ex-
ternal symbols, these might turn round and say: “You mean nothing which we have not
taught you, and then only so far as you address some word as the interpretant of your
thought.” In fact, therefore, men and words reciprocally educate each other. (CP 5.313,
1868)

There is a certain affinity between this Peircean account of the relationship be-
tween the signs and their users on the one hand and Saussure’s theories of the im-
mutability of the verbal sign and the determination of each signifier by the system
of which it is part on the other. As Stetter (1989: 159) has pointed out in his Saus-
surean interpretation of the above quote: we are not the masters of our signs “who
determine the interpretation of terms but it is rather determined by presuppositions
inherent in the system of language”, but Peirce’s object of the sign is of course
more than the system of which the sign is a part.
The co-evolution of signs and their users can only take place if purposes are as-
cribed to both. But this does not mean that the sign user is the autonomous agent
external to the signs as which the intentionalists describe him (see 2.3). Peirce
solves the apparent paradox of the conflict between the purposes of the sign user
and the one of the sign with the argument that sign users are themselves objects of
signs (see 2.5) so that their intentions are, in turn, purposes of signs. By no means
do sign users pursue nonsemiotic purposes, for they themselves are and act as signs
in the flow of thought-signs and public signs which constitute them as signs. This is
the line of argument of the famous passage in which Peirce defines the human
being as a sign:
 Semiotic foundations of pragmatics 175

There is no element whatever of man’s consciousness which has not something corre-
sponding to it in the word; and the reason is obvious. It is that the word or sign which
man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in con-
junction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that
every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the
man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the words homo and
man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the
thought. (CP 2.314, 1868)

If the sign user is a sign, his or her intentions are signs, too, and in the speaker’s ut-
terances the underlying intentions have to be interpreted as objects of signs. As the
object determines the sign so does the sign determine its interpretants. Words “only
stand for the objects they do, and signify the qualities they do, because they will
determine, in the mind of the auditor, corresponding signs” (CP 2.92, 1902). As
any object of a sign determines the sign which it represents so do the speaker’s in-
tentions, since they are objects of signs. This is how the speaker’s intention partici-
pates in the creation of an interpretant.

2.3. Intentionality of communication and the purpose of verbal signs

The classics of linguistic pragmatics agree in considering intentionality as a pre-
requisite of verbal communication. Levinson (1983: 16) summarizes as follows:
“Communication consists of the ‘sender’ intending to cause the ‘receiver’ to think
or do something, just by getting the ‘receiver’ to recognize that the ‘sender’ is try-
ing to cause that thought or action. So communication is a complex kind of inten-
tion that is achieved or satisfied just by being recognized.”
Searle (1983: 164–66) postulates two intentions. First, there must be an inten-
tion to represent on the speaker’s side, but since it is possible to represent without
the purpose to address or to influence anybody, a second intention is required: the
intention to communicate. Searle (1983: 166) explains that it is impossible to in-
form a hearer that it is raining without intending that this message represents
truly or falsely the weather condition expressed. Not only the speaker’s intention
but also the hearer’s awareness of this intention is a prerequisite of communi-
cation. Furthermore, the belief produced in the hearer’s mind as the result of the
message must have its cause in the speaker’s intention (cf. Sperber and Wilson
1986: 23).
In structural semiotics, intentionality is the criterion by which communication
is distinguished from signification. The distinction has its roots in the writings of
Buyssens (1943).8 All signs which humans can interpret, including the signs of
physical nature, have signification, but not all of them are intended; only those
signs constitute acts of communication which have an addresser whose intention it
is to convey a message to an addressee. In the tradition of analytical language phil-
osophy, Grice (1957) interprets the difference in question in terms of the dichot-
176 Winfried Nöth

omy of “natural” (i.e., unintentional) and “nonnatural” (i.e., intended) meanings.

The latter term is unfortunate, though. To call the signs of natural language “non-
natural”, as Grice does, fails to do justice to the continuity of semiosis in the evol-
ution of life from nature to culture (cf. Nöth 2008).
Prieto (1966: 33–38) anticipates Searle’s theory of the two communicative in-
tentions when he distinguishes between two indications which signs have in com-
munication, a notificative and a significative indication. Significative indication is
the one by which a sign indicates whatever it means (i.e., its signification). Notifi-
cative indication, by contrast, indicates that the sign is being communicated with
the intention of a sender. The content of a notificative indication is so to speak: “At-
tention! This sign is intended to convey a message to you!” (cf. Hervey 1982: 71).
If signs can only be intended or not, intentionality cannot be a matter of degree.
However, intentions are volitions, and wishes and desires may vary in strength.
Addressers may be divided as to their intentions, they may have doubts and hesi-
tate whether they should communicate or not, or they may merely pretend to com-
municate and act as if they communicated (cf. Parret 1994). Such factors of inten-
tionality are rarely taken into consideration in linguistic pragmatics.
Psychoanalysis, by contrast, has shown how verbal and nonverbal messages
may also communicate hidden intentions which the utterer may want to conceal
but fails to do, e.g., when he or she, impatient with the hearer, loses control over his
or her voice, sounding angry despite the intention to appear calm. In such a scen-
ario, the speaker’s loss of control over his or her voice is the sign of a conflict be-
tween two intentions, one determined by the unconscious mind, the other by the
conscious self. The conflict of intentions is thus the symptom of a divided self in
which a conscious mind aims at concealing what the unconscious mind intends to
express.
Linguistic pragmatics also disregards what the communication theorists
Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson (1967) say about the ubiquity of communication
in everyday life. In their study Pragmatics of Human Communication, the authors
postulate the metacommunicative axiom that it is impossible not to communicate,
be it verbally or nonverbally: “Behavior has no opposite. There is no such thing as
nonbehavior […]. One cannot not behave”, and any form of behavior in social in-
teraction is of semiotic relevance since “one cannot not communicate” (Watzla-
wick et al. 1967: 48–49). Even silence and doing nothing are messages.
Peirce’s semiotic theory of intentionality (cf. Kappner 2004) and his theory of
the purpose of signs in sign processes are rather incompatible with the views of in-
tentionality held in mainstream linguistic pragmatics.9 Peirce defines the sign as a
medium (MS10 339: 283r, 1906), but not as one which mediates between an ad-
dresser and an addressee; instead, the sign logically mediates between its object,
which it represents, and its interpretant, which is the interpretative effect it creates.
The object of the sign is the verbal or nonverbal knowledge, feeling, behavior, or
habit which the sign user associates with the sign. The knowledge of its object is a
 Semiotic foundations of pragmatics 177

