Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen:

It is nearly a truism to say that our mobile era of electronic communication has produced a huge semiotic system, consisting of the famous components of a Peirce-like semiotic theory such as signs, objects and interpretants. It is nonetheless regrettable that this somewhat simplistic triadic exposé of Peirce's theory of signs has persisted in semiotics, or one of its neighbouring disciplines, as the somehow exhaustive and accurate description of what Peirce intended. The more fascinating and richer structure of signs that is coming out from their intimate relation to the dyadic view of intercommunication (Peirce's term) has been noted much less frequently. 

Despite this shortcoming, the full Peircean road to inquiry — as the dynamic community of inquirers, or the community of quasi-minds consisting of the liquid in a number of interconnected bottles, or the communities of the users of data that is being provided by Nature or the vastly increasing electronic sources — is nonetheless capable of reflecting the contemporary weight put on all kinds of multi-agent systems and multi-agent communiqué in computation. However, the weight ought still to be amplified by incorporating the Peircean dyadic idea of communication as a dialogue between the interlocutors of a general nature of a mind putting forward signs, into a richer semiotic picture emerging from a truly interdisciplinary multi-agent research. For one thing, the agents are not only abstract communicators but also signs, and thus also minds and real objects. As some signs are in a sense phenomenal they are suitable for framing the electronic communication of quasi-minds. What the correlates of Peirce's concepts of representament (a sign put forward by the Utterer), interpretant (what the sign determines within the Interpreter), and various subspecies of interpretant (intentional, effectual and communicational ones) in the context of contemporary media-driven communication are, is something that needs to be sought for in the general amalgamation of Peirce's sign-theoretic triadism and the communication and action-theoretic dyadism. This is yet to be accomplished. Its importance can be seen, for instance, from the perspective of Peirce's surprising idea of "commens" as the locus where all the actions responsible for the possibility of "common ground" between the partakers meet. This reflects the computational desire to furnish multi-agent systems with properties that would enable them to entertain appropriate interoperation. The initiatives of semantic and pragmatic webs also receive increased semiotic motivation when adjoined with an understanding of Peirce’s theory of communication. Above all, the phrase "medium of communication" was taken by Peirce to illustrate a broader notion than just the noun "sign", namely a species of Thirdness.

In this paper, my purpose is to identify some of the main issues and problems in such a general amalgamation, and assess the contributions it may have to the emerging contour of Peircean communication, as sculpted by the recent era of intercommunicating computational systems.