Abstract
Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) and Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) spent considerable effort trying to clarify and articulate what they meant by signs and the ideas, or concepts, associated with them. There are many attempts in the scholarly literature to align Peircean and Saussurean terminologies, as well as several valiant efforts to create new synthetic models encompassing their differences. My task here is different: to point out several ways in which Peirce, an American experimental physicist and logician (trained as a chemist), and Saussure, a Swiss linguist (trained as a philologist of Indo-European languages), have fundamentally opposed views stemming
