SOURCE: "Peirce's Theory of Signs," in A Perfusion of Signs, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, Indiana University Press, 1977, pp. 22-37.

In the following excerpt, Zeman discusses Peirce's semiotic approach to logic and science.

The lifetime of Charles Sanders Peirce spanned a period of tremendous change and development in human knowledge, in the sciences in general. He was a young man of twenty in the year that Origin of Species was published; he approached the end of his life just before Albert Einstein presented us with General Relativity. His lifetime saw the emergence of psychology as a discipline separate from philosophy, a birth attended by philosopher-psychologists such as his good friend William James. The work of Peirce, like that of the other American Pragmatists, reflects the ferment of the times.

His thought bears the imprint of science, not the science of that Nineteenth Century which, as Loren Eiseley has...