Signs Conveying Information: On the Range of Peirce's Notion of Propositions – Dicisigns

This chapter introduces Peirce's notion of proposition, "Dicisign." It goes through its main characteristics and argues that its strengths have been overlooked. It does not fall prey to some of the problems in the received notion of propositions (their dependence upon language, upon compositionality, upon human intention). This implies that the extension of Peircean Dicisigns is wider in two respects: they comprise 1) propositions not or only partially linguistic, using in addition gesture, picture, diagrams, etc.; 2) non-human propositions in biology studied by biosemiotics.