Signs Conveying Information: On the Range of Peirce's Notion of Propositions: Dicisigns

摘要

This paper introduces Peirce 's notion of proposition, "Dicisign. " It goes through its main characteristics and argues that its strengths have been overlooked. It does not fall prey to some of the problems in the received notion of propositions (their dependence upon language, upon compositionality, upon human intention). This implies the extension of Peircean Dicisigns is wider in two respects: they comprise I) propositions not or only partially linguistic, using instead gestures, pictures, diagrams, etc.; 2) non-human propositions in biology studied by biosemiotics.