prerequisite for the interpretation of the sign. While the object of the sign includes
aspects of what linguists define as meaning (see 3.3), the interpretant includes the
illocutionary force and the perlocutionary effect of a speech act, as defined by Aus-
tin (1962). In Peirce’s definition, the interpretant is the cognitive, emotional, or be-
havioral effect which results from the interpretation of the sign.
According to Peirce, the sign is a semiotic agent with its own intention (cf. 2.2).
Signs continue to exert their agency in the absence of those who first produced
them. This topic is also discussed by Derrida (1988: 8), who uses the metaphor of
the machine for the agency which the written sign exerts irrespective of its pro-
ducer: “To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is
productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder
in its functioning, offering things and itself to be read and to be rewritten.” Peirce’s
view of the agency of the sign goes beyond the mere assumption of its interpreta-
bility in the absence of its writer. Signs have a life of their own, which can be
studied in processes of language change and in the way texts are interpreted in new
ways as time passes and signs change. In 1904, Peirce writes about the purpose of
the symbol: “The symbol, by the very definition of it, has an interpretant in view.
Its very meaning is intended. Indeed, a purpose is precisely the interpretant of a
symbol” (EP 2: 308).
With purpose, Peirce thus does not mean the sign user’s intention, but the
sign’s intention to represent its object and to create and interpretant, i.e., to “be in-
terpreted in another sign” (MS 1476, 1904). Purpose is thus a semiotic teleology
inherent in the sign. Not only uttered or written signs have purposes, but also
thought-signs. Their purpose is to act in a mental dialogue in which one thought-
sign is “translated or interpreted in a subsequent one” (CP 5.284, 1868).
On the one hand, the sign represents its object to the mind of an interpreter, on
the other, the object represented by the sign is “in a sense the cause, or determinant,
of the sign even if the sign represents its object falsely” (CP 6.347, 1909; cf. Par-
mentier 1985). To justify the autonomy of the sign by its being determined sounds
contradictory, but it describes the process of an autopoietic self-determination of
the sign. Since the object of the sign is not external, but internal to the sign, to say
that the sign is determined by its object means that it is determined by a dynamics
inherent in itself and not by an agency outside of the sign (cf. Colapietro 1995).
The way in which a sign is determined by its object depends on its modes of re-
lation to its object and its interpretants. Rhematic signs, such as words in isolation,
are determined to represent their objects as such, without affirming, questioning, or
negating their existence. Dicentic signs, such as affirmations, are determined by
the truth of what they represent, and arguments are determined by the laws of logic
and reasoning in general. Symbols are determined by the habits of their users, by
which they have become symbolic signs. Indices are determined by their objects
because they are related to them by causal, temporal, or spatial relations, whereas
icons represent their objects by means of qualities of their own. All these factors
178 Winfried Nöth

determine the sign independently of their use. For example, a rhematic symbolic
legisign such as the word apple, uttered by a speaker, is determined by the habits of
the speakers of English to represent the fruit of the apple tree by means of this
word; the word represents its object as a general kind without affirming the exist-
ence of any particular fruit. The sign user may try to escape from his or her deter-
mination by the object of this sign and use this word to refer to a pear, but in the
long run, words cannot be used in this way because the speech acts will fail. A sign
user may also lie or argue against the laws of logic, but in the long run, to ignore the
truth and the laws of reasoning will not pay. Furthermore, verbal signs are deter-
mined by biolinguistic and evolutionary constraints, which have restricted the
speakers’ possibilities of articulation and perception (cf. Deacon, 1997: 116).

2.4. Conversational cooperation, commonage, and the common ground

The model of communication underlying the classical theories of linguistic prag-
matics is one of rational discourse.11 The aim of dialogic communication is guided
by the ideal of mutual consensus; the speaker’s purpose must be achieved. Com-
munication is modeled as being cooperative; its goal is not only comprehension but
also the full acceptance of the intended message on the part of the hearer; speech
acts can only succeed or fail, and successful speech acts fulfill felicity conditions;
the speakers’ intentions are described as being sincere, and the messages are al-
ways relevant. Such accounts of verbal exchange between speakers and hearers
model communication according to the ideals of a desirable symmetry between the
agents interacting in dialogue. The underlying assumption is that a full congruence
between the speakers’ intended meaning and the hearers’ understanding of it is not
only possible but also desirable.
To reach consensus is indeed an ideal of dialogic interaction in rational dis-
course. The very concept of communication implies, in its root, the notion of mak-
ing something common to those who communicate. Morris (1946: 195) expresses
this normative goal of communicative interaction in a definition according to
which communication is “the use of signs to establish a commonage of signifi-
cation”. The assumption that commonage is an essential characteristic of com-
munication is not undisputed. In everyday language, e.g., it is contradicted by the
military metaphors by which speakers represent their arguments as “positions”
which need be “defended” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 7). In the sociological theory
of communication, Luhmann (1984) starts from the basic assumption that the dif-
ferences between the utterer’s and the interpreter’s frames of mind instead of their
common ground, is the source of all dialogic interaction, whereas Habermas
(1981) founds his Theory of Communicative Action on the assumption that consen-
sus is constitutive of rational communicative interaction.
As a prerequisite for, and means of, reaching the normative ideal of dialogic
commonage, linguistic pragmatics recognizes such principles as Grice’s maxims
 Semiotic foundations of pragmatics 179

of conversational cooperation and its derivative, the principle of relevance advo-

cated by Sperber and Wilson. A precursor in the study of these normative prin-
ciples is Peirce (Pietarinen 2004, Short 2007: 213–14). Although by no means re-
stricted to the study of rational discourse (Oehler 1995: 267–68), Peirce’s
speculative rhetoric describes conversational cooperation as follows:
Honest people, when not joking, intend to make the meaning of their words determinate,
so that there shall be no latitude of interpretation at all. That is to say, the character of
their meaning consists in the implications and non-implications of their words; and they
intend to fix what is implied and what is not implied. They believe that they succeed in
doing so, and if their chat is about the theory of numbers, perhaps they may. (CP 5.447,
1905)
However, immediately after this description of rational conversational cooper-
ation, Peirce also points out that commonage can only serve as a regulative idea, an
ideal which can rarely be reached in ordinary conversation. The sentence after the
above passage goes on to say: “But the further their topics are from such presciss12,
or ‘abstract’, subjects, the less possibility is there of such precision of speech. In-
sofar as the implication is not determinate, it is usually left vague” (CP 5.447,
1905). Furthermore, Peirce also argues that, despite all efforts of cooperation, dia-
logues also evince a fundamental divergence of interest between the participants.
From this perspective, Peirce calls the participants of dialogue “opponents” (MS
515: 25, s. d.; cf. Hilpinen 1995: 293) and describes dialogic interaction in terms of
a metaphorical scenario of war: “The utterer is essentially a defender of his own
proposition and wishes to interpret it so that it will be defensible. The interpreter,
not being so interested, and being unable to interpret it fully without considering to
what extreme it may reach, is relatively in a hostile attitude, and looks for the in-
terpretation least defensible” (MS 9: 3–4, c.1903).
Relevance, so much discussed in linguistic pragmatics since Grice, is another
principle about which Peirce has written (cf. Pietarinen 2004). Peirce discusses it
as follows: “If the utterer says ‘Fine day!’ he does not dream of any possibility of
the interpreter’s thinking of any mere desire for a fine day that a Finn at the North
Cape might have entertained on April 19, 1776. He means, of course, to refer to the
actual weather, then and there, where he and the interpreter have it near the surface
of their common consciousness” (MS 318: 32–33, 1907). Whereas Grice would
describe the elliptic utterance “Fine day” as one which requires filling the gap of
what remains unsaid by means of nonconventional conversational implicatures,
Peirce would consider most conversational implicatures unnecessary since com-
munication, studied from the semiotic perspective, is not only verbal communi-
cation. What linguistic pragmatics describes as gaps between what is said and what
is left out may be a gap in the verbal message, but interpreters of a dialogue do not
only interpret words; they also interpret nonverbal signs and the situational cir-
cumstances of the utterance. What appears a gap in the verbal message may not be
a gap in the multi-channel message of the dialogic exchange. Furthermore, not
180 Winfried Nöth

