Vincent M. Colapietro is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saint Mary's College. He twice received the Douglas Greenlee Award for papers accepted for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, and Chapter Five of this book received the first Charles Sanders Peirce Award from the Peirce Society. He has also received the John William Miller Essay Prize.

Based on a careful study of his unpublished manuscripts as well as his published work, this book explores Peirce's general theory of signs and the way in which Peirce himself used this theory to understand subjectivity. Peirce's views are presented, not only in reference to important historical (James, Saussure) and contemporary (Eco, Kristeva) figures, but also in reference to some of the central controversies regarding signs. Colapietro adopts as a strategy of interpretation Peirce's own view that ideas become clarified only in the course of debate.