Sign, Ground, and Interpretant

This chapter begins by elaborating on the relationships among what Peirce called sign, object, and interpretant. It goes on to explore how memory, mimesis, and metaphor form the ground for these relationships, and in the process transform people’s understandings of themselves in the world, sometimes with enormous consequences. The chapter achieves this by analyzing aspects of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, China’s cataclysmic Taiping Rebellion in the nineteenth century, reworked temples to a goddess in contemporary Taiwan and mainland China, and memorials to the Holocaust in Vienna and Jerusalem.