everything that is left open and undetermined in conversation needs to be filled by

implicatures either. It is wrong to assume that the speaker’s message is always
clearly determined and that the interpreter’s only task is to fill the gaps in order to
restore the intentions which seem unclear. Vagueness and the impossibility of re-
solving it may be the speaker’s purpose and the interpreter’s source of creative
thinking (see 3.3).
In Peirce’s speculative rhetoric, commonage is not only a normative goal; it is
also its prerequisite of the dialogue. As the prerequisite of communication, it be-
longs to the domain of the object of the sign; as its goal, it pertains to the interpre-
tant created by the sign. The object of the sign can only be known if both the utterer
and the interpreter have collateral experience of the Real or Dynamical Object of a
sign. In order to know what a sign represents, we need to have “previous acquaint-
ance with what the sign denotes” (CP 8.179, s. d.). The sign itself cannot express its
dynamical object, “it can only indicate and leave the interpreter to find out by col-
lateral experience” what it represents (EP 2: 198, 1909). There is nothing “non-
conventional” in this process of interpretation, as Grice assumes with his implica-
tures. Interpretation, according to Peirce is always a natural process of abductive,
inductive, and deductive inferencing.
An aspect of the object of the sign, i.e., that which must be presupposed for
communication to be successful, is the common ground of experience and knowl-
edge which the utterer and the interpreter share. Both Grice and Searle have de-
scribed it as a prerequisite of conversation. Pietarinen (2004: 302–305) shows in
which respect Grice’s and Searle’s theories of the preconditions of successful com-
munication were anticipated by Peirce. In 1908 Peirce formulates it as follows:
“No man can communicate the smallest item of information to his brother-man un-
less they have […] common familiar knowledge […] such that each knower knows
that every other familiarly knows it, and familiarly knows that every other one of
the knowers has a familiar knowledge of all this” (MS 614: 1–2, in Pietarinen
2006: 438). To make clear that no circulus vitiosus is involved in this endless reci-
procity, Peirce underlined that this infinite regress is a logical and not a psycho-
logical one: “Of course, two endless series of knowings are involved; but knowing
is not an action but a habit, which may remain passive for an indefinite time” (MS
614: 1–2, in Pietarinen 2006: 438).
Insofar as commonage is the goal of communication, it pertains to the interpre-
tant of the sign. Peirce calls the meaning effects common to the speaker and the
hearer the cominterpretant of the sign. At the same time, he recognizes that there
may be effects of meaning which are specific to the utterer and the interpreter, the
former being the intentional, the latter the effectual interpretant:
 Semiotic foundations of pragmatics 181

There is the Intentional Interpretant, which is a determination of the mind of the utterer;
the Effectual Interpretant, which is a determination of the mind of the interpreter; and
the Communicational Interpretant, or say the Cominterpretant, which is a determination
of that mind into which the minds of utterer and interpreter have to be fused in order that
any communication should take place. This mind may be called commens. It consists of
all that is, and must be, well understood between utterer and interpreter at the outset, in
order that the sign in question should fulfil its function. (EP 2: 478, 1906)

The commind, as Peirce calls the fusion of the two minds in one and the same
commens elsewhere, is a normative ideal. In practice, the ideal of a commind can
never be fully reached since mutual understanding is only possible in a fragmen-
tary way. In 1907 (MS 318), Peirce points out that no interpreter can be said to have
access to the utterer’s mind. Knowledge about what a speaker means can only be
obtained in fragments, and such fragments are mere “copies of a scrap torn out of
another’s life”. By such scraps we can only “supplement the ideas of [our own]
life” (MS 318: 194, 1907; cf. Johansen 1993: 198–202). As interpreters we must
match those fragments found in the signs of the utterance with our own discourse
universe and find out where they can be “inserted or recopied” in our own “pan-
orama of universal life” (MS 318: 194, 1907). Interpretation is thus a semiotic
patchwork put together by abductive, inductive and deductive reasoning.

2.5. Dialogue as the prototype of verbal communication, and the dialogical

nature of the sign
Peirce not only considered the dialogue as “a wonderfully perfect kind of sign-
functioning” (EP 2: 391, c. 1906), he also had derived his first model of the sign to-
gether with the first version of his three categories, the I, the IT, and the THOU
from the three elementary constituents of a dialogue (W 113: xxvii, 174, 1865).14
Fisch explains how the model of the sign is derived from the model of the dialogue:
“Peirce began where most of us begin, with a model, which, taken by itself, would
suggest too narrow a definition; namely the model of conversation between two
competent speakers of the same natural language – say, English. […] It goes with-
out saying that words are signs; and it goes almost without saying that phrases,
clauses, sentences, speeches, and extended conversations are signs” (Fisch 1986:
357).
In Peirce’s fully developed semiotics, “a sign, or representamen, is something
which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses
somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps
a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first
sign. The sign stands for something, its object” (CP 2.228, c.1897). Sign, object,
and interpretant must be understood as following each other in time. The object
comes first insofar as it precedes the sign; it is that which must be known before the
sign can be understood. The sign comes next since it represents the object to an in-
182 Winfried Nöth

