It may be helpful to map some Peircean semiotic concepts onto Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to see how they illuminate each other. Ricoeur doesn’t use Peirce in this way himself, but he certainly used much of the semiotic work that built upon CS Peirce’s initial contributions to the field. Peirce adumbrates three types of signs: the icon, which relates the sign to the signifier via resemblance, the index via material causality, and the symbol via convention, each of which contains various degrees of freedom relative to the degrees of determination of each’s Peircean “Interpretant.” Peirce formulated the relation of the sign to its signified as a triad that included what he called the “Interpretant,” which was the intermediation of semantic meaning within the semiotic relation of seeing one thing (the signified) in terms of another (the sign). The sign did not directly present the signified in an unmediated way but through a concept, which for Peirce was the Interpretant in the intention of the interpreter.

Paul Ricoeur also formulated semantic meaning in terms of the relative degrees of freedom given to the intention of the interpretant, which for Ricouer was the hermeneutic circle of interpretation itself. The signifier determines its signified incompletely, which leaves room for possible interpretations in the gap between them. The irreducible ambiguity of this gap is generative because new semantics and new concepts can be formed in the clash of interpretations within the conceptual mediation of the intention of the interpretant, which mirrors Ricoeur’s depiction of a metaphor as a clash of meanings that poetically renewed and increased being within the degrees of freedom given by the virtuality of the imagination.

The more distantiated the relation between the signifier and its signified, which was the relative level of abstraction of the interpretant, the more degrees of freedom contained in the possibility space actuated by the relation. Even semantic possibility spaces that seemed mostly determined, such as the indexical relation of cause and effect, can be reopened to reinterpretation, or reimagination, through the clash of possible interpretations given by the interpretant of the metaphor. One of Ricoeur’s favorite examples is GM Hopkins’ metaphorical predication, “The mind contains mountains,” which clearly contains sublime degrees of freedom for the poetic imaginations of a community of interpreters. For Ricoeur, as for Giles Deleuze, imaginal virtuality was actual and as ontologically real as a physically actualized possibility space, just as a conceptual realization in this actual possibility space was as ontologically real as a physical realization. Finally, CS Peirce’s “Hypostatic Abstract” has many illuminating overlaps with Ricoeur’s notion of semantic realization in the poetic imagination to be covered in the next episode.

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