The semiotic study of Charles Peirce is ______ in its approach:

Concept

An approach is classified by the kind of apparatus that settles its claims, not by its subject matter. Experimental work manipulates variables under controlled conditions; historical work reconstructs development from dated evidence; quasi-legal work argues from codified rules and precedent; quasi-scientific work borrows science's formal apparatus - definition, classification and rule-governed inference - without being an empirical natural science.

So to label a thinker's method, ask what decides a claim for him: a trial, a document, a precedent, or a definition.

Applying it to Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce came to signs from logic. He described logic in its general sense as "the quasi-necessary, or formal doctrine of signs", and built semiotic as a formal system rather than as a programme of measurement.

1. He begins from a triadic definition: every sign relates a representamen to an object for an interpretant.

2. From that definition he derives classifications - icon, index and symbol by the sign-object relation, plus further trichotomies that generate his sign typologies.

3. The results are reached by definition and deduction, so they are general and rule-governed in the way the results of a formal science are.

4. No claim of his rests on a controlled trial, on an archival date, or on an adjudication between parties.

Cross-check against the other descriptions

• Experimental would require manipulated variables and a control comparison; Peirce's semiotic derives its results from definitions, not from trials.

• Historical would require tracing sign use across dated periods; Peirce's classification of signs is general and synchronic.

• Quasi legal would require argument from codified rules and precedent; Peirce's warrant is logical necessity, not juridical procedure.

Result

Peirce's semiotic study is therefore quasi-scientific in its approach: it takes over the systematic, classificatory form of a science while remaining a philosophical doctrine of signs. This is also the reading recorded in the NTA final answer key for UGC NET June 2024 Paper 1 (held 27 August 2024, Shift 2).