terpretant, and the interpretant follows last since it is created by the sign. This tem-
poral sequence makes clear how the three correlates of the sign correspond to the
three correlates of a dialogue, addresser (or sender), message, addressee (or re-
ceiver): the sign (or Representamen) is the message; it addresses the interpretant as
its receiver, and the sender of this message is its object, which determines the sign
(cf. Bergman 2003: 11, Pietarinen 2006: 426).
Despite the close association of the interpreter and the interpretant in the pro-
cess of interpretation, the interpretant must not be confused with the mind of the
addressee of a message. In its full definition, the interpretant is any “significant ef-
fect of the sign” (CP 2.303, 1902), be it a feeling, action, or thought, and since sig-
nificant effects of signs are not restricted to individuals and to the present moment
of sign interpretation, the interpretant can also be a memory, a habit, a fashion, an
innovation, a revolution, a war, or a peace treaty. In all cases, the interpretant is
itself a sign.
The object of the sign corresponds to its sender in an equally impersonal under-
standing (cf. 2.2 on the utterer’s intention as an object of the sign). Ransdell (1977)
explains why Peirce equates the two instances of conversation which linguists are
used to distinguishing as the referent of the sign on the one hand and the sender of a
message on the other: to the degree that the reality, the phenomena which we per-
ceive, experience, or think about, are interpretable phenomena, they are objects of
signs. Reality is a sign producer since it is the cause of the signs which we have of
it; after all, we interpret reality by means of its signs, which in turn create interpre-
tants. Both the sender of a message who, although not a creation of this message,
is nevertheless the source of its distribution, and the sign’s object precede the
moment and are the causes of the production of the sign.
Not only the sender but also the sign itself has an agency in the process of se-
miosis, as shown above (2.2–3). Peirce calls it the “action of the sign” (e.g.,
CP 5.472–73, 1905), but again, this agency, which is due to the purpose of the sign,
is neither restricted to the purpose of a human being nor must it be the effect of a
verbal sign. There are even signs which have no sender at all. These are evidently
the natural signs (cf. Nöth 2008). Since “there can be no isolated sign”, Peirce at-
tributes a Quasi-utterer to (natural) signs without a real utterer (CP 4.551, 1906).
There are also signs without an interpreter but a Quasi-interpreter (CP 4.551,
1906), for example, “if nobody takes the trouble to study the record” (EP 2: 404,
1907). According to Peirce’s dialogic semiotics, it is essential that the utterer or
quasi-utterer as well as the interpreter or quasi-interpreter are not instances ex-
terior to, but can be found within the sign, in which “they must nevertheless be dis-
tinct” although “they are, so to say, welded” in the sign (CP 4.551, 1906). A sum-
mary of the resulting simultaneity of the presence and absence of the utterer in the
dialogical sign is the following:
 Semiotic foundations of pragmatics 183

The action of a sign generally takes place between two parties, the utterer and the inter-
preter. They need not be persons; for a chameleon and many kinds of insects and even
plants make their livings by uttering signs, and lying signs at that. Who is the utterer of
signs of weather, which are not remarkably veracious, always? However, every sign cer-
tainly conveys something of the general nature of thought, if not from a mind, yet from
some repository of ideas, or significant forms, and if not to a person, yet to something
capable of some how “catching on”. (MS 318, S. 17, 1907)

In the dialogic process of conversation, the continuous alternation between the role
of the utterer and the one of the hearer involves a permanent transformation of
signs into interpretants and interpretants into the objects of new signs creating new
interpretants. This continuous process of alternations and transformations is a
source of creativity in semiosis. Since not only the utterers but also the objects of
the signs participate in the dialogue in the sense that they determine its interpre-
tants, not only the voices of two participants but a plurality of voices is audible.
Dialogue is a Bakhtinian polyphonic chorus with a plurality of participants speak-
ing the voices of many discourses (cf. Nöth 2009).

3. Pragmatism and Peirce’s semiotics of meaning and reference

Peirce’s semiotics is also relevant to issues of linguistic pragmatics such as the re-
lationship between and the respective scopes of semantics and pragmatics, the dif-
ference between speaker, hearer, and utterance meaning, the nature of reference
and indexicality in language, and the theory of speech acts. Even the concept of
pragmatics has its origin in Peirce’s writings.

3.1. Pragmatics, pragmatism, and pragmaticism

The term pragmatics, as introduced by Morris (see 1.), was clearly inspired by the
philosophy of pragmatism, whose main representatives in the first decades of the
20th century were William James and John Dewey, and whose founder was Peirce
(cf. Murphy 1990). In a letter of 1912, Peirce explained why and how he coined the
term in the 1870s (Houser 1998: xxi-xxii): “When I gave the doctrine of pragma-
tism the name it bears […] I derived [… it] from , – ‘behavior’, – in order
that it should be understood that the doctrine is that the only real significance of a
general term lies in the general behavior which it implies” (in: Eisele 1987: 95).
Morris’s change of the concept of pragmatism to pragmatics made the term more
compatible with the names of the neighboring fields of pragmatics in linguistics
syntactics and semantics as well as with the term linguistics itself.
One of the main aims of pragmatism is to overcome the dualism between
thought and action (Colapietro 1992: 430–31). Peirce formulated the essence of
pragmatism, as he conceived it, in several versions of his “pragmatic maxim” for-
184 Winfried Nöth

mulated in several versions since 1878. In 1902, the maxim stated the following:
“Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we con-
ceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is
the whole of our conception of the object” (CP 5.9, c. 1905). Peirce gives the fol-
lowing account of how this maxim should be applied: “Pragmatism is the principle
that every theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is
a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to
enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence
having its apodosis in the imperative mood” (CP 5.18, 1903). Colapietro (1992:
433) gives an example of how this principle can be followed in practice: “To learn
most clearly the meaning of an assertion – e.g., of ‘Sugar is soluble’ – requires us
to translate the assertion into a maxim such as ‘If you place this substance into
water or similar liquids it will dissolve.’”
Disappointed with how his word coinage became “abused in the merciless way
that words have to expect when they fall into literary clutches” (CP 5.414, 1905) in
a trend that culminated in the “deterioration of pragmatism into behaviorism”
(Nadin 1993: 223), Peirce, in 1905, began to replace the term pragmatism with the
neologism pragmaticism, a word “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers”, as its
author remarked (CP 5.414, 1905).
Parret (1983: 3) believes that there are three main lessons which the philosophy
of pragmatism has taught to linguist pragmatics: “Meaning is context bound,
rationality is discourse bound, and signifying should be seen as understanding”.
What linguistic pragmatics has learned from the tradition of pragmatism is cer-
tainly the importance of the study of language with respect to its consequences for
human action and behavior.
A common ground of Peirce’s semiotics and the classics of linguistic prag-
matics is the normative approach to communication. Among the other insights
which Peirce has contributed to linguistic pragmatics is the pragmatic “principle of
expressibility” often attributed to Searle. Searle’s (1969: 220) definition is: “For
any meaning X and any speaker S whenever S means (intends to convey, wishes to
communicate in an utterance, etc.) X then it is possible that there is some ex-
pression E such that E is an exact expression of or formulation of X.” Peirce re-
duces it to the form: “thought and expression are really one” (CP 1.349, 1903).

