Thinking is the process or act of thinking, the product or result of that process or act.
In semiotics, it is seen as a sign process.
According to its supporters, semiotics has a conceptual revolution, a radical revision of the way we think about such things as reason, consciousness, thoughts, and even feelings.
Charles Peirce writes:
“There is no reason why thinking … should be seen in this narrow sense, in which silence and darkness are most important to it. It should rather be understood as covering the whole of rational life, so that experience it must be taken as an operation of thought. ” (CP 5.420).
The tendency to consider this process taking place within one’s mind or head is especially characteristic of the modern period of Western thought.
This makes the personal (“silence and darkness”) an essential feature of thinking. For Peirce, as for other semioticians, this is a mistake. There is no doubt that we often return to the theater of the imagination to play the perfect experience. But whether these individuality or hidden experiments are original or very important forms of thinking is deeply doubtful. In short, although there is no consensus among semiotics, there is a tendency to construct thinking as a process of dialogue that sometimes takes place in personal spheres or in our imagination, but often (perhaps even more often) in the public arena of our daily engagements and inclusions.
According to Peirce, one of the most important characteristics of thinking is to be specific, and another of its essence is to be general. Thinking tends simultaneously in opposite directions – to specific applicability and to ever higher generalizations (CP 5.594-5).
In other words, thinking is a dialectical process. The field of semiotics reveals precisely this aspect of thinking, as it exposes its quest for knowledge, on the one hand, through specific combinations and applications of signs, and on the other, through signs in general.
The first side is clearly visible in the detailed classification of signs created by the semioticians, the other in the general definitions or patterns of signs (or semiosis) – from their writings.
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