What is a "symbol"?

In Voltaire’s Zadig and the other examples mentioned above, symbols represent (i.e. represent or point to) an object, event, action, repeated process, state of affairs, or emotional state. wait. These different kinds of referents (that is, the things to which they refer) can be real or imagined.

For example, the Queen's Bitch and Zadig's Resourcefulness are both fictional works of Voltaire. The only thing they have in common is that they all exist or occur in objects, processes, and states in a material, historical, or fictional world.

In other words, symbols can represent relationships in the real world as well as relationships in the imaginary world. While this is very true and important, it is still insufficient because there is still a lack of an element that Peirce called an “explanandum.” This symbolic component can be found in Zadig's successful description of the queen's lost bitch.

For example, he said, "I saw animal tracks on the sand, and I could easily tell that they were the tracks of a dog. There were some long lines printed on the small pile of sand between the tracks. I knew it was a female dog with saggy breasts that had given birth to puppies a few days ago.” Zadig understood and explained some of the characteristic marks on the beach and their relationships (the long lines between paw prints on the beach). So the phenomenon (long streaks on the beach) only becomes a symbol when interpreted (the streaks as marks on a bitch's nipples). This means that symbols not only imply representational or referential relations to objects, states, and processes in the world, but also indicate a possible meaning.

Using Peirce's terminology, it can be said that signs, in a broad sense, consist of three interrelated elements: (1) signs in the narrow sense, also referring to representations, that is, signs that refer to something else; (2) the object, that is, what the sign represents and what the representation represents; (3) the (possible or potential) meaning that the sign takes into account, which can be embodied in a new sign, which Peirce calls the interpretant. In Zadig's case, the pattern on the beach is the symbol (representative); the queen's bitch is the represented object; Zadig's interpretation and translation of the (possible) meaning of the pattern is the interpretant.

In his famous definition of the sign, Peirce provided the following explanation of this triadic relationship:

A sign, or representation, is something that represents something For people, to replace something in some aspect or with some ability. It can speak to someone, that is, it can create an equal symbol, or even a superior symbol, in that person's mind. The sign it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. This symbol refers to something, its object, but it does not refer to all aspects of its object, but to aspects related to a certain idea, which I usually call the basis of the representation.

Even if Peirce retained only a small point of the concept of foundation in semiotics, it should be noted that signs reproduce concrete properties of objects. The lines on the sand led Zadig to deduce that they were left by a female dog, and that the female dog had recently given birth to puppies, which were lame in one leg and had long ears. However, the marks in the sand gave him no such clues - like the color of the dog or the sharpness of its teeth. In fact, it is impossible to determine how many attributes this animal has because the symbols provide no relevant information. Therefore, Peirce distinguished between two objects:

1. Immediate object (immediate object), the object directly represented by the symbol (in this example, Zadig reconstructed the appearance of the dog based on the traces left by the dog) ).

2. Dynamic object (dynamic object), an object outside the actual symbolic relationship (the lost dog in the example), and can be reproduced by countless different symbols.

Portrait photography reproduces the image of a person at a specific moment. This image is formed at different distances, angles and specific light; it is shot with a specific camera and a specific way of focusing, using a specific film and a specific way. Rinse and process. This is all the characteristics that determine the immediate object. Furthermore, the person represented in the photograph, i.e. its dynamic object, can be the source of an indefinite number of representations, i.e. signs that contain or point to the immediate object, including the visual and mental representation of him/her when we see him/her .