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Peirce and Hjelmslev: Man-as-sign/man-as-language

Peirce's two articles, 'Questions concerning certain faculties claimed for man' and 'Some consequences concerning four incapacities', are generally recognized as a denial of epistemological foundationalism (see, e.g., Delaney 1973: 240-251; Prendergast 1977: 288-305). In the former article, Peirce rejects any notion of Cartesian 'intuitions' as foundations for knowledge, and any Kantian 'noumenal' reality existing beyond the limits of knowledge. That which is real, for Peirce, is knowable, and the process of knowing is semiotically rather than intuitively grounded. Peirce's arguments, Oehler (1979: 70) asserts, provide 'the foundation for a totally new way of considering the problem of cognition and reality'. In the latter article, Peirce examines the 'consequences' of his rejection of foundationalism. The significant themes to which Peirce's 'four incapacities' give rise culminate in the claim that man is a sign, and the sign is language. I argue that Peirce's arguments for a semiotic theory of cognition, together with his assertion that 'the word or sign which man uses is the man ... my language is the sum total of myself (1931-1958: 5.314), as a consequent of this theory, provide the basis for asserting that language is the primary constitutive element of human reality. The context of Oehler's assessment of the semiotic basis of Peirce's theory of cognition is that, since '[t]he object of cognition is reality', theories of cognition are by definition theories of reality. Peirce considers two views of reality in his writings. On the one hand, there is the view of the real as presented in his essay The fixation of belief, wherein Peirce argues for the reality of an external world, 'whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them'. This is the reality of objects as objects, and is the 'fundamental hypothesis' of 'the method of science' (5.384). On the other hand, there is the view of reality presented in Peirce's rejection of foundationalism. This is the reality that is constructed through a process of semiosis, that is, the reality of general conceptions and general signs. The context of Peirce's second view of reality is his interpretation of