3.2. Reference and indexicality

Reference and deixis are key issues of linguistic pragmatics; in Peirce’s semiotics,
in which the term reference is hardly used (cf. Nöth 2006), these topics are studied
as indexical signs. Searle (1969: 26–29, 72–96) studies reference as a speech act.
Expressions may be used to refer or they may not be used to refer. A man came is
used to refer to ‘a man who came’; John is a man is not used referentially, but
predicatively (Searle 1969: 27). Necessary conditions of a referring speech act are:
 Semiotic foundations of pragmatics 185

“whatever is referred to must exist” (1969: 77); “There must exist one and only one
object to which the speaker’s utterance of the expression applies”, and: “The hearer
must be given sufficient means to identify the object from the speaker’s utterance
of the expression” (Searle 1969: 82).
Existence, singularity, and referential selectivity are criteria of the genuine
index in Peirce’s semiotics. In fact, all of Searle’s conditions of reference are con-
ditions of the genuinely indexical sign: “A genuine Index and its Object must be
existent individuals (whether things or facts)” (CP 2.283, c. 1902), and indexical
signs are “directions of what to do to find the object” (CP 2.289, c. 1893). In
contrast to Searle, Peirce also studies to what degree nonverbal signs can be genu-
ine indices and to what degree language may be insufficient for the purpose of re-
ferring to an individual object. Furthermore, he also studies another kind of index,
which he calls degenerate index. Such indices do not refer directly to individual
existing object; instead, they refer to symbols or mental objects (cf. Nöth 2000:
187). Their prototype is the relative pronoun, which is a sign referring to another
sign.
Since not all expressions are used to refer, according to Searle, not all of them
have a referent. In Peirce’s semiotics, too, only genuine indices have a referent in
the sense of referring indexically to an individual existent object, but although not
all signs have a referent, all signs have an object.15 Peirce’s semiotics is utterly in-
compatible with the dualistic theories of referential semantics which split verbal
reference into two mutually independent domains, one being external to the human
mind, the other being mental and hence internal to it. According to Peirce, not ref-
erence and sense are the correlates of the sign, but the object and the interpretant,
and all signs have an object as well as an interpretant. All words are signs which
represent an object and determine an interpretant, even the conjunction and. Savan
(1994: 189) describes its object as our experience of how of two or more entities
are combined to form a group, a set, or otherwise a whole, but since the object of
the sign need not be a material thing, we should add that the idea of a symmetrical
conjunction is among the objects of this sign.
A sign without an object would be a contradiction in terms in Peirce’s se-
miotics. In contrast to the referent of logical semantics, which is defined as an in-
dividual or class of existents, Peirce’s object of the sign may also be a feeling, an
experience, a cognition, a thought, an imagination, or even a fictional event. Unlike
the sense or meaning of a word, the interpretant is not necessarily a mental con-
cept, a thought, or an idea corresponding to the sign; it can again be a feeling, an
action, or even be a material thing, provided it is a result of a sign. For example, the
cake baked according to a cooking recipe is among the interpretants of the recipe
practically interpreted by the cook. The object of the sign may also be something
“believed formerly to have existed or expected to exist” or “something of a
general nature” (CP 2.232, 1910). Only rarely is it a “thing”. It is rather that in-
formation, knowledge, or experience which an observer of the sign must have in
186 Winfried Nöth

order to be able to interpret the sign. Peirce had adopted the term object from 13th
century scholastic terminology where objectum meant “a creation of the mind in its
reaction with a more or less real something […] upon which cognition is directed”
(MS 693A: 33; Pape 1996b: 115).
The index is defined in opposition to the symbol and to the icon as a class of
signs comprising natural but also conventional signs. An index is “really affected”
(CP 2.248, c. 1903) by, or “physically connected with, its object; the sign and its
object make an organic pair, but the interpreting mind has nothing to do with
this connection except remarking it, after it is established” (CP 2.299, c. 1895).
Among the features of Peirce’s index are that it directs the interpreter’s attention
towards the object and that it asserts nothing, but shows the object (cf. Goudge
1965: 53–54). Examples of verbal and nonverbal indexical signs are: a weather-
cock, a yardstick, a photograph, a rap on the door, a pointing finger, any other ges-
ture that indicates a present emotion, a cry for help, deictic words, proper names,
possessive, relative, personal, and selective pronouns.
All verbal utterances contain explicit or implicit indices referring to, or iden-
tifying, the situational circumstances, the time, place, or persons in whose context
they were uttered. The adequate interpretation of these indices is necessary to dis-
tinguish successfully between the relevant and irrelevant interpretation of a sign
(cf. 2.4):
If, for example, a man remarks, ‘Why, it is raining!’ it is only by some such circum-
stances as that he is now standing here looking out at a window as he speaks, which
would serve as an Index (not, however, as a Symbol) that he is speaking of this place at
this time, whereby we can be assured that he cannot be speaking of the weather on the
satellite of Procyon, fifty centuries ago. (CP 4.544, 1906)

Morris did not adopt the term index, but his category of identifiors corresponds to
Peirce’s index (1946: 154, 362). But in contrast to Peirce, Morris restricted the
class of identifiors to spatio-temporal deixis. Identifiors signify “locations in space
and time (locata) and direct behavior toward a certain region of the environment”.
The identifior “has a genuine, though minimal, sign status; it is a preparatory-
stimulus influencing the orientation of behavior with respect to the location of
something other than itself”. Morris distinguished three kinds of identifiors: indi-
cators, “which are non-language signals”, descriptors, which “describe a spatial or
temporal location”, and namors, which are “language symbols, and hence, substi-
tute signs synonymous with other identifiers”.

3.3. Meaning in dialogue and its vagueness

Several meanings are involved in the utterance of a speaker addressed to a hearer.
Searle (1969: 45–48) distinguishes between intended and conventional meanings,
Leech (1983: 6) between pragmatic and semantic meanings, and Levinson (1983:
 Semiotic foundations of pragmatics 187

16–17) between speaker meanings and utterance or sentence meanings. The vari-
ous kinds of meaning distinguished by these authors partly overlap, but some of the
criteria according to which these distinctions are made differ significantly.
Leech’s “semantic” meaning roughly corresponds to Levinson’s sentence
meaning and Searle’s conventional meaning. All three kinds of meaning are op-
posed to what is studied in linguistic pragmatics, i.e., how meaning is intended by a
speaker and understood by a hearer. Leech defines “semantic meaning” as a mean-
ing “defined purely as a property of expressions in a given language, in abstraction
from particular situations, speakers, or hearers” (1983: 6). Can such a meaning
abstracted from the circumstances of its use be called “conventional”, as Searle
suggests when he opposes “conventional” to “intended meaning”? The idea that
intended meaning is opposed to conventional meaning is rejected by Strawson
(1971), who points out that conventional meaning is not only semantic meaning
but pertains to pragmatic meaning, too, since speech acts, like words and sen-
tences, are also determined by conventions.
The study of pragmatic meaning, according to Leech (1983: 14), begins with
the study of utterances: “In fact we can correctly describe pragmatics as dealing
with utterance meaning and semantics as dealing with sentence meaning.” With
this definition, Leech’s dichotomy of semantic vs. pragmatic meaning is no longer
compatible with Levinson’s dichotomy of utterance meaning and speaker mean-
ing, which suggests that the study of speaker meaning is the domain of pragmatics
and not the study of utterance meaning.
Furthermore, Levinson’s distinction between speaker meaning and utterance
meaning raises the question of how speaker meaning can differ from utterance
meaning at all. Is not the utterance meaning the meaning conveyed by the utterer,
i.e., speaker? Can an utterer, by means of an utterance, convey any other meaning
than his own or her own meaning?
The distinctions drawn by the three authors thus do not only overlap, they also
contradict each other. If speaker meaning is the utterer’s and thus also the intended
meaning, one can no longer oppose it to utterance meaning (as Levinson does).
Speaker meaning can only be intended meaning since whatever a speaker utters
must be intended, but if utterance meaning is speaker meaning and speaker mean-
ing is intended meaning, the congruence of theses meanings makes Leech’s dis-
tinction between semantic and pragmatic meanings invalid. On the other hand, if
speaker and utterance meanings are intended meanings, and if utterances are deter-
mined by conventions, too, Searle’s distinction between intended and conventional
meanings is invalid.
If there is speaker meaning there should also be hearer meaning. Grice (1989)
takes it into consideration but the dichotomies set up by Leech, Searle and Levin-
son neglect it. Sbisà and Fabbri (1980: 314) criticize this neglect for reducing “the
interpretive work of the addressee […] to the mere recognition of a set of coherent
intentions on the part of the agent/speaker”. The neglect of the category of a hearer
188 Winfried Nöth

