Interrogating Peircean Semiotics: A Critical Exploration

Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic model of the sign—consisting of the Sign, Object, and Interpretant—remains one of the most influential contributions to semiotics. It is often celebrated for bringing mind, meaning, and reference into a unified account of semiosis. Yet when examined critically, especially from a perspective attuned to language as social meaning-making, Peirce’s model raises several concerns.

The Peircean Sign: A Receiver’s Eye View?

Peirce defines a sign as something that “stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity.” The triad includes:

• The Sign (also called Representamen): the form taken,

• The Object: that to which the sign refers,

• The Interpretant: the effect of the sign on the mind—a sort of understanding or interpretive response.

From the outset, the model is heavily oriented toward the interpreter rather than the producer of meaning. This makes it, fundamentally, a theory of interpretation rather than of communication. The sign becomes something that acts upon a mind, not something a mind does.

This invites the question: where is the meaning-maker in Peirce’s model? Peirce speaks of “somebody” for whom the sign stands for something—but that “somebody” is cast as a recipient, not a participant in a shared system of meaning. Semiosis here appears as a mental process, not a verbal or social process.

The Object: Referential Realism Reasserted?

The Object in Peirce’s model is what the sign is about. But Peirce’s approach to the Object is curiously undifferentiated: he treats physical things, abstract concepts, events, even other signs, all under the same heading. The Object is simply “what the sign refers to.”

This creates two major problems:

1. It collapses ontological distinctions. A tree and “justice” are both Objects, yet clearly belong to different orders of experience. The model provides no mechanism for distinguishing these semiotically—no stratum or system in which different types of meaning are organised or generated.

2. It naturalises reference. Peirce’s signs are taken to refer to their Objects as if the relationship were somehow direct or inherent, even if mediated. The real-world object is what anchors the sign—thus embedding the model in a kind of realist ontology that may sit awkwardly with the fluid, intersubjective, and socially negotiated nature of meaning.

A Noun-Centred Ontology?

Peirce’s conception of the sign seems to emerge from a philosophical orientation toward “things”. Even abstract concepts are assimilated into a system of reference that appears to privilege the noun over the verb, the entity over the process.

This perspective encourages a static view of meaning: signs are about things, rather than doings or becomings. From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which begins with process and interaction, this is a telling asymmetry.

One might speculate that Peirce theorised semiosis by reflecting on what things mean rather than how meaning is made. His categories of icon, index, and symbol are organised around types of relation to Objects, rather than types of interpersonal or ideational meaning.

The Interpretant: Layered Mind-Effects

The Interpretant, Peirce’s most original contribution, is the idea that signs generate responses in the mind—understandings, feelings, actions. Peirce distinguishes immediate, dynamic, and final interpretants, corresponding roughly to the form of the sign, its effect in context, and its generalisable meaning over time.

Yet here again, meaning is constructed as an internal effect, not a social act. The Interpretant is not a negotiation between speakers, but an internalisation within the mind. It makes Peircean semiotics primarily a psychological theory of meaning rather than a sociological one.

This is not a criticism from the outside—it is embedded in Peirce’s own concern with logic, phenomenology, and categories of thought. His triadic model was part of a broader metaphysical system, not a linguistic or communicative one.

The Motivation: Addressing Saussure’s Silence on Mind?

Peirce’s semiotics can also be read as a response to what he might have seen as an excessive formalism in Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist model. Where Saussure bracketed the referent and focused on the internal structure of language, Peirce insisted on reintroducing mind, cognition, and reference.

In this sense, the model is motivated by a desire to reintegrate meaning and thought into a philosophical understanding of signs. But this gain comes at the cost of overlooking meaning as social action—as something co-constructed through interaction, shaped by systems, and realised through language.

Conclusion: Valuable, but Incomplete

Peirce’s model offers profound insight into how signs can operate at multiple levels of interpretation, and his typology of signs has had wide influence. But the model is limited by its orientation toward individual cognition, its conflation of all referents as “Objects,” and its silence on the systemic, stratified, and interactive nature of meaning-making.

From a contemporary standpoint—especially one informed by functional linguistics and discourse theory—Peirce’s semiotics appears less like a general theory of signs and more like a theory of how minds respond to signs.

That, in itself, is valuable. But it is only one part of the story.