Welby’s Significs and Semeiotics of Peirce: to the Problem of Sign and Meaning

The aim of the article is to grow some parallels between significs of Victoria Lady Welby and Charles Peirce’s semeiotics.
Ch.Peirce is well-known philosopher and one of the founding fathers of modern semiotics. The name of Lady Welby is not well known to domestic scholars, but she may be rightfully con-sidered as real “mother-founder” of semiotics. In the frame of significs meaning is treated as trichotomy which includes sense, meaning and significance as dif-ferent levels of sifnification. Significs
emphasizes the dynamic character of sig-nifi cation process and the necessity of considering it in broad context, especial-ly in the
context of axiology. The authors specially note that trichotomy “sense-meaning-significance” correlates with such trichotomies as, for example, “planetary-solar-cosmic”. Trichotomy of meaning in significs corresponds to Peirce’ division of the interpretant into “immediate interpretant”, “dynamical interpretant” and “final interpretant” as Peirce himself describe this correspondence in one of his letter to Lady Welby. The author of the article believe that there is evidence in favor of the influence of Welby’s ideas on the semiotic conception of Peirce. From the authors point of view approach of significs and semeiotics both may be related to the interpretative semiotics which considers signs and meaning in the frame of the continuous process of generation, transformation, and translation in the semiotic sense of word. As a result of their research the authors reach the conclusion that significs and semeiotics laid the foundations of modern global semiotics and modern semioethics.