meaning in linguistic pragmatics is due to its normative approach to the study of

conversation. Like Chomsky, who pursues a normative approach to syntax when
he postulates the idealized competent speaker as one who commits no mistakes in
uttering sentences, Searle (1969: 20) explicitly adopts a normative approach to the
description of the speaker’s meanings in conversation when he declares that “cases
where the speaker does not say exactly what he means – the principal cases of
which are nonliteralness, vagueness, ambiguity, and incompleteness – are not the-
oretically essential to linguistic communication”.
Speakers can “mean more than they say” (Leech 1983: 9). According to Searle
(1969: 45) the difference between what a speaker means and what he or she says is
a difference between the meanings intended by the speaker and those convention-
ally inherent in his or her utterances. “Meaning is more than a matter of intention; it
is also at least sometimes a matter of convention,” says Searle (1969). The theory
of implicatures is based on the assumption of such differences between meaning
and saying.
Peirce’s theory of meaning is pragmatic throughout (cf. Hilpinen 1995: 297).
Meaning is the idea which the sign “attaches to its object” (CP 5.6, 1905), but
meanings are not a priori inherent in signs; they can only reveal themselves in pro-
cesses of semiosis (Pape 1996a: 308). Words only have meaning “in so far as we
are able to make use of it in communicating our knowledge to others and in getting
at the knowledge that these others seek to communicate to us” (CP 8.176, 1903).
Thus, no “semantic” or “conventional” meaning can be found in Peirce’s assump-
tions. In accordance with the pragmatic maxim, the meaning of an utterance re-
veals itself in its interpretations as well as in the actions and habits which are its
consequences. In one of his later definitions, Peirce concludes that “the meaning of
any [assertion] is the meaning of the composite of all the propositions which that
[assertion] would under all circumstances empower the interpreter to scribe” (MS
280, ca. 1905; cf. Pietarinen 2005: 1769). Since utterances have no inherent mean-
ing independent of their use in speech acts, Peirce does not distinguish between ut-
terance and speaker meaning. Furthermore, he distinguishes between many more
kinds of meaning. Some aspects of meaning are associated with the object of the
sign insofar as the sign presupposes collateral knowledge of its object and a com-
mon ground of knowledge shared by the speaker and the hearer. Other meanings
pertain to the interpretant, the effect of meaning created by the sign (cf. Bergman
2000: 234 for both). In the theory of the interpretant discussed above, we find the
intentional interpretant as a counterpart to speaker meaning and the effectual in-
terpretant as the counterpart to Grice’s hearer meaning, but Peirce distinguishes
other kinds of interpretants (cf. Johansen 2002: 48). His immediate interpretant,
the meaning which the sign indicates before it is interpreted, comes close to
Searle’s conventional meaning, but the interpretant is not always the meaning of a
sign in the linguistic sense. For example Peirce distinguishes between an emo-
tional, and energetic, and a logical interpretant. The first is an emotional, the sec-
 Semiotic foundations of pragmatics 189

ond a bodily reaction to a sign. Only the third comes close to the kind of meaning
which linguists usually describe since logical meaning is the meaning of a concept
but since not all words are concepts, words also have meanings which are not logi-
cal interpretants.
Peirce also acknowledges the possibility of differences between saying and
meaning so much discussed in linguistic pragmatics, but his account of how mean-
ing is conveyed in the dialogue of an utterer and an interpreter is based on other
premises. Meaning is not determined by rules, conventions, and speakers’ inten-
tions, as Searle (1969: 43–45) sees it, but by habits, common grounds, and the col-
lateral experience of the object of the sign. Meaning is not only vague by excep-
tion, but it is essentially vague (Nöth and Santaella 2009). If meaning is fuzzy in
language because of the generality and vagueness of words, it is even vaguer if the
feelings, desires, and inner conflicts are considered which speakers and hearers
have when they communicate. Emotions, e.g., are never certain and clear; they are
necessarily vague, merely expressible and interpretable in the form of allusions,
conjectures, surmises, guesses, intuitions, and communicative negotiations. There-
fore, “no communication of one person to another can be entirely definite, i.e., non-
vague. […] Wherever degree or any other possibility of continuous variation sub-
sists, absolute precision is impossible. Much else must be vague, because no man’s
interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man’s.
Even in our most intellectual conceptions, the more we strive to be precise, the
more unattainable precision seems” (CP 5.506, c. 1905).
Vagueness and generality are the two major causes of indeterminacy in conver-
sation, but this indeterminacy leads not only to misunderstandings or even failures
of communication. Instead, indeterminate signs are also a source of creativity to
both utterers and interpreters. The interpreter can and must exert his or her own
imagination in determining what the vague or general sign means. He or she can
specify what is left undetermined by associating it with meanings from his or her
own textual universe. The utterer of a vague sign has the advantage that he or she
can suggest meanings without being held responsible for them. Hence vagueness is
not only a risk that endangers communication; it also offers a useful potential of
creativity to those who communicate. Peirce develops these ideas of the advan-
tages and risks of taking and giving freedom of semantic choice with an example of
a generality and one of referential vagueness:

A sign […] is objectively general in so far as it extends to the interpreter the privilege of
carrying its determination further. Example: “Man is mortal.” To the question, What
man? the reply is that the proposition explicitly leaves it to you to apply its assertion to
what man or men you will. A sign that is objectively indeterminate in any respect is ob-
jectively vague in so far as it reserves further determination to be made in some other
conceivable sign, or at least does not appoint the interpreter as its deputy in this office.
Example: “A man whom I could mention seems to be a little conceited.” The suggestion
here is that the man in view is the person addressed; but the utterer does not authorize
190 Winfried Nöth

such an interpretation or any other application of what she says. She can still say, if she
likes, that she does not mean the person addressed. Every utterance naturally leaves the
right of further exposition in the utterer; and therefore, in so far as a sign is indetermi-
nate, it is vague, unless it is expressly or by a well-understood convention rendered gen-
eral. (CP 5.447, 1905)

Elsewhere, Peirce gives indefinite pronouns as the example of the risks and
chances which generality and vagueness bring to the semantic choices made by the
utterer and the interpreter: “‘Some’ means that the speaker is to select an instance,
while ‘Every’ or ‘Any’ means that a second person is to perform the selection. Of
course, it is easier to satisfy the conditions of a statement if one can select one’s
own examples, except for this, that he who undertakes to find an example guaran-
tees that there is one, while if he leaves the selection to another, and there is none,
his statement is not broken down” (CP 2.523, fn 1, 1893).

