  Connected with Peirce’s insistence on the ubiquity of mind in the cosmos is the importance he attached to what he called “semeiotic,” the theory of signs in the most general sense. Although a few points concerning this subject were made earlier in this article, some further discussion is in order. What Peircean meant by “semeiotic” is almost totally different from what has come to be called “semiotics,” and which hails not so much from Peirce as from Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles W. Morris. Even though Peircean semeiotic and semiotics are often confused, it is important not to do so.  Peircean semeiotic derives ultimately from the theory of signs of Duns Scotus and its later development by John of St. Thomas (John Poinsot).  In Peirce’s theory the sign relation is a triadic relation that is a special species of the genus: the representing relation. Whenever the representing relation has an instance, we find one thing (the “object”) being represented by (or: in) another thing (the “representamen”) and being represented to (or: in) a third thing (the “interpretant.”) Moreover, the object is represented by the representamen in such a way that the interpretant is thereby “determined” to be also a representamen of the object to yet another interpretant. That is to say, the interpretant stands in the representing relation to the same object represented by the original representamen, and thus the interpretant represents the object (either again or further) to yet another interpretant. Obviously, Peirce’s complicated definition entails that we have an infinite sequence of representamens of an object whenever we have any one representamen of it.