Semiotic, Semiology, and Semiogony

A Semiotic theory such as Peirce's is more accurately classified as 'Semiology'. What it does present is an account of the structure of the sign-signified-interpretant relation. However, it offers no explicit 'Semiogony', i. e. an explanation as to how a bare phenomenon becomes transformed into a sign, to begin with. His preference for Inductive processes suggests that he implicitly subscribes to an Associationist Semiogony, in which one phenomenon is taken to represent another on the basis of their prior constant conjunction. Now, the similarity of such Associationism to Hume's theory of Causality might suggest that the Semiogony of a neo-Kantian would be based on some a priori Category. However, Cassirer's Semiogony is Hegelian--he argues that phenomena are fundamentally expressive, with both sign and signified being entailed in a unitary phenomenon, e. g. a smile. Furthermore, their compresence is dialectical, leading first to their separation, and, subsequently, to their reconciliation. Hence, according to this theory, the disassociation of sign and signified precedes what amounts to a re-associtation, so what Associationism offers is a merely derivative, partial Semiogony. But Cassirer's Semiogony also has a Semiological consequence--if a phenomenon is fundamentally expressive, it presents a counter-example to Peirce's thesis that sign and signified are distinct phenomena.