4. Semiotics of speech acts: Peircean and Greimasian contributions

The theory of speech acts is the branch of linguistic pragmatics to which semiotics
has both contributed as a precursor and to which it has offered alternative ap-
proaches. The semiotic precursor of speech act theory is again Peirce; the alter-
native approach to be presented in the following is an approach based on the se-
miotics of A. J. Greimas. Only passing reference can be made to the semiotic
elements of a pragmatic theory of speech acts which may be found in the typology
of discourse of Charles Morris (1946: 203–205; cf. Nöth 2000: 94) and to the rather
different elements of a semiotics of some speech acts developed in the framework
of M. A. K. Halliday’s systemic semiotics by Ventola (1987).

4.1. Peirce’s contributions to speech act theory

Peirce’s contributions to speech act theory have been the focus of interest of sev-
eral studies.16 In wider contexts they have also been discussed by Hilpinen (1995,
1998) and Pietarinen (2004, 2006). Actually, Peirce has even anticipated key terms
and issues of speech act theory, among them Austin’s thesis that by speaking we
“do” things and that this doing is an “act”. In a fragment of 1908, Peirce describes
the speech act of taking an oath in these terms: “Taking an oath is not mainly an
event of the nature of a […] Vorstellung, or representing. It is not mere saying, but
is doing. The law, I believe, calls it an ‘act’” (CP 5.546).
In anticipation of the distinction between an illocutionary act and its proposi-
tional content of an utterance later drawn by Searle (1969: 23–29), Peirce defines a
proposition as the logical content of a sentence, irrespective of the particular
“mood” in which it is uttered (cf. Brock 1981a: 281). Sentences differ from utter-
ances as types differ from tokens:
 Semiotic foundations of pragmatics 191

A sentence, in the sense here used, is a single object. Every time it is copied or pro-
nounced, a new sentence is made. But a proposition is not a single thing and cannot
properly be said to have any existence. Its mode of being consists in its possibility. A
proposition which might be expressed has all the being that belongs to propositions al-
though nobody ever expresses it or thinks it. It is the same proposition every time it is
thought, spoken, or written, whether in English, German, Spanish, Tagálog, or how. A
proposition consists in a meaning, whether adopted or not, and however expressed. (MS
599: 5–6, ca. 1902)
Among the speech acts which Peirce describes as moods of propositions are asser-
tion, judgment, question, denial, doubt, command, teaching, taking an oath, laying
a wager, lying, poetic language, and forms of politeness.17 Expressing a proposi-
tion in one of these moods “involves an act, an exertion of energy, and is liable to
real consequences, or effects” (CP 5.547, ca. 1908). The “exertion of energy” as-
sociated with these moods is evidently equivalent to Searle’s illocutionary force of
speech acts. Examples and illustrations of the consequences which such speech
acts have for their utterers and interpreter are: “An assertion is an act by which a
person makes himself responsible for the truth of a proposition. Nobody ever as-
serted that the moon is made of green cheese; yet this is a familiar proposition”
(MS 599: 5, ca. 1902). The person who took an oath has only made an assertion if
the denotation of the proposition is a fact (CP 4.500, ca. 1903):
[An oath] would be followed by very real effects, in case the substance of what is as-
serted should be proved untrue. This ingredient, the assuming of responsibility, which is
so prominent in solemn assertion, must be present in every genuine assertion. For
clearly, every assertion involves an effort to make the intended interpreter believe what
is asserted, to which end a reason for believing it must be furnished. But if a lie would
not endanger the esteem in which the utterer was held, nor otherwise be apt to entail
such real effects as he would avoid, the interpreter would have no reason to believe the
assertion. (CP 5.546, 1908)
By contrast, a conversation solely determined by the conventions of politeness has
no consequences as to its truth: “Nobody takes any positive stock in those conven-
tional utterances, such as ‘I am perfectly delighted to see you,’ upon whose false-
hood no punishment at all is visited” (CP 5.546, 1908). Among the speech acts
whose consequences depend on the truth of the proposition expressed are not only
assertions and oaths, but also laying a wager. Peirce describes the consequences of
these speech acts as follows:
What is the difference between making an assertion and laying a wager? Both are acts
whereby the agent deliberately subjects himself to evil consequences if a certain prop-
osition is not true. Only when he offers to bet he hopes the other man will make himself
responsible in the same way for the truth of the contrary proposition; while when he
makes an assertion he always (or almost always) wishes the man to whom he makes it to
be led to do what he does. Accordingly in our vernacular ‘I will bet’ so and so, is the
phrase expressive of a private opinion which one does not expect others to share, while
‘You bet’ is a form of assertion intended to cause another to follow suit. (CP 5.31, 1902)
192 Winfried Nöth

Peirce considers not only the conditions of publicly expressed speech acts but also
such mental acts, as a judgment or a doubt. “A judgment is a mental act by which
one makes a resolution to adhere to a proposition as true, with all its logical con-
sequences” (CP 5.31, 1902). Among the mental acts expressing propositions which
are not asserted is the doubt: “I may state it to myself and worry as to whether I
shall embrace it or reject it, being dissatisfied with the idea of doing either”
(CP 5.31, 1902). Peirce also specifies several of those conditions of speech acts
which Searle later called “preparatory conditions” (cf. Brock 1981a: 282). For
example, Peirce’s formulation of what Searle calls the “preparatory condition” of a
speech act is: “The only way to get a sufficient understanding of a proposition is to
imagine one person communicates in some language to a second. The utterer does
not, properly speaking, communicate it to the interpreter unless the latter is at the
time ignorant (or oblivious) of its truth” (MS 284: 41, 1905; Brock 1981a).
The distinction between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary effects of a
speech act has almost no counterpart in Peirce’s theory of speech acts. A conse-
quence of the pragmatic maxim is that speech acts do not only sometimes have per-
locutionary effects; they have always such effects. The study of these effects is the
study of the interpretant, which is a necessary constituent of all signs (see 2.4).

