69249454-chandler-semiotics

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SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS
play the role of a signifier is familiar from using a dictionary and finding
oneself going beyond the original definition to look up yet another
word which it employs. Peirce’s emphasis on sense-making involves a
rejection of the equation of ‘content’ and meaning; the meaning of a
sign is not contained within it, but arises in its interpretation. Note that
Peirce refers to an ‘interpretant’ (the sense made of a sign) rather than
directly to an interpreter, though the interpreter’s presence is implicit
– which arguably applies even within Saussure’s model (Thibault
1997, 184). As we have seen, Saussure also emphasized the value of
a sign lying in its relation to other signs (within the relatively static
structure of the sign system) but the Peircean concept (based on the
highly dynamic process of interpretation) has a more radical potential
which was later to be developed by poststructuralist theorists. Arising
from Peirce’s concept of the interpretant is the notion of dialogical
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FIGURE 1.6 Peirce’s successive interpretants