From subjectivity to subjunctivity in children’s performatives: Peirce’s endoporeutic principle

Abstract Peirce’s treatment of index as seme, pheme, and delome supplies convincing explanatory support for gestural performatives. His semiotics evidences how non-symbolic signs can present, urge, and submit propositions, absent more conventional signs. Peirce uses index as a powerful agent to establish and highlight the implicit intentions pregnant within communicative acts, especially obviated in the interpretants which unfold in intra- and intersubjective exchanges. This inquiry explores the ontogeny of children’s prelinguistic gestures and posits, as does Austin, that these acts alone qualify as performatives given their communicative purpose. These indexical gestures are so foundational to proposition-making that they imply predicates and ultimately scaffold the construction of arguments. In fact, the propositions and arguments that index (shapes implicitly or explicitly) facilitate social ends as articulated in Peirce’s endoporeutic principle. This endoporeutic principle materializes when sign producers influence interpreters, urging them to adopt or recommending that they adopt proposed propositions/arguments housed in gestural sequences (performatives). What these early performative gestures ultimately exemplify is a social, subjunctive effect. This incorporates the Peircean principle of “submitting,” not compelling (to the mind of another for adoption), potential habits of mind.