This work aims to re-evaluate the importance of the human imagination in the semiotic of C. S. Peirce. Based on a selection of texts from the Collected Papers (from 1878 to 1903), it attempts to describe the formal relationship between imagination and the controversial notion of semiotic ground. This account of the imagination as a prerequisite for the creation of new beliefs and habits also draws from the Aristotelian notion of "ascending mimesis" and the Peircean normative science of esthetics.

Of the many teachings on triadic semiotic that I was fortunate to receive in my life, none was more long-lasting and stimulating than what I learned by reading and exchanging ideas with Joseph Ransdell. And most salient among the ideas he explained with such admirable clarity were those related to iconicity, that apparently simple but most enigmatic relationship of formal identity between a sign and its object. That is why the main objective of this article is a discussion of the (...) semiotic quality that is embodied in some kind of material substance, called ‘hypoicon’ in Peircean semiotic.1 The hypoicon is the kind of sign whose functioning is based on its likeness to its dynamical object,2.. (shrink)

The article discusses the theoretical and analytical relevance of spontaneity, the basis of creativity, considered as a central aspect of the semiotic model of C. S. Peirce, through the study of its incidence on human identity, on the self. To do so, I work with a series of technical concepts ..