This chapter presents a detailed explanation of Peirce’s early and late views on semiotic indeterminacy and then considers how those views might be applied within biosemiotics. Peirce distinguished two different forms of semiotic indeterminacy: generality and vagueness. He defined each in terms of the “right” that indeterminate signs extend, either to their interpreters in the case of generality or to their utterers in the case of vagueness, to further determine their meaning. On Peirce’s view, no sign is absolutely determinate, i.e., (...) every sign is indeterminate to at least some degree and so exhibits some degree of generality or vagueness. If Peirce was right about this, then no instance of biosemiosis is completely determinate—every biosign must be general or vague to some degree. I show that on Peirce’s view, whether a sign is general or vague depends on its immediate object, “the idea which the sign is built upon,” and I explain how Peirce would go about identifying the immediate object of a sign lacking both a minded utterer and a minded interpreter—an identification that must be possible if any biosign is indeterminate. (shrink)

In the 1890s, Peirce reformulated quantification theory by expressing it in a language of diagrams, called existential graphs. Peirce thought that the iconicity of his graphs made them suitable for analyzing logical reasoning. Iconic signs can be said to show their meaning, and this paper studies the ways in which graphs do this. Peirce's pragmatic analysis of propositions resembles game-theoretical semantics, and existential graphs show what they mean by displaying the structure of the semantic game for the proposition represented by (...) a graph. (shrink)