A SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO THE ZHOUYI FROM A PEIRCEAN PERSPECTIVE

IN BANG

ABSTRACT

This paper aims at the semiotic interpretation on the signs of the Zhouyi. Semiotics, although it
was born from western background, could give us the effective tool for understanding the semiotic
character of the Zhouyi, because the use of the signs had been the universally diffused phenomena in
the ancient times. In this paper, the semiotic aspect of Zhouyi is explained mainly from the perspective
of C. S. Peirce who represents the American semiotic tradition. His semiotic viewpoint could give us
a useful frame of reference for clarifying the Zhouyi’s semiotic aspect. Peirce’s semiotic view implies
two important philosophical doctrines, namely, the pansemiotism and synechism. Pansemiotism is
the view that all environmental phenomena are semiotic in their essence, whereas the synechism is
the tendency to regard everything as continuous. In Peirce’s synechism that does not distinguish the
physical phenomena from the spiritual phenomena, we can find the similar element analogous with
the worldview included in the Zhouyi. Peirce analyzed the meaning of semiosis through the triadic
relation among the representamen, the object, and the interpretant. Three elements of the Zhouyi’s
semiosis consists of the image of the gua, the phrase of the gua, and the meaning of the gua. In
addition, Peirce introduced the trichotomy of signs according to which the signs are classified into the
index, the icon and the symbol. Based on Peirce’s definition, the sign of the Zhouyi can be regarded as
having the character of both icon and symbol. But, the index does not belong to the character of the
Zhouyi sign. Finally, Peirce admitted the abduction, or the abductive inference as the method of logical
reasoning in addition to the induction and deduction. Abductive reasoning is the process of adopting
an explanatory hypothesis, when an inquirer considers of a set of seemingly unrelated facts, armed
with an intuition that they are somehow connected. As the historian, Carlo Ginzburg suggested, the
abductive reasoning is a way of thinking that is typical to the divinatory paradigm. As the divinatory
paradigm is based on the personal knowledge, and can be obtained by conjecture, Ginzburg also
called it as the evidential, or conjectual way of thinking. Peirce thought that the abduction played a
crucial role in forming the logic of the scientific discovery. He interpreted the abduction essentially
as a creative process of generating a new hypothesis. Unfortunately, the importance of the abduction
has been largely overruled by the analytic tradition in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy.
However, to make an antithesis between science and divination as the rationalism and irrationalism
does not help at all for the discovery of truth.