معناشناسی و تحلیل اجتماعی چیزهای مادی

This article discusses certain aspects of Peircean semiotics as they can contribute to the social analysis of material artifacts. It focuses on the concepts of iconicity and indexicality, paying particular attention to their roles in mediating contingency and causality, and to their relation with possible actions. Because iconicity and indexicality themselves ‘assert nothing,’ their various social roles turn on their mediation by ‘Thirdness’. This circumstance requires an account of semiotic ideologies and their practical embodiment in representational economies. The article concludes with a call for a richer concept of the multiple possible modes of ‘objectification’ in social life.