Charles Sanders Peirce

In this course

Peirce's triadic semiotics—the relationship between representamen (sign), object, and interpretant—provides the theoretical architecture for understanding how meaning is constructed and contested in art and culture. The course readings deploy Peirce to analyze Duchamp's strategic manipulation of signs and language, showing how art can exploit the gap between object and interpretation to challenge conventional meaning-making. His framework thus becomes essential for thinking through how systems of signification underpin both artistic practice and the algorithmic systems that increasingly mediate our encounters with signs and representations.

Background

Charles Sanders Peirce was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". According to philosopher Paul Weiss, writing in 1934, Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician". Bertrand Russell wrote in 1959, "he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever".

Mentioned in 3 readings