Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Interestingly, Berkeley anticipated C.S. Peirce's division of signs into indices, icons, and symbols , as he contended that one idea can suggest another "by likeness [icon], by necessary connexion [index]... or by arbitrary convention [symbol]." ( The Theory of Vision Vindicated ) (The correspondence is not exact, however, since Berkeley includes a fourth category he calls "geometrical inference".)

C.S. Peirce famously posited a trinitarian division of the sign into indices, icons, and symbols, where an indexical sign works by proximity, and iconic one by similarity, and a symbolic sign by convention. For our purposes here we will be mainly interested in indices and symbols, so let us give an example of each: smoke seen over a distant ridge is an indexical sign of there being a fire over that ridge as well: the smoke, in a sense, "points to" (indexes) the fire. Each of these words I am writing is a symbolic sign: they mean what they do by the conventions of the English language, and may mean something quite different or nothing at all to non-English speakers. I bring this up because in Ron Unz's recent series of pieces on race and IQ at The American Conservative , he has noted that urban populations generally have higher IQs than rural populations, and that urbanization has been a major factor in large IQ increases in a number of people: the Irish urbanization fr...