4.2. Speech acts as narrative scenarios: The Greimasian approach

Elements of the structural semiotics of A. J. Greimas18 are the foundation of a the-
ory of speech acts developed by Sbisà and Cooren.19 Sbisà (1983: 100–101) criti-
cizes Searle’s speech act theory for being based on a causal theory of action (cf.
Davidson 1980) which results in a too strictly speaker centered approach to the
study of dialogues. According to Sbisà, the causal approach to speech acts means a
regrettable “return of the subject, the triumph of the empirical speaker” and the “re-
suscitation of the use of introspection as a criterion of sense” (1983: 100–101). To
liberate pragmatics from its mentalist bias, she proposes a semiotic conception of
acts and actions. In accordance with the definition proposed by Greimas and
Courtés (1979: 5), Sbisà defines an act as a “fair-être”, a ‘make-be’, i.e., “the pro-
ducing of a state (or of a change of state)”. She argues that the agent of an act thus
defined is not the cause of the speech act but simply its presupposition. Instead of
the study of speech acts, Sbisà proposes the study of interactions between speakers
and hearers. The focus should be on the hearer as an active participant of the dia-
logue; it should be taken into consideration that the hearer has the choice “(i) to se-
lect an acceptable interpretation of the speech act, and (ii) to either accept the
speech act, under such an interpretation, as a successful act, or to completely or
partly reject it as more or less inappropriate and ‘unhappy’” (Sbisà and Fabbri
1980: 305).
Instead of investigating the utterer’s agency in dialogic interaction, Sbisà
(1983: 102, 1987: 259) deals with action as an “ascribed concept”: the interpreter
 Semiotic foundations of pragmatics 193

“ascribes a certain change-in-the-world to the responsibility of the [utterer as the]

agent”. In this perspective, agency shifts from the utterer to the interpreter, whose
decision it is to ascribe intentions and meanings to an utterer or not. With this shift
of perspective, the analysis can take into consideration ascriptions of agency to
quasi-utterers in Peirce’s sense (see 2.5). According to Sbisà (1987: 259), the ut-
terer of a sign, whose agency is now merely an agency ascribed by the hearer, can
thus “be a human individual, an infra-individual instance (e.g., the Unconscious), a
super-individual construction (class, party, society, church, and the like), and even
a personified natural agent.” Hence, in a semiotic speech act theory adopting these
premises, not only speakers are agents, but even “beings other than humans can be
said to do things with words” (Cooren 2006: 8). Two common examples of assert-
ive and commissive speech acts in which agency is ascribed to nonhuman agents
are: “This decision contests his result” and “This signature commits you to pay-
ment” (Cooren 2006: 17).
Based on her assumption that acts result in transformations of states, Sbisà
(1985: 529) arrives at a redefinition of basic concepts of speech act theory: (1) “A
speech act is the production of an utterance insofar as it brings about a change for
which the utterer is taken to be responsible […].” (2) “An illocutionary act is the
production of a change of context at the conventional level of the addresser’s and
the addressee’s modal competences.” (3) “A perlocutionary act is the production of
a change of context at the material (psychological or praxeological) level of the ad-
dressee’s reactions.” An example of her Greimasian approach to the illocutionary
force of speech acts is Sbisà’s (1985: 530) study of the discursive figure of manipu-
lation, which she defines as the agency of a manipulating addresser who puts the
manipulated addressee into a position of “not being able not to do”. The application
of Greimas’s theory of modalities leads Sbisà (1984: 100) to a typology of modal
changes of the speakers’ and hearers’ states in speech acts, e.g.: in exercitives (such
as granting or permitting), the speaker addresses the addressee in the deontic mood
of ‘being allowed’ (can), and the effect in the addressee is one of the modality of
obligation (ought); in commissives, these two modal ascriptions are inverse.
Taking up Sbisà’s and Greimas’s elements of a semiotic pragmatics, Cooren
(2000: 81–169) proposes a model based on the premise that speech acts involve a
narrative scenario typically involving three actants: the speaker as the agent, the
hearer as the recipient, and the utterance as the object of transfer (Cooren 2000:
86). Uttering is seen as an act of production in which “the object produced by the
agent”, i.e., the utterance, “is irremediably severed or dissociated from its origin”
so that the producer “no longer has control over the object produced” and acquires
an agency of its own (Cooren 2000: 82–83). A speech act is always embedded in a
plurality of verbal and nonverbal texts; it does not only refer to, it also produces a
situation. Continuing to act in absence of its utterer, the speech act becomes “the
product of multiple texts that ‘speak on behalf’ of their producer, creating one or
several different situations” (Cooren 2000: 87).
194 Winfried Nöth

Following Greimas’s discourse grammar, which describes narrative roles by

means of the actantial model of verb valency of Tesnière (1959), Cooren develops
a typology of illocutionary acts based on verb valencies. According to this model,
assertives are bivalent and performatives are trivalent speech acts (2000: 89). The
latter involve an agent, an object, and a recipient. The tetravalent actantial model
of the factive verbs, which involve four actants, then “allows opening up the tradi-
tional speaker/hearer schema by acknowledging action from a distance, which
could be called ‘tele-action’” (Cooren 2006: 2). The utterance “John asked Mary to
send his report to Bill” is an example of a tetravalent teleactive speech act. To tele-
communicate, thus means to delegate a speech act to another agent who communi-
cates it on behalf of the delegating agent: one discursive agent mobilizes “other
agents that serve as representative or delegates” of the delegating agent (Cooren
2000: 6).
In view of the fundamental differences between Peirce’s pragmaticist semiotics
and Greimas’s structural discourse semiotics, it is remarkable that both schools of
semiotics, for very different reasons, agree in their criticism of the speaker-cen-
tered approaches to speech acts. It is equally remarkable that, quite independently
of each other, both schools of semiotics postulate models of semiotic agency in
verbal interaction radically distinct from those proposed by the classics of lin-
guistic pragmatics. Nevertheless, the fundamental difference between the two se-
miotic approaches in this latter respect must not be ignored. Whereas Greimas’s
model attributes agency to actants in discourse, Peirce attributes agency and auton-
omy to the sign itself.

Notes

1. Cf. Posner (1991) and Nöth (2000: 433–438).

2. See Parret (1983), Posner (1997), Nadin (1987, 1993), Deledalle, ed. (1989), Driel, ed.
(1991), Hilpinen (1995, 1998), Pankow (1995), Pietarinen (2004, 2005, 2006), Rellstab
(2008), and Andersen (2009).
3. Cf. Liszka (1996: 3–15), Pietarinen (2004), and Houser (2009: 91).
4. CP refers to Peirce (1931–58).
5. Cf. Fisch (1986: 339), Liszka (1996: 109), and Bergman (2007).
6. EP 2 refers to Peirce (1998).
7. Oehler (1990, 1995), Colapietro (1995), Bergman (2000, 2004), Santaella and Nöth
(2004), and Pietarinen (2006).
8. See also Prieto (1966, 1975; cf. Nöth 2000: 228).
9. See 2.2 and Burkhardt (1990).
10. MS refers to Peirce (1979).
11. Cf. Allwood (1978: 4) and Levinson (1983: 103).
12. For Peirce’s distinction between presciss (from prescind) and precise see Spinks (1991:
19–23) and CP 5.449, 1905. Roughly, prescission is giving “attention to one element
and neglect of the other” (CP 1.549, 1867).