Significs, Pragmatism and Mother-Sense. Welby’s Conversations with Peirce and Others

Welby’s correspondence with Peirce began with his review of her What is Meaning? (1903), published by Hardwick in 1977, a contribution to spreading Peirce’s later thinking, but also to reproposing Welby’s ‘significs’. This is encounter between the pragmatist Peirce’s approach to sign studies and Welby’s significs oriented by mother-sense. A dialogue, real and not formal, between two conceptions of meaning which, notwithstanding differences, meet in a participative contribution to the construction of the sign science – from Peirce to semiotics, from Welby to significs. The difference does not only concern signs, but also values which they both recognize as inextricably connected to signs. In this encounter, significs doubtlessly exerts a non-negligible influence upon semiotics: for Peirce it is not reason that characterizes the human, but reasonableness. And if thanks to the ‘play of musement’, which Peirce attributes to humans, we are able to imagine a different world from the current one dominated by male reason, the possibility of constructing it cannot but depend to an extent on what Welby calls mother-sense, which despite the denomination is not a prerogative exclusive to females.