Tracing signs of a developing science

The correspondence between Victoria Lady Welby and Charles Sanders Peirce started in 1903 when Welby sent Peirce her book What is meaning?, and continued with the exchange of letters about language and meaning until 1911, when Welby died. While Welby elaborated from a linguistic and semantic perspective a new science of meaning and communication called significs, Peirce worked on semiotics, the study of the logic of signs, from a pansemiotic view in which the universe is perfused with, if not composed exclusively by, signs. Although Peirce and Welby probably had a different view on the concept of sign, they shared an interest on language and meaning, and their correspondence is a very important document for semiotic studies. The value of these letters is mostly noticed by Peirce's scholars, since an important development on his theory of signs can be found in them. In addition, their correspondence is of great significance for the history of modern semiotics. In the nineteenth century many modern theories of meaning were proposed, but for the first time a general theory of signs was developed and called semiotics. Both Peirce and Welby played a crucial part in this and their correspondence is a great source of signs for better understanding the development